Hacker News

Top stories

Live mirror
30 storiesupdated just nowView source snapshot
  1. One Year of Sponsored Servo Development(servo.org ↗)
    35comments
  2. GLM Built Its Own Inference Infrastructure(z.ai ↗)
    10comments
  3. Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust(nvidia.com ↗)
    281comments
  4. Keys Not Included: recovering the signing keys for US driver's license barcodes(ryan.science ↗)
    65comments
  5. The Relation Between Mathematics and Physics by Paul Dirac(cam.ac.uk ↗)
    19comments
  6. My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it(jakeasmith.com ↗)
    23comments
  7. Training a 4B model to produce 81% faster query plans than Postgres(rohanbansal.com ↗)
    118comments
  8. Xiaomi Mimo 2.6 live post-training dashboard(xiaomi.com ↗)
    114comments
  9. Lucasart's Afterlife(togameforlife.wordpress.com ↗)
    14comments
  10. Comparison of Malloc() Algorithms(egbert.net ↗)
    10comments
  11. OpenAI Model Misalignment Report(openai.com ↗)
    3comments
  12. Cloudflare/Security-Audit-Skill(github.com/cloudflare ↗)
    13comments
  13. Small programming tricks(will-keleher.com ↗)
    237comments
  14. Backups Aren't Simple(filipovski.net ↗)
    147comments
  15. Developing provably correct Rust code with Verus(amazon.science ↗)
    19comments
  16. Breaking the 1.58-bit Barrier for Ternary LLMs(arxiv.org ↗)
    32comments
  17. Online Z3 Guide(microsoft.github.io ↗)
    discuss
  18. A 32-year-old bug walks into a Telnet server(watchtowr.com ↗)
    26comments
  19. The engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve(johnjwang.com ↗)
    78comments
  20. The Return of Sail Power: Cargo Ships Are Turning Back to the Wind(gcaptain.com ↗)
    59comments
  21. Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations(github.com/arnegiacomo ↗)
    243comments
  22. AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran(wsj.com ↗)
    341comments
  23. HarnessTax: How Much Does the Harness Matter for Coding Agents?(harnesstax.github.io ↗)
    53comments
  24. Back to the future: modules for Guix packages (2022)(guix.info ↗)
    1comments
  25. OpenSpec – A lightweight and configurable AI spec framework(openspec.dev ↗)
    62comments
  26. PCB is brought to you by Fable 5(a6mzero.com ↗)
    52comments
  27. Performance Improvements in .NET 11(devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet ↗)
    64comments
  28. Japan's book scene is moving from bookstores to libraries(untranslatedjp.substack.com ↗)
    79comments
  29. US interest rates raised for first time in three years(bbc.com ↗)
    63comments
  30. Reversing Factorio's RNG(gegell.github.io ↗)
    30comments

Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust

702 pointsby 23h agodeveloper.nvidia.com
279 comments
12h agoHN ↗

I'm looking forward to trying these when they stabilize! I currently use WGPU for graphics, and cudarc for CUDA.

Note: Cuda-oxide is similar to Cudarc's host component, but uses a rust-style kernel dialect. Advantage: Share structs between host and device. Disadvantage: Trading standard Cuda kernels for a new, WIP dialect.

I haven't tried the tile API yet; looking forward to it.

The last time I checked, Cuda Oxide was Linux only, and required Async; these are why I haven't tried it yet.

11h agoHN ↗

cudarc been great for me, because it's easy to look up existing examples and references, and it maps 1-to-1 with what I see. I'm already having a tough time with CUDA itself, a dialect of it makes a tad harder to rely on previous work.

Seems more ergonomic in general though, both approaches they share, compared to cudarc, and less build infrastructure and fiddling with environments, which is great.

11h agoHN ↗

Nobody cares if kernels are written in Rust. Kernels were meant to be written in C, but if you want to go more high-level try Triton or a similar DSL that nicely abstract tile sizes etc.

11h agoHN ↗

oh no no no, this is going to break the CPP hold on AI and game dev.

4h agoHN ↗

Nah, Rust compiler still needs C++ to be built in first place, and everyone on AI uses LLVM as infrastructure.

11h agoHN ↗

kernels aren't meant to be written by any defined language. C is just a traditionally good default language that took over from assembly. No particular reason we have to stick with C.

9h agoHN ↗

And quite a few reasons that something better than C should be used. Rust seems a good candidate.

4h agoHN ↗

That is exactly why OpenCL failed adoption, focusing on C, instead of being polyglot like CUDA.

4h agoHN ↗

SYCL is the natively polyglot counterpart, with practical implementations of it compiling down to the same sort of SPIR-V kernels as OpenCL. (OTOH, much of the current adoption on the open standards side seems to target the more widely supported SPIR-V compute shaders, via Vulkan compute.)

4h agoHN ↗

Not really, first of all it is for C++, not the range of languages supported by CUDA.

Before SPIR was a thing in OpenCL, Khronos could not understand why anyone would care about anything else other than C99, or why supporting Fortran on GPUs was at all relevant.

Secondly, from the competition only Intel cares about SYCL with their own sugar on top, OpenAPI.

AMD hasn't cared one second about it.

You may mention Codeplay, which is anyway an Intel owned company since 2022.

As for Vulkan, it doesn't have neither the features, nor the tooling that CUDA enjoys, it is the usual putting up with using LEGOs from different brands, with various pin sizes, that is so common with Khronos.

21m agoHN ↗

I haven't felt this popular since then 1990s when I was opposing Visual J++ and IIS.

18m agoHN ↗

noob here - what's the benefit of this? Will using Rust lead to more optimal LLMs or code or both?

11h agoHN ↗

The launch is checked rather than trusted.

Damn even Nvidia is putting out fully Claude-written articles.

11h agoHN ↗

not to worry, they have an 'AI generated summary' box too

10h agoHN ↗

This thread flags an honest assessment of AI signal detection.

9h agoHN ↗

It gets fun when someone uses an uncensored model to bypass a refusal, but they accidentally pick one that was trained for erotic writing and brings its particular talent to the documentation task.

11h agoHN ↗

That's actually a magnificent observation. This is not only an indication of a keen eye, but a trained brilliant mind as well.

9h agoHN ↗

One might even say it is load-bearing on the seam!

6h agoHN ↗

Why this is important: it's the honest take.

6m agoHN ↗

We do this wicked sin called having fun once in a blue moon here.

Slashdot's spirit shall live somewhere, no? Rent is all-time high and it can only afford here, for now.

11h agoHN ↗

even Nvidia

Why "even Nvidia"?

They are fully behind using AI for basically everything.

What's next? "Damn, even McDonald's is putting out unhealthy food"

10h agoHN ↗

Sure, but even Anthropic doesn't appear to use Claude for blog posts. (I don't think anyone should. The prose stinks.)

10h agoHN ↗

Anthropic _absolutely_ does

They are just better at hiding it or configuring Claude.

