I mean, I don’t agree with that and neither does Knuth, and it sounds like neither do you, but hey, it’s not up to me to tell anyone other than my own team how to write code or run a business. There are always going to be dev jobs that just don’t care about performance until they’re in trouble and wasting money and time. If what you’re saying is that some dev shops don’t want to consider GPU programming because they don’t care about performance at all, and it would be hard to propose CUDA as a solution there due to the prevailing attitudes, then yeah I agree that’s not the place to learn CUDA. I’d have to agree that’s an obstacle to learning CUDA, but that’s not really CUDA’s fault or a general obstacle to using GPUs, it’s just the wrong place & time. Better to find a job at a company that cares about performance, right? There are lots of them.
FWIW, your phrasing makes it sound like you do hold this opinion, which is why I asked about who believes this. You’re stating it both here and above first as though it’s a general fact before later qualifying it’s someone else’s belief and slightly distancing yourself. I still can’t tell where you really land, but hopefully we’re more violently agreeing that disagreeing. All I’m saying is it would be doing your peers and HN both a service to challenge misinterpretations and misunderstandings of what Knuth was trying to get across, that performance matters (and also that efficient use of your time matters too).
I need names. Especially those that don't require a long history of GPU programming or PhD in a related field to even get an interview. Bonus points if they're not a startup that is about to fail and is desperate to hire anyone who wants work on cool stuff for free while it lasts. Even better if they have a business model that is not cryptocurrency, HFT or just hoping to get acquired.
Yes, I'm more than a bit disillusioned with the field. We could do much better if there hadn't been some people who made a lot of money on the "move fast and break things" or "nobody got fired for buying X" attitudes. I was trying to communicate those things as if they were commonly accepted attitudes but not really true. I think I failed. Sarcasm never works on the Internet.
I see, I hear you. Well, all the FAANG companies have high performance dev groups that dabble with GPU. Games companies all do GPU, plus any team doing graphics. Neural network jobs at AI companies are around but more likely to require the history & PhD, and land in the startup category. First place I did any GPU work for my job was WebGL at LucidChart (a web app competitor to Visio). AMD, Apple, Sony, Nvidia and anyone else making GPU or SIMD units have tons of jobs and you can likely start with something close to what you currently do and transition toward more high performance programming. I dunno if that’s at all helpful, but sorry about the disillusionment, I know that can be difficult to deal with.
I mean, I don’t agree with that and neither does Knuth, and it sounds like neither do you, but hey, it’s not up to me to tell anyone other than my own team how to write code or run a business. There are always going to be dev jobs that just don’t care about performance until they’re in trouble and wasting money and time. If what you’re saying is that some dev shops don’t want to consider GPU programming because they don’t care about performance at all, and it would be hard to propose CUDA as a solution there due to the prevailing attitudes, then yeah I agree that’s not the place to learn CUDA. I’d have to agree that’s an obstacle to learning CUDA, but that’s not really CUDA’s fault or a general obstacle to using GPUs, it’s just the wrong place & time. Better to find a job at a company that cares about performance, right? There are lots of them.
FWIW, your phrasing makes it sound like you do hold this opinion, which is why I asked about who believes this. You’re stating it both here and above first as though it’s a general fact before later qualifying it’s someone else’s belief and slightly distancing yourself. I still can’t tell where you really land, but hopefully we’re more violently agreeing that disagreeing. All I’m saying is it would be doing your peers and HN both a service to challenge misinterpretations and misunderstandings of what Knuth was trying to get across, that performance matters (and also that efficient use of your time matters too).