Comment by IAmNotACellist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IAmNotACellist | Hacker News Reader

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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.

>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.

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.

"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

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.

If you read the rentry you'll see that both of them were working on an issue that l29ah raised, along with other users. jart's work was on something that didn't end up making it in, the malloc() approach. slaren is the one who wrote the code in the commits I linked to, and that's the code that was adopted. You can (and should) do a comparison of the mmap code and see. What I wrote about the version change, magic number, WIN32, etc., is all true too. As is the haste with which the new PR was made, leading to the recent pushes to revert due to swap thrashing and anger over false and rushed claims about "miracle RAM reduction" etc.

In fact, if you read the thread you linked to, you'll see this for yourself too, no reentry required. There's nothing actually objectionable or "repulsive," as jart put it, in that renetry, with an exception of the "r word" being applied to a proposed technical solution.

Your interpretation is incompatible with what we see and the clear timeline. The social media bragging, the second PR, etc., are further evidence. I hope whatever anger you had going into this has abated to the point where you can now actually judge the evidence.

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...

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