Social Animus

May 28^th, 2026 @
justine’s web page

The most difficult challenge to working in open source is that there’s
no institutional screening process, since the goal is to just let people
organize themselves and build things. This has meant that many of the
people who get involved have never had the opportunity to work with the
most exemplary members of each group the world has to offer. During the
culture wars of the 2010s, the first person who tried to solve the
problem of how to include these uncommon individuals was Coraline Ada
Ehmke, who wrote the
Contributor
Covenant. I always thought her solution went too far, since I found
a much
easier answer for my own project, which has been to never accept
anonymous contributions and to not merge a single line of code until the
contributor sends an email promising to assign me copyright.

I always thought my security posture was too paranoid, so when llama.cpp
came out in 2023, I found the code Gerganov wrote to be so beautiful
that I did the one thing that I promised myself I would never do, which
was collaborate with an anonymous developer from his team named Slaren.
This was the first time in five years that I wrote a change with someone
on a project that wasn’t my own. After
submitting our
work he went on 4chan afterwards and accused
me plagiarism, saying that even my changes were his own. The way the
community reacted is an interesting case study into the guile some
developers have learned since the culture war, because the locus of
thought for llama.cpp has always been on 4chan. They were the ones who
originally leaked the Meta LLaMA v1 weights. You can map the way
developers talk on that board to their anonymous accounts on GitHub. I
actually developed migraines for the first time in my life and ended up
in the hospital (since I didn’t have health insurance and had to wait in
the ER) due to the eye strain of reading unfiltered thoughts about me
for months. It’s unusual because the community originally reacted
positively towards my work, until one of its members felt threatened by
me, and since they’re all anonymous there’s not much proof it wasn’t
just a few guys. This was the reason
Wendy Hanamura
cited when she canceled my invitation to speak
at the Internet Archive.

In any case, I’m really happy that these back channels exist, because
the greatest competitive advantage I’ve ever had was to monitor which
pull requests people on 4chan complained about, and then merge them into
llamafile before
Gerganov could. This is how my
Mozilla Builders project
shipped support for new models like Gemma 2 before any other grassroots
project. I got hundreds of thousands of downloads on Hugging Face. There
were so many downloads that Mozilla couldn’t believe it, because so few
people showed up on our issue tracker. Mozilla was sponsoring my work
because they want to support the community, and as far as anyone could
tell, there wasn’t one. I always thought this happened because my code
was just that good. In a past life, when I was originally trained to
write kiosk software for reverse vending machines in Java, no one ever
contacted the vendor unless there was something wrong, and since
llamafile is an ex nihilo project that I worked on for six
years, beginning with an empty file and an assembler, I had plenty of
time to pin down most of the bugs on my own.

I even wrote a blog post giving Slaren more credit,
because it instilled in him a false sense of confidence that led him to
tackle harder problems, like multiplying three dimensional numbers. To
fix the performance issues with mixture of experts models that caused, I
tried to upstream my tinyBLAS tensor multiplication code in
PR #6840
and it’s a great example of what it’s like to work with me. Gerganov’s
doctoral advisor was Iwan Kawrakow, who was the power behind the throne
on that project. He invented the “K” quantization formats many people
use to compress their weights. He was curious about my change and I told
him that he’d be able to build better matrix multiplication kernels than
me if he used my block tiling technique with his quants.

llamafile ended up receiving an avalanche of pull requests from Iwan
that were licensed Apache 2.0 so that Gerganov couldn’t use them. This
enabled us to have faster cpu inference than any other project. That
meant consumers and businesses stood a better chance of being able to
use LLMs without needing to purchase expensive GPUs. We made that
happen, even though the llama.cpp team had more than a million dollars
of funding, and were successfully acquired by Hugging Face after Iwan
had moved on to
start his own project.

Hacker News is my favorite place on the web, because it’s the last
bastion of curiosity online. This was the cheat code I used to restart
my career in 2020. The first thing I did was I wrote an article about
αcτµαlly pδrταblε
εxεcµταblε and I hosted it in a Google Cloud Storage bucket. When
users voiced concerns about the optics of my CDN URL and its use of the
Greek alphabet, the Hacker News moderator dang
said:

People have of course been pulling such tricks for years. We don’t
allow it generally, and in fact are pretty strict about that. But
all such rules have exceptions.

The quality of this post is so high that it doesn’t feel right to
override any aspect of what the author created, including quirks
like the title. There may be a superficial similarity to
garden-variety title pimping, but as someone who bathes in spam
every day I can tell you how rarely such gimmicks come attached to
first-class feats of hacking prowess. Respect for content requires
looking closely enough to detect truly unusual cases, pick them out
of the mud, and give them a special place.

