Bryce

London for the London CUDA meetup and Pi Data London, then Budapest for a day for the Budapest Python meetup, then Hamburg for ISC and the Hamburg C meetup, and then Ramona and her 14-year-old niece joined me there.

Conor

Welcome to ADSP the podcast, episode 243, recorded on July 1st, 2025. My name is Connor, and today with my co-host Bryce, we chat about learning languages, we recap some recent CUDA and Python meetups, and more say something. Hello, hello.

Bryce

Shish. Am I saying that right? I've been learning Polish. I've been learning Polish with the uh with the apps.

Conor

That is not a word that's a good thing.

Bryce

Yeah, it is. Yeah.

Conor

Oh, it's chesh. Shish.

Bryce

I love this. Uh so so uh reading from the recording? I am, yeah.

Conor

Okay, okay, good.

Bryce

Reading from the transcript, the AI transcript. It says sh-h I s h is what he thought I said. And then it says, Connor. What is chic? Sheik. And then and then and then uh Connor says, oh, it's chest. And then Bryce, chest. There we go. Chest.

Conor

Well, I'm probably I haven't I I I mean I did like a ton of Polish at one point.

Bryce

Yeah, I remember.

Conor

Chess it's it's one of the harder things to say, actually, because it's like C Z E S C or something like that.

Bryce

Yeah, it's got two, it's got like three of the the letters that um that we don't have.

Conor

Yeah. Yeah, it's alright. It's definitely not shish, though, I can tell you that.

Bryce

I I even practiced before we got on the call and uh and you you can see how that how that went.

Conor

But uh an easier one and more impressive in my opinion, uh is uh Shepreshim, which I believe is uh I'm sorry or excuse me. So if you're like walking around, um you just say, oh shoppashim.

Bryce

And um, I'll have to remember that one because uh you know I'm I I I I'm a very clumsy person, so I'm constantly bumping into my girlfriend around the apartment.

Conor

Yeah, I to take a small little tangent, even though we have lots of more exciting things to talk about, I have such um a uh a bone to pick with all these language learning apps.

Bryce

Yeah, I was just about to to ask um the reason the reason the reason I tried to speak Polish to you was I was going to ask for your advice on what's the best way to learn. Um, because I tried Duolingo and it immediately bothered me because I like I when I tried Duolingo, I just put in that like I have no knowledge. Because like I know a couple Polish words, but like I just wanted to start from like the most basics. And so it started like teaching me words, but it doesn't explain like con it doesn't explain anything. It doesn't explain conjugation, like it doesn't like it just like does everything through examples, um, and like you're supposed to learn through inference, which is like maybe that's the way, but like I wanted something where it's gonna explain to me like these are the different, you know, forms, and like here's how you do like conjugation and like something like that. And also, I'm terrible at pronunciation. I want an app where it's gonna have where like for me to make progress, I have to speak the words correctly, and like it it it will grade how well I've spoken them.

