Daniel Lemire
@lemire
Software performance expert. Ranked in the top 2% of scientists globally (Stanford/Elsevier 2024) and among GitHub's top 1000 developers.
I do not get angry often… but bad software gets my blood boiling. Here is an example. Many banking mobile applications in Canada will just stop working. You may get an obscure error message… or just a spinning wheel. When it happens, you need to update the app in the app…
Our CPUs were designed for small models (code). GPUs were designed for large models (graphics). Before the current AI revolution, CPUs were the dominant platform. Nvidia was the big winner of the recent cycle. Nvidia is not the only play. Amazon has its own specialized…
If you are in Venice… in a remote corner, there is this great restaurant. Highly recommended.
No matter where you are, no matter which beer you drink, you cannot escape Quebec regulations. We are the Europe of North America.
We have had ChatGPT for years, how many cures did it come up with? How many scientific innovations did it produce? Of course, we may eradicate all diseases in the next ten years. It may happen. But what evidence do we have? We still live in a world where Microsoft Windows file…
I hope what you claimed is true and I don't expect a "crash" of CS and CE either. But time after time I saw the viewpoints from AI advocates saying that AI will be dominant in coding and building software soon (not in the far future). Thats what confuses me. Hassabis even claimed…
I am willing to put place a public bet (100$ to the charity chosen by the winner) that computer science and related fields will continue to be popular in the coming two years. No crash in sight. Before you bet against me, check the historical data. The dot-com crash and…
Prediction: a year from now, US computer science departments will find their enrollment at 50% of what they have been the past few years. I'm willing to bet a peppercorn on it for someone who really wants to hold me to it. (-:
Casey gave a great talk on object oriented programming. He was kind to object oriented programming… but he couldn’t « not say » that Alan Kay’s vision failed. I found his hypothesis for what motivated Kay credible (i.e., biological cells as self-organizing objects). As a…
[1/3] I'm really happy with how well The Big OOPs has been received. It was a hard talk to put together due to the volume and complexity of the material, and it took a lot of time to weave everything into a single coherent presentation that could flow well while being accurate.
"Economic freedom (capitalism) leads to pollution." Really? Let us look at some maps.
Maybe we should focus less on trigonometry and parabolas in high school and more on AI.
The official real (chained) GDP per capita in Canada (Q1) since 1981. Between 1981 and 2001 (20 years), we became 35% richer. That's a 1.5% gain per year on average. Between 2005 and 2025 (20 years), we became 10% richer. That's less than 0.5% gain per year on average.…
"Myself, I prefer to read the documentation" em effers will do any and everything BUT read the documentation. You can look like a friggin genius just reading the API docs. They mention quirks or assumptions that may not be intuitive and often cause head-scratchers.
If the programming work you need to do is just 'established knowledge', the LLM can multiply your productivity by a factor of ten or more. So if you are working for an IT department and all they have for you is boring routine work, and you are teleworking... then you can pretty…
The next major release of simdjson will include support for C++26 static (compile-time) reflection. To be clear, it means that you will be able to turn your own data types into JSON strings, and go from JSON strings to data types. If you are into advanced C++, or you just like…
"All innovation comes from industry is just wrong, universities invented many useful things." But that's not the argument. Nobody thinks that Knuth contributed nothing to software programming. Rather the point is that the direction of the arrow is almost entirely wrong. It is…
PL theory attracts a certain kind of individual who depends on the language to give them their power. That's why they love languages so much. When those people take the reins of a group's culture, it's game over.
University is definitely not a place for non-conformists. Highly hierarchical and structured. Slow moving.