pantsforbirds (u/pantsforbirds)

pantsforbirds commented on GPT‑5.3 Instant openai.com/index/gpt-5-3-... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

idiotsecant · 10 days ago

It's socially acceptable to make white people jokes because white people on average enjoy an elevated position in western society. It's viewed as 'punching up'. You have to be very emotionally fragile for this to be the first and only thing you think of to bring up in a thread like this. It's also supremely uninteresting cable news talking point slop.

pantsforbirds · 10 days ago

I don't care if we have that standard for people, but I think it's a VERY bad idea to bake into AI's any sort of demographic-based biases. Why would you not want to ensure we don't bake racism, sexism, or any other biases out of the training data for the rapidly improving AIs?

pantsforbirds commented on Bridging Elixir and Python with Oban oban.pro/articles/bridgin... · Posted by u/sorentwo

pantsforbirds · 21 days ago

When rust was still a fairly new language i remember using capn'n proto to communicate between some rust code and python as a way to experiment with handing off performance critical tasks to a compiled language.

I wonder how well a similar approach would work with elixir + python. Elixir obviously has very easy process isolation, but I think you'd be stuck using a NIF approach for Elixir, which probably removes any reason to try capn'n proto over just protobufs?

pantsforbirds commented on Anthropic invests $1.5M in the Python Software Foundation discuss.python.org/t/anth... · Posted by u/ayhanfuat

lambdaone · 2 months ago

Python is a typed language. Perhaps you were trying to say something different?

pantsforbirds · 2 months ago

They clearly meant a statically typed language. Yes Python is Strongly Typed, but I think we all knew what they meant.

pantsforbirds commented on Learning Fortran (2024) uncenter.dev/posts/learni... · Posted by u/lioeters

thatjoeoverthr · 3 months ago

I actually had a fantastic experience with Fortran lately. I ported a compute kernel from python/numpy to Fortran 2018, partially due to the GIL and partly so I could use Intel's compiler. The performance improvement was tremendous. Several times faster per core, then multiplying further because I could take advantage of threading. In all, the 3 day project increased actual throughput 450x.

(I considered JAX, but the code in question was not amenable to a compute graph. Another option was to thread by fork, and use IPC.)

I liked the language itself more than expected. You have something like "generics" with tensors. Suppose you pass a parameter, N, and you also would like to pass a tensor, and you would like to specify the tensor's shape (N, N). You can do this; the parameter type constraints can reference other parameters.

Tensors and various operations are first-class types, so the compiler can optimise operations easily for the system you're building on. In my case, I got 80% improvement from ifx over gfortran.

Invocation from Python was basically the same as a C library. Both Python and Fortran have facilities for C interop, and Numpy can be asked to lay out tensors in a Fortran compatible way.

Part of what eased the port was that Numpy seems to be a kind of "Fortran wrapper". The ergonomics on tensor addressing, slicing and views is identical.

pantsforbirds · 3 months ago

If your problem fits into arrays/matrices/vectors as the only required datastructures, Fortran is a VERY good language.

pantsforbirds commented on The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI Partner on Sora openai.com/index/disney-s... · Posted by u/inesranzo

pantsforbirds · 3 months ago

I think I'm the only one kind of stoked about this. My kiddos are going to LOVE making short films with their favorite Disney Princesses.

pantsforbirds commented on Python Data Science Handbook jakevdp.github.io/PythonD... · Posted by u/cl3misch

pantsforbirds · 3 months ago

I used the Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) page/blog at my very first job. It was immensely useful and I've loved his work ever since.

pantsforbirds commented on V8 Garbage Collector wingolog.org/archives/202... · Posted by u/swah

Benjamin_Dobell · 4 months ago

I've recently become the maintainer of https://github.com/godotjs/GodotJS (TypeScript bindings + JS runtime for Godot). GodotJS supports numerous runtimes, but V8 is the most well supported. Unfortunately, I have been noticing V8's GC a bit more than I would like recently.

Don't get me wrong, I'm aware V8 wasn't designed with games in mind. QuickJS (which is also supported by GodotJS) is probably the safer bet. Or you know, not JavaScript at all. However, I'm building tooling specifically for kids to make games, and TypeScript is leagues ahead in terms of usability:

https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids

Before I make the swap to QuickJS out of necessity, I was hoping to try my hand at tuning V8's GC for my use case. I wasn't expecting this to be easy, but the article doesn't exactly instill me with confidence:

> Simply tuning the system appears to involve a dose of science, a dose of flailing around and trying things, and a whole cauldron of witchcraft. There appears to be one person whose full-time job it is to implement and monitor metrics on V8 memory performance and implement appropriate tweaks. Good grief!

If anyone reading this has experience with tuning V8's GC to minimize stop-the-world GC duration (at the cost of overall memory use, or runtime performance etc.) I'd greatly appreciate any advice that can be offered.

pantsforbirds · 4 months ago

Have you explored using Apple's javascript core engine at all? I know bun was built on it, but I don't know much else about it.

pantsforbirds commented on Go is a good fit for agents docs.hatchet.run/blog/go-... · Posted by u/abelanger

nilslice · 9 months ago

you should check out the Extism[0] project and the Elixir SDK[1]. This would allow you to write the core services, routing, message passing, etc in Elixir, and leverage all the BEAM/OTP have to offer, and then embed "agents" written in other languages which are small Wasm modules that act like in-process plugins.

[0]: https://github.com/extism/extism [1]: https://github.com/extism/elixir-sdk

pantsforbirds · 9 months ago

That's a really interesting idea. My original thought was to use MCP as the way to define other agents, but I'll have to do some more research into extism!

pantsforbirds commented on Go is a good fit for agents docs.hatchet.run/blog/go-... · Posted by u/abelanger

alberth · 9 months ago

Any reason for SQLite use, instead of the BEAMs built-in mnesia data store?

https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/mnesia/mnesia.html

pantsforbirds · 9 months ago

I'm still in the exploration/experimentation stage of the project, but I'm currently using a mixture of SQLite, PostgreSQL, S3, and DuckDB.

My original thought was to spin up SQLite databases as needed because they are super lightweight, well-tested, and supported by almost every programming language. If you want to set up an agent in another programming language via MCP, but you still want to be able to access the agent memory directly, you can use the same schema in a SQLite database.

I may end up using mnesia for more metadata or system-oriented data storage though. It's very well designed imo.

But one of the biggest reasons has just been the really nice integration with DuckDB. I can query all of the SQLite databases persisted in a directory and aggregate some metadata really easily.

pantsforbirds commented on Go is a good fit for agents docs.hatchet.run/blog/go-... · Posted by u/abelanger

pantsforbirds · 9 months ago

I've been messing around with an Elixir + BEAM based agent framework. I think a mixture of BEAM + SQLite is about as good as you can get for agents right now.

You can safely swap out agents without redeploying the application, the concurrency is way below the scale BEAM was built for, and creating stateful or ephemeral agents is incredibly easy.

My plan is to set up a base agent in Python, Typescript, and Rust using MCP servers to allow users to write more complex agents in their preferred programming language too.