One of the great new F# tools in .NET Core 3 Preview 3 is F# interactive as pure .NET Core application.

To use dotnet fsi in your Visual Studio Code with the Ionide F# IDE plugin instead of the fsharpi binary, add the following to your user settings.json:

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"FSharp.fsacRuntime": "netcore",
"FSharp.fsiFilePath": "/usr/local/share/dotnet/dotnet",
"FSharp.fsiExtraParameters": ["fsi"]

Remember to replace fsiFilePath with wherever your .NET Core 3 dotnet binary is installed. (On mac and Linux, do which dotnet, on Windows where dotnet to find out.)

On Wednesday April 3, 2019, I finished migrating this site from Wordpress to Hugo. An important part of this project was finding a new system for handling blog post comments.

On my personal blog, I am able to use the free and ad-free tier of Disqus, but because vxlabs.com is strictly-speaking a company site (even although 100% of the posts are non-commercial), that won’t work here.

Furthermore, the $9 / month price tag of the lowest Disqus tier is not really justifiable with the relatively small number of comments being handled.

TL;DR: For best results with mixed precision training, use NVIDIA’s Automatic Mixed Precision together with fastai, and remember to set any epsilons, for example in the optimizer, correctly.

Background

Newer NVIDIA GPUs such as the consumer RTX range, the Tesla V100 and others have hardware support for half-precision / fp16 tensors.

This is interesting, because many deep neural networks still function perfectly if you store most of their parameters using the far more compact 16-bit floating point precision. The newer hardware (sometimes called TensorCores) is able to accelerate further these half precision operations.

I have prepared a simple Ansible script which will enable you to convert a clean Ubuntu 18.04 image (as supplied by Google Compute Engine or PaperSpace) into a CUDA 10, PyTorch 1.0 preview, fastai 1.0.x, miniconda3 powerhouse, ready to live the (mixed-precision!) deep learning dream.

I built this script specifically in order to be able to do mixed-precision neural network training on NVIDIA’s TensorCores. It currently makes use of the vxlabs.com build of PyTorch 1.0, because we need full CUDA 10 for the new TensorCores.

In a previous post I showed how to get Palantir’s Python Language Server working together with Emacs and lsp-mode.

In this post, we look at the brand new elephant in the room, Microsoft’s arguably far more powerful own Python Language Server, and how to integrate it with Emacs.

Motivation

Since that previous post on Palantir’s language server, I’ve been using Emacs far more intensively for Python coding in tmux on remote machines with GPUs for deep learning.

(The wheel has now been updated to the latest PyTorch 1.0 preview as of December 6, 2018.)

You’ve just received a shiny new NVIDIA Turing (RTX 2070, 2080 or 2080 Ti), or maybe even a beautiful Tesla V100, and now you would like to try out mixed precision (well mostly fp16) training on those lovely tensor cores, using PyTorch on an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS x86_64 system.

The idea is that these tensor cores chew through fp16 much faster than they do through fp32. In practice, neural networks tolerate having large parts of themselves living in fp16, although one does have to be careful with this. Furthermore, fp16 promises to save a substantial amount of graphics memory, enabling one to train bigger models.

Over the years, I’ve built up quite a collection of notes as Org mode text files. So far, it has proven to be the most expressive and the most robust note-taking modality out of a long list of candidates that I’ve tried.

Note-taking using Org mode has one big drawback however: Mobile accessibility.

In other words, consulting one’s org mode notes database from a mobile device is painful. This should not be the case; notes should be always and instantly available, even on mobile.

The language server protocol was proposed by Microsoft as a way for different editors and development environments to share language analysis backends

This post describes how to configure Emacs, lsp-mode and the palantir python-language-server for improved code intelligence when working on Python projects. (I’m planning a companion post for Emacs, C++ and the cquery language server.)

Goal

Before starting, it is motivating to see what we are working towards.

With a correctly configured setup, Emacs will sport, amongst others, improved completion with interactive documentation, imenu navigation, documentation on hover, and really snazzy find definitions (=M-.=) and find references.

Phil Hagelberg recently won the Lisp Game Jam 2018 with his entry EXO_encounter 667.

What I found most interesting however, was his interactive programming setup.

He programmed his game in (and contributed new features to) a Lisp to Lua compiler called Fennel, and used the game programming library Löve.

With Emacs and some Lua thread magic, he was able to perform runtime changes and introspection to his live running game project. (See below for a demo!)

tmtxt-dired-async by Trần Xuân Trường is an unfortunately lesser known Emacs package which extends dired, the Emacs file manager, to be able to run rsync and other commands (zip, unzip, downloading) asynchronously.

This means you can copy gigabytes of directories around whilst still happily continuing with all of your other tasks in the Emacs operating system.

It has a feature where you can add any number of files from different locations into a wait list with C-c C-a, and then asynchronously rsync the whole wait list into a final destination directory with C-c C-v. This alone is worth the price of admission.