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Cake day: June 3rd, 2023

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  • I haven’t heard of that being what threading is, but that threading is about shared resourcing and memory space and not any special relationship with the scheduler.

    Per the wiki:

    On a multiprocessor or multi-core system, multiple threads can execute in parallel, with every processor or core executing a separate thread simultaneously; on a processor or core with hardware threads, separate software threads can also be executed concurrently by separate hardware threads.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(computing)

    I also think you might be misunderstanding the relationship between concurrency and parallelism; they are not mutually exclusive. Something can be concurrent through parallelism, as the wiki page has (emphasis mine):

    Concurrency refers to the ability of a system to execute multiple tasks through simultaneous execution or time-sharing (context switching), sharing resources and managing interactions.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrency_(computer_science)



  • If what you said were true, wouldn’t it make a lot more sense for OP to be making a joke about how even if the source includes multi threading, all his extra cores are wasted? And make your original comment suggesting a coding issue instead of a language issue pretty misleading?

    But what you said is not correct. I just did a dumb little test

    import threading 
    import time
    
    def task(name):
      time.sleep(600)
    
    t1 = threading.Thread(target=task, args=("1",))
    t2 = threading.Thread(target=task, args=("2",))
    t3 = threading.Thread(target=task, args=("3",))
    
    t1.start()
    t2.start()
    t3.start()
    

    And then ps -efT | grep python and sure enough that python process has 4 threads. If you want to be even more certain of it you can strace -e clone,clone3 python ./threadtest.py and see that it is making clone3 syscalls.





  • I think to some extent it’s a matter of scale, though. If I advertise something as a calculator capable of doing all math, and it can only do one problem, it is so drastically far away from its intended purpose that the meaning kinda breaks down. I don’t think it would be wrong to say “it malfunctions in 99.999999% of use cases” but it would be easier to say that it just doesn’t work.

    Continuing (and torturing) that analogy, if we did the disgusting work of precomputing all 2 number math problems for integers from -1,000,000 to 1,000,000 and I think you could say you had a (really shitty and slow) calculator, which “malfunctions” for numbers outside that range if you don’t specify the limitation ahead of time. Not crazy different from software which has issues with max_int or small buffers.

    If it were the case that there had only been one case of a hallucination with LLMs, I think we could pretty safely call that a malfunction (and we wouldn’t be having this conversation). If it happens 0.000001% of the time, I think we could still call it a malfunction and that it performs better than a lot of software. 99.999% of the time, it’d be better to say that it just doesn’t work. I don’t think there is, or even needs to be, some unified understanding of where the line is between them.

    Really my point is there are enough things to criticize about LLMs and people’s use of them, this seems like a really silly one to try and push.