[khuey]

Maybe I'm just getting old but the "if you don't spend $20,000 on a workstation you're going to be left behind like a dinosaur" at the top of this article is a huge turn off to reading any further. And I say that as someone who owns a workstation with more cores than the author's.

[Avicebron]

The author was also asking for money to buy a house in SF and travel on private planes like a few days ago..the donation must have really showed up if they are using 20k machines at home.

[wasabi991011]

She bought the workstation at a discount (see bottom of TFA).

Also, it was pre-2025 (before she got her job at Gradient Canopy), so long before asking for donations.

Finally, if you read the actual donation request, you can see she is trying to make a living doing open source, and is being honest about what the money is going to. Why is that an issue?

[crote]

There's quite a bit of a spectrum between "trying to make a living doing open source" and "asking for people to pay for a house in one of the most expensive cities in the country - plus a private jet. It's also quite grating to see it written like we should be grateful that we are even allowed to donate to her.

And if she's even half the genius she's claiming to be, why aren't the big tech companies in a bidding war over who get to pay her a million-dollar salary?

From what I've read of her in the past she seems to be a pretty damn good developer. But in the open source world those are a dime a dozen. If you want to make a living off of it you've got to market yourself, and this... isn't how you do that.

[TimTheTinker]

> From what I've read of her in the past she seems to be a pretty damn good developer. But in the open source world those are a dime a dozen

Not exactly. Very few people in recent decades have achieved anything comparable to αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε and Cosmopolitan libc - they're in the category of "that should not even be possible". Of course, Tunney's work doesn't touch Fabrice Bellard in terms of sheer breadth and impact, but they're arguably in the same category.

[crote]

The concept of a polyglot[0] has been around for ages: the Wikipedia page mentions an 8-language one going around on Usenet in the 1990s. If it works for source code, and for scripting languages, and for things like PDF+ZIP, why wouldn't there be a pretty good chance the various executable formats are flexible enough to allow for it too?

A libc which is flexible enough to select specific code paths depending on runtime conditions? Every libc already does this to make use of the latest hardware features[1], using the same approach for platform-specific code isn't a huge stretch - you're basically doing a lightweight WINE.

Her work is definitely impressive, but it isn't magic. You'll see similar stuff if you look into the demoscene, or the IOCCC, or a decent chunk of the talks at CCC. And it's not like APE and Cosmo libc are seeing massive adoption: the people who want portability but can't even compile for multiple platforms are probably happier with something like Java due to the better ecosystem support.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyglot_(computing)

[1]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Glibc-More-AVX-512-October-202...

[TimTheTinker]

Yes, polyglot binaries are a straightforward extension of the notion of polyglot source code to binary executable files. But APE/Cosmopolitan takes this to insane levels:

- a fully cross-platform libc with cross-platform support built into the output binary, integrated into clang and gcc toolchains

- not just cross-platform, but also cross-architecture: output binaries work unmodified on both AMD64 and ARM64 architectures

- sheer number of executable format compatibilities: it's a polyglot across macOS, linux, windows, 3 BSDs, and a bootable BIOS target

- polyglot not just for executable outputs, but also for PKZIP. You can open and modify an executable using common zip file editors. And post-hoc zipped-in data can be accessed/modified by code in the executable using interfaces in cosmopolitan libc

- Zip polyglot can be used to create portable embeddable code-packaged interpreters where the code being interpreted is loaded/executed from zipped-in data. One example: RedBean is a very high-performance APE-packaged web server that serves data in its zip archive and hosts web service code from Lua scripts in its zip archive. Built-in library enables Lua code to store/retrieve data from zipped-in SQLite databases.

The comparison to the demoscene and IOCCC is apt, but this is at another level because it's all production-ready. The Llamafile format is an APE binary compiled with Cosmopolitan libc with model weights zipped into it.

[blauditore]

Do you have a link?

[insamniac]

https://web.archive.org/web/20260529122658/https://justine.l...

[blauditore]

I was wondering if the author is joking, but after reading a bit more about the attribution drama, it seems rather a lack of reality check and reflection. If you plagiarize work, get called out on it, and then call this "harrassment", I don't know...

[nick__m]

That's reads like an egotic cocaine fueled rant mixed with a PBS pledges drive.

I understand why the author deleted it !

[nutjob2]

> I have nothing against this person.

Your bad faith reading of that article says otherwise. It's bleedingly obvious that it's satire. Do you think people seriously ask for donations to fund a private airplane?

$20K of gear isn't that much if you're an independent developer, and if you're working for others as such in the US, and you're not a financial basket case, it's doable. She even says "It put me in the poor house for a few months" so she made sacrifices to get there. You can too, if you want to. Why the envy?

To the contrary, so you really seem to have a problem with her.

[references https://web.archive.org/web/20260529122658/https://justine.l... ]

[aleph_minus_one]

> $20K of gear isn't that much if you're an independent developer

Perhaps in the USA if you have a well-paid job at a MAMAA company ...

[loeg]

I wouldn't read it too literally. I read it as jokingly rationalizing an obviously overkill self-indulgent purchase.

[camgunz]

I gotta think people are working pretty hard to not see it's a joke.

[toast0]

If we're being overly generous, they're saying you need at least a raspberry pi? You can see a 3x improvement there, which shows the pattern works, and that's good enough for a dinosaur (this interpretation is easier to justify if you just skim the article... Which I did the first time)

But agreeing with you, I've done big optimization stuff for multicore servers (not as many cores, but same kind of work) and my workstation was something small with not even the same os. I don't need the big machine on my desk to understand the concepts. I just need the big machine to check my work. For me, that's always been a production machine, sometimes a production machine taken out of rotation for pre-validation before running on production load. I guess I should mention, I work on applications specifically, and libraries and kernels as it relates to making whatever my application is work better. I also don't have a problem with pinning threads to cpus... but my applications are usually one big program that fills the system. Someone writing a general purpose library has a harder time.

Of course, if you want to do this kind of work and you don't have your own production load, you're going to have to borrow, rent, or buy a big machine. It doesn't need to be your workstation though. I hate working with cloud nonsense, but if your tests are short, and you do the upfront work to make your images start fast, you can probably save a lot of money by renting spot instances when testing ... I don't know if you can do spot instances of bare metal though, so you're probably stuck with vm overhead.

[khuey]

Yeah, you can rent an equivalent workstation from AWS for under $10/hour (and that's the on demand price) so I don't think cost is a huge barrier to doing this sort of work. The language and listing the prices of the workstations down to the penny just strikes me as a rather unprofessional way to communicate.

[kitd]

Go to the end. Those machines were provided by the companies discounted so she could continue her llm research. She's not saying "anyone who's anyone" has a 1024-core workstation these days.

[keybored]

Yep. The consolation is I guess that it might be better if developers with such modest means as “splurged on” two 20KUSD~ work stations (and left in the “poor house” for a few months, oh my) are competitive instead of absolutely all of us becoming compute renters.

But then they go on to take a Gemini job[1] so I dunno, more consolidation than consolation perhaps.

[1] TFA says “job offer” but another comment[2] says that they work there.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48348919

[nutjob2]

She's clearly making a point about taking advantage of the optimization/algorithm she's pitching, and doesn't seem very serious. Alternatively, someone reading that as a serious claim is rather naive.

[lpapez]

Except that is not what the article says and you clearly missed the sarcasm.