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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

See YouTube.

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.

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.

(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)

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.

I believe we'll be left to wonder.

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.

Yes. And crap. Not in my code bases.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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".

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

> 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.

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

Isn't that how CUDA code is normally written?

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.

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

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

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

[1] https://github.com/huggingface/candle

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Why "even Nvidia"?

They are fully behind using AI for basically everything.

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

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.

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.

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

They are just better at hiding it or configuring Claude.

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

I put the "humanized" output through Pangram and it still comes out as 100% AI generated.

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?

(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.)

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.

> 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.

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

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

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”

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.

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

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.

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.

Speak for yourself. I read it.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

- "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".

It's so horrible. 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.

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).

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!

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.

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?

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.

Just because an LLM can do something doesnt mean we shouldnt learn it. Imagine if your math teacher had this attitude with calculators. Or your engliah teacher with audio books, "no need to learn to read we have audio books and llms".

I sometimes also struggle with the motivation to learn these days, but I realize its a crutch and super bad for my future to fall for that trap.

You having access to an llm does not make you special, you will not get farther than the person who also understands the thing they can do with the LLM, just like how the kid who did well on math in high school didnt rely on a calculator (and is doing far better in life than those who did).

That code looks like garbage btw...

What the hell is your problem? Getting on the Internet and hurling personal insets around. Get a grip.

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.

This is more promising: https://github.com/Rust-GPU/rust-gpu/