We ended up sinking two years into it, and never ended up with a particularly good compiler (although we did absolutely crush a couple toy benchmarks).

Arguably both sides of that tradeoff were wrong, though, as the eventually successful PyTorch 2.0 compiler (TorchInductor) was based on Triton (plus some custom higher-level scheduling logic).

I love my kids profoundly, and I think in the long run I will be happier than if I’d not had them and focused on work instead (work tends not to care about you after you leave. Maybe if you’re Steve Jobs or something). But in the moment, life is pretty stressful.

Now I have “flexible” work hours, and it’s all cramming in whatever I can late at night so that I can accommodate the schedule of kids’ daycare. If we didn’t have flex hours, one of my wife or I would have no choice but to quit to manage the kids, and we’d have less income but probably be happier. But since we have the choice it’s all too tempting to keep burning the candle at both ends and the middle.

Simple example: I was trying to hang some shades in my kid’s room. First set went in fine, second set, my drill hit something too hard for it (brick? Metal?). At this point I’m kind of stuck. I can search Google for this scenario but it’s hard to know conclusively which situation I’m in, and I don’t know how dangerous or destructive what I’m doing could be.

This is probably laughable to lots of you who know, intuitively from experience, what’s happening and what to do, but for someone who had no idea like me, it’s pretty intimidating.

(Coda: we bought stick-on shades and they were trivially easy to install and worked great)

If I had any literary skill, I’d write a tragedy in which the hero’s flaw is his lack of hubris. (Perhaps it would be autobiographical - my grad school advisor said my weakness is that I’m not arrogant enough.)

See I'd assert the opposite, or at least the following more nuanced version, for myself:

If I make a baked potato, I'll eat it and be quite happy -- even delighted! -- with it. But! If I have to choose between a baked potato or garlic bread (say, on a restaurant menu) I'd choose the garlic bread virtually every time, unless I'm exerting Herculean levels of willpower to choose healthier options. And if I'm served a baked potato and garlic bread, I'd probably eat the potato, and then somehow find room to eat the garlic bread anyways.

I don't disagree that healthy food can be very tasty, but I mitigate my own struggles with healthy eating by "merely" never keeping unhealthy options around, so I can focus more on the joy of the healthy food, and not have to constantly choose to avoid the high-calorie treats.

Thanks for the great write up as well as mold itself!

I found myself wondering if one could create a domain-specific language for specifying string processing tasks, and then automate some of the tricks with a compiler (possibly with human-specified optimization annotations). Halide did this sort of thing for image processing (and ML via TVM to some extent) and it was a pretty significant success.