Conor

So Duolingo does do that at some point. It just gets introduced a little bit later. And so, yeah, for I mean, for the background, I mean I used to speak Chinese very well, like back in 2012, and I spoke a little bit of Polish at one point. I've also um so I've done Chinese on Duolingo, I've done Polish, I've and sometimes I've messed around like learning a little bit of Spanish or Dutch or Japanese. But my and and so they they do do speaking, they do do the um, you know, spelling if you want, kind of, but you can kind of toggle that in the settings. My main issue though is the words that they start you with. Like I'm trying to think what the most recent one, I think it was uh I re-downloaded it uh and started learning a bit of Japanese, and like they don't in the first like seven or ten lessons, you don't learn yes or no or thank you, or like and like I usually you want it for conversational purposes, or like, you know, uh it's like and in the first seven or ten words I'm learning doctor and lawyer. And I'm just like, Yes, I don't like I don't need like the first things you should learn are like yes, no, excuse me, I'm sorry. Um and then it's like uh they like even they even ask, like, what are you using this for? And it's like, oh, usually what what people choose is like travel or like basic conversation. And I understand that they need to introduce like a couple nouns like Apple or something like that. Um, but I'm always shocked like how far you get into it before they start like introducing you, like and and numbers is also very important. Like a lot of times when you're ordering something, you want to be able to say like one, two, or anyway. So I know Duolingo is very successful, and I'll I should mention too, I I also um am actively learning Persian, but Duolingo doesn't support Persian. Uh so um I have to use a different app called Mondli. Um and I've tried a couple others, all of them are terrible. Duolingo is the best, but I think this space is ripe for disruption with like some LLM where basically you can just say, like, this is I want to have this kind of conversation and teach me these kinds of words. And you're definitely correct. They never like in in Mondli uh with all the Persian that I do daily, it never teaches you the uh conjugations. Basically, like, luckily my partner is Persian, and so I can just ask. Uh, and a lot of times when I'm like uh hanging out with your family, I'll like take the opportunity to to and and the pronunciations that the app gives you are very, very formal. And so they always give me a heart and they're like, ah, that's not how you pronounce house. It's uh hune, not hana. And I'm like, well, I mean, the lady on the app says hane, so like what am I how am I supposed to know? And anyway, so it's just like there is a massive opportunity here for some app to come in. Like, Duolingo is amazing at the gamification, but in my opinion, they're actually quite terrible at getting you in a place where like you've you understand, like you said, conjugations, and also you have like a really like your course at a vocabulary with the the path, I'm sure they've done studies, but I'm guaranteed I guarantee you they're optimizing for like retention, not actually.

Bryce

Well well, uh I have a theory about um so it's interesting. I I felt the same way because like for the Polish, the the first couple words it taught is like man, woman, boy, girl, and then uh um Oh yeah.

Conor

And those are very hard. Jewchenka, like for girl is uh it's it's not a it's not a simple word.

Bryce

And then they also teach you um the word for eating, because the word for eating is very similar to the word for I or I my theory is that the reason that they w teach you the word for eating um is that it's very similar to how you say am, and so you get if you didn't get taught what the word for eating meant early on, you would get confused. Because it's like right for like is eating, and then that's very similar to how you would say um like yestem, which is uh like I am.

Conor

Um yestem, yeah.

Bryce

Yeah, yeah. And and then they but then they also teach you like, you know, like milk, bread, apple. Like I think app like apple, man, boy, woman, uh, girl were like the first like five words. And I I did find it a little weird. One thing that occurred to me is that it's perhaps they start off with concrete nouns because they have this pictorial element where they show you the sentence like, you know, and the sentence like that you're gonna translate as like I am a boy, and it's got a little cute like pictograph of a little boy. And then for like I am a woman, you know, they've got a cute little pictograph of a woman, and maybe they did some research and they determined that you if if like you make a visual connection, you're gonna learn better. Um, but I I tried another app called Babbel. Um the first thing that Babbel taught you was like how to say yes and no. Um and I liked Babbel better because like it I felt like it did a better job of explaining things. Like it explained like that, like nah, or I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrong, is how you say no, but then like it explains that like it me it can mean no and also not, and that like it's used in for negation, and it did a good job of explaining the differences. And then it also started explaining some of the different um sounds in poles, like z. Um, and it like made analogies to like this sound um for for like uh the the Polish letter like R Z. It made the analogy like this sounds like how you'd say the S in pleasure. And I was doing this, this particular one with my girlfriend, and she was like, Oh, that's very clever. Like I've never thought of explaining it to people like that, but like that's exactly that's exactly how I would think of it.

Conor

That's what really good language teachers, like when I was learning Chinese, that was one of the things like the R, um, they said exactly the same thing, like the shur, which is like a really soft R. That's how words that start with R in Chinese a lot of the times, like I think urban is jet uh Japan, and it's like that's one of the harder words to pronounce. Um, and and so they do tricks like that. So, like that's actually what really good like language tutors and language teachers do. They they give you some analogy that ties back to what you know how to say in your own language, right?

