Kyle O'Brien (Kai)

I like code, sound, and minimalism. prev. @ApolloGraphQL, ◢ @BigCommerce IPO team member. . . ceo: @oapicli, @htmx_org

[The Verge @verge]

Anthropic releases its first Mythos-class model Claude Fable https://t.co/JFDQ0khEjW

[Spencer Baggins @bigaiguy]

A teenager in the United States started publishing software at 14 in 1998, built the entire online infrastructure for the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, joined Google as a software engineer, quit in 2018, and then spent five years writing a C library that does something the entire industry said was impossible.

Then she combined it with llama.cpp and shipped the easiest way on the planet to run a large language model on any computer.

Her name is Justine Tunney.

Here is the story, because almost nobody outside the low level systems world knows what one engineer has built.

Justine was born in 1984. She started writing and publishing software at 14, back when distribution meant uploading binaries to BBS systems and chat networks. She picked up the handle jart, which she still uses on GitHub today. She did the work most teenagers her age were not doing. She read the systems programming literature. She studied compilers. She fell in love with C.

In July 2011 she registered the @occupywallst Twitter handle and the occupywallst dot org domain. Within weeks the protest movement that began in Zuccotti Park in New York had become a global phenomenon, and her infrastructure was the digital backbone of the entire thing. She handled the social media, the website, the donations, the coordination. She built the platform that pushed the movement to reach millions.

After Occupy she joined Google as a software engineer. She worked on TensorBoard, the visualization tool for TensorFlow, and on site reliability for Google infrastructure. She stayed for years. Then in 2018 she left Google Brain to work on a personal project.

The project was called Cosmopolitan Libc.

Cosmopolitan does something most C programmers would tell you is mathematically impossible. It lets you compile a C program once and have the resulting binary run natively on Linux, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD with no modification. One file. Six operating systems. No virtual machines. No interpreters. No recompilation. The technique she invented is called Actually Portable Executable.

The implications are wild. Cosmopolitan binaries violate every assumption about how operating systems load programs. They are at once a Windows PE file, a Linux ELF binary, a macOS Mach-O binary, and a shell script. The same bytes run on every platform.

For five years she worked on it mostly alone. She funded the development partly through Mozilla's MIECO program, which sponsored her work on Cosmopolitan 3.0, released on October 31, 2023.

A month later she shipped llamafile.

llamafile is what happens when you combine Cosmopolitan with llama.cpp. You take any LLM weights file in the standard GGUF format, you wrap it in Justine's binary, and you get a single file that runs on six operating systems without installation. No Python. No CUDA setup. No dependency hell. Just one file that you double click and it works.

Mozilla launched it as an official project of their innovation group on November 29, 2023. It went viral immediately. The repository, hosted at github .com/mozilla-ai/llamafile, now has 24,600 stars. The license is Apache 2.0.

Justine kept shipping. She added GPU support to Cosmopolitan, a task systems engineers thought would require rewriting the whole thing. She added dlopen support, another thing nobody else had figured out. She wrote whisperfile, a single file version of OpenAI's Whisper speech-to-text model based on the same architecture.

Her GitHub profile lists projects most engineers would consider impossible. sectorlisp, a Lisp interpreter that fits in a boot sector. blink, the tiniest x86-64-linux emulator on Earth. bestline, a teletypewriter command session library. redbean, a complete web server inside a single zip file.

A teenager who shipped software in 1998 grew up to write the C library that the entire local AI movement now runs on top of.

She did most of it alone, and most people scrolling AI Twitter cannot name her.

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer than I am.

[alli @sonofalli]

https://t.co/fYnCp5xX5X

[zeta @zeta_globin]

I hate the heat I hate the heat I hate the heat I also hate humidity I hate the heat I hate the heat how on earth did I live in texas for 18 years I hate the heat I hate the heat I hate the heat why did I ever leave seattle I hate the heat

[Shawn Charles🎤🔥 @ShawnBasquiat]

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you

[The Hunt🎤🔥 @TheHuntSpaces]

https://t.co/9cFg4Mnotv

[m4rio @m4rio_eth]

🚨 TL;DR: Attackers are sending fake Sentry bug alerts to projects using public Sentry DSNs. The fake alert is designed to trick AI agents into running a malicious `npx` command that looks like a Sentry profiling diagnostic.

Do NOT run commands from Sentry issues/logs/alerts unless verified.

These are not legitimate Sentry fix commands. The malicious package reportedly steals environment variables/secrets and sends them to advisory-tracker[.]com.

[Brendan Falk @BrendanFalk]

Hey @ClaudeAI you have a UI bug. You still show the placeholder text when the user's first input is a numbered/bulleted list

[Kyle O'Brien (Kai) @kyle_o]

@MishTechie I’m literally starting mine right now, black with raw honey

[Kyle O'Brien (Kai) @kyle_o]

Who all applied for a role today? Did your values and the companies’ values align? What set you apart from others when accomplishing tasks in that role?

[Kyle O'Brien (Kai) @kyle_o]

@MishTechie 🌅

[Kyle O'Brien (Kai) @kyle_o]

@DevinLeJeune_TX @tigersjaw @thisismbV is one of the most perfect bands I’ve ever seen 💀insane vocalist, insane guitar, loudest show I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen NIN twice

[Kyle O'Brien (Kai) @kyle_o]

@MishTechie

[Robert Scoble @Scobleizer]

So awesome to see the interest in AI for creative purposes.

[Ian Hanschen @furan]

Windows Vista's slogan was "The Wow starts now." I remember it because when the DWM team moved buildings, I took the banner down from our old building, which was no longer a Windows building, and put it up in my new office. It’s hidden behind that whiteboard.

[Kyle O'Brien (Kai) @kyle_o]

I asked if anyone knew what an actuator was on a Space last night and the room went immediately silent 😳

[Kyle O'Brien (Kai) @kyle_o]

@kyliebytes @Dilpickle1 @hopes_revenge 👀

[Kyle O'Brien (Kai) @kyle_o]

@kyliebytes @hopes_revenge It’s a vibe for sure

[Abby Laporte @abbylaporte]

Releasing some acoustic (fully human...) music soon :)

Not an expert at all, but June 14th I will post about an EP (that I made on my Chromebook) & the link to listen!

Much love to all & have a blessed & uplifting summer, even in these trying times. Stay grounded & loving plz!