I have several skills that reformat text to remove AI-speak tells.

9h agoHN ↗

That's about as useful as saying you asked the magical sky fairy.

8h agoHN ↗

I think you can't trust Pangram in a high stakes situation, but it is absolutely better than random noise at detecting AI-generated text. Which isn't surprising. If the distribution of probabilities can yield blatant Claudisms, it's not surprising it would also have more subtle deviations.

(Addendum: As I recall, LLM-generated outputs roughly follow Zipf's law, but the distribution still tends to have some subtle distinctions vs human text; pretty interesting, but I don't know where I heard this, so nothing to cite. Sorry.)

8h agoHN ↗

Pangram has an extremely low false positive rate. Even on adversarial examples.

One trade-off is even some obviously LLM text won't get detected by them, but they work really hard to ensure false positives are rare since a false accusation is much worse for society than someone getting away with LLM meatpuppetry.

9h agoHN ↗

To be honest with you, I don't think I would be able to identify with high certainty that the bottom text is AI generated, so it definitely goes a long way to obscure the AI-generated nature of it, but I also think it still feels unnatural somehow. I realize my framing naturally calls into question whether I'm being honest, but I am being honest. Given my experience with similar "skills" (it's just chunks of prompt, nothing magical after all) I expected even less.

But still, this is all very strange because it wasn't that many generations of AI models ago that AI writing was a lot better - I'm talking GPT 4.1, Claude 4.5, that sort of era.

Anthropic newsroom posts on the other hand are carefully constructed and well-written in a way that I have not seen demonstrated by LLMs yet, past or present. I expect that they have well-paid staff who are careful with every detail of their public communications. When you put it that way, it almost feels unfathomable that they wouldn't, doesn't it?

8h agoHN ↗

I don't feel like either one of you really has a strong claim. "Doesn't appear to" is subjective, and of course it's impossible to prove one way or another.

7h agoHN ↗

You're simplifying the exchange a little too much. I said:

Anthropic doesn't appear to use Claude for blog posts

My claim is literally the lack of evidence, which, yes, can't prove anything. This claim can be contested easily by showing evidence that they in fact, do appear to be using Claude to write prose in blog posts.

They said:

Anthropic _absolutely_ does

Sounds pretty certain Anthropic is in fact, using Claude to write blog posts. Enough to emphasize "absolutely". That doesn't read like "I'm going off of vibes", that reads like "I can prove it". So, fine. Prove it. I don't believe it, and I want to hear the proof.

I'm skeptical, but it wouldn't be my first time being wrong. But flatly, if you make claims with this kind of certainty, yes I want to hear your proof.

My point in saying "Even Anthropic doesn't appear to be using Claude for blog posts" was not meant to be some striking revelation, I literally was considering it a prior to make another point. This on the other hand sure does sound like a striking revelation to me, that a lot of people across the Internet would be curious to hear. Like I'm sure these people would be interested:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wdfd92/are_anthr...

I will admit that I am unnecessarily aggressive sometimes, but I wouldn't have changed my response much in any case. If you're going to make a strong claim like this, I want your evidence, not your vibes. Otherwise, the claim should be a lot weaker.

I also realize that this sort of brashness upsets HN a bit, but it is what it is. I pandered comments for votes in my 20s a bit, time to grow up, sometimes people won't like you. Sometimes I feel something deserves a brash response.

9h agoHN ↗

I think implication being organizations with 40,000+ employees and even more consultants and contractors plus a lot of budget are also using LLMs to draft public facing content instead of paying for content writers or even just proof readers .

It points to friction rather than cost economics. Same reason we are always surprised why multi billion dollar product companies with millions of install base prefer electron instead of a native app.

9h agoHN ↗

This does not imply that the organization is not paying for content writers or proof readers. It does suggest that they are not getting the value of paying for content writers or proof readers.

8h agoHN ↗

It does suggest that they are not accurately measuring the value of paying for content writers or proof readers.

People and companies are hungry for knowledge about people's reactions, but the modern internet DOES NOT give an accurate image of people's views.

8h agoHN ↗

No. It suggests they don't mind littering slop into the information environment.

4h agoHN ↗

Of course, that is the whole point of using AI to replace workers.

Only devs think it isn't coming for them, it is empowering and nothing else will happen, no team reductions, nah how come.

9h agoHN ↗

I believe most of their marketing videos use fairly convincing text to speech too, not voice actors.

9h agoHN ↗

McDonald's food is not even that unhealthy. I just tried a Burger King burger the other day and it's terrible. I think it's like 2000 calories in a single burger or something.

9h agoHN ↗

found the McShill. The King will hear of this!

8h agoHN ↗

I think it's like 2000 calories in a single burger

that would be pretty cool, you can just get your entire day's calories from one burger

8h agoHN ↗

I couldn't even finish it man, it was so fucking sloppy. I had to throw away like 40% of it.

2h agoHN ↗

2k cal would be around 250ml of oil. or 350grams of peanuts. So doing with bread, meat, and other stuff alike requires over 600g of food, an excellent value to energy.

8h agoHN ↗

Is Jensen Huang still all-in on OpenClaw? That moment feels more like a flash in the pan.

10h agoHN ↗

I get the impression that Nvidia employees don't care too much - I started seeing fully AI-written "documentation" on some of their smaller projects more than a year ago (i.e., before it was even slightly a good idea).

10h agoHN ↗

People never really read documentation before. Agents do read it now, and they seem to understand LLM-written text just fine.

10h agoHN ↗

People never really read documentation before.

The heck you talking about? How do you think we wrote software for the last 50 years?

10h agoHN ↗

when you start to internalize that these kinds of statements are an indication of how the average developer of the last 10-15 years operated the adoption rate of AI makes a lot more sense

9h agoHN ↗

This is extremely depressing, I think I'm coming around to the realization that you may be right and I've been naive my entire career.

10h agoHN ↗

Yeah lol it’s basically the only reliable way to know how things work. Pre-AI, I read documentation for libraries that I used almost every day.

And now with AI I’m using it to fact check Claude. And still reading it for myself to understand why other peoples code is written a certain way. It’s basically the most important thing to reference when coding.

Sure today Claude can just read the library code and tell you what a function does or how to do something. But it still won’t tell you why something is a certain way or won’t figure out specifically-designed usage patterns as reliably as the author telling you “this is an example of doing x”

9h agoHN ↗

only reliable way to know how things work is to reverse engineer them

6h agoHN ↗

But that’s my point, it’ll tell you how things work. In libraries I’m using, you can just read the code yourself.

You need the documentation to know why certain things work a particular way, or to know why some relationships or methods are the way they are

9h agoHN ↗

I really appreciated a friend reaching out to me with some PHP questions today. It was, to me, fairly basic but he was having a hard time grokking the documentation vs reading what his coworker wrote (some code using output buffering).

