[ddren]

I was trying to distance myself from this situation, but this is just too painful to read. I am sincerely sorry that people have harassed you on my behalf, but I have no control over what some people say or do on an anonymous board based on publicly available information.

That doesn't mean that I am happy with the way our collaboration was handled. Why did you create a new converter when you knew there was already an existing pull request that addressed the same issue? Why did you modify the model format and break backwards compatibility when the current format was proven to work with mmap? Why did you change the magic string of the file format to include your initials, when there was an explicit version number field for this purpose? Why did you create a new pull request when you could have added your changes to mine? Why did you rush to merge the PR instead of taking your time to verify that everything worked properly, while listening to feedback from the other contributors and users? Why did you did you ignore concerns raised by other contributors in my PR? Why are you claiming that I was unable to make the WIN32 code work when the final version in your PR is virtually identical to mine, making me look incompetent?

Ultimately, it was my decision to move on, close my PR and allow yours to continue unchallenged, and I owned that decision every single time that I have commented about it, including in the PR linked in this post, where I recommended keeping your PR and working on fixing the issues being raised. I am sorry that some people have harassed you, but making me responsible about this is extremely unfair. There are plenty of reasons for people to feel disappointed about your behavior without me having to say anything about it.

I don't expect that anyone will believe me about this, after all I am just an "anonymous person". The truth is, I am extremely weary about posting this because I know how much damage you can do to me if you insist on this route to your followers. What is your theory, that because I am nobody I have nothing to lose? How are you not aware of the huge power imbalance between a "celebrity programmer" with thousands of followers and a nobody like me?

Anyway, all the information is publicly available on github for anyone who cares enough to verify it.

- slaren

[lhnz]

  > I was trying to distance myself from this situation [...]

You were trying to distance yourself from the situation?

Looking at https://rentry.co/Jarted [0], there was somebody claiming to be you saying things like:

1. "Slaren here. Pretty much all that has been said here is correct, what jart did was to take my code, remove backwards compatibility, add a new converter and then proceed to take all the credit."

2. "To understand why I did that, you have to go back here: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/issues/91#issuecommen... jart initially created an implementation of mmap a couple of week back that was an abomination that relied on doing things like replacing malloc. Completely unworkable in a real code base. [...] So anyway, I joined jart's discord and talked to her about this a bit, she seemed to be interested in collaborating and that's why I added her as co-author, even thought she didn't write a line of code of the PR. Eventually out of nowhere she opened the PR that you all know and asked me to close mine. That's when I realized what was happening. So whatever, I did what she asked, left her discord and tried to forget about it".

This was intermingled into comments calling jart a "troon" (a derogatory term for transwoman).

Are you saying unequivocally that this wasn't you?

Even assuming that somebody was stealing your identity, why didn't you point out the problems with the PR upfront? One can't sit on the sidelines casting aspersions (even posthoc) while also claiming that they are distanced from the situation.

Either (a) people are competently pretending to be you on some kind of anti-trans imageboard by some how managing to make past statements that are perfectly consistent with the statements you've made today, or (b) you did pop into that thread to stir up shit.

I think there is a later comment in that thread from you responding to someone saying `#JusticeForSlaren` and requesting that they don't do anything, but that was yesterday and at this point it was too late.

In general what can be seen online doesn't look good for you and you are lucky to be anonymous. I know that you feel that jart stole your glory and it seems they did, but you responded with passive aggressive behaviour and whipped up a mob -- it's hard to believe you are stupid enough to not realise what you were doing with your comments. There were many better responses you could have made: you picked the worst one.

[0] The `.org` is mysteriously down: https://web.archive.org/web/20230402192741/https://rentry.or...

[IAmNotACellist]

They weren't calling for drama:

> Maybe I should have contested it but I was and still am going through a pretty rough patch in my life and just didn't have the willpower to start any drama. Mostly I think it sucks because IMO the worse technical solution got merged because their PR had a more flashy title.

>That's when I realized what was happening. So whatever, I did what she asked, left her discord and tried to forget about it.

>I really don't want to start any drama so I'll just say that I wrote the code in my commits.

No one claiming to be that user said anything derogatory or ever called for drama. You're making hollow accusations, basically: "Your messages were intermingled among bad comments" "some other users said bad things," "do you denounce you ever gave your side of the story?"

