#program distribution

[fall23iksection]

DIAGRAM - conceptual section Seattle library - allocating program to location in building

_ik

[monstrousgourmandizingcats]

I've just accepted (embraced, even) that I'm going to be incredibly defensive of this silly little cannibal show for the rest of my life, because no matter what happens in this finale, or with renewal or critical reception or fan reception or whatever else, the story of Yellowjackets will have been the story of a show that had a lot of Big Ideas about things like death, fate, and God; swung for the fences and had both strikeouts and grand slams; was not written or directed or acted for wimps or critics; and had, as a great woman once said, a lot of gore and a lot of gay.

[britishchick09]

a 1989 print ad for the 1990 mini series!! :o

[blubberquark]

Share Your Anecdotes: Multicore Pessimisation

I took a look at the specs of new 7000 series Threadripper CPUs, and I really don't have any excuse to buy one, even if I had the money to spare. I thought long and hard about different workloads, but nothing came to mind.

Back in university, we had courses about map/reduce clusters, and I experimented with parallel interpreters for Prolog, and distributed computing systems. What I learned is that the potential performance gains from better data structures and algorithms trump the performance gains from fancy hardware, and that there is more to be gained from using the GPU or from re-writing the performance-critical sections in C and making sure your data structures take up less memory than from multi-threaded code. Of course, all this is especially important when you are working in pure Python, because of the GIL.

The performance penalty of parallelisation hits even harder when you try to distribute your computation between different computers over the network, and the overhead of serialisation, communication, and scheduling work can easily exceed the gains of parallel computation, especially for small to medium workloads. If you benchmark your Hadoop cluster on a toy problem, you may well find that it's faster to solve your toy problem on one desktop PC than a whole cluster, because it's a toy problem, and the gains only kick in when your data set is too big to fit on a single computer.

The new Threadripper got me thinking: Has this happened to somebody with just a multicore CPU? Is there software that performs better with 2 cores than with just one, and better with 4 cores than with 2, but substantially worse with 64? It could happen! Deadlocks, livelocks, weird inter-process communication issues where you have one process per core and every one of the 64 processes communicates with the other 63 via pipes? There could be software that has a badly optimised main thread, or a badly optimised work unit scheduler, and the limiting factor is single-thread performance of that scheduler that needs to distribute and integrate work units for 64 threads, to the point where the worker threads are mostly idling and only one core is at 100%.

I am not trying to blame any programmer if this happens. Most likely such software was developed back when quad-core CPUs were a new thing, or even back when there were multi-CPU-socket mainboards, and the developer never imagined that one day there would be Threadrippers on the consumer market. Programs from back then, built for Windows XP, could still run on Windows 10 or 11.

In spite of all this, I suspect that this kind of problem is quite rare in practice. It requires software that spawns one thread or one process per core, but which is deoptimised for more cores, maybe written under the assumption that users have for two to six CPU cores, a user who can afford a Threadripper, and needs a Threadripper, and a workload where the problem is noticeable. You wouldn't get a Threadripper in the first place if it made your workflows slower, so that hypothetical user probably has one main workload that really benefits from the many cores, and another that doesn't.

So, has this happened to you? Dou you have a Threadripper at work? Do you work in bioinformatics or visual effects? Do you encode a lot of video? Do you know a guy who does? Do you own a Threadripper or an Ampere just for the hell of it? Or have you tried to build a Hadoop/Beowulf/OpenMP cluster, only to have your code run slower?

I would love to hear from you.

[seventeendeer]

pokémon needs an offline version of pokémon home that's an actual little small game where you live on an island or smth with your pokémon and there's nothing to really do or accomplish but you can walk around and look at your guys playing in fields and on beaches and having naps under trees and you can see all their data together in 1 place and click a button to pet them, maybe feed them a snack

just a really simple little simulator where you can store all your lil friends and hang out w them that isn't just. subscription-based glorified menu

[vivaciousoceans]

I just got confirmation that a food distribution program that I came up with in middle school is being implemented at my little sisters elementary school and it’s just the news I needed

[inkykeiji]

hi clari! after reading ur posts about being a film and basically lit major i was curious about why u decided to study film at a university level n how it ties into ur “story” if u know what i mean

hello!! hmm i’m not like 100% sure what you mean by story (like, as in the story of my life???) but i decided to study film at a university level because i love cinema with everything in me and planned to work in the industry in any way, whether that be in production or distribution or exhibition or on an even more academic level (it’s a dream of mine to create my own film journal and publish academic pieces written by women).