I brushed up on the docs since I haven't touched it in a couple years, explained my understanding of the ob_* functions, and gave him a very brief demo on a PHP playground.

He could have asked any LLM to tell him what that chunk of code did, and to explain the three functions, and instead he reached out to me. That felt _good_. Talking shop has always been a good way for me to form connections, because the pressure to socialize becomes task-oriented and you start to learn about how people think and feel, and that opens up easier paths for actual connection. It was nice.

Just like the Old Internet still exists - niche websites, mailing lists, probably a BBS or two (likely more right?), the pre-LLM world will trudge on, for a time. I hope LLMs actually lead to good things for people in the long run, and for now I personally will remain sparse in my usage of them.

9h agoHN ↗

Copy past the example code, then tweak until it breaks? If we were meant to read documentation, not reading it would cause a compiler error!

8h agoHN ↗

My absolute greatest skill in my career, that has consistently set me apart from my peers, is that I read documentation thoroughly.

It is shocking how much of a differentiator this is. You will discover that the software you’re already using is much more capable than you realized.

8h agoHN ↗

The good news is your attention to actually reading and understanding documentation will differentiate you more and more as others (short-sighted, IMO) outsource understanding to an LLM.

9h agoHN ↗

What? People never read documentation?

I start with reading and exploring documentation first; with the codebase as a secondary tab.

When it’s not LLM generated, documentation is supposed to be easier to read and more insightful than code.

8h agoHN ↗

People never really read documentation before.

Speak for yourself. I read it.

10h agoHN ↗

Is that your honest load bearing assessment you’re going to flag?

10h agoHN ↗

I hadn't read the article and read this comment as though NVIDIA themselves were implying that this library was checked but not trusted by them since it was fully LLM generated.

10h agoHN ↗

What are we for, I ask? What the hell are we now. Chatters to LLMs now? Is this our future? It really is starting to feel like it now.

9h agoHN ↗

Dude I am in slop fucking hell right now. There is still room for a human touch, without which the agents will lever us harder and faster into a world of incomprehensible garbage.

9h agoHN ↗

I totally concur. I'm almost lost for words at this stage. I need me some land to grow vegetables on and that's about it. Maybe some chickens. Every single day brings more despair (and not the prosperity we were promised).

9h agoHN ↗

Good luck with that. You will have to pry the water from the AI datacenters.

9h agoHN ↗

Do you know that's not really a thing or are you just wanting to help spread the propaganda?

8h agoHN ↗

... doesn't one of those imply the other?

9h agoHN ↗

I have land and chickens, and I'm really excited about the future & AI.

8h agoHN ↗

I'm also an optimist but the crash is imminent. I hope I am wrong.

8h agoHN ↗

Land, chickens, and private local AI running sustainably on the farm sounds like the least dystopian version of this AI future!

9h agoHN ↗

Do you have the stomach to walk into a high school in the USA these days? Teachers use AI to generate assignments. Students feed the assignments to AI and submit the responses. Teachers feed the student submissions to an AI for grading.

8h agoHN ↗

This is true even at the undergraduate level unfortunately…

8h agoHN ↗

Then here we are. AI apocalypse. Something of note. I've started to pay more attention to canned goods. Soups with lentils and so forth.

3h agoHN ↗

FYI, the world is a lot more decentralized than we think and even during the Dark Ages, guess what, that was happening in Europe and many places in the world were booming scientifically, technologically, etc.

10m agoHN ↗

Dark Ages weren't as interconnected by communications and wrapped by the tentacles of transnational corpocracy as modern world, though...

8h agoHN ↗

It's true of most work in many and soon most white collar jobs, too. Claude writes some dense useless thing, everyone else uses Claude to summarize and write a reply to the thing. The Claude-submitted PRs get automatically reviewed and commented on by a GitHub Claude review bot. The programmer asks Claude to check out Claude's review comments to Claude. Claude pushes a commit to the branch and writes a comment. The Claude review bot reviews the commit and leaves a comment. The human [...].

My hot take is that it's not really that terrible in the long run for work since I think LLMs will probably be nearly or actually AGI and better white collar workers than most humans within 5 years of today. But it is very funny and surreal in the meantime.

It is definitely bad for school, though. Kids IMO should actually be encouraged to use LLMs but not in or for class work outside of an AI best practices class. Probably stop giving them homework (90% will always try to find a way to make AI do it) and have them solve problems in class hours with no electronics so that they're forced to not defer learning. This will become even more important once we have AGI.

3h agoHN ↗

LLMs will probably be nearly or actually AGI

What if they don't?

This will become even more important once we have AGI.

What if we achieve AGI in 50+ years? Should everyone live in this Kafkaesque world until then?

1h agoHN ↗

I have two kids in engineering programs at a state University. They are allowed to use AI for homework assignments, but the homework is no longer worth any credit. They have a lot more papers, quizzes, and tests in class that count for their entire grade.

7h agoHN ↗

I know many teachers who actually have respect for the profession, themselves, and the students. Thankfully that means they don't do this.

Whether this is a widespread macro trend is another issue, and would be terryfying.

If true, however, it would reflect on the values of the organization: we have spent decades underpaying teachers, and doing a poor job of pretecting schools from frivoluos lawsuits. Add into that, districts have thrown money into new buildings, have been suckered by Big Tech to adopt their policies (common core was pushed by Big Tech and has been a distaster as well as computers in classrooms). As a nation (the USA) we can't get our act together for a rigorous national exam, etc etc.

6h agoHN ↗

About half of the states in the USA require the ACT or SAT for high school graduation.

Alabama is one state that requires the ACT. The mean score in Alabama is below 18/36. Wisconsin is another. Its students score on average about 1 point higher than the national average of 19.4/36.

If you prefer states that require the SAT, the mean SAT score of students from Delaware is less than 980/1600, about 50 points below the national average.

I'll leave it to others to argue about whether these exams are rigorous.

7h agoHN ↗

As a high schooler going to a school with stricter rules on AI than most in my area, I can say that it's been going downhill ever since GPT 4. Teachers constantly use AI to create assignments(my French Teacher regularly handed us work with GPT 5.1 prose and emojis). Students are also rampantly using AI and bypassing school restrictions(We have a google account, making it easy to use Gemini if we just sign out), causing an inflation in GPAs and test scores. There's no easy solution to the problem, banning AI-tools only help somewhat as even typing into Google has AI web results, and students are quickly overcoming ways to restrict them. I have a friend that vibe coded an application that allowed his Mac Mini's desktop to be mirrored on his school chromebook, bypassing every restriction with sub 1-second latency. Of course, that opens the can of worms to whether schools should allow students to use AI...

3h agoHN ↗

Of course, that opens the can of worms to whether schools should allow students to use AI...

We are starting to see results indicating cognitive decline due to AI in education, so no, we should do everything possible to ban it except for very limited fields.

