I can't really understand what's going on after a few minutes poking around (best I can tell an argument over attribution?), but I certainly sympathize with the project author having to deal with some stupid internet drama that takes away from a cool project. This seems to be one of the less-discussed challenges with popular open-source.
The blog post is a narcissistic cringe ride, and the PR did not give credit to the level this Slarin appears to have been involved. Also, the change seems to cause a performance regression in some cases, which someone had also pointed out. It seemed to optimize for the case where only a subset of the weights are needed at the expense of the case where all of them are eventually needed. Seems the kind of thing that should have been tested prior to checking in.
Overall, these people would be better off taking their drama on Twitter or LinkedIn. ggerganov did the right thing kicking them out.
> @slaren made 7 commits in his fork, which @jart then squashed down into one
Good lord, it's terrible when the peanut gallery feels like they have to comment on development practice.
Why would numbers of commits be a relevant metric in an Open Source project? Of course squashed commits are easier to handle during reabses and such, and when that work can be squashed to a single "initial mmap support" commit, then that's fine.
> @jart rewrote @slaren's code, which slaren wrote first
Click the 4chan links and you’ll see in their own words what this was really about (trans maintainer, channers worried about their waifu bot getting cucked.) Most seem to not know what they’re talking about- some admit to being retarded. Highly suspicious of this being tech related.
Also note the stats on GH subscribers and stuff. This is a lolcow dossier…
Events like this make me glad I don’t contribute OSS. I’ll keep my coombots proprietary.
I didn’t know Justine was trans. Her wikipedia article doesn’t mention it, and has another female middle name which suggests that her parents gave the names to her.
I am not much familiar with her work except the impressive Cosmopolitan / Redbean mentioned on HN in the past. But she seems to be quite a controversial figure that is for some weird technocracy and against democracy and leftists, despite being a leader in the zucotti park protests… in short, someone who is no stranger to drama and controversy, and actively courts it:
All true, stuff I didn’t like about her, but also ancient history (article is from 2014!)
And like I said, you can follow the links and see the brigade discussing something else entirely.
Personally I don’t want an OSS ecosystem that banishes trans people or people who had weird proto-alt-right politics pre-Trump. If you’re gonna banish anyone, banish the ones posing existential risks to projects by their brigading against contributors they don’t like.
Yeah, I definitely prefer to be part of very inclusive and open OSS ecosystems, that do things in good faith.
I am not part of the YCombinator or West Coast ecosystem, but didn't it banish gay people with weird pro-alt-right politics pre-Trump, and then supported Trump? Like, for some reason there was a movement to banish Peter Thiel: https://mashable.com/article/peter-thiel-y-combinator
As a country, we ignore the Yemen war, and are told to only clutch pearls about taking money from Russia due to the Ukraine war. I imagine that YC stopped taking Yuri Milner's money a decade ago, partly because of his ties to the Kremlin, but probably it was just a natural parting of ways eventually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631084
Anyway, just saying ... ecosystems aren't always perfect.
The issue is that mmap was unilaterally (or close to unilaterally) implemented and made the only way of loading files. Users do not have an option to continue to not use mmap.
Probably - if sadly - the right decision. Despite being a great feature and improvement, something simply "happened" to the project vibe and so the community, apparently as a direct response to that PR.
Similarly, this GH issue response to that occurrence, despite having made valid points in a reasoned manner, also held some of the same kind of "happen", in response - which is understandable, but not diffusive.
It ultimately doesn't matter who contributes, if someone truly believes in the project, they'll be just as happy to step away from it if they're affecting its momentum, even through no fault of their own or just a misunderstanding.
Momentum is important - and at an early stage like this, when vibe is building and community is forming, it can be very. I hope ggerganov continues to make these difficult decisions characteristic of clear leadership.
There's something extremely odd about the drama that occurs around justine in particular. It makes me feel there's some iceberg of things I don't know going on and I genuinely don't have the faintest clue what it is. I just know they make some cool software, like APE, cosmopolitan libc, and I believe landlock-make, which are inspirational projects to people who love clever yet practical hacks.
As for these LLaMA changes, I ran it on my machine for fun, and it worked perfectly. I wound up re-converting my models, but it doesn't take terribly long to do so even for 65B. After that, generation starts nearly instantaneously, which is very impressive. I wouldn't be surprised if there are legitimate problems with the change. Obviously people who deleted their local copy of the original model to save disk space are probably displeased, and maybe it is a massive performance reduction in some cases.
I wish I understood, and yet I fear I don't really want to know at the same time.
edit: At least in this case, it seems like it's mostly drama around attribution and unnecessary changes. Kind of sad that an otherwise really useful code change wound up being marred by probably-avoidable drama, but such is life ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Honestly, I don't have any input, I just hope everyone can resolve their gripes amicably in due time.