Bryce

Yeah. But um it's you know, it's funny because I've always thought I've been like really bad at languages. Um, and the the thing that finally inspired me to do this was we were in um we were at the C committee meeting in Bulgaria, and before that we were at uh ISC in Hamburg. I've I've been to like eight countries in the past month for this like CUDA tour of uh surprise, surprise. Uh um yeah, so the whole the whole itinerary was um London for the London CUDA meetup and Pi Data London, then Budapest for a day for the Budapest Python meetup, then Hamburg for ISC and the Hamburg C meetup. Um and then Ramona and her 14-year-old niece joined me there. And her niece um uh she speaks some English, but uh she's not you know not fluent yet. Um and and so like you know, if her and I are talking like one-on-one, like we're we're using the phone, we're we're we're using Google translating the phone. And then we went from Hamburg to the committee meeting in Bulgaria. Um and uh then there was another meetup uh uh there in Sofia. Um uh it was sponsored by NVIDIA, although I didn't actually uh speak at it, my my colleague Gonzalo ended up speaking at it instead. Um and then I was in Turkey uh in Madrid. Um but uh I was just like uh I you know every time I I run into a remote's family, you know, um most of them just speak Polish. Um and uh, you know, it's like you're sitting like and having like lunch and everyone else talking in Polish, and you know, you're not gonna be able to keep up. And uh so I was like, all right, it's finally it's time after three years. I need to I need to start learning. But um I always I always had this perception that like it was just gonna be impossible for me to learn languages other languages because um I'm really bad at pronunciation. Um and I took like I took like eight or ten years of Spanish in uh from like elementary through middle school through high school, um and I've retained like no Spanish. And then I took Latin in college because you had to have a language requirement, and my my my theory behind Latin was it's a dead language, they can't make you speak a dead language, and I'm bad at pronunciation. But it turns out I was wrong, they didn't make us speak Latin in class. But I also retained like none of that.

Conor

It's it's probably uh I mean it sounds like you do have a history of uh struggling, but it is it is the apps are not helping you, in my opinion. I I think that there's an opportunity for an app out there that is really like kind of immerses you in what it's like to just go to a country and having to start speaking. Like it is a like I I studied Chinese for like seven months before I moved there. I think I learned more in the first week having moved to China than I did in the seven months leading up to it because it's like you know, one, two, three hours a week, like and and that's the only time, and then sure you're studying a tiny bit on the side versus you go there, and every single interaction, you basically like sure, like uh almost everyone in China speaks English, but they don't expect to switch to English. Like you definitely run into people that want to practice their English, but for the most part, when you're going on you know subways or out to eat, like that's the language you have to operate in. So very quickly, like you are forced. And you'd be surprised how fast, once you start to do that, it starts to reinforce all the things that you kind of studied in your head, but it like it it's just like it skyrockets. And like Duolingo is like a terrible version of basically like doing that one to two, three hours a week. Like my joke I always used to say when I was learning uh uh Polish was Yalubia Kaczka, which means I like ducks. Uh because like I knew ducks so quickly, and I was like, why do I know the word? And like they teach you all these animals. Like, I I I can't remember elephant, uh, but I also I I used to say, like, I like pink elephants or whatever it was, because like the set of words they would teach you, and like I do, I wouldn't know how to order something, I wouldn't know how to uh and then at some point you know it it taught you like oh I'm sorry. And I was like, oh like an actually very useful thing that you will say on like the daily basis. And like they at one point they also teach you credit card. And I was like, okay, like another very useful thing, like when you're in a store, there they always ask, like, do you want cash or credit card? And usually, like as a foreigner, you just like point to your card, and it's very, it's very like embarrassing. You're just like, Yes, I don't live here. Um, I have no idea what you're saying. I'll just point at this thing. But if you know how to say credit card, now it's like you say credit card, you say thank you, and then poof, you're done. It's like you're local.