LLMs aren't calculators or even computers, their generated output is too flexible, generic and basically starts replacing thinking.

Most likely they should only be allowed during late highschool years or just at university level, when people at least have a chance to learn how to research on their own.

1h agoHN ↗

Remembering my teachers 20 years ago talking about staying in school grading until 8-9 PM, I wonder if these things are a symptom instead of a disease

7h agoHN ↗

I find it interesting that this was downvoted twice without explanation.

9h agoHN ↗

Claude, rewrite my graphics card in Rust. Make no mistakes.

9h agoHN ↗

Yeah. I think if the text is written for other machines, then by all means have an LLM generate it, but if it is intended for a human audience, have a human being write it.

We are still much better at writing in a way that doesn't waste other people's time.

9h agoHN ↗

It is the number 1 thing I cannot stand with Claude slop. It's a sort of anthropomorphization of language. Every "thing" does, produces, feels, wants, asks, answers, etc....

- "Launch is checked"

- "Question is asked"

- "The implementation answers"

- "The model wants"

- "The results name"

- "The connection surfaces"

- "The prompt wires"

- "The feature rides the mechanism"

Every single fucking thing is alive, wants things, and does things.

It's terrible. Infuriating. I want to rip my eyeballs out reading this filth. All. The. Time. "The anger is real".

7h agoHN ↗

Create any page with a file uploader. They all look the same now. It's like the Twitter Bootstrap days of responsive design. You'll get an icon which looks like ones on (on the drop space) those sites which are like "you must wait 60 seconds for this file to download".

It's so horrible. The human element has been completely removed and replaced by..... mediocre.

4h agoHN ↗

The human element has been completely removed and replaced by..... mediocre.

No it hasn't. The human element is still there, prompting the LLM. The change is that the human is happily accepting the first thing they get rather than critically looking at it and seeing a problem.

3h agoHN ↗

The real problem is that the human is only seeing dollar signs.

3h agoHN ↗

I don't think it's that because I see a lot of this in businesses where the human isn't paying the bill, or is even aware of what the bill is.

Humans are seeing either a shortcut to go faster (accepting low quality to move on immediately; reasonable if they're short on time) or a shortcut to lowering effort (accepting low quality because they don't care; not so reasonable but probably has a deeper root cause).

1h agoHN ↗

All of the examples read like: "The dude abides", except in a grotesque/parody way.

8h agoHN ↗

Even their writing skills are getting rusty.

8h agoHN ↗

it seems like that's the way the industry is headed

4h agoHN ↗

Another of those AI is bad for articles, great for coding.

Plenty of us share the same opinion on doing reviews of AI generated code.

11h agoHN ↗

First of all, this is a pre-1.0 release that requires a nightly Rust compiler (if you choose the SIMT track with cuda-oxide) so that one is going to be unstable software.

Secondly, When an issue occurs with a kernel or you want to write your own custom kernel in Rust, now we need to diagnose if the problem came from either cuda-oxide (SIMT), Rust's side, CUDA or Tile (If you decide to choose the Tile track).

Another dependency into the list and course everything is open source except CUDA itself. So any issue that happens on the CUDA level, you are forced to wait for them to fix it.

11h agoHN ↗

In this age of LLM written everything which has softly killed my motivation for learning Rust somewhat, this has revived my interest if not only for the fact the LLMs haven't yet been trained on this yet!

11h agoHN ↗

LLM don't need to be trained in a library to use it well. It's just Rust which they know well.

11h agoHN ↗

And what prevent you exactly ?

There were humans far superior than you for writting Rust before LLM, now there's a LLM. The only difference is price and time execution.

You get an awesome teacher (LLM) ready to answer all your questions about Rust.

And you still find excuses not to learn it ?

At some point, just realize you've been lazy to learn it and LLMs are just an excuse.

10h agoHN ↗

I think OP’s point is that the payoff in learning a new language has diminished in this AI era. You can call that lazy, I’d consider it smart to consider whether you could be doing other, better, things with your time.

10h agoHN ↗

If the sole motivation for learning things are payoff, then sure.

9h agoHN ↗

the sole motivation is feeding and sheltering my family. in the time BC (before Clankers), rust was a better way to do that.

8h agoHN ↗

Sad to break it to you, but...

I had LLMs write a pile of cuda-rust code and they were quite competent at it. Ported a bunch of (C++) CUDA kernels over, and ground away on them til they got equivalent performance

https://github.com/rdaum/eider/tree/main/backends/cuda-oxide

And mostly just DeepSeek 4.1 Flash, too. Not even a frontier model.

Sorry.

7h agoHN ↗

I was learning Rust slowly when the LLM enabled coding became good enough. I switched from learning to full on building with Rust. I still learn high level concepts as needed but I will not be able to write Rust on my own at all.

And that sounds scary but the way I got over the fear is by realizing there are many things that I do very well but I do not know their internals very well. Driving is an example. I barely understand what the steering wheel, clutch or brake pedals do. I have driven over 130,000 Kms and I will perhaps drive more than double that in the next many years.

I have been building software since PHP/Drupal days. Got into AWS S3 as a beta user. Adopted Memcached (and MQ) in 2008 out of necessity. Then Python/Django for 10 years. Then Rust. And tons of JS/TS. I owe a lot to my curiosity. I believe we can keep learning what we need and still delegate most of programming to agents.

7h agoHN ↗

There are two types of programmers: the pragmatists who see programming as a chore and would gladly never write a line of code again given the right tools, and the gardeners who don't want their enjoyable and rewarding garden-tending work taken away from them.

4h agoHN ↗

The "pragmatists" who get excited developing a prototype for a week before they realize they will never be able to ship something anyone else will use because each trivial change becomes exponentially more difficult for the LLM to implement and completely impossible for the "pragmatist" to reason about, with every new commit liable to break something else.

Still waiting for this revolution of amazing 10x software! It's been 10 months since Everything Changed in November, surely the 10x pragmatists could have leveraged their effective 8 years of development time? Or maybe we'll move the goalposts again and say that actually, Everything Changed with Astra, we'll just need to wait another three months?

7h agoHN ↗

I've found sorta the opposite - in any area, it can just do everything for you, or it can be an incredible teacher. I've been re-learning a lot of higher-level math and it has been an knowledgeable, infinitely patient, always-available tutor. Of course, I could just have it do just about any math I want for me, but that's not the point.

Kinda the same with language/technology stuff - it can be a great tutor and it can scaffold other parts of a project for you. It can give you feedback and let you focus on the interesting parts.

I guess the motivation itself may be hard because of the fear of it taking over much of our jobs, but having this kind of help/feedback is pretty cool for the sake of learning things just because they are interesting!

2h agoHN ↗

I've found sorta the opposite - in any area, it can just do everything for you, or it can be an incredible teacher.

Please don't. I've had all of Codex, Claude and Gemini convincingly tell me absolutely wrong stuff, pointing it out with easily verifiable example they come up with more and more weird reasons.

