Nvidia’s keynote at the recent Computex was full of bold marketing and messaging, bordering on complete BS.

The “CEO Math” lesson with the “The more you buy, the more you save” conclusion has reminded me of another bold claim (and play with the numbers) from earlier this year.

At Blackwell’s intro, one of the slides stated there’s a 1000x boost in the compute power of Nvidia GPUs. Though many noticed the comparison was not apples-to-apples: FP16 data type performance for older generations was compared against FP8 and FP4 smaller data types introduced in the newer hardware. Apparently, lower precision computation is faster. The graph would be much nicer if the FP16 line continued. Like that:

It is great that the new hardware has acceleration for smaller data types. It follows the trend of quantized language models – trading off slight LLM performance degradation for smaller size and faster inference. Though presenting the figures in the way they were presented:

• not explaining the difference in datatypes,
• hiding the baseline and breaking consistency
• not highlighting the downside of decreased precision…

… that seems like a sketchy move worth of “How to Lie with Statistics” book.

Anyways… To come up with the above numbers for the FP16 performance for Hopper and Blackwell I found the specs for the products that had 4000 TFLOPS FP8 and 20000 TFLOPS FP4.

They are:

• H100 SXM FP8 3,958 teraFLOPS and FP16 1,979 teraFLOPS

• GB200 NVL2 dual GPU system with FP4 40 PFLOPS and FP16 10 PFLOPS (5000 FP16 teraFLOPS per GPU)

The improvement in performance is still impressive, yet 1000x is way nicer than a mere 263x

The post Nvidia’s 1000x Performance Boost Claim Verified appeared first on ProdSens.live.

What is Middlewares in Express.js?

In the realm of backend development with Express.js, managing repetitive tasks like user authentication and input validation across multiple endpoints can become cumbersome and lead to code redundancy. However, there’s an elegant solution at hand: Middleware.

Let’s understand using an example Why do we need Middlewares?

Whenever a user makes a new request to the backend, we need to do the following prechecks before resolving the request.

1) Check if the user is valid or not (Authentication)
2) do the input validation

One simple solution I can think of is to write the logic of authentication and input validation for each endpoint. This solution is good but not the best because we are repeating our code and increasing the code readability.

What can we do to overcome this challenge?

THE BEST SOLUTION IS TO USE MIDDLEWARES

Before jumping into the implementation part, first understand the flow of code execution.

Let’s understand how to create the middleware

const express = require('express');
const app = express();
app.use(express.json())


app.get('/courses' , userAuthentication , (req, res) => {
  //write the logic of getting all courses
})

app.listen(3000, () =>{
  console.log('server is running on 3000 port')
})

In the above code, we can see an endpoint ‘/courses’, and the purpose of that endpoint is to get all the courses.

Before it gets the course and sends the response, we need to check whether the user is logged in or not, and then if a user is logged in, we can move forward and get all the course and send back the response.

const express = require("express");
const app = express();
app.use(express.json());

const userAuthentication = (req, res, next) => {
  //Let's assume you will write the logic for checking if a user is logged in.
  let isLogged;
  //islogged is a boolean value, and it will keep checking if a user is logged in or not
  if (!isLogged) {
    res.json({
      msg: "User is not logged in",
    });
  } else {
    next();
  }
};
app.get("https://dev.to/courses", userAuthentication, (req, res) => {
  //write the logic of getting all courses
});

app.listen(3000, () => {
  console.log("server is running on 3000 port");
});

middleware is nothing but a JS function, and it has three parameters

1) req object
2) res object
3) next() —> The purpose of this method is to move the controller to the next middleware.

Execution Flow

1) The user hits the endpoint ‘/courses’

2) The controller will call the middleware userAuthentication

3) userAuthentication will check if the user is logged in. if logged in, it will call the next(), and there is no more middleware; the controller will reach the end and get the courses. if not logged in, the user will get a response saying, “User is not logged in.”

By leveraging middleware, you achieve:

• Improved code readability and maintainability.
• Centralized handling of common tasks like authentication and validation.
• Modular architecture, facilitating easier debugging and testing.

The post Enhance Your Express.js Backend with Middleware for Efficient Request Processing appeared first on ProdSens.live.

AI tools can handle a wide range of helpful tasks. But they won’t deliver optimal content performance unless you apply them strategically. Here are some top-recommended implementations — and their real-world implications.

The post Enhance Your Content’s Power With a Performance-Centric AI Plan [Sponsored] appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Today is day 17 of my 29 Days of Open Source Alternatives series, where I’ll be exploring open source alternatives to proprietary software in the categories of Game Development and Multimedia, Development Tools and Platforms, Productivity and Collaboration Tools, and more. If you’d like to see the list of the open source alternatives I’ll be covering this month, head over to my 29 Days of Open Source Alts Page or if you’re interested in some of the top OSS projects of last year, check out this list. This is post is in the Productivity & Collaboration Category.

