mustAAAAAAAAAAARD stormblessed, GMNSE

always stalking startups. VC babe. ENGINEER. writer. reading Disworld. trying to learn everything. bridge 4. ✨spicy✨. feminist. crashoutwt.

[mustAAAAAAAAAAARD stormblessed, GMNSE @ruby_oa]

It took a while, but I'm done.
https://t.co/2pYBaiOTze

[mustAAAAAAAAAAARD stormblessed, GMNSE @ruby_oa]

I shared this with a group earlier this week- figured I'd post here. It's something I've wanted to talk about for a while now- Talking to users; more specifically User interviews/ research.
Note: a majority of what's here is from Startup School and a book called The Mom Test.

[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.

[Fav ⛧ @Favwontmiss]

Having trouble brainstorming and want to use AI? Talk to your friend with adhd. We have so many ideas and never drink water.

[🍂 @Lovandfear]

That's all I want

[Big Wums ✨ @WumiTuase]

08/06/24
We decided on a garden wedding in June & didn’t get canopies or tents. Our people were scared because of the weather forecast.
But our faith moved mountains because it didn’t rain that day & a fabulous time was had 🥹❤️
Two years with my fave. Forever to go ❤️

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

As someone who partially grew up among European elite kids like him, this reminds me just how incredibly hollow some of them are.

For a quick background, I went to one of the poshest high schools in France (Janson de Sailly, for those who know) and, afterwards, to what was at the time - and probably still is - the most expensive undergraduate school in Europe (EHL in Lausanne, Switzerland).

Needless to say, many of my classmates were from unbelievably privileged backgrounds. Just in my classroom in Lausanne I had the son of a (very famous) Russian oligarch, the son of Italy's largest real estate developer and the son of Spain's largest real estate developer (funnily, the latter two were flat mates).

Another classmate of mine came from the richest family in Naples, Italy and - while we were at school - his father (known in Naples under the nickname "Il Sultano") got arrested for having bribed half of Naples's city council - which, if you know Naples, ought to tell you something.

These were the kids I was doing group projects on business ethics with (literally) 😅

Anyhow, my story, and probably my luck, was that - before going to high school in Paris - I was raised in very normal public schools in the South of France where my friends were anything but wealthy. Their parents were farmers and everyday workers.

Which means - and I'd come to realize this was very important in life - that it was easy for me to understand how big a mistake it is to see money as identity and meaning - and to confuse someone's net worth with their actual worth.

What really struck me at the time was the contrast with my "poor" classmates of earlier in my life. They couldn't define themselves by what they had - by definition - and this forced them to reach deeper for their identity: their skills, knowledge, humor, etc.

Rich kids can skip that entire process, and the tragedy is that most of them do: they reach for the readymade identity that money provides. I remember being incredibly frustrated by many of my classmates, like "ok, I get it, your dad is rich and you own a lot of nice things but who are YOU, what else is there?" The answer, more often than not, was nothing.

To be fair, there were exceptions. One of my classmates I was most impressed by came from one of Zurich's wealthiest families (which, if you know Zurich, means insanely wealthy) yet he was almost OCD in not showing he had money: driving the shittiest car imaginable, living in a small studio, etc. He was very intellectual, very contrarian, and clearly at war with the idea that his family's wealth ought to define who he was.

I only discovered who he actually was when I started my first company and he approached me to invest: to discuss the investment I went to one of his family homes, which it turned out was a literal palatial castle on the shores of Geneva lake. The guy had decided to live in a small rundown studio when he literally had a castle sitting empty a 5-min drive away.

THAT I was impressed by: it's easy to see that money isn't meaning when you don't have any. To see it when you have more than almost anyone - when everyone around you is organized around the opposite assumption - is much harder. But to actually live it, to choose the studio when you have the castle keys in your pockets - with no audience to applaud you for that - that shows real depth.

At the end of the day, I think, the real distinction isn't between rich and poor but between people who exist from the inside out and people who exist from the outside in.

Wealth just happens to make it incredibly easy to be the latter, to skip the work of becoming someone and settle for a borrowed identity that glitters from the outside but is hollow all the way through. A Potemkin village identity.

This is actually a real societal issue, and magnified by social media (with idiotic posts like this one 👇): the more "outside in" folks out there, the less people with genuine internal anchors, the more fragile everything becomes.

When you think about it, everything that genuinely matters in a society is built by people who think for themselves: they take the world in, pass it through something genuinely their own, and give back something that didn't exist before: an idea, a conviction, a stand.

Every reform, every invention, every act of moral courage in history came from someone with an internal anchor strong enough to resist the current. Remove those people and all you have left is the current.

This isn't new, by the way. Most ancient traditions warn against exactly this, from the Bible (the golden calf story) to Confucius, who built his entire ethics around the distinction between the exemplary person (the Junzi, 君子) - oriented around internal cultivation and righteousness - and the petty person (Xiaoren, 小人), oriented around profit and gain. The junzi builds himself from the inside, the xiaoren chases what's outside.

So please, do not make the mistake of being impressed by wealthy people flaunting their wealth. Don't focus on the glitter, focus on the hollowness it's trying to hide.

[ọrẹ @orethebrave]

ancestors had a whole festival for her yunno. people measured wealth by her. cannot actually believe the yam slander i'm seeing.

[ponmo @twoponmotwoegg]

“do you have a safety net if this doesn’t work out?”

yes, it’s called suicide.

[Nans @nansbello]

This is a feminist, pro-choice, pro abortion, anti homophobia, anti-redpill and the likes of them account. I really don’t want ANYONE thinking otherwise.

[a @zananhinzaawaaz]

oh to serve men

[mustAAAAAAAAAAARD stormblessed, GMNSE @ruby_oa]

every day existential crisis
please nau

[mustAAAAAAAAAAARD stormblessed, GMNSE @ruby_oa]

this is why you only message the ones 2+ years out
fresh grad no fit help you

[Akinlolu Akanbi @Dove_Dynamics]

Na now I understand why our alumni didn't respond to us then whenever we message them for financial contribution 😭💔

[L @lanreadelowo]

Hi lol, let poor kids from africa invest plzz

[goma @soigomaa]

Free my man

[Sweet Kpakpo @sweetKpakpo_]

You will be saving a little princess just by Retweeting please 🙏🏽🙏🏽🥹

[mustAAAAAAAAAAARD stormblessed, GMNSE @ruby_oa]

low-key we should all boycott NYSC

[Ugegbe ✨ @MarinatedTurks]

I see a lot of you "Christian men" are very hilarious.

You only know sin when it is aborting of a fetus that sadly needs medical urgency and lifetime dependency.

Fornication, adultery, lying, wickedness,!covetousness, is all human flesh weaknesses.

Hypocrites 😂.

[Nans @nansbello]

“I would kill my son if he was gay” is also joining the crowd to say abortion is bad😭

[Ren (Hater Era) @Elegant_Prose]

We talk a lot about how therapy speak has been coopted by manipulators, but not enough about how social justice language gets used by people "advocating" for shit that isn't an actual injustice.

[Omolomo @Omolomo_o]

Day 23.

Yall are starting to slowly forget 💔