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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
- 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.
I understand why the author deleted it !
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... ]
Perhaps in the USA if you have a well-paid job at a MAMAA company ...