Bryce

So I I know about I know a collection of uh of random Polish words um uh that for amusing reasons. Uh first of all, you know, most importantly, Lodi, which is ice cream. Um and I'm I'm I'm very troubled by this. According to ChatGPT, Google Translate, and my girlfriend, there is no distinct word in Polish for gelato, which I think is like a food crime. Like you need your language needs to have distinct words for gelato and ice cream. Um but I know Lodi. Um and then I know uh a variety of names or nicknames that Ramona has had throughout the years. So her family used to call her Brodonk Brodronka, which is like the Polish word for ladybug, which kind of sounds like Ramonka, which is the like uh the like casual, like family version of Ramona's name. Um so they would call her like Ramona Badr Badronka. Um and then I call her sometimes rybka, which is like the diminutive of uh fish, uh, because she just drinks like a ton of water. So I'm like, you're my fish. And uh and she says that like in in Polish, like people, like couples' nicknames for each other will be to like call each other something like uh like rybka, like which in I English would be like, you know, like I don't know, um it would be like f it it is to fish what like doggy is to dog. Um but uh but yeah, and and um it was interesting what you're saying about you know the immersion part of it because Ramona's niece um she came to visit us two years ago uh in New York. Um and I noticed she her English improved when she was here for the trip. And when when she met up with us in in Hamburg, the first like three to four days, um uh she was uh like her English was rustier. And maybe it was just a confidence thing. I always feel like she understands more than she's willing to speak because she like she can understand a bit, but she doesn't feel comfortable in speaking. But like by the end of the trip, I could tell that she had um uh that like her c her English comprehension was much better. And I don't think it was that um like yeah, she she learned a lot of things just like chatting, like talking with us day to day for uh seven or eight days. Um but also it was just like being immersed, I'm sure that a lot of things that she already knew, you know, sort of came uh came to the front of her head.

Conor

Yeah. It's it's uh it's very common. Like I don't typically uh break out into a Persian when I'm uh with Shima's family. But a lot of the times, like I can pick up on not full sentences, but I'll hear like one or two words, and then you can infer the rest. Right, right, right. And so like every once in a while, like, you know, I'll I'll say something and then they'll be like, huh. Uh like her mom's always like, oh, it's not safe to talk around him anymore, like he's learning too quickly.

Bryce

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I definitely feel like even even with the little bit that I know, um, you know, I can I can suss out a little bit. And um and it's interesting, it was interesting being in Spain for a couple days because it reminded me that I do actually know a little bit more Spanish than I um than I I think. And uh so so what do you recommend for for learning if not the app? I was thinking to like see whether Ramona's niece would want to like hop on you know WhatsApp with me every now and then and like she could practice her English and I could practice my Polish. Because I know that that's something that uh that I've I've had colleagues in the past. I had a colleague back at LSU who would like wake up at like 5 a.m. and go into the office to Skype his uh his friend in China to to for them to mutually practice their Chinese and and English.

Conor

Yeah, I I would 100% recomm if you can do that, recommend that. Like I mean, when I was I mean, my my best recommendation is move to the country where they speak the language because it just skyrockets. And I actually, when I was in China, I built a program in Excel that basically was a compilation of all the vocab that we would get in uh class, and then I had two different modes. One where it would uh feed me the English and then I would have to say out loud the the Chinese uh pronunciation, and then the other one was where it would give me the Chinese character, and then I'd have to do the same thing. And the way it would work is after I would answer it out loud, uh then click a button to see if I'm right, and then it would I could click like, did I get the pronunciation right or everything right? And it would, if I got everything right, it would put it on some list where it wouldn't show me anymore. And if I got it wrong, it would go back in the list. And so over time, you know, there's a couple thousand words in there. It's only showing me the ones that I have trouble remembering. And that there that is like a it's specifically like it's a type of memorization technique that like they put some fancy name on, but it's just like a that's like a what do you call it? Very intuitive way. Like if you have flashcards and the every single time you get a flashcard and you always know it, you you go, you put it in a pile and you don't look at it anymore.

Bryce

Like that's uh Yeah, I that's that's what I used to do when I was studying in school. Um uh you know, the second part of school, the the like two years where I I tried in college, is I would you I would do either flashcards on the computer with some some GNU flashcard app. This is back when I used Linux, or I would like actually write out physical flashcards and I'd do the same thing. But what I would do is like I would I would go through the entire set three times, and when I was going through each time I would go through the set of flashcards, I would, if once I got the flashcard right, I would set it aside. And then I would continue going through the ones that I missed. Um and I would just do that three times. And one one technique that I I used, um, which I still use when I'm doing giving the talk, is um I try to like go over the talk the night before I'm gonna give it. Because I find, or like I would do the flashcards right before I go to sleep the night before of the test. Um because I I just find that doing the like practicing the material the night before, it helps me retain it better. Like doing it right before I sleep.

