The paper was published by IEEE and with professors as co-authors. Only the second author is a student. And I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand like that because of a magazine article. Students come up with breakthroughs all the time. The paper itself says it disproves Yao’s conjecture. I personally plan to implement and benchmark this because the results seem so good. It could be another fibonacci heap situation, but maybe not. Hash tables are so widely used, that it might even be worthwhile to make special hardware to use this on servers, if our current computer architecture is only thing that holds back the performance.

Edit: author sequence

Some commenters on this post are clearly not aware of PTX being a part of the CUDA environment. If you know this, you aren’t who I’m trying to inform.

There seems to be some confusion here on what PTX is – it does not bypass the CUDA platform at all. Nor does this diminish NVIDIA’s monopoly here. CUDA is a programming environment for NVIDIA GPUs, but many say CUDA to mean the C/C++ extension in CUDA (CUDA can be thought of as a C/C++ dialect here.) PTX is NVIDIA specific, and sits at a similar level as LLVM’s IR. If anything, DeepSeek is more dependent on NVIDIA than everyone else, since PTX is tightly dependent on their specific GPUs. Things like ZLUDA (effort to run CUDA code on AMD GPUs) won’t work. This is not a feel good story here.

The term “rice burner” originated in the Anglo-American context, and the word “ricing” cannot be divorced from the way people use “rice” as a versatile and generic racial epithet in varied context outside of the software world. As in people going, “haha, rice” something when being racist against Asians. It’s a long and ignominious American tradition to demean racial minorities with food. As in insulting Mexicans with “bean”. Anecdotally, some older Italians still remember being made to feel bad for eating pasta, when Italians weren’t white yet. The term “ricing” will certainly remain racist due to the way anti-Asian racism continues to work. Hence my point that the term must be abandoned, if one wishes to not be racist. Just find a different word for it. it ain’t that hard. It is certainly not possible to use an American word with racist origins without divorcing it from the cultural context from which it came.

It is clearly racist. “Ricing” comes from a derogatory term for Asian racing vehicles. You cannot excuse the racism inherent to it by personal ignorance. It’s the same logic as black face being racist, whether you’re personally aware of the history behind it or not.

Though I no longer live in the US, as an Asian computer scientist, I am quite aware of how it is clearly perceived as a racist term by many Asian Americans. To me, it will also never stop being offensive. So, please, stop with this “ricing” stuff.

And I thank you, Norah. As an Asian woman, any Linux space can feel pretty unwelcoming sometimes. Most of the time it’s the sexism, but this insistence on saying “ricing” is just another reminder that many in this space enjoy a bit of racism on the side, too.

I don’t usually say anything; I’m personally too afraid of being dragged into an endless “debate”. Perhaps a bit cowardly on my part. So, I appreciate you pointing it out first.

It’s still racist when you make it an acronym. We know the term originally came from a racist term for Asian vehicles.

Very nice! I wish I could use an AMD GPU, but sadly machine learning keeps me on the CUDA platform. Gotta make a living. That said, recent NVIDIA drivers got better on Linux. I can finally use Wayland problem free now. Games on proton also work just fine.

However, this only works well on Arch, BTW. Really wish I could just use Debian. I’m a computer scientist, but I also get tired of an avalanche of software updates every couple of days; I don’t need all the latest and greatest software. My German internet commection also means I wait up to half an hour sometimes.