I was so happy to be welcomed that day, that I went on to build other
hobby projects like redbean, which is the
sixth most upvoted Show HN
thread of all time. I also made SectorLISP
(the world’s tiniest LISP interpreter) and
SectorLAMBDA (a binary lambda calculus
interpreter in a 383 byte x86-64 executable). After a few years of doing
this, doors finally started opening up for me. Mozilla asked me to come
to MIECO meetings each week. One of the happiest days in my life was
when a Wikipedia editor came along and cleaned up the BLP issues in my
article. I was so glad to be treated fairly by a great website, even if
I only have a short article, because most of the work that went into my
biography was adjudicating concerns about whether I should be
included
at all.

llamafile is based on my
Cosmopolitan C
Library and LWN wrote an
article about it that
explored its technical depths better than anything that’d been written
previously, including by me. The site’s owner Jonathan Corbet is easy to
influence. He doesn’t moderate his website and he limits his admin
powers to avoiding conflict. When
Jürgen
Geuter told him that cosmopolitan is an antisemitic dog whistle and
that my existence is about destroying democracy, Jonathan decided to add
an apology to the top of the article while continuing to host the bad
faith criticism and then prevented new comments from being made.

Lobsters is the best place to go when you want candid feedback. My
AI Training Shouldn’t Erase
Authorship blog post originally had a more emphatic title. One of
the issues I have is that I’m so popular on Hacker News that people
there don’t criticize me so much these days, even when I’m wrong. But
since you can always count on Lobsters to tell you what they’re
thinking, when I saw someone complain about what he thought the title
should be, I just used his idea instead of my own. This upset the
moderator so much when he saw that I was optimizing my writing style
based on feedback from his site, because he had already
banned me for spamming,
along with every single person I invited too, like woodrush, whose
LAMBDALISP project
I encouraged him to share. So this became the day Lobsters also banned
my domain, so that no one else could post my articles.

The U.S. government comes across today as not wanting people like me to
participate in public life. Since I’m a volunteer, and as a general rule
in life, I only try to help others when my help is wanted and needed. So
when the Don started his second term, I get a job at the
Gradient Canopy
to help improve the performance of their
tensor
processing units for Gemini. It’s a great place to be invisible
since it’s a building so secretive and so secure that even googlers
aren’t allowed to just waltz in and grab a free lunch. Inside you’ll
find Sergey surrounded by developers who put more thought into brewing
their coffee than Gale Boetticher, working on a codebase that’s filled
with Einstein summations. I walked and rode those little gbikes so much
that I lost twenty pounds. It’s basically like being exiled to Heaven.
Unfortunately the friend who fought hard for me to be included had to go
on paternity leave. Then the company spent billions of dollars to hire
Noam Shazeer, who’s listed as an author of the
Attention is All You
Need paper so folks think he invented AI. The first thing he did
with his enormous wealth and power is share his
animus
towards trans people and I got fired for performance reasons around
that time.

All three of the people I worked with at Mozilla ended up moving on to
different things after I got curious about TPUs, because we thought the
llamafile project failed. But Mozilla still managed to find a team that
loved it enough to keep working on it. One of their goals has been to
introduce support for new models. They decided to do that by unvendoring
the project and synchronizing it with the canonical upstream code. They
wrote a great report about the
15x
performance regression in MoE models that caused. That’s because
they’re still working out how to bring back Iwan’s code, Gerganov
stopped merging my changes too, and he didn’t have room for
GeLU.

I want the llamafile team to move fast and break things, because they’re
independently verifying what I can’t easily explain. Since llamafiles
use my Actually Portable Executable file format, the release artifacts
are engineered to last forever. My historical git revisions are also
hermetically sealed with deterministic build reproducibility on multiple
OSes, making the source code a permanent living artifact too, because
all the build tools are Actually Portable Executables. There’s no
mistake the team can make that would threaten my legacy or prevent users
from continuing to enjoy the software. The team’s efforts can only add
value. Due to this, and its freestanding vertically integrated nature,
llamafile offers the strongest assurance of any AI platform that you’ll
have total control and be able to depend on it to behave precisely and
predictably in your business operations forever.

Most computers these days have software installed for monitoring
executables. It’s presented a unique challenge for Actually Portable
Executable, since polyglots is a coding technique extensively studied by
security researchers who had only seen it be abused and never get used.
My programs were flagged as malware for years, even though I made a good
faith effort to conform to all the documented best practices of each OS.

Wiz also makes security tools, except they don’t just prevent unwanted
software from running, but they use their visibility to quantify the
impact of open source projects, and then publish aggregate reports.
The
State of AI in the Cloud 2025 said that llamafile was being used by
a third of organizations, which made it more productionized than ollama,
llama.cpp, TensorFlow, and even the Anthropic SDK. It’d be great if
people used empirical analysis of whose software is being used when
distributing resources.