Conor

Yeah.

Bryce

And I think there's some science behind that. I don't know.

Conor

Yeah, yeah. There's there's definitely like research. So I mean that's so that's like uh that's not really built into any of the apps that I know of. Um I would say just use whatever app that you like. Uh even though they're terrible, they're still a good way to learn pick up vocab or whatever. Are you taking like a class for Persian? Uh I had a tutor at one point, but it lasted one session, even though I paid for five, uh, because I'm so socially awkward and like couldn't ask for what I wanted. So it was it was I mean, it was virtual, but uh I didn't want to learn how to write, and she was like forcing me to write, and I kind of was I tried to like articulate like can we just skip this part? I just want to learn how to speak. And uh she was like yes, yes, and then just ignored what I said, and uh and so that was that. Um but uh I don't I don't really pack pack practice with Shima because um she speaks Persian but not like super fluently. Um and so honestly, what my recommendation is if you have access, and you do via Ramona and Ramona's family, is is uh when you hang out, like you know, you silently listen and try and pick up things, but like slowly over time, there's small things that you can do to just like you can say one-off words. Like when you say goodbye, say the goodbye in Polish, you know, like in Persian it's chora hafez. Like you just like everyone's saying it, and so it's like, oh, like right, I know that word. Uh and so then you say that, and then everyone goes, oh, it's it's very cute that the person's learning. Um but then slowly over time, you just like uh you s that like so then those words, I don't have to think about like goodbye in Persian Persian. Like I just it's automatically like it goes in when you're when you're learning a language, there's certain phrases that they like it's what they talk about like when you're really fluent, you can dream in the language, which is like when I was learning Chinese, like I got to the point where I was doing that. And like it um Even now, like there's certain things, like when you say, like, I don't know, that's probably like one of the most common things you're gonna say when learning a language. And in in Chinese, like, I'll never forget that Wolbuj. Yeah, I'm probably butchering the pronunciation of that now. But like you wanna start like getting those phrases and uh and saying them as like much as possible. And yeah, if you're gonna do something with like your niece, I would say learn the phrase like get you wanna get to the point where the snowball really starts rolling, and that's where you can basically you have enough like fluency, although fluency is the wrong word, like you know enough the language that even if you don't understand what she's saying, you can say like in Chinese, I think it was like uh uh well booming by Nika i Jzuma, which means I don't understand, but could you explain? Um and then as soon as you have that that like enough Chinese or enough Persian or enough uh Polish that you can say that, they'll switch into simpler language of the vocab that you probably know, and then you're off to the races. And that's when it like really starts snowballing because you have enough to get by. You just like you just don't know all the words and and you have trouble listening sometimes. Um, which is all to say that like you need to have access to these people, whether you go move to the country or have family or have a partner, or someone out there builds an app that basically like you can you can have this like conversation. Um and literally I have a list of like 50 things now uh and like in the top five is build a specifically like a Persian learning app that does exactly this kind of thing, and that basically like I just want to like sit there and like converse and um be like ah sorry I didn't understand that because there's some apps like Monly does have this kind of back and forth conversation where you have a conversation, but like you have to read the words that it's giving you. You don't get to like make up what you want to say, and so like it's a scripted conversation, which still is you do kind of like it's like oh hello, hello, how how's your day? Blah blah blah. But it's not exactly what you would be doing, right? Like it's gonna give you some set of words, and it's like, well, I don't actually know what that means. And so you're just like kind of guessing.

Bryce

Um anyway, so so um sh Persian was not Shima's first language, right? Her her her native tongue is English.

Conor

Uh I should know this. I mean, she was born in uh Persia.

Bryce

So maybe, maybe, but what didn't she move when she was real young?

Conor

Yeah, yeah. She moved when she was very young, though. Um so I think after six months they moved to Germany for a little bit. And um then they ended up moving to Canada, I think, before she was two. So uh you could never tell.

Bryce

When did she start learning English?

