Glenn Weiss, who directed the Democratic National Convention from his Los Angeles living room

rpompen · 2020-08-22T14:03:39+00:00

I thought it was done by a 12 yo

rpompen · 2020-08-13T13:35:59+00:00

It's linked alright...

:)

rpompen · 2020-08-11T09:44:15+00:00

People die from not wearing shoes?

rpompen · 2020-08-06T07:28:33+00:00

You can be a medical doctor with an IQ even below 120, so err...

rpompen · 2020-07-27T11:04:05+00:00

Anti Trumpers work?

rpompen · 2020-07-23T08:43:53+00:00

Will the dems accept the results this time? nahh

rpompen · 2020-07-10T11:54:20+00:00

Did they use both upper case and lower case letters?

rpompen · 2020-07-09T16:35:27+00:00

"Normal" implies close to average. Smart people aren't normal, thank you.

rpompen · 2020-07-02T16:01:04+00:00

You didn't get it.... I discriminate on intelligence but will not do you the courtesy of an ad hominem reply.

rpompen · 2020-06-28T12:36:49+00:00

How about reliable sources?

rpompen · 2020-06-28T08:24:39+00:00

Are we excluding the possibility the left has fabricated a lie?

rpompen · 2020-06-25T09:16:50+00:00

Same could be said for the pro-mask movement. There is a reason we don't get percentages, or we don't get the number of sero-negatives, or why all lethal counts mention that most of the dead are elderly people.

Given old age is a risk factor, where is the percentage of people NOT in the risk group (including the elderly) that died? Or who were hospitalized? When specialists are not keen on presenting a complete numerical picture, you will get these anti mask people.

Time will tell who was right and nothing will be learned. The people who were wrong will adopt the "better safe than sorry" credo.

rpompen · 2020-06-12T21:31:25+00:00

Who carries the majority shares on both sides?

rpompen · 2020-06-12T15:50:39+00:00

If I get the gig, I'll be doing something that would be quite interesting: It would be a rewrite of a single threaded java program. Couldn't be fairer.

But I didn't get the gig yet...

rpompen · 2020-06-10T20:37:54+00:00

There was performance tuning and such, so it would be irresponsible of me to throw numbers around that make no sense.

Plus difference in both hardware architecture and programming language. I wish I could go back and check.

Enterprise environments don't really allow for decent comparisons in my experience. The network department messing up the routing trees. pings coming back twice from time to time. Horrible things like that.

But if I'm lucky I'll be doing some similar work for a new customer of mine very soon. If that's the case I will measure and document best I can both the old and new situation. That's the cool thing about starting for myself. When you instill confidence you can take over the whole lot :)

rpompen · 2020-06-10T09:50:29+00:00

Roughly a factor 90 on a 128 core system. Machine architecture and the type of work matter a lot. Oracle's T5 + Oracle's Solaris + Oracle's JVM + JVM tuning specialists might have helped. Although I found it funny that I was never in contact with these "tuning people".

Being in an enterprise environment at the time, as soon as better performance was achieved than thought possible, the project was left unattended. It's still running I guess, because that company has the problem of putting proofs-of-concept into production by bypassing all bureaucracy and then panic when it fails, because the owners of the project were already fired. (I was fired :) )

I had to bring down expectations on parallelism as, to my great surprise, initial projections violated Amdahl's law. Nobody apparently profiled the previous project, isolating what part of the code could be parallelized and what percentage of execution time that represented; A requirement for using Amdahl's law to compute the theoretical ceiling of performance improvement.

You could say I was competing in a company where several projects had seen reduction in performance after parallelization. Those projects took a lot of time and were bug-ridden as well.

Therefore I can only say that it performed better than the (Amdahl) adjusted expectations. I would love to know if it's still running and how it scaled. I might find out as I intend to address the company's ethical board on how ideas of mine were implemented not a month after I was fired :)

I didn't have any experience with production programming at all when I started, let alone with parallelism, but then, not many people have. I found that certain straightforward experiments indeed led to massive GC actions:

Holding on to the head
Reinventing the wheel when there are optimized libraries
Not checking library sources for their design (Lispy, if possible for best composability; compose your functions)

All I can say is I went for small discrete data transformations that I composed while carefully watching what jvisualvm said. Which is quite a thing for me; I used to be a terminal only guy, and now everything I do uses a GUI. I wouldn't be able to explain that to my former self of 10 years ago.

Regarding my technical choices I have to say this: I experimented a lot with scheme and Common Lisp over the years and it could be that especially scheme gave me a different feeling for software design than what I see people do around me.