Things don't become correct simply because most sources are again - easily and logically verifiable - wrong. This already was a plague when people "just googled" stuff and effectively returned with the most SEO optimized answer. Now we have very convincingly written instances all over the place.

If these were singular instances I wouldn't be so worried, but if you are learning it already is very easy to learn something wrong. This is why back in the days when people still used physical books to learn new things it was a good idea to check first which books are actually recommended. There have been a lot of "experts" that wrote things they clearly misunderstood but worked for all the examples in their books.

To give a common example for both the backend and frontend devs, that isn't about a specific projects. LLMs and Google searches frequently turn out wrong results regarding CORS caching and how it works in relation to domains/hostnames. The circumstances under which Content-Disposition work are another example. I think a lot of wrong statements that LLMs are "convinced" about are due to wrong statements (sometimes in otherwise correct response) of popular Stack Overflow answers.

It's saddening how much wrong "common knowledge" exists in the industry. I have been bitten by a lot of these, but it feels when people don't even actually code and think anymore this will just rise forever.

2h agoHN ↗

Please don't.

I will.

Can these be wrong? Certainly. So can humans. Many of your examples are of humans being wrong. That doesn't make LLMs - or humans - useless. The fact that they are not infallible is not a reason to avoid using them and I'm not going to throw out a tool that has been incredibly valuable to me because someone on the internet got some bad CORS advice.

11h agoHN ↗

what this article tells me is that no one at Nvidia actually cares about this project whatsoever. otherwise, they would have had a person actually write the announcement.

11h agoHN ↗

I strongly dislike CUDA. Once you have allowed that proprietary cr*p into your C++ codebase, it is very hard to get rid, and you end up with code that is either tied to a single vendor or an #ifdef hell, probably both.

The best way to program GPUs is face up to the reality that they are not the same machine as the CPU, write your kernels in separate files, and launch them manually, like in Metal, OpenCL, and D3D12, etc. These days we even have DSLs like Triton that make kernel writing much more ergonomic than anything you would hope to achieve in Rust.

11h agoHN ↗

Is this satire? D3D12 and Metal aren't any less proprietary than CUDA.

39m agoHN ↗

You can call their APIs without needing to compile your code with a proprietary compiler or adopt a bastardized version of C++.

11h agoHN ↗

The best way to program GPUs is face up to the reality that they are not the same machine as the CPU, write your kernels in separate files, and launch them manually

Isn't that how CUDA code is normally written?

10h agoHN ↗

No. CUDA allows you to write all the code in a single file, and uses a preprocessor to split it back out and pass it through separate compilers, one for host and one for device.

10h agoHN ↗

This true, but you can write the two separately if you want.

The disadvantages of writing them together are listed in the various parent posts. But some code authors really like the convenience of having the two in the same file.

11h agoHN ↗

You could also use Mojo, one language for all targets.

11h agoHN ↗

I began to lose interest after the acquisition. Have you been following along, are they still going to open source it?

11h agoHN ↗

I thought they already did and released the compiler source code under Apache 2.0.

11h agoHN ↗

The Mojo compiler has been open source for over a month now.

And the Mojo standard library has been open source for over a year.

It’s all open source. Go check it out!

10h agoHN ↗

Nice, thank you. There is an old python project I've been thinking about converting to Mojo.

10h agoHN ↗

Or julia if you want a much more mature ecosystem.

9h agoHN ↗

I highly recommend Julia for (scientific) GPU programming but it would be nice if there was a larger community and/or funding behind the GPU side of things. It has very few core devs for what it is.

11h agoHN ↗

Once you have allowed that proprietary cr*p into your C++ codebase

People have been doing that all the time for every kind of codebase. It's just part of the business. I don't see how it's worth having any emotions or opinions about it. Seems like you are wasting your energy.

Are win32 APIs proprietary? So you decide to use them, use a wrapper/UI framework, or don't develop for Windows. Easy choice.

Developing for embedded devices? So you read the manufacturers manual and implement based on the spec, use some sort of HAL if they are available, or you don't have a job. Even simpler.

10h agoHN ↗

CUDA is not an API, CUDA is a language, so you cannot make that comparison.

10h agoHN ↗

The CUDA runtime is a special case of one of the libraries provided by the CUDA Toolkit. The CUDA runtime provides both an API and some language extensions to handle common tasks such as allocating memory, copying data between GPUs and other GPUs or CPUs, and launching kernels. The API components of the CUDA runtime are referred to as the CUDA runtime API.

From: https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-programming-guide/01-intro...

5h agoHN ↗

CUDA is neither an API, nor a language, it is an ecosystem.

4h agoHN ↗

That's a nice way of saying that it's a dependency clusterfuck.

I've never understood why we can't just expose the GPU ISA directly the way the CPU does. It's all getting compiled down at the end of the day so someone has to write a compiler for it either way. We'd be substantially better off IMO if it was all built directly into LLVM and then let middleware sort out the details.

4h agoHN ↗

Because even CPUs rather use JIT runtimes to deal with the various kinds of ISAs that exist.

Naturally plenty of folks rather use software that doesn't take advantage of the hardware they paid for.

3h agoHN ↗

That would require vendors to either stick with a single backwards compatible ISA like intel did for x86 or document how their graphics cards work.

CPUs manage this by changing the internal micro-architecture, but historically GPUs only needed to support a graphics API and used that abstraction layer to freely change the hardware.

8h agoHN ↗

Are win32 APIs proprietary?

Yes. And crap. Not in my code bases.

8h agoHN ↗

If you're going to make apps in windows, you need to call their proprietary API somehow. Maybe you do it via a wrapper library, or via electron or something. But that's the same thing, just with more indirection.

7h agoHN ↗

Find a way to get ring 0 without touching any system APIs and you can just make your own APIs. My programs shall never say "please."

7h agoHN ↗

Your programs shall never grace my systems.

1h agoHN ↗

What makes you think he'll let you have a say in this? Btw, you wanna buy some ~~dea~~ usb sticks?

48m agoHN ↗

If you're going to make apps in windows, you need to call their proprietary API somehow. Maybe you do it via a wrapper library, or via electron or something. But that's the same thing, just with more indirection.

Not even close to being true. You can invoke syscalls directly, just needs a bit of reverse engineering. I wrote a bare metal libc library, with (not a whole lot of) effort I'm fully able to interface with the kernel/open windows etc. Fully statically linked, no libc, no win32, compiled on Linux executed on Windows.

The problem is this isn't really well documented _at all_, and I even ended up attempting to get in touch with the Windows kernel dev team to give me the actual internal syscalls/endpoints, but they refuse to cooperate. Which is why writing anything for Windows is entirely pointless.

5h agoHN ↗

The CPU on most machines is quite proprietary. I don’t understand this faux purity dogma.

Practical computing is not and never has been an abstract pure concept. It’s about making machines built by corporations to do usefull things at scale.