Conor

Uh that's a good question. I don't actually know. I mean, her her she's her English is perfect, right? So I mean people have heard her speak from time to time on the podcast. Um I would think immediately.

Bryce

Yeah, because it's interesting with Ramona, because Ramona um uh you know her native language is Polish. She lived in Poland and she was she she was 17. She didn't speak any English until she came to the US. And she came to the US uh when she was 17, went into high school, learned English. Um and then for most of her life in the US, she's not really had that many, or at least the last couple of years, she's not had a ton of Polish speakers to interact with. Um and so sometimes when she's talking to her family, even though Polish is her native tongue, she's got like she can't find the words that she needs. She's like, oh, I have to go look on my phone to find this word that I know in English, but I don't know in Polish. And I just think it's a fascinating phenomenon because Polish was her native language. Um and it's not like she's entirely lost it, but um I I think that at the very least her Polish and English are equally strong, but I think her English is actually stronger than her Polish. I think that English is more of her uh her, you know, it's not her native tongue, but it's her first language now.

Conor

Yeah. Well, I mean, if you think about it, uh like in the Scrabble dictionary, uh just as a reference of a dictionary, I think there's like 138,000 words. I mean, most people don't know like half of those, but the ones that you use commonly, I think are there's there's like two to four thousand of them or something. And so there's so many words that are on the edge of like you know it, but like you'll use it once a year, once every couple years, when it's like it's you know, if you're talking about some polit political thing or, you know, some domain-specific thing, like you know the words, it's in the back of your brain, but like it's so easy to forget that stuff and also not know that stuff if you're learning the language. Like that's the thing, is people used to say, oh, like your Chinese is amazing, you're fluent. But I was like, if I can't have a conversation about the current like political climate and like the politicians that are running for what party and whatever party, like you're not actually fluent, right? You can't have a conversation about like anything. It's like, no, I can go out and have a good time, go to some dance class, go to some board game event, and like totally converse with people. But if they start dropping down into like the intricacies of like the I don't know, the collegiate badminton scene in China and like the up-and-coming people, like I I know the word for badminton or or did at the time, but like I I don't know how to follow that conversation. Anyway, so my point being is it's very easy. Like, I don't think we realize like how uh expansive like our vocab set is, but like the percentage that we actually use on like a weekly basis is yeah, exactly. It's a it's a super long tail. So like it's so easy to forget that stuff.

Bryce

Um it's kind of true of all languages where they have where the folks the the common vocab size is like two to four K. I mean it's probably order of magnitude, it's true, but I wonder whether there's languages where the common vocab size is a lot smaller or a lot larger.

Conor

I think that's I I actually stole that like I uh um from learning Chinese is that they say you need to know like two to four thousand characters because a single character maps to a word. Right. Which a lot of people struggle with, which is why I like I specifically built that program to you know practice my character recognition. But I think in general it's true, right? Like um and they they say it's it's two to four thousand c uh characters or words to like read a newspaper. And the ideas about newspapers, even though they're talking about a different a bunch of different things, in general, actually, and I know this because my my dad's a reporter, is you're supposed to lean towards uh simpler language. Um my dad used to always joke that he would say when he was younger, uh, there's a veritable plethora of options. Um, or maybe it was my my aunt that would say that to bug my dad, uh, because those are veritable and plethora are two uh nice sounding words, but I remember my dad saying once is like you'd never you'd never put that in a newspaper article because you're writing to like inform the masses. And so you're not gonna reach for words that are uh, you know, four or five syllables that might not be in everyone's lexicon or vocabulary because people aren't gonna understand it.

Bryce

Um I wonder if there is some lesson here for uh interactions with large language models. Should you use simpler language when talking to an LLM because uh the simpler language is gonna activate uh uh more in its uh in its weights than uh than more obscure words that uh it just has less information about?