my goals have changed a little now—i still love cinema, and i’d still die to work in the industry, but i’m currently more focused on creating (writing for) indie games + publishing novels & collections of short stories. everything i studied in school + the skills i developed n sharpened there are still helpful and applicable to these fields as well so!! i definitely do not regret my degree at all and i’m really happy i went with it! c: i also loved my program so so so much <3

[backyard-gp]

This is what the WDC points and standings would look like if Max wasn’t competing:

Perez: 229 points

Alonso: 191 points

Hamilton: 190 points

Leclerc: 127 points

Russel: 125 points

Sainz: 115 points

Norris: 97 points

Stroll: 65 points

Ocon: 50 points

Piastri: 45 points

Gasly: 34 points

Albon: 19 points

Hulkenberg: 12 points

Bottas: 10 points

Tsunoda: 9 points

Zhou: 8 points

Magnussen: 4 points

Sargeant: 1 point

De Vries: 0 points

Ricciardo: 0 points

[farmerstrend]

Farmers in Lari Empowered Through Bold Pig Farming Program

Kiambu County launches a high-impact pig farming initiative in Lari Sub-County, providing piglets and inputs to boost agribusiness, create jobs, and support smallholder farmers. Farmers in Lari Sub‑County received a major boost as hundreds of residents in Kirenga Ward took part in a community empowerment exercise aimed at transforming livelihoods through agribusiness. The Kiambu County…

[enyementv]

The King Salman Humanitarian Aid Center signs agreements to distribute 600,000 food baskets and implement health and vocational programs in several provinces.

King Salman Humanitarian Aid Center Signs Agreements for Food Distribution in Yemen The King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center has signed two cooperation agreements with civil society organizations to distribute 600,000 food baskets in Yemen for the years 2025-2026. The total weight of these food baskets amounts to 35 tons and 640 kilograms. Aiming to Alleviate Food Insecurity Engineer…

[rydengg]

a majority of you know nothing about how porn is made and distributed and the people in power are counting on you not knowing. i’m so tired.

one of the major things they count on you not knowing is that tube sites do not produce even a decimal of the content you consume. tube sites are just video platforms. they are access to content that isn’t put behind a paywall in the first place. mainstream studios that can often do put shortened versions of their films on tube sites for advertisement. these only make up a fraction of the content that people actively consume as well - much more of it is independently created than folks realize.

with pornhub’s model program, a MASSIVE amount of the content there is uploaded consensually by independent performers themselves. we get ad revenue and, as previously stated, it makes for decent advertisement. i believe the other big tube sites have programs that are similar. and yes, we are age verified when we apply to become part of the model program. every single thing we upload has to go through approval before it goes public.

i’m saying this because every single time a porn-related post goes around someone brings up tube sites before anything else, and they often bring up dated or entirely false information. PH and all of the big tube sites used to have MASSIVE issues (that we warned people about back then - nobody listened) with non-consensually uploaded content but they’ve long since had to change their stance on this and become fairly strict. i’m not saying there’s zero content of that nature. it’s just not all that different than any platform that has video content. all of them face issues of copyright and non-consensual media. (and i’d say they enforce their rules arguably better than platforms like say, facebook.)

and that’s not even to mention how it isn’t even a small facet of the industry despite the general public grouping it altogether. you cannot accept any kind of profit on onlyfans, manyvids, apclips, etc unless you go through a process that includes identity verification. you cannot upload any content involving another person besides who you already have paperwork for. that paperwork includes age verification. and while i’m absolutely there are people that find ways around this… that’s literally everywhere lol. in no other industry does that small outlier define the whole practice.

like… ALL of the propaganda, all the proposed legislation against sex work and specifically porn paints the exact opposite picture of what i’m telling you and so many of you are eating it up. they want you to have a visceral reaction so you don’t think critically and now - watching it hurt people outside the porn industry - we’re seeing what that does in the long term.

we have warned you. we will continue to warn you. the choice to stay ignorant is the choice to condemn yourself to a discriminatory society that’ll be overall worse off in the long run. it will run you over the moment it sees you as perverse, too.