There is no ”non proprietary” computing unless you make your own stack.

5h agoHN ↗

Yes but there are business costs to using high-level proprietary tools and libraries. If you write your app using win32, you won’t be able to port is very easily. You’re also stuck with whatever bad or bizarre decisions Microsoft made.

It’s even worse for CUDA. GPUs are expensive, and now you’re vendor locked. You’re between a rock and a hard place. Either spend millions in engineering time, or millions on price-gauged hardware.

5h agoHN ↗

I wonder which APIs you would use to port easily, because POSIX and Khronos aren't it either, as they are industry standards driven by companies where one has to pay for a seat at Open Group and Khronos offices.

4h agoHN ↗

There is no ”easy” porting.

Once this is accepted the rest becomes easier as you are not wasting time trying to find a silver bullet.

I mean it’s then ”just normal work”.

4h agoHN ↗

If you write your app using win32, you won’t be able to port is very easily.

Is this still true? eg, Shopify saying porting is now easy so no need for abstractions.

1h agoHN ↗

Porting has never been hard. Just follow the platform guidelines. Make sane architecture. Done.

I mean _it's just work_. You don't need to invent anything. Just do the work.

What _is_ hard is when people run after silver bullets to avoid all this work.

Because people who don't understand software decide it would be cheaper to implement something only once. Or someone who does not really understand what they are doing insists that same C++ code runs automatically on all platforms.

AI has given the software engineers permit from the beancounters to do the sane thing.

Good software development orgs _have always_ done proper per platform ports.

Also - there is nothing wrong in supporting only one platform as such!

35m agoHN ↗

Good software development orgs _have always_ done proper per platform ports.

I really wonder why this was never fundamentally fixed. How performant a certain instruction on a specific platform is, how well it is supported and potential equivalents or sets of other instructions to emulate an equivalent are usually all very well understood.

So there should be some graph of operations which can transform any software from and to the specifics of each platform. Especially because firmware + compliers + platform abstracting libraries are basically already just that graph, although (usually?) to lossy to be applied in reverse. Add the recent developments in very large scale statistics to it and it'd probably be quite possible to transform from and to generic intent in the implementation to the uniqueness of each platform. E.g. the theming differences between a MacOS UI and a terminal application served over serial or the processing capabilities of a VLIW CPU compared to a FPGA or a GPU server.

Considering the enormous amount of work that went into compilers, better debugging and intermediate representations it seems like a huge missed opportunity nobody seriously asked the question whether information could be emitted that would allow for decompiling all the way back to the generic intent.

4h agoHN ↗

” If you write your app using win32, you won’t be able to port is very easily.”

This is wrong way around.

If you don’t support the platform your app runs on using the native api:s to the hilt your port is just bad.

If you actually want to support multiple platforms _you actually need to support_ them from the ground up.

This is speaking industrially and businesswise. A professional software business always has per-platform implementation resources. Or they have just one platform. Or they pretend they are multiplatform and then _everybody_ _daily_ fights with the problems this causes.

Obviously those elements that can be portable should be. It’s like Einsteins simplicity maxim - your codebase should be as portable as can be but not more.

” It’s even worse for CUDA…”

No these are just the business and market constraints. If this does not make sense for your offering then don’t use it. This feels like false FOMO - CUDA is not a silver bullet but it might be a specific solution to a specific problem.

3h agoHN ↗

Win32 is the most stable abi on the Linux desktop.

43m agoHN ↗

Dead wrong. Win32 (externally) only seems stable, but internally it changes between Windows releases. Win7 syscalls are completely different from Win11 syscalls, meaning if I want to release a binary _without relying_ on Win32 I need to provide full syscall mappings _for each and every Windows version_. This doesn't happen on Linux.

6h agoHN ↗

Many software engineers forget they're employee of a business.

2h agoHN ↗

I don't see how it's worth having any emotions or opinions about it.

Ironic, seeing as that is an opinion about it. Also weird telling people in an online discussion forum not to have opinions.

11h agoHN ↗

yeah, just write a stub/wrapper around it and abstract. it's the classic coupling problem. nothing to do with CUDA

10h agoHN ↗

I strongly dislike CUDA. Once you have allowed that proprietary cr*p

Genuine question...why not just type "crap"? It's not even that much of a curse, but I've never really understood the point of self-censorship. If you don't want to curse then you could just use a non-curse word.

10h agoHN ↗

It may be to bypass censorship, rather than self-censorship. Some platforms block or shadowban comments with curse words. Not sure about this platform.

9h agoHN ↗

HN definitely doesn't give a crap about that word.

9h agoHN ↗

can confirm, looks like crap is not on a list

9h agoHN ↗

I have written many words far worse than "crap" on this site. I haven't gotten in trouble over it yet.

I do find it a little amusing, because commenters stopped criticizing my cursing the moment I started getting a good chunk of karma here. I remember in 2016 someone criticized me for using the term "shitposting"...I don't think I've gotten that kind of criticism since 2016 though.

7h agoHN ↗

They dont like "seppo" for some reason.

2h agoHN ↗

Back then the term was still associated with 4chan.

9h agoHN ↗

* is used to give emphasis and show that they are using the word as curse word rather just calling it bad

8h agoHN ↗

It doesn't read as emphasis to me. It reads like the person is trying hard not to curse, and they think "crap" is a curse word. It's a little bit adorable, like I'm reading a comment from an obedient child.

6h agoHN ↗

I guess you are not from the generation of texters. This how languages work we used to use * as a way to avoid getting censored it over time became a way to curse or give emphasis.

6h agoHN ↗

Sounds like a generational thing.

I grew up texting. But in the 90s any profanity filters could just be turned off in settings.

5h agoHN ↗

People are getting used to censor themselves in order not to be reported, banned, or «hurt » other sensibilities. The words « rape » couldn’t be written in instagram for example, what a great way to deal with such a serious issue. Mainly an American thing spreading away from young people if you ask me. Sorry America, just being honest here.

1h agoHN ↗

After reading through the threat here it seems more like a cultural thing. The US has quite a lot of filters for profanity. I remember from my youth that in 2009 Eminem was a guest in a Germany TV show and very happy to swear as much as possible without being censored. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2OC-yKZ5Yag

3h agoHN ↗

I’ve been texting since it was first a thing (sms on Nokia phones) and no one I knows does this. We just say shit, fuck, and crap.

2h agoHN ↗

Is that a cultural/national thing instead of an age thing?

I've never had texts censored by texting providers, they're not supposed to read texts in the first place (at least around here).

2h agoHN ↗

I'm definitely from the generation of texters and there was never any censorship going on with SMSs... yours must be a cultural or regional thing.

2h agoHN ↗

Maybe you didn't have T9 enabled but I consider it censorship when I type bitch and it gives me chubi.

Even now I wonder if I am allowed to type bitch here...

I guess we will find out.

