Rust wgpu now has a
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@ireneista @mcc @decay @amarioguy That's a good particular example. A part of computing freedom that I think is pretty important is "being able to make music with computers, ideally in realtime." I have that on my list of vital user stories for my someday project microkernel OS. The arts are the kind of thing that make computers worth doing.
A lot of realtime music plugin stuff depends of Fourier transforms and SIMD in general.
@MaddieM4 @ireneista @mcc @decay @amarioguy Music, as well as speech synthesis!
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@MaddieM4 @decay @riley @ireneista @amarioguy *rubbing eyes* is SPIR-V an ISA? I thought it was literally a fork of LLVM IR
That is a very different abstraction level with very different forward compatibility commitment risks
@mcc @MaddieM4 The original SPIR was a fork of LLVM IR. SPIR-V is more or less "GLSL encoded as an SSA-based VM bytecode". @decay @riley @ireneista @amarioguy
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@ireneista @mcc @decay @amarioguy @MaddieM4 the big advantage of simd on modern cpu/gpu systems is very small inner loops and things like memcpy where the overhead of going to GPU and back overcomes the speed benefits
@ireneista @mcc @decay @amarioguy @MaddieM4 like in ngscopeclient we ended up deleting a significant amount of the AVX code because it was slower than doing it on the GPU and was just one more implementation to keep in sync with everything else when we made changes, test, etc.
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@r @ireneista @MaddieM4 @mcc @amarioguy me, perking up from behind my behringer x32
@decay @ireneista @MaddieM4 @mcc @amarioguy it's *still* wild to me that there exists audio gear that costs more than something like an eNodeB
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@mcc @decay @riley @ireneista @amarioguy Architecture revision is a very reasonable good faith assumption to make, which GPU companies IMHO do not even slightly deserve. It's just an IP protection thing.
SPIR-V would not exist, in an extremely successful way, if GPU ISAs were a bad idea for technical reasons. It exists nestled into Vulkan as a compromise with IP protection.
@MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @riley @ireneista @amarioguy GPU shader processor architectures did go through a few different evolutions so there was something to that but I think they've more or less stabilized on what is and isn't a good idea (access memory through a plain pointer, do SIMD between shader invocations, not within one, that sort of thing). But even so there are a lot of subtly different approaches to things like flow control or sampler state to give just two examples.
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@decay @ireneista @MaddieM4 @mcc @amarioguy it's *still* wild to me that there exists audio gear that costs more than something like an eNodeB
@r @ireneista @MaddieM4 @mcc @amarioguy our production kit is built around a Behringer x32 Producer which is not cheap but not crazy expensive, but you're basically talking a mildly chunky computer attached to a shitload of power amps that has to be able to bounce around in the back of a truck for a substantial amount of its life and work perfectly as soon as power is applied, which is really what you're paying for. Not quite aerospace but close
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@r @ireneista @MaddieM4 @mcc @amarioguy our production kit is built around a Behringer x32 Producer which is not cheap but not crazy expensive, but you're basically talking a mildly chunky computer attached to a shitload of power amps that has to be able to bounce around in the back of a truck for a substantial amount of its life and work perfectly as soon as power is applied, which is really what you're paying for. Not quite aerospace but close
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@r @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy thank you!
very helpful list
sigh, yes. maybe we can beat some swords into paintbrushes though...
@ireneista @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy my initial sketch for a potential completely different approach to this material (which has *not* been trialed at all, because social stuff fell through, so grains of salt etc.):
1. functions, with a focus on function composition. if you have "USA K-12" brainworms, concepts from the mess that is "pre-calculus" but taught with through a very "computer science" lens, probably with code samples
2. linear maps, with a focus on how this is _an abstraction_
3. matrices and vectors, with a focus on *computation*
4. FIR and IIR filters. the general goal is to get to a working "live demo" with as little "boring" theory on the critical path as possible
5. frequency domain and spectra
6. short time fourier transforms
????
7. < i haven't actually planned it this far yet >
idk if this would be viable or worthless
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@MaddieM4 @ireneista *is* that done on on-board controller silicon? I would have assumed it's done in a CPU-driven userspace thing installed in to the regular operating system alongside the driver.
Like I'm certain they *could* do it with on-board controller silicon, if they wanted, but even then I suspect that on-board controller silicon would look a lot like a small ARM running a CPU-based compiler in a tiny Linux
@mcc @MaddieM4 @ireneista My suspicion is that it's just much easier to develop / maintain / manage the ever-growing software stack (compiler and friends) as a library that runs on the host rather than as a more "firmware"-y environment deployed on the GPU itself. Combined with the desire to be able to do offline/AOT shader compilation and the like.
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@r @ireneista @MaddieM4 @mcc @amarioguy me, perking up from behind my behringer x32
@r @ireneista @MaddieM4 @mcc @amarioguy but yeah jumping back up here a lot of this is technical theater. You can go to school for lighting design, stage electrics, audio engineering and like such as and learn this stuff but there's no real connection back to the computer-touching or EE side
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What I mean is, my daydream GPU was going to be designed to be good for the kinds of 2D acceleration you need to like, run a web browser, scroll a window, move a window around. Want to do anything 3D? It's slow or it kicks you back out to MESA software rendering. I just wanted a computer I can use in a day to day way that felt like it was mine and I owned it.