Conor

I don't know. I do not know. Although I do know that lately with like esoteric stuff, if you're super specific about it, it is actually amazing. Like I asked it a question about BQN the other day, which notoriously these models aren't fantastic with array languages, let alone the bleeding edge ones that have been invented in the last like five years, and it absolutely nailed it. Like I was asking if you could do some pattern matching, destructuring thing in the header of a function, which is specific to BQN, like APL and friends don't have it. And it was like unfortunately, like you can't do what you want. Like you can do it this way, you can do it this way, and it was it was 100% correct. And so the point being is I think it is actually if like if you go to some corner of the model, it is actually still quite good, even if it's got a uh a smaller corpus of stuff. Um uh speaking actually, well, should we got a spend uh uh well it is a perfect transition. Uh all right, maybe we'll transition. We might come back to the uh to hear more about the CUDA trip. You know, I mentioned that uh it's on my list. Okay, yeah, just spend five minutes uh just uh I'm curious, how did that go? You know, uh because you were given talks at most of these places, correct? True or f true or false? Um, yeah, yeah.

Bryce

Um it was great. I was uh I'm just putting my trip report together yesterday. Yeah, great audiences. Um uh yeah, it was interesting in in Hamburg. Um there were some number of people from ISC, the the uh International Supercomputing Conference, um, uh which is like the European version of the supercomputing conference that we have in the US. Um and so a bunch of people from that came to the um uh C user group, and then there were some locals too, and uh just great questions, ton of great questions um uh there. Like people were grilling me. We spent like an extra 30 minutes there on uh QA. Um but it but all around, yeah, uh pretty much all the meetups um very engaged audiences. Um uh, you know, it was a mix of some of some of the meetups for people who weren't that familiar with CUDA, um, weren't that familiar with HPC. Some of them were people who were very familiar with uh CUDA and HPC. Um, but it was sort of applicable for everybody because we were essentially showing uh, you know, here's how we want you to think about teaching and learning and using CUDA today. So it's like we're rethinking how we educate. Um and uh I think the dog is here because it's around time for her to get food, and she wants to remind me that she's hungry. Uh, but she still has at least 22 minutes before she gets to eat. And hopefully you're not interfering with the microphone too much. Um but um but yeah, and and a lot of uh students, in particular at the London meetup, it was at uh University College of London. Um, and uh we we did a raffle at the end of the meetup um where one of the things we raffled away was lunch with Andy Terrell and me. Um and two undergraduate students won, and so we had lunch with them on Sunday. Um and uh that was really that was really nice. One of them was uh was a law student uh who uh was into tech, and so she came to uh uh came with all the CS students to uh uh uh to to our our you know very, very deeply technical meetup. Um and uh yeah, I mean it w it was great. Uh uh I think I had a a great time. I'm really happy with the talks that I gave there. Um I'm gonna be doing a few more meetups later this year.

Conor

Um, was this the the toolbox talk that we did a whole episode on earlier, or was this a variant of that?

Bryce

Yeah, so so the the C talk I was giving was the toolbox talk. And I want to and and basically the that toolbox talk is presenting a new view of how you should learn CUDA and think about CUDA. Um so it's like if you it's it's an overview of like here's how you should write CUDA C ⁇ code, and like if you don't know anything from about CUDA C ⁇ , um here's a good place to start. But if even if you do know stuff about CUDA C ⁇ , it's still good content to watch, to understand um what levels of of abstraction should you be working at, you know, and and one of the key takeaways is you should start at the high level of abstractions, you should start with using libraries, et cetera. And I want to make a Python version of that talk, um, which is sort of like like an intro to CUDA Python. Um but the the Python version of the talk that I was giving was um uh was about how you can write kernels in uh uh CUDA Python and exploring a couple different cool kernels. Like I think I think we talk about softmax and like a row-wise sum. And um uh I think I cut out the summed area table uh problem from that talk, which is one that I think you and I have talked about in the past. But that's from that's more of like a Bryce algorithms talk. Um I mean, okay, they're all kind of price algorithms talks.

Conor

Yeah, I'll I'll leave links to both the sum area table uh episode and we also did an episode on the uh the toolbox. Be sure to check these show notes either in your podcast app or at adspthepodcast.com for links to anything we mentioned in today's episode, as well as a link to a GitHub discussion where you can leave thoughts, comments, and questions. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed and have a great day.

Bryce

Low quality, high quality. That is the tagline of our podcast.

Conor

That's not the tagline. Our tagline is chaos with sprinkles of information.