1h agoHN ↗

But typing "b*tch" with T9 is just as difficult (if not more) as typing "bitch". Anyway, I guess I never had a need to swear much over SMS. On IRC, on the other hand...

1h agoHN ↗

Am I, with around 30, in this generation? Putting * in words seems like self censorship to me. Still, might have a cultural component. German here.

31m agoHN ↗

I'm in my 40s and * is self-censorship to me. It must be a cultural thing.

6h agoHN ↗

Maybe more like p**p, as in "that cunt p**ped in my yard"?

I'll admit, it never once occurred to me that people might be using censored characters to provide more emphasis that a word is a swear, but I guess it does indeed do that, at least to the writer. Whether that comes across to the reader, and whether the writer cares that their intention was understood... I'm not so sure.

5h agoHN ↗

Hah. Yeah, I agree. It's one of those things I admit is `lost in translation` for sure.

4h agoHN ↗

What about ^#%& as was traditional in newspaper comics strips?

4h agoHN ↗

How about "Pockmark!... Freshwater swabs!... Bully!.." or "Amoeba! Bashi-bazouks! Chowderheads! Certified Diplodocuses! Nyctalop! Ectoplasm!"?

2h agoHN ↗

"Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!"

1h agoHN ↗

I was so disappointed when I tried reading tintin in other languages and found the dear captain was straight up using slurs in those. I wonder whether the english language ones have been edited over the years to remove that sort of thing

5h agoHN ↗

In any context I've seen, asterisks are for wrapping formatting and said formatting it to add emphasis. So being in the habit of typing `emphasised phrase`, for italics - regardless of whether the platform parses markdown/similar formatting, e.g. SMS.

To have an unclosed asterisk replacing characters in a word? I've only ever seen that as a way to bypass censorship. This spans communications from people currently in their 40s down to 20.

3h agoHN ↗

i do this to put emphasis, i always type "h*ck".

(although it is a half-joke since it's definitely not a curse word imo)

2h agoHN ↗

I think a string of non-alphanumeric characters would work much better here, like "Once you have allowed that proprietary @#$&% into your C++ codebase”

Leaves more to the imagination.

6h agoHN ↗

My guess is that jacobgorm will not reply. I would love a reply, because I want to understand how others think.

I believe we'll be left to wonder.

5h agoHN ↗

Platform may retroactively make up and enforce rules that makes your content violate terms (and remove them)

See YouTube.

4h agoHN ↗

I certainly dislike how everyone on YouTube is saying “SA” and “unalive” and “corn”.

It’s one thing if it’s some funny commentary channel avoiding those words, but what bothers me is the true crime YouTubers. In the subject of true crime, rape and murder are just things that are probably going to come up, and when they refuse to use the appropriate language, it comes off as infantilizing, which is weird considering that my actual YouTube account is over 18, let alone the viewer using it.

Advertisers ruin everything, I guess.

2h agoHN ↗

It's become so bad that even quality history youtube channels are frequently using euphemisms like "moustache-man" instead of just saying "Hitler", to avoid their videos being buried by The Algorithm, and therefore cut severely into their viewership.

2h agoHN ↗

I think it's a win-win. Intelligent people easily knows what they're talking about, and the others don't get offended. /s

29m agoHN ↗

even quality history youtube channels are frequently using euphemisms like "moustache-man" instead of just saying "Hitler"

That can be quite confusing. You had German mustache-man, Russian mustache-man, French mustache-man (Petain), French small-mustache-man (de Gaulle), Spanish small-moustache-man (Franco)

58m agoHN ↗

I don't think those filters are even real, I think it's just mass-hysteria. I call these kinds of behaviours "traditions", but I'm not sure if there's a better term for it.

Basically someone comes up with something which is nonsensical, but plausible. Like believing that their videos are unpopular because they said the word "rape" and the algorithm magically got them, rather than because their videos suck. Then someone else sees that and starts thinking it is true. It silently spreads across the population.

I've seen this in organisations, where new recruits haven't been properly trained. Someone has come up with a method which is wildly incorrect and illegal, but plausible. The other new people around them have copied them. They've become slightly more experienced people, they've taught the next round of new people.

Before you know it, half of the organisation is doing something hilariously wrong, and they all sincerely believe it is the right way of doing it, because everyone does it. It's just self-reinforcing at that point.

13m agoHN ↗

I am sure they are bullshit. Like when they mute cursing and "risky" speech, but when you enable autogenerated subtitles they show up there. Youtube knows what thay said regardless if it's censored or not. It's so fucking stupid

5h agoHN ↗

His kids were probably watching him type over his shoulder and he didn’t want to hear, “Daddy, what does crap mean?”

4h agoHN ↗

I am arguing that they would ask that anyway.

I guess I never understood censorship when it’s plainly obvious what you’re censoring. Anyone who can read will clearly know that it said “crap”, so I don’t see how it’s fundamentally different than just saying the word. You still put the word into my brain.

4h agoHN ↗

"Daddy, what does cr*p mean?" Kids aren't stupid and this self-censorship isn't protecting anyone from anything.

(if a platform is serious about Bad Words for whatever reason (moral?) they would also forbid character replacements; ultimately it's the intent, not the word itself, that they try to steer with rules like that)

2h agoHN ↗

I'd consider that a joke - but also zero issue using any words talking in front of kids. You might wish to explain them anyways.

4h agoHN ↗

cause you might go to the eternal flames if you say a no-no word online

4h agoHN ↗

Your comment only makes sense in context if you believe in a deity who is too dumb to understand the difference between cr*p and crap. I for one do not worship a Bayesian spam filter.

3h agoHN ↗

What if a toddler is browser HN and sees the curse word?

2h agoHN ↗

IMO cr*p and crap are both valid but separate swear words. People have a wide option to choose from when they want to swear, and people like variety (much much more than LLMs do). People also tend to influence each other with their usages: cr*p is popular because it is popular.

Otherwise cr*p is just as good as crap, shit, horseshit, poopoo or such.

edit: * replaced with \* as HN interprets asterisks as formatting for emphasis. Thx latexr for informing me

2h agoHN ↗

To use a literal asterisk on HN, do ** or \*. Your single usage in two places instead turned the majority of the post italic.

1h agoHN ↗

Normative behavior has shifted due to pervasive censorship and surveillance.

1h agoHN ↗

I thought that cp*p is some kind of ugly cuda pointer declaration :D And being non-standard C++ syntax it wouldn’t compile.

14m agoHN ↗

Because I know it is not technically crap, a lot of competent people worked on it, most with good intentions. I suppose it is better described as a cleverly designed Trojan horse than can infect your software and make that software become crap, in the sense that it becomes harder to maintain, increases code duplication, messes with your build system, ties your build system to platforms that have their toolchain binaries available, etc., etc., without bringing any long-term benefits over learning things the hard way.

