I agree 100%.

Here’s why I prefer making “useless” stuff: https://austinhenley.com/blog/makinguselessstuff.html

And my list of similar projects: https://austinhenley.com/blog/challengingprojects.html

I want to do a database and then something involving genetic algorithms next. If I have infinite time, another video game emulator too.

I had implemented some computer games in DOS.

I had wanted to implement a spreadsheet, although I intended a "zoned spreadsheet", which has a zone grid (separate from the data grid), and each zone row has a number of data rows and each zone column has a number of data columns, and some properties are then properties of zone cells and others are properties of data cells. I think this would be better than most existing spreadsheet programs.

I did not know of some of the things that are mentioned there.

Thank you for sharing these! I've been looking for something productive to do over the summer. Why not make some "useless" stuff, huh?

This is beautiful!!! Adding it to the end of the post right now.

Now if I can just use SIMD directly from Python without calling out to another language.

Hi Austin! Was just checking your blog and the vowels detection post (< https://austinhenley.com/blog/vowels.html>).

What exactly do you mean by “use SIMD directly without calling out to another language”?

In some way Assembly will probably anyways be another language… but that’s a technicality.

I guess the spectrum of SIMD-related work in relation to Python is quite broad. There are projects like PeachPy, to help one write x86 Asm in Python, new Python’esque languages like Mojo, or SIMD libraries with thin CPython bindings. Do you mean one of those?

PS: I’m in the last camp. And in case you are focused on ASCII, for vowel search, have you tried StringZilla’s `find_first_of` (< https://github.com/ashvardanian/StringZilla/blob/960967d78c7...>)? I think it should perform well ;)

why would you want to? if you are performance bound with Python code, you can pick up a 20-50x performance improvement by switching language.

Right, but if there's only a small portion of my code that does string search and it's a hot path, it would still be much much much more convenient to access SIMD-based string search code direct from Python rather than writing the code (LLM or not) in another language and then construct bindings (LLM or not).

2 problems.

1. Python's data types are all bad for performance

2. once you optimize once part, a new part will be the bottleneck

You can use cython and call C SIMD code from it.

Try Nim. It's pretty easy to get the hang of it for simple things, and you can make a python module too.

We are hiring.

Very nice find (pun intended). I added an update at the end with your solution and a link to this comment.

YouTuber or move to the mountains.

I think it is time * (votes+comments).

In practice, if it gets any real amount of votes or comments, you have to wait a year to repost. If it doesn't get any attention, it can be reposted quickly (though I think it should be a day later).

I spent nearly a week of my Microsoft internship in 2016 adding support for Source Depot to the automated code reviewer that I was building (https://austinhenley.com/blog/featurestheywanted.html) despite having no idea what Source Depot was!

Quite a few devs were still using it even then. I wonder if everything has been migrated to git yet.

Naah still a lot of stuff works on sd !! Those sd commands and setting up sd gives me chills !!

I miss CodeFlow everyday. It was such a great tool to use.

CodeFlow lives on and is still held in high regard. It's even made it's way to support the github repos, not just git. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/codeflow/aphnoipoco...

Still buried as internal only though.

Most of the day to day is in git, now.

Writing out hundreds of lines of code is not what I meant by proactive tools…

Where are the proactive coding tools? https://austinhenley.com/blog/proactiveai.html

It was probably auto flagged as dupe because the original was discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43957010

Thanks! We missed that. I've pinned a link to the other thread to the top now.