On the GPU however, the hyperthreads are just a round-robin execution queue to take advantage of instruction pipelining. The register bank of a single GPU core is huge and can be flexibly divided across a variable number of thread contexts when a kernel is launched. Many thread contexts can be held in registers simultaneously in a single GPU core. That makes stalling on memory latency much less of a problem. The hardware can focus on delivering raw bandwidth with high latency and get great overall performance. This throughput-instead-of-latency trade-off extends to many other aspects of GPU design.

The promotional material likes to label the individual lanes as “cores” because it sounds more impressive. And, it’s not entirely incorrect.

Even the dev docs use the marketing terminology. The description I gave above needs a bit of piecing together.

Instead, the "modern" APIs allow you to leverage your pre-existing knowledge of "allocate arrays of structs and start indexing them." That's not trivial. But, it is already familiar. And, it ends up a lot better in the end compared to "Invoke whole lot of functions to manipulate a hidden state machine."

You can find a little info on Modern OpenGL at https://github.com/fendevel/Guide-to-Modern-OpenGL-Functions, https://juandiegomontoya.github.io/modern_opengl.html, https://ktstephano.github.io/, https://patrick-is.cool/posts/2025/on-vaos/

If you are going to use Vulkan, check out https://howtovulkan.com/ Vulkan started with a lot of compromises to make mobile hardware happy at the expense of making everything overly complicated on desktop. Over the past decade, desktop devs have managed to get a lot of features added to make Vulkan on desktop more sane. How To Vulkan covers that newer approach. This recent video "It's Not About the API" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bSzp-QildA shows how simple it can be if you let it.

And, if you are on a Mac, folks who use Metal like it a lot. Don't worry about lock-in. Once you learn the basics, knowledge is easily transferable to DX12 and Vulkan. You should plan to write 3 or 4 renderers to throw away anyway :P

As @petecordell put it: "Telling a programmer there's already a library to do X is like telling a songwriter there's already a song about love."

Sometimes I'm not interested in the inner workings of a technology, I just want a one-off tool. Ex: No interest in web tech. But, vibe-coded a tool to scrape and cross-reference a couple of online reports. Now I have the info I need for other projects.

Sometimes I know exactly what I want and it's quicker to hand-hold the AI through making it for me. Ex: Put together yet another SIMD math lib recently. SIMD intrisics are an obnoxious API. But, a non-SIMD implementation is easy to verify and many SIMD implementations are easy to validate vs. the non-SIMD reference. It's just a huge amount of obtuse code.

Sometimes I don't know exactly what I want and it's great to have a always-online partner to bounce questions off of, do rapid-prototyping for me, do code reviews for me. AIs aren't perfect. But, being instant, patient and often right makes them a huge improvement over online forums.

Lots of people start out with a non-programmable config format. But, as their situation becomes more complicated, they end up shoehorning in programmable-ish features until they realize they are running straight into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule and decide to do it properly.

https://www.uni-konstanz.de/mmsp/pubsys/publishedFiles/LuCoD...

Besides that, first use case that comes to mind is that gamedev likes Lua but iOS does not like LuaJit in JIT mode.

> There are few to no side-effects to melatonin use in adults (there is uncertainty about the risks & benefits in children & adolescents28), and it is not addictive or habit-forming like caffeine is. The usual dose for a night is 0.5-3 mg and I take 1.5mg [29]; my dose is highly likely to be too high. High doses may well be responsible for why some people try melatonin and report that it does nothing or hurts them, since in one study, the best dose for old people was 10x smaller (0.1mg or 0.3mg) and for one blind person, 0.5mg [30 31 32] . Zhdanova et al 1996 found 0.3mg & 1.0mg to affect sleep onset similarly. A study of delayed-release melatonin found with their high dose of 4mg (but not 0.4mg) elevated melatonin levels 10 hours after bedtime ( Gooneratne et al 2011) - potentially interfering with waking time.

It is difficult to find doses as small as 1mg sublingual (dissolve under the tongue) in my area. Everyone is trying to sell you 5-30mg chewables. And, I expect everyone is buying them under the assumption that more is better. But, here it explicitly is not.

The way melatonin works well for me is to wait until I'm already settled into bed and should be asleep, but I'm not. Do a couple body scans to relax for real. Try to think about something mindless. Then if I'm still awake, pop 1mg under my tongue. I'll usually wake in the morning with half of it drooled on my pillow :P

AFAICT, SGI was a textbook Innovator’s Dilemma case with an expensive enterprise product that’s hard to give up in the face of cheap, low-margin competition.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f90R2taD1WQ

On the opposite side, startups building on difficult languages like Haskell, Elixir, Erlang have a built-in bias towards hiring a team that can get a lot more done with a lot less people. Great for startups. Terrible for enterprise.

https://learnopencv.com/3d-gaussian-splatting/