9h agoHN ↗

Launching kernels manually is an error prone PITA which I believe is the principle reason for CUDA's popularity. Having the compiler give an error when you mess up is a huge benefit. But having the compiler allow you to express "I want to launch this kernel over a grid with these dimensions, with these arguments" as a single expression is where the vast majority of the value comes from.

The having it all in a single file is mostly an artefact of the fact that it is C++, because C++ is single file at a time compilation. In D (which is multiple files in a single compiler invocation) with DCompute (which targets CUDA and OpenCL with upcoming support for Vulkan and Metal), you are required to write the kernels in a separate module, but you get all the benefits of the compiler complaining when you mess up _and_ the expressivity of "launch me this kernel".

5h agoHN ↗

Having the compiler give an error when you mess up is a huge benefit.

Shouldn't this be alleviated by the current code generation machines?

4h agoHN ↗

Well yeah, but then you are using code generation, not writing code directly.

8h agoHN ↗

Having also played with Metal and WebGPU (at least years ago), I would say that CUDA is, amazingly, the best GPGPU API we have. Do I wish we had an open source parallel programming language as good or better than it? Yes. But asymmetrically hating on CUDA like this is how we continue to lag behind it in UX.

The best way to program GPUs is face up to the reality that they are not the same machine as the CPU, write your kernels in separate files, and launch them manually

Not to mention that this is a completely sane way to use CUDA as well.

5h agoHN ↗

People that attack proprietary APIs always miss the point why most devs outside FOSS circles prefer them.

Turns out when one isn't ideologically against something they aren't willing to put up with a lesser experience just for the cause.

3h agoHN ↗

I know it's not the same thing because proprietary vs open software it's way less important but, generally if you are not ideologically against something you can easily follow the stream and do lot of nefarious actions, especially if the action has enough degrees of separations from the actual nefast outcome.

8h agoHN ↗

I don't mind CUDA, I do mind that all of the SDKs don't dynamically load the various CUDA shared libraries at runtime.. intertwining itself into your application linking process makes for extreme binary portability inconvenience.

8h agoHN ↗

? I find it hard to see the issue here. Just put it in a separate file and call it?

7h agoHN ↗

Anyone here looking at Modular's offerings?

6h agoHN ↗

from what i can tell, you're going to be stuck with that no matter what you do

i'm currently using vulkan, and HLSL via dxc. which should be portable but it's not.

apple refuses to support vulkan, and relies on moltenvk and there's a bunch of OS/hardware/driver differences no matter what you do, that you'll probably have to feature test for, and compile a few different versions of your code no matter what you do

i think if you're doing something that you don't have to distribute to customers, just picking one stack and getting locked in has some appeal.

it leaves you vulnerable to lockin. but, especially in the age of ai, "claude, port this to vulkan" seems like a good enough defense against that

8h agoHN ↗

Towards the end of the post, we (NVIDIA) mention that this work was done in collaboration with Vectorware and others in the Rust community. And we can't wait to build further with the community.

10h agoHN ↗

Will it then be possible to query TJunc hotspot temps on linux?

4h agoHN ↗

The same way as people trust AI sloppy on their code.

7h agoHN ↗

Once again... There's literally no point to a low level shader language for heterogenous back ends.

9m agoHN ↗

Why? The point of a shader language is to define a function that outputs some graphics. Why should that not be portable between GPUs/CPUs of different vendors?

9h agoHN ↗

Rust for GPU programming? My CUDA debugging sessions just got a whole lot less painful, hopefully.

1h agoHN ↗

There's a lot of unsafe code at that level... Rust probably makes it more painful for little gain

9h agoHN ↗

Been waiting for something like this. CUDA C++ is a pain; Rust's safety for kernel programming could be a game changer.

9h agoHN ↗

Interesting direction from Nvidia. Anything that makes writing reliable GPU code less painful is definitely a good thing.

8h agoHN ↗

Makes me sad that Go doesn't get love. I feel like Go is perfect for LLMs.

7h agoHN ↗

Don't think we're gonna see garbage collections anywhere near gpu for many reasons.

4h agoHN ↗

Go's type system is not at the same level as C++, Fortran, Python, Julia, Haskell, Java, to quote the languages with CUDA support from NVIDIA and their partners.

8h agoHN ↗

Really exciting but it reads like Claude instead of what Nvidia posts have generally been like in the past. I don't need nor want my tech blogs to sound like a young adult novel.

7h agoHN ↗

I’ve had this happen to me several time over the past weeks and it’s gone from quaint to humorous to farcical to outright “is-the-world-gaslighting-me” insane.

Just today I was reading Stanley Druckenmiller’s op ed in WSJ. This dude is like 80 and has made billions of dollars, and he got Claude to write his op ed???

Unbelievable. And the tells are so obvious, yet people still love the Claude-like quips and odd grammatical choices that read like halfway asshole halfway mid-sentence confusion.

2h agoHN ↗

That op ed was absurd. I respect Druckenmiller a lot and am always impressed with his lucidity in interviews. The Claude “ick” was all over his writing.

3h agoHN ↗

Yeah definitely Claude. Lazy authors, if you're going to get AI to write for you please use Astra instead - it makes way less annoying prose than Claude.

7h agoHN ↗

Does this mean I can write shaders in Rust for use with WGPU or Vulkan?

2h agoHN ↗

The way I understood it, rust would become an option next to Vulkan, WGPU (and opengl etc?).

But only for compute tasks. So, practically an alternative language to write compute shaders in.

7h agoHN ↗

The recent circular moves that Nvidia is making is designed to wrap things around them, anything to keep the AI model party going.

6h agoHN ↗

I read this the other day - definitely think it is the right direction Nvidia is taking.

Thank you NVIDIA - for once (not twice though - you've given us nothing but despair for Linux+GPU).

5h agoHN ↗

I wonder how many parallels there are between CUDA's Tile abstraction and that of Metal.

4h agoHN ↗

Anyone know when Rust's std::autodiff will become stable? Assuming this Rust support expands to other GPU vendors, autograd will probably be the only reason to use Slang instead of Rust anymore.

3h agoHN ↗

I was told in the 2025 LLVM dev meeting that it will always stay in nightly because it's not practical for them to provide long-term stability guarantees that is expected of stable Rust.

3h agoHN ↗

Not a cuda programmer, but since they’re making a new API, why would they already make it inconsistent at start? :-/ I’m referring to the examples a,b,c vs z,x,y (different ordering of output elements)

3h agoHN ↗

Thank you Nvidia !! You're in the right path.

2h agoHN ↗

My understanding is not so deep regarding GPU programming or Rust... Does this mean anything regarding Nvidia GPUs and WebAssembly / WebGPU?

2h agoHN ↗

No. Rust is a non-web programming language.

39m agoHN ↗

Does this weld Rust to CUDA? Can we use the Rust code to run on other archs?

22m agoHN ↗

yikes, I prefer python taichi similar to

@fast def calc(x,y):pass