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i swear people who are outsiders here have only clickbait takes; if you've never had to ship GPU code professionally you should just not comment on these things

i swear people who are outsiders here have only clickbait takes; if you've never had to ship GPU code professionally you should just not comment on these things. the source language has never been the moat. Nvidia sells to hyperscalers. Hyperscalers have armies of kernel authors who have no issue translating shaders by hand (or now with claude). Nvidia's moat is (and will remain for the foreseeable future) the entire stack. you cannot fathom the pain and misery of working on literally any other stack. if you've never debugged a GPU synchronization error or kernel panic due to some GPU firmware bug or fought absolute shit profilers hunting for perf you really have no idea what you're talking about. EDIT: i can't believe this really requires saying but graphics and compute are not the same domain at all. if you work in graphics for GPU but not compute then you are still way out of your depth commenting. to wit: graphics people do not (and cannot) write CUDA kernels/shaders.

swerner 24d ago
If that is your standard, I do have an idea what I’m talking about.
- mathisfun123 24d ago
  Ya? do tell us about your experience that leads you to believe mere translation is the bottleneck in the market...
  - swerner 24d ago
    I’m too old to participate in internet pissing contests.
    - mathisfun123 24d ago
      this isn't a "pissing contest"? you made a speculative claim in a public forum and i'm challenging your authority to make such a claim. a "pissing contest" would be if i had said i've shipped hundreds of thousands of lines of shader code into prod and thus you clearly have no idea what you're talking about because you haven't (which is also true).
      - swerner 24d ago
        I could post the GitHub URLs of all the shader code I wrote that’s running on countless GPUs right now, but what would it change? I’m still just a random guy on the internet with an opinion that happens to be different from your opinion. You can simply disagree with me, regardless of my experience (or lack thereof).
        mathisfun123 24d ago
        > You can simply disagree with me that's exactly what i did and made an argument for why i think you're wrong. in response you provided exactly zero substantive remarks other than "i've written shaders" and then accused me of pissing. also FYI it's clear from your profile that you've only worked on graphics (embree, blender, etc) and not compute. so i'll repeat: you're an outsider and you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
        swerner 24d ago
        Outsider to what?
        mathisfun123 24d ago
        to the domain you presume to have authority to comment on
        swerner 24d ago
        What domain do you think I was talking about?
        imtringued 23d ago
        You can't know if he is an outsider so your argument runs into nothing. If you kept explaining why AI won't remove the CUDA moat and doubled down on that, then swerner would have kept silent, meanwhile your comments would stay so your current strategy is one blunder after the other.
swerner 24d ago
Most modern graphics is compute. Pixar, Dreamworks, Sony, etc do not use Vulkan to render their movies. It’s CPUs or CUDA. “graphics people do not (and cannot) write CUDA kernels/shaders” is just not true at all. All it would take to verify that would be things like reading the introduction of the OptiX documentation, a small sample of SIGGRAPH GPU papers or the Blender/Cycles source code.
- swerner 24d ago
  Wait, I have an idea: What is your qualification for talking about graphics programming? If you cannot provide credentials, I will have no other choice than to claim you don’t know what you’re talking about, based on the criteria by which you judged my comments so far.
PunchTornado 24d ago
But claude will not be able to debug the whole stack? I have no experience in the domain. But as an outsider, it seems to me, that if the rate of progress is maintained, i don't see why agents wouldn't be able to do it in a couple of years
- swerner 23d ago
  If your stack is open source, why not? I’ve had good results with pointing an LLM to a debug build of the GPU compiler when I saw it crash. It just seems you need to periodically remind them that gdb exists to prevent it from littering your drivers with printfs.

swerner 24d ago

If that is your standard, I do have an idea what I’m talking about.

mathisfun123 24d ago
Ya? do tell us about your experience that leads you to believe mere translation is the bottleneck in the market...
- swerner 24d ago
  I’m too old to participate in internet pissing contests.
  - mathisfun123 24d ago
    this isn't a "pissing contest"? you made a speculative claim in a public forum and i'm challenging your authority to make such a claim. a "pissing contest" would be if i had said i've shipped hundreds of thousands of lines of shader code into prod and thus you clearly have no idea what you're talking about because you haven't (which is also true).
    - swerner 24d ago
      I could post the GitHub URLs of all the shader code I wrote that’s running on countless GPUs right now, but what would it change? I’m still just a random guy on the internet with an opinion that happens to be different from your opinion. You can simply disagree with me, regardless of my experience (or lack thereof).
      - mathisfun123 24d ago
        > You can simply disagree with me that's exactly what i did and made an argument for why i think you're wrong. in response you provided exactly zero substantive remarks other than "i've written shaders" and then accused me of pissing. also FYI it's clear from your profile that you've only worked on graphics (embree, blender, etc) and not compute. so i'll repeat: you're an outsider and you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
        swerner 24d ago
        Outsider to what?
        mathisfun123 24d ago
        to the domain you presume to have authority to comment on
        swerner 24d ago
        What domain do you think I was talking about?
        imtringued 23d ago
        You can't know if he is an outsider so your argument runs into nothing. If you kept explaining why AI won't remove the CUDA moat and doubled down on that, then swerner would have kept silent, meanwhile your comments would stay so your current strategy is one blunder after the other.

swerner 24d ago

Most modern graphics is compute. Pixar, Dreamworks, Sony, etc do not use Vulkan to render their movies. It’s CPUs or CUDA. “graphics people do not (and cannot) write CUDA kernels/shaders” is just not true at all. All it would take to verify that would be things like reading the introduction of the OptiX documentation, a small sample of SIGGRAPH GPU papers or the Blender/Cycles source code.

swerner 24d ago
Wait, I have an idea: What is your qualification for talking about graphics programming? If you cannot provide credentials, I will have no other choice than to claim you don’t know what you’re talking about, based on the criteria by which you judged my comments so far.

PunchTornado 24d ago

But claude will not be able to debug the whole stack? I have no experience in the domain. But as an outsider, it seems to me, that if the rate of progress is maintained, i don't see why agents wouldn't be able to do it in a couple of years

swerner 23d ago
If your stack is open source, why not? I’ve had good results with pointing an LLM to a debug build of the GPU compiler when I saw it crash. It just seems you need to periodically remind them that gdb exists to prevent it from littering your drivers with printfs.