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galdauts

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Hi, I'm a computational science student, focusing on scientific computing as well as molecular and cell biology.

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I think a more nuanced take is appropriate here. It‘s true that computers were invented with the express goal of speeding up military and corporate computing (back when computers were still people), but their influence on our culture and society extended far beyond those initial applications. The telephone was invented as a means of long-distance communication, but it shaped our values surrounding communication as well. Therefore it may be hard to predict what will ultimately become of a technology.

I agree that there are a lot of overhyped technologies though. Quantum computing has been in the works for decades now, with little to show for it in the popular perception.

Yes, that's the paper my predecessors worked on! I replicated the measurements with an upgraded version of Julia (1.12), but despite the claimed performance benefits, Julia still performed poorly.

Thank you for the article! We're mainly interested in floating-point performance and energy consumption w/r/t to solving differential equations and tridiagonal systems of equations, while running on a 128-core compute node. Our current results will likely only be presented in May, but here are last year's results: https://www.cs.uni-potsdam.de/bs/research/docs/papers/2025/l...

Our Julia code is parallelised with FLoops.jl, but so far Numba has shown surprising performance benefits when executing code in parallel, despite being slower when executed sequentially. Therefore I can imagine that Julia might yield better results when run in a regular desktop environment.

We have been running benchmarks to compare different languages relevant to high-performance computing and unfortunately Julia still lags behind even Numba-JIT-compiled Python. Perhaps my understanding of Julia is limited, but even the Rodinia SRAD program, which was originally written in Julia, performs faster in all other implementations that aren't Julia.

I agree with you. Having lost a close family member to cancer over a period of years, the only regret I have is not trying more to improve her quality of life for as long as I could. Putting in effort to understand the diagnosis is warranted, but there are no miracle cures, even if there are miracles sometimes.

I feel like the use of the term "anti-AI hype" is not really fully explored here. Even limiting myself to tech-related applications - I'm frankly sick of companies trying to shove half-baked "AI features" down my throat, and the enshittification of services that ensues. That has little to do with using LLMs as coding assistants, and yet I think it is still an essential part of the "anti-AI hype".

The issue is not even so much generating fake videos as creating plausible deniability. Now everything can be questioned for the pure reason of seeming AI-generated.

I'd like to add that there are different flavours of both capitalism and socialism. The kind of disaster capitalism practiced in Russia and other former Soviet Union countries in the 90s certainly didn't lead to an improvement of living standards for quite a long time, if even. China also presents a case of state capitalism where companies are strictly controlled by the government as evidenced by the recent set of regulations published a few weeks ago and many companies are owned by the children of party members.