There are a few rudimentary open source GPUs, but none with this focus, and critically, *none I know that support Vulkan*.
@mcc if my aim were to implement the most minimal hardware 2D accel I'd probably target XRender so I could shim it, from my current understanding
Haiku is maybe getting hardware 3D ... eventually(?), and has forbidden slop, if you hadn't seen -
@ireneista @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy my initial sketch for a potential completely different approach to this material (which has *not* been trialed at all, because social stuff fell through, so grains of salt etc.):
1. functions, with a focus on function composition. if you have "USA K-12" brainworms, concepts from the mess that is "pre-calculus" but taught with through a very "computer science" lens, probably with code samples
2. linear maps, with a focus on how this is _an abstraction_
3. matrices and vectors, with a focus on *computation*
4. FIR and IIR filters. the general goal is to get to a working "live demo" with as little "boring" theory on the critical path as possible
5. frequency domain and spectra
6. short time fourier transforms
????
7. < i haven't actually planned it this far yet >
idk if this would be viable or worthless
@ireneista @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy on this note, it's an absolute shame that "pre-calculus" in the USA K-12 "traditional" math pathway is such a poorly-implemented clusterfuck
for those not familiar, as far as i can tell, this was *supposed to be* a wrap-up of elementary algebra and *the bridge* into the "real math" mode of thinking (i.e. the "correct" blend of formalisms, beauty, discovery, abstractions, etc. that mathematicians actually use)
instead, it typically turns into a poorly-motivated grab-bag of topics that aren't clearly "calculus" but that they couldn't fit anywhere else
a bunch of the "i wish i knew the math needed to do X" i've seen where X is something computer+art-ish doesn't actually require much beyond this (okay, probably some extra discrete math bits because the USA curriculum just refuses to add any of that)
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@mcc if my aim were to implement the most minimal hardware 2D accel I'd probably target XRender so I could shim it, from my current understanding
Haiku is maybe getting hardware 3D ... eventually(?), and has forbidden slop, if you hadn't seen@izzy If I am creating a new universe, I do not wish to bring the following things with me into it: C, X, OpenGL. We can do better. We should find a way to do better. Even webtech is better.
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@brouhaha I don't know how many years I have and I don't know how many years I'm able, constitutionally, to go without reaching a goal. If doing A does not achieve my goal without B, can I actually get all the way to the end of A knowing that I've still got to do all of B when I'm done? What if writing both A and B takes so many years together that the definition of what you need for A and B to work shifts in the meantime?
@mcc @brouhaha then hand out work to the rest of us!
right now the big problem we collectively face is that we are all very enchanted with the idea of doing everything ourselves, getting everything exactly to our personal tastes, all that
we're personally, like, guiltier than most people in that regard >< so there's that ><
if we can narrow it down to just a few major paths, we can start walking those paths together instead of alone
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This thread is probably meandering and maybe solipsistic. My point is this: My weird background means I can look at this staircase full of missing stairs, identify one step, and go, "I can fix that". But I don't know if there's enough of me to fix multiple steps. I haven't decided what to do from here. Pick a step and fix it anyway? Pick a "fun" project, like the GPU [which face it, even if I finished it chances are not high more than 3 people would ever use it]? Give up and learn electric bass?
@mcc yeah it's rough out here atm. I can say that spending more time building physical things rather than digital ones has been good for me, but that it's still feeling increasingly bleak work wise. I still make indie games, don't personally use llms at all, yet almost my entire stack seems to be trying to turn into pink slime, and the pay is still pretty bad.
So yeah idk bass sounds pretty good tbh
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@ireneista @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy on this note, it's an absolute shame that "pre-calculus" in the USA K-12 "traditional" math pathway is such a poorly-implemented clusterfuck
for those not familiar, as far as i can tell, this was *supposed to be* a wrap-up of elementary algebra and *the bridge* into the "real math" mode of thinking (i.e. the "correct" blend of formalisms, beauty, discovery, abstractions, etc. that mathematicians actually use)
instead, it typically turns into a poorly-motivated grab-bag of topics that aren't clearly "calculus" but that they couldn't fit anywhere else
a bunch of the "i wish i knew the math needed to do X" i've seen where X is something computer+art-ish doesn't actually require much beyond this (okay, probably some extra discrete math bits because the USA curriculum just refuses to add any of that)
@r @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy yeah, sigh, that matches our observations (and also explains why we didn't perceive it as having any actual content, as kids)
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@r @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy yeah, sigh, that matches our observations (and also explains why we didn't perceive it as having any actual content, as kids)
@r @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy (since we already had that way of thinking from self-study done at the expense of our grades and against the wishes of our teachers)
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@r @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy (since we already had that way of thinking from self-study done at the expense of our grades and against the wishes of our teachers)
@r @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy it makes us really angry that the only way to actually learn anything in the US is to decide that you're fucking well going to learn what you think is important even though everyone in authority will punish you for doing so and you'll have to put up with twenty years of insults about your intelligence
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@r @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy it makes us really angry that the only way to actually learn anything in the US is to decide that you're fucking well going to learn what you think is important even though everyone in authority will punish you for doing so and you'll have to put up with twenty years of insults about your intelligence
@r @MaddieM4 @mcc @decay @amarioguy the entire fucking country would collapse if not for people who made that choice at a young age, to learn despite being punished for it
and it's too much to put on children. it's completely unfair.