And I'd certainly consider it distancing yourself from the conversation when you close your PR and remain silent when someone essentially steals your code, and goes from "I was co-author" to "my code," "my work," "I did this," "I'm the author" all over Twitter, a bragging PR where she changed the magic number to her initials, etc.

I'm the one "responsible" for noticing this and raising the flag that something isn't right. Code was stolen and the toxic user responsible was taking more and more credit. The community reacted appropriately, on the whole, as did the owner of the project in banning the plagiarist. She's free to add her side of the story, of course. This issue was actually raised with her on Twitter twice and she ignored it, before it made its way to Github. To the extent that drama was caused by this, it's wholly the fault of the person who created this situation with her unethical behavior and intentionally misleading statements.

Of course no one can verify if that user is the same one in the 4chan threads. It's 4chan. But the commit history speaks for itself, and is well-documented by now.

None of this is an excuse for derogatory terms or slurs to be used on 4chan (or elsewhere), but you're intentionally muddying the waters.

[IAmNotACellist]

>The major point I make is that the posts online that purport to come from Slaren do not show that they had "distanced themselves from [the] situation".

It's evident from simply looking at the PR that the user @slaren on the Github distanced himself from the situation. Days had passed with no one discussing the stolen code until I brought it up in the original PR (which jart rebased off of and created the infamous "Make loading weights 10-100x faster" PR)

> Yes, I can see that you were one of the key people that created drama, by asking "I'm wondering how much was written by you and how much by jart?" [0]

I didn't create drama. Jart created drama. By stealing code. Plagiarism. Then shameless self-promotion, to this very moment.

Do you have absolutely no integrity whatsoever?

>and then when they publicly said they didn't want to start drama, trying to get private comment from them by saying "My contact info is in my profile if there's more to say."

They didn't contact me, and I simply went through the public Github history to document what jart had done, and continues to do.

>I think somebody could choose to believe this, but somebody that reads the GitHub and desuarchive.org threads might also feel that @InconsolableCellist and @slaren had a part to play, too.

Yes, correct. I told you my part, I noticed what jart was doing. Why have you continually ignored what jart did? Why do you seem to think it's some minor issue that she stole code, bragged about it, took all the credit, and damaged the community with unnecessary drama? Why are you so focused on everything except the central ethical issue?

>Yes, it's technically possible that somebody pretending to be Slaren investigated the GitHub and was able to correctly infer exactly what happened chronologically including that they had collaborated on jart's Discord. However, Occam's razor suggests it was Slaren themselves and not a very clever troll.

Even if that were true--which it isn't, to my knowledge--it changes nothing about jart's behavior. Even if every user also used derogatory slurs, it changes nothing about the wrong was committed (but adds additional wrongs).

Fortunately, for anyone level-headed enough to look at what's been discussed so far, you can see the unethical behavior of the user that stole code, the aftermath, and the appropriate reaction for that user to be banned. The behavior that you've ignored and seem wholly unconcerned with, as if blind to it. Plagiarism.

[lhnz]

I believe you meant to respond to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35430052

However, I won't respond to you here, since (1) it should be quite clear that I think @slaren wasn't given enough recognition for their work from my prior comments and that there is a more positive approach you could have taken to helping to give them this, and (2) the rest of what you said about ethics is subjective, and I think wrong in magnitude -- for example, I'm not sure it's correct to call it "plagiarism" when @jart's PR mentioned the collaboration with @slaren, used co-authored commits and linked to their PR.

[IAmNotACellist]

"my changes"

"Here's how folks in the community have been reacting to my work."

"I just wrote a change that's going to let your LLaMA models load instantly..."

https://archive.ph/PyPFZ

"I'm the author"

https://archive.ph/qFrcY

"Author here..."

"Tragedy of the commons...We're talking to a group of people who live inside scientific papers and jupyer notebooks."

"My change helps inference go faster."

"The point of my change..."

"I stated my change offered a 2x improvement in memory usage."

https://archive.ph/k34V2

"I can only take credit for a 2x recrease in RAM usage."

https://archive.ph/MBPN0

"I just wrote a change that's going to let your LLaMA models load instantly, thanks to custom malloc() and the power of mmap()"

https://archive.ph/yrMwh

jart was working on a malloc() approach that didn't work and slaren wrote all the code actually doing mmap, which jart then rebased in a random new PR, changed to support an unnecessary version change, magic numbers, a conversion tool, and WIN32 support when that was already working in the draft PR. https://archive.ph/Uva8c

[lhnz]

From what I can see, @jart had spent a considerable amount of time on this problem and had posted an interesting-but-not-production hack to it (https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/commit/5b8023d9354010...) on March 17th, which they had also excitedly posted about on Twitter.