Designers today have many options for design tools. But navigating closed ecosystems, subscription models, and limited integrations makes it all, well, complicated. And to add to this complication, I want to share another option that might reshape the design experience: the open source tool, Penpot.

Designers and developers can finally work in unison to build beautifully designed software experiences that truly scale up.

In this post, we’ll take a look at Penpot’s features, compare it to proprietary alternatives, and take a look at its community.

Spotlight: Penpot

It’s worth noting that Penpot 2.0 is coming soon and it sounds like there will be some major updates.

Some of the most notable features today include:

• A professional UI that is easy to use: Penpot has a clean and intuitive interface that is easy to use.
• The ability to create design systems, components, interactive prototypes, and designs: Penpot allows you to create all of the design assets that you need for your project in one place.
• Support for open standards: Penpot supports open standards, so that you are not locked into any one vendor.
• The ability to be self-hosted or used in the cloud: Penpot can be self-hosted on your own servers or used in the cloud. This gives you flexibility in how you deploy and use the tool.
• Generates Code for Your Designs: Penpot generates CSS and markup code (currently only SVG).

Open Source

Penpot talks a lot about their decision to be an open source tool, including their Free For Ever policy.

Our mission is to provide an open source & open standards platform to bring collaboration between designers and developers to the next level.

This is reflected by the support they’ve had around their open source project.

25.6k
205
Forks: 1.2k
Commits: 12.5k+
Total Contributors: 147
License: MPL-2.0 license

We can see there’s a lot movement on the Penpot repo in the last 90 days, with a strong PR velocity.

When we dive in a little deeper to see their contributors, we see a pretty good balance of the top five contributors. It would be great, however, to see more support from the community, since there is no shortage of issues (324 at the time of writing).

Comparison

Takeaways

Examining open source alternatives enables designers and developers to enjoy benefits beyond proprietary counterparts, such as increased control, reduced costs, and enhanced extensibility. And with Penpot, there’s no exception. Evaluating design tools requires careful consideration of a variety factors, ranging from ease of use to cost structures, feature availability, and alignment with individual values and goals. With Penpot 2.0 dropping soon, I definitely have my eye on this one.

The post What Design Tool Should I Use? appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Even recently when I read or watch something related to Twitter I encounter comments about “Them lazy, overpaid programmers, haha, Elon fired them and the app still works! Those libtars got what they deserved”. Probably you, the reader, also have encountered these comments.

They are extremely problematic and we should not be silent about them.

Problem 1: being lazy or exploitation?

There are many levels we can choose to interact with that statement:

Mental health

Not working until exhaustion IS healthy. The burnout culture is NOT healthy. We, as a society should work towards reducing workload and not increasing it.

You did a great job! Now I no longer need to exploit 10 people, just exploit you and I can fire the 9 others.

What a joke! Be more productive to have more free time, so we can give you more tasks.

This is not sustainable as high productivity also means extremely vulnerable “quantum states”. Having free time helps the mind replenish its stores, from which we can create those “quantum states”.

Productivity

Unlike stacking boxes, software engineering usually looks like a chess party: you have to consider your moves, you have to think of what can go wrong in the near and in the far future.

In short: highly specialized job requiring very particular mental states.

You can’t write good code if there’s war in your heart (family issues, etc.). You can’t write good code if you’re tired, exhausted, demotivated. You can’t “grind” your mind into “omniscient creator” mode by sucking it up.

The only way to get into the “zone” is to be a good mental state.

That’s when you are extremely productive. With a sharp, fresh mind and a light heart.

Developers therefore will require different schedules.

Usually most of us know exactly from when until when they are the most productive, be it from 6am in the morning until 2pm, or from 10am to 6pm. Or maybe two-three distinct times.

It’s not up to anyone but the person to know when they are the most efficient.

Problem 2: overpaid? Or we underpay other people?

In this stage of equality, developer salaries usually allow people to live a middle-class existence of decades ago:

• they can go to vacation
• they might be able to afford their own apartment

BUT

• the moment our (mental) health declines we are not padded
• there are no secret stashes of money
• you can’t really afford not working at somewhere
• we are still workers requiring working rights, safety network and public healthcare

And yet, we get the hate.

Enough is enough. It’s not us who exploit people. It’s not us who make health care unavailable. It’s not us who make people work long hours. We’re just workers, only the pay is more meaningful.

If they want to hate somebody, hate the billionaires, hate the paid politicians who lobby against working rights, raising mininum wage and so on.

Not living in perpetual existential crisis should not be a hated privilege. It should be the norm.

The unsaid problem: set against each other

We’re a very cheap punching bag, a strawman for issues beyond us. The only real choice we can make is to find a better employer. We can’t influence policies, we can’t topple goverments, we’re just workers who live from their brains.

Hating us solves nothing.

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Content management systems can help align your content strategies with organizational goals, increase efficiency, and enhance your brand experience. Take these steps to capitalize on all that potential.

The post Build a Robust Content Infrastructure With the Right CMS [Sponsored] appeared first on ProdSens.live.