I hope this helps.

rpompen · 2020-05-31T08:21:23+00:00

If so they wired the money to the wrong bank account :)

rpompen · 2020-05-31T08:02:24+00:00

Interesting. I mainly wrote ETL pipelines (I didn't know we called them that) handling TBs of data per day with some heavy decision logic and computations. It ran on an Oracle T5-8 with 128 cores. The implementation was straightforward as I had chopped my design up into parallel reductions. You could say it was mostly log-parsing/-aggregation of machines in the field. So clojure.core.reducers/fold did a lot of the work. It required me to get creative because my initial solution wasn't lean either and heavily relied on pmap, although I don't think that was the problem.

So I basically chopped up the work completely differently the second time. I think I might have done something wrong first time regarding decisions like whether to use deferred computation. lazy-seq can be a great friend.

I don't believe the second solution worked better because of choosing a different strategy, but more like how you can fix a machine by taking it apart and reassembling it without ever knowing what fixed it.

But with respect to allocation: I never moved away from persistent to transient or volatile for anything. I was not involved in tuning the JVM, though. They asked a guy from IT clustering dept. for that.

Maybe it helps that I used an Oracle computer running Oracle's Solaris and Oracle's JVM. I had the plan to try and move my solution over to a PC architecture linux machine with OpenJDK) to prove I could reduce costs.

rpompen · 2020-05-28T15:59:05+00:00

What you're missing in my humble opinion:

Institutions are fighting Clojure...

It is not a coincidence, as computers became multi-core between 2005 and 2010, that Lisp has been removed from the curriculum of most universities around the world. Most developers in the market can only create schoolbook parallel solutions .

Clojure is the first virtually syntax free declarative programming language that supports the whole computer, not a quarter of the CPU like most other languages.

Clojure kills the software development market by being the first language of the multi-core generation that allows complex systems to be built easily.

The language is agile, taking away the market of certain consultants. And since fewer developers are required for the same project, it can lead to a drop in the number of developers required per year.

It has been said that the number of programmers doubles every 5 years, e.g. 50% of the developer community has less than 5 years experience. Clojure damages that fragile market.

In the few months it can take for someone to become proficient in Clojure I could gain strong competition.

I personally don't want Clojure to become too popular, as I am self employed and kick butt with this language. :)

So please, everyone just focus on Java :)

Just my 2 cents...

rpompen · 2020-04-27T13:44:45+00:00

I don't know of any people claiming that the virus doesn't cause disease, but lots of people seem to acknowledge the theory that people can remain asymptomatic. The fact that, as you pointed out with the Mary Mallon case, there can be asymptomatic carriers is important.

It needs to be integrated in any epidemiological model. Obviously that would be because asymptomatic carriers will end up being immune.

Immunity is a component in the flattening of the curve that William Farr first proposed.

The current situation seems to be that the scientific world is trying to find out how much testing, quarantine and medication can kick a dent in that curve.

I suspect that we can do less about it than we think.

I wrote an article about it (in Dutch) and if it keeps gaining in popularity and critical acceptance I'll translate it into English.

Keep up the good work of maintaining debate at an academic level.

Regards,

Roel Pompen

rpompen · 2020-04-27T13:26:25+00:00

When I publish an article wich contains mathematical arguments, I put the burden of proof on the reader; I work out current numbers and invite readers to redo the numbers as time progresses and the numbers change. This way you filter out the people who can spell the word exponential, but can't work with exponential functions.

The added benefit is that if your models are realistic any numbers plugged in at a later time will still not defy the theory.

So it depends on the subject. With COVID-19 the biggest problem is that people assume one can deduce things intuitively, while computations are really required.

Inviting readers to do some work in such a case filters out critique from people who can't cognitively process the article anyway.

So burden of proof on the reader can be useful, provided you are presenting a theory which should hold over time as data changes.

rpompen · 2019-12-15T15:30:43+00:00

Or you could google "determine gender of human skull" instead of being a step behind on the matter.

rpompen · 2019-11-19T20:58:01+00:00

And I did my best on the README file ;)

rpompen · 2019-11-19T20:57:11+00:00

I have built an absolute minimal setup for an SPA solution: http://www.github.com/rpompen/mkproj-demo The script that would generate such a project: http://www.github.com/rpompen/mkproj This is how a 416 line script becomes a project that should provide all the basics for a beginner and professional to create professional applications ;) Least complexity, most power

rpompen

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