There’s also group C which I was part of, you just say that you just pooped or scratch your butt whenever they ask you to load/unload and they’ll immediately offer to do that for you instead.

Not sure it counts but nostalgia kicked in and I replayed Chrono Trigger yesterday. Sadly I messed up at the fair in the beginning so I’m soon going to be found guilty in the game 😬

Slow and steady wins the race

It’s actually a good thing that visual learners get a chance to learn useful stuff by watching videos. Not everyone has the attention span required to read through a Wikipedia page.

I’d call the cops on them

Since you already know Java, you could jump straight to C++ with Bjarne’s book “Programming - Principles and Practice Using C++”: https://www.stroustrup.com/programming.html

You can then move to more modern C++ with his other book “A Tour of C++”: https://www.stroustrup.com/tour3.html

And then if you’re curious to know how software design is done in modern C++, even if you already know classical design patterns from your Java experience, you should get Klaus Iglberger’s book: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/c-software-design/9781098113155/

In parallel also watch the “Back to Basics” video series by CppCon (see their YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CppCon , just type “back to basics” in that channel’s search bar).

Learning proper C++ should give you a much better understanding of the hardware while the syntax still remains elegant, and you get to add a new skill that’s in very high demand.

If you’re doing C++ then C++ Weekly by Jason Turner is an awesome must-watch.

For anyone wondering what Proton GE is, it’s Proton on steroids: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom

For instance, even if you have an old Intel integrated GPU, chances are you can still benefit from AMD’s FSR just by pushing a few flags to Proton GE, even if the game doesn’t officially support it, and you’ll literally get a free FPS boost (tested it for fun and can confirm on an Intel UHD Graphics 620).

Congrats! Your laptop will be even happier with a lighter but still nice-looking desktop environment like Xfce and you even have an Ubuntu flavor around it: Xubuntu.

TIL!

and it’s mobile-friendly and distraction-free too

My bad, I’ll move there then

With how MS Teams and now CNN have been reported here to be blocking Firefox, you know that Firefox is doing things right. If web giants are ganging up against it, it’s all the more reason to switch to it to make a statement and prevent big tech from making privacy violation the norm.

Hard to tell as it’s really dependent on your use. I’m mostly writing my own kernels (so, as if you’re doing CUDA basically), and doing “scientific ML” (SciML) stuff that doesn’t need anything beyond doing backprop on stuff with matrix multiplications and elementwise nonlinearities and some convolutions, and so far everything works. If you want some specific simple examples from computer vision: ResNet18 and VGG19 work fine.

Works out of the box on my laptop (the export below is to force ROCm to accept my APU since it’s not officially supported yet, but the 7900XTX should have official support):

Last year only compiling and running your own kernels with hipcc worked on this same laptop, the AMD devs are really doing god’s work here.

Yup, it’s definitely about the “open-source” part. That’s in contrast with Nvidia’s ecosystem: CUDA and the drivers are proprietary, and the drivers’ EULA prohibit you from using your gaming GPU for datacenter uses.

ROCm is that its very unstable

That’s true, but ROCm does get better very quickly. Before last summer it was impossible for me to compile and run HIP code on my laptop, and then after one magic update everything worked. I can’t speak for rendering as that’s not my field, but I’ve done plenty of computational code with HIP and the performance was really good.

But my point was more about coding in HIP, not really about using stuff other people made with HIP. If you write your code with HIP in mind from the start, the results are usually good and you get good intuition about the hardware differences (warps for instance are of size 32 on NVidia but can be 32 or 64 on AMD and that makes a difference if your code makes use of warp intrinsics). If however you just use AMD’s CUDA-to-HIP porting tool, then yeah chances are things won’t work on the first run and you need to refine by hand, starting with all the implicit assumptions you made about how the NVidia hardware works.

HIP is amazing. For everyone saying “nah it can’t be the same, CUDA rulez”, just try it, it works on NVidia GPUs too (there are basically macros and stuff that remap everything to CUDA API calls) so if you code for HIP you’re basically targetting at least two GPU vendors. ROCm is the only framework that allows me to do GPGPU programming in CUDA style on a thin laptop sporting an AMD APU while still enjoying 6 to 8 hours of battery life when I don’t do GPU stuff. With CUDA, in terms of mobility, the only choices you get are a beefy and expensive gaming laptop with a pathetic battery life and heating issues, or a light laptop + SSHing into a server with an NVidia GPU.

It depends. I’m working in the quant department of a bank and we work on pricing libraries that the traders then use. Since traders often use Excel and expect add-ins, we have a mostly Windows environment. Our head of CI, a huge Windows and Powershell fan, once then decided to add a few servers with Linux (RHEL) on them to have automated Valgrind checks and gcc/clang builds there to continuously test our builds for warnings, undefined behavior (gcc with O3 does catch a few of them) and stuff.

I thought cool, at least Linux is making it into this department. Then I logged into one of those servers.

The fucker didn’t like the default file system hierarchy and did stuff like /Applications and `/Temp’ and is installing programs by manually downloading binaries and extracting them there.

Pascal is so incredibly good and simple that I was writing programs (sort of, half of the time it was gibberish) in it when I was 7 years old and what helped a lot was that at the time Turbo Pascal came with lots of cool examples/tutorials, so you could just play around with code snippets until you figure it out on your own. Those who witnessed how programming can be taught today to 7~10 year olds using JS or Python might relate, Pascal was just that simple and clean.

Delphi was also amazing, it had the same simplicity of Visual Basic to make GUI apps while featuring a much better and more rigourous language.

That’s a good way of maximizing technical debt.