I'm looking at this transcript and I'm getting a different picture than what you describe https://podscripts.co/podcasts/lex-fridman-podcast/381-chris... . Yea, he doesn't specifically say vectorization and multi-threading or whatever but he also doesn't say you don't need some skill to get to huge speedups.
Does he say that you _do_ need skill to get huge speedups?
In fairness it's been a long time since I watched this, but I remember being struck by how obviously dishonest Lattner was throughout. For example at one point he talks about approachin mojo from a first principles perspective, using the speed of light as a limiting factor for what's computationally possible. Complete bullshit. You'd have to be working at the hardware layer for that to begin to be relevant, and even then photonic computation is years away. It's essentially technobabble.
Speed of light is actually the limiting factor in modern chips and has been for a long time. It's one of the major reasons why process shrinks are jumps in performance: literally the speed of signals in the CPU shrinks.
I re-read that passage where he mentions the speed of light. Clearly he's trying to explain that if you start from the bottom of what the hardware can do and try to get that all to the programmers hands then you have something that is close to the theoretical speed. This is different from trying to go down the stack from python down and seeing where you can optimize.
I think you're a bit too angry already to interpret what he's saying as how he meant it. You seem to be twisting everything to make it sound stupid.
In fairness it's been a long time since I watched this, but I remember being struck by how obviously dishonest Lattner was throughout. For example at one point he talks about approachin mojo from a first principles perspective, using the speed of light as a limiting factor for what's computationally possible. Complete bullshit. You'd have to be working at the hardware layer for that to begin to be relevant, and even then photonic computation is years away. It's essentially technobabble.