I’ve been getting a lot of rest since leaving Google and I recently
became interested in working on Cosmopolitan Libc again. I was fiddling
around with its qsort() function last week when I noticed I
could make smoothsort go 1.5x to 3x faster using a trick that
inlines memcpy() calls. This is the algorithm I use in
place of heapsort as the fallback path for quadratic quicksort.
Smoothsort doesn’t depend on malloc(), which means it’s
safe to use in signal handlers. The most interesting part of this
discovery is that Musl Libc’s qsort() function doesn’t do
quicksort at all, and instead it just calls smoothsort. So the impact
potential for my change was large enough that I couldn’t resist the
temptation to mail a patch to the Musl mailing list. The next day I got
an email back from Rich Felker rejecting the change and then
he told
me that I’m not someone he felt comfortable having involved.

A few days ago, I got served with a tax warrant from the State of New
York. They believe I didn’t pay taxes in 2018 and they want an amount of
money that’s more than twice my current yearly income. Connecticut also
does this, where they’ll file a tax lien, take my money, then a cheque
will mysteriously arrive in the mail years later giving so much of it
back, and then, after another year rolls by, they’ll call me on the
phone saying I didn’t pay my taxes. This is what it’s been like living
in California for the last ten years.

The first technologist was Prometheus who took fire from the gods and
gave it away to humanity. The gods did not believe that humans deserved
to cook their food, so they tortured him forever for doing it. This is a
story that has repeated itself throughout history. My favorite movie is
Stand and Deliver, which is about a group of young kids from the ghetto
who learned calculus and aced the AP exam, only to have their scores
revoked and were forced to take the test again. Any time a group gains
knowledge which other people feel like they shouldn’t have, there is
always an unfair cost that must be paid, otherwise society is incapable
of accepting it.

I am the intersection of so many unliked groups whose minds I’ve come to
understand. If you were to use bayesian inference to compute the
probability that I’m a good person, it would underflow a double. In
practice, this just means I’m a curious person who hasn’t had much to
fear, since I’ve never had much to lose. If the day should ever come
when society chooses to accept me, then the negative attention I’ve
received will be viewed for what it really was, and then people will be
able to safely examine my lifelong track record of kindness and
conspicuous public service. All of the people I’ve talked to in my life
will be influenced by my example and then stand a better chance of
flourishing thanks to an increased interest in understanding.

If my math kernels, my systems software, and my hobby projects can’t
persuade others that I have value, then perhaps money will. Money is the
only way to measure success that everyone understands. I can’t continue
to develop the AI tools that a third of organizations use without any
kind of compensation if I’m serving as a lightning rod for widespread
social animus. I’ve always been happy to write code and give it away for
free, but I never could have predicted what it would cost me in terms of
social isolation. There won’t be many things left I’m able to do unless
I can count on your financial and emotional support.

I need you to donate money to me, and I mean you, as in literally you.
You couldn’t have read this far unless you are someone who legitimately
cares, and your compassion means more to me than any amount of money. I
need you to donate publicly under your real name and I want you to tell
your friends how much money you gave me, since that’s the best way to
show that you’re serious. Your words have the power to manifest a social
gravity that’ll attract others to show me a similar kindness, along with
a willingness to be understanding of those who are similar to me.

The reason why it has to be all of you, is because that’s the only thing
that’s going to keep everyone who donates safe. Openly supporting me
requires bravery, because you’ve seen how organized and determined my
adversaries have become. Many of the people who’ve been kind to me in
the past have faced unfair consequences for doing so. Your willingness
to use money and share your voice sends a message to everyone watching
that the cost benefit analysis to hurting me has changed, and that my
life is now universally recognized as having value.

The reason why you must donate to me, is because my current situation
has given many young developers the impression that no matter how hard
working, talented, empathetic, diplomatic, and apolitical they make
themselves to be, they won’t have much to look forward to earning no
matter how helpful they end up being.

Right now my only source of income is the $15k/year I got by being one
of the top 300
GitHub users globally. That puts me in the 99.9997th percentile of open
source developers (based off GitHub’s 100 million monthly active user
count). What it means is that I’m uniquely able to convert your money
into the largest amount of value for society. I want to start by using
the money to buy myself a home in San Francisco, in a neighborhood where
I can feel safe, so that I can have a bed, set up a real office,
entertain guests, and take photographs. I want to travel around the
world and experience the cosmopolitan lifestyle my project is named
after, using only private aviation, so that I won’t be molested or risk
being detained each time I fly. I want to hire an elite team that can
help me accomplish my social and technical goals, such as adding native
support for my file format to every operating system.

Every dollar you give me is an act of protest against the policies that
have made it difficult for me to write code with dignity. I will keep
creating the optimal amount of disharmony that’s needed to encourage
others to reconsider their priors. Your support will upset everyone who
feels that I don’t deserve the gift of life. For every hater who gets
distracted focusing on how rich I am, it’ll mean one more trans woman
gets to be herself in peace. For every hater who doom scrolls over how
intelligent I am, it’ll mean one more cis woman gets to do knowledge
work without someone accusing her of being born a man. I could keep
going with these examples, but I think you get the idea. My startup
helps to drain the excess social animus that exists in our society by
writing the most beautiful computer programs and then spreading our
enthusiasm for the past, present, and future of technology.

Visit my GitHub Sponsors
page to donate.