[holyjak]

"The Hydro Project at UC Berkeley is developing cloud-native programming models that allow anyone to develop scalable and resilient distributed applications. Our research spans across databases, distributed systems, and programming languages to deliver a modern, end-to-end stack for cloud programming." A part of that is the Rust Hydro library, for writing choreographed distributed dataflow programs. I.e. run it on a cluster or couple processes, with primitives for sending data etc.

They have also published a number of interesting-looking papers exploring topics such as defining the foundational semantic properties of streaming languages (streaming progress and eager execution) and rule-based rewriting of distributed algorithms, CRTDs and Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocols to make them more scalable without being error-prone. The 2021 New Directions in Cloud Programming sets the direction for the project (and I appreciate its decomplecting of the aspects of distributed systems :)), and the 2021 master thesis Hydroflow: A Model and Runtime for Distributed Systems Programming provides, I assume, background for Hydro. It states:

[..] Hydroflow new cloud programming model used to create constructively correct distributed systems. The model is a refinement and unification of the existing dataflow and reactive programming models. Like dataflow, Hydroflow is based on an algebra of operators which execute in streaming fashion across multiple nodes. [..] construct provably monotonic distributed programs which can always make forward progress without incurring the high cost of coordination. Hydroflow is primarily a low-level compilation target for future declarative cloud programming languages, [..]

More about the 2025 Hydro:

Hydro is a high-level distributed programming framework for Rust. Hydro can help you quickly write scalable distributed services that are correct by construction. Much like Rust helps with memory safety, Hydro helps with distributed safety. Hydro also makes it easy to get started by running your distributed programs in either testing or deployment modes.

Hydro is a distributed dataflow language, powered by the high-performance single-threaded DFIR runtime. Unlike traditional architectures such as actors or RPCs, Hydro offers choreographic APIs, where expressions and functions can describe computation that takes place across many locations. It also integrates with Hydro Deploy to make it easy to deploy and run distributed Hydro programs either locally or in the cloud.

[narayansevango]

Winter warm sweater and blanket donation by Narayan Seva Sansthan

[brianmoffet]

I've had people tell me that they wish they knew as much about computers as I do, I usually tell them "no, you really don't"...

A fun thing about computer skills is that as you have more of them, the number of computer problems you have doesn't go down.

This is because as a beginner, you have troubles because you don't have much knowledge.

But then you learn a bunch more, and now you've got the skills to do a bunch of stuff, so you run into a lot of problems because you're doing so much stuff, and only an expert could figure them out.

But then one day you are an expert. You can reprogram everything and build new hardware! You understand all the various layers of tech!

And your problems are now legendary. You are trying things no one else has ever tried. You Google them and get zero results, or at best one forum post from 1997. You discover bugs in the silicon of obscure processors. You crash your compiler. Your software gets cited in academic papers because you accidently discovered a new mathematical proof while trying to remote control a vibrator. You can't use the wifi on your main laptop because you wrote your own uefi implementation and Intel has a bug in their firmware that they haven't fixed yet, no matter how much you email them. You post on mastodon about your technical issue and the most common replies are names of psychiatric medications. You have written your own OS but there arent many programs for it because no one else understands how they have to write apps as a small federation of coroutine-based microservices. You ask for help and get Pagliacci'd, constantly.

But this is the natural of computer skills: as you know more, your problems don't get easier, they just get weirder.

[abyssalaerlocke]

Trying to figure out how these plots break down into scenes, and what order they should go.

Remembers I had the same problem with the last Cyberpunk fic I tried to write, and started with a sprawling diagram of dependencies that I programmed to randomly generate an acceptable scene order, and when it generated something that didn't seem right, I added more dependencies, until I honed in on a single sequence

😐

[farmerstrend]

AFA Champions Sustainable Coffee Farming at Mama na Kahawa Phase 2 Launch in Nandi County

Agriculture and Food Authority launches Mama na Kahawa Phase 2 in Nandi County, empowering women with 500,000 coffee seedlings and sustainable farming training. Nandi County, Kenya — The Agriculture and Food Authority (AFA), under the leadership of Chairman Hon. Cornelly Serem and Director Felix Mutwiri (representing Director General Dr. Bruno Linyiru, OGW), played a central role in the launch…