This was 2 weeks prior to @slaren's contribution (https://github.com/slaren/llama.cpp/commit/fc685122f95f212d1...) on March 29th, so in a sense, it's quite possible that what you've just shown is that @slaren saw that @jart was working on mmap support, worked out a cleaner solution and then wasn't happy with only being a co-author -- for their contribution, they believed that they must be the only person mentioned on the PR: although this is weird, since I don't think they even have a public profile, so maybe instead the truth is that they weren't comfortable with working with somebody that hypes up any changes they've worked on for popularity?

I don't think saying "my changes" on Twitter and other social media means what you suggest it does as is it is just informal speech to refer to things you've worked on with "my", and particularly when you see the times this was expanded (e.g. "yesterday my changes to the LLaMA C++ file format were approved") it seems more reasonable than it does without this context.

[lhnz]

The major point I make is that the posts online that purport to come from Slaren do not show that they had "distanced themselves from [the] situation".

  > No one claiming to be that user said anything derogatory or ever called
  > for drama. You're making hollow accusations, basically: "Your messages 
  > were intermingled among bad comments"

I did not make that accusation. My accusation is that it is ill-advised to enter an anonymous imageboard where people use words like "troon" and often show mob-like behaviour, and to decide there to mouth-off about how someone took all credit for your code, removed backwards compatibility, and to add that their original attempt was an "abomination".

This is not "removing yourself from [the] situation" as Slaren asserts.

  > And I'd certainly consider it distancing yourself from the conversation
  > when you close your PR and remain silent when someone essentially steals
  > your code [...] I'm the one "responsible" for noticing this and raising
  > the flag that something isn't right.

Yes, I can see that you were one of the key people that created drama, by asking "I'm wondering how much was written by you and how much by jart?" [0] and then when they publicly said they didn't want to start drama, trying to get private comment from them by saying "My contact info is in my profile if there's more to say."

  > To the extent that drama was caused by this, it's wholly the fault of the
  > person who created this situation with her unethical behavior and 
  > intentionally misleading statements.

I think somebody could choose to believe this, but somebody that reads the GitHub and desuarchive.org threads might also feel that @InconsolableCellist and @slaren had a part to play, too.

  > Of course no one can verify if that user is the same one in the 4chan threads.

Yes, it's technically possible that somebody pretending to be Slaren investigated the GitHub and was able to correctly infer exactly what happened chronologically including that they had collaborated on jart's Discord. However, Occam's razor suggests it was Slaren themselves and not a very clever troll.

I'm really not muddying the waters here. What you're trying to argue is difficult for me to believe, and whether or not you disagree with the level of recognition given by jart, your comment that "it's wholly the fault of the person who created this situation with her unethical behavior" is ugly. It pins all the blame on jart when it's quite clear from both Slaren and your comments that you were trying to cause drama (anonymously and publicly).

I'd just like to add that if yourself and @anzz1 had wanted to give @slaren the recognition that they deserved in a positive way, you'd have linked to https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/issues/91#issuecommen... and signal-boosted that as the key insight that enabled the PR to land, rather than taking the approach you took.

[0] https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/pull/586#issuecomment...

[dontupvoteme]

Pretending to be someone else to stir up drama is pretty much par for the course for 4chan, especially because they really, REALLY hate transexuals. I'd have been more surprised if someone WASN'T claiming to be slaren.

Trust absolutely nothing from that site or any other imageboard unless people provide documented evidence, e.g. timestamped picture or signed message, etc

>The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.

>Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.

I don't actually have any idea where this quote appears these days, I've just been hearing it in reference to chans for well over a decade now. I think it might have been on the bottom of every page in the past.

[xcdzvyn]

It's /b/'s banner.

[jart]

I can't thank you enough for posting this. I found the link too repulsive to click that far. I learned a new word today. So that's what they call people like me these days. Hate is such a lost opportunity.

[throwaway43223]

it is good to hear your side. sympathy for all involved. lets hope this is resolved amicably and this important project and helpful contributors lives are not further impact. (I myself believe you. sincerity comes straight through and +1 for not using "probably" in describing what "happened".)