Social Animus (opens in new tab)

This post resonates with my situation very much, although I have not made even a tiny fraction of the contributions this person has. I think if a person like this is struggling to find work, but the donkeys who code my government's dysfunctional websites are all fully employed, it suggests the software industry is in very big trouble.

That being said, and speaking from my own experience, one can develop ego problems if they've been undervalued by society. You can start viewing other people as lesser than you for not understanding your situation. I managed to escape those toxic thought patterns by practising empathy as a deliberate activity, and forcing myself to give love and grace to others until it felt natural.

I have to ask the other side: why is this person so controversial?

The only thing I'm aware of: she posted a very weird petition to appoint Eric Shmidt as "CEO of America" (https://9to5google.com/2014/03/20/occupy-wall-street-co-foun...) and told people to read Curtis Yarvin, in 2014.

EDIT: lobste.rs context: https://lobste.rs/c/hjlmw1

I feel like it is a very great privilege to be able to post this to Hacker News, soliciting donations. I was out of work for the longest time (thankfully, I finally found some). I too have disadvantages, I have a few mental disorders which make living not the easiest and the world is not made for people who are different in any way. I've contributed to HN in the past, have plenty of stuff on Github but I do not have the access to be able to ask people to pay my way. I realize that my output is a fraction of Justine's but there are very few people who can post a blog post soliciting donations on the top of such a major site. It just feels very, very personal, and it is.

I realize that it takes great courage to do what Justine does, the world is not fair to trans people or many other groups. I want her to be safe and happy. I have however, observed Justine make some pretty careless remarks about homeless people or you can Google her views on slavery or various political individuals and they're not great. They are views that hurt people. I've noticed in past threads these are brought up but she does not address them, which strikes me as lacking the courage that she usually has.

Justine, can you clarify some of the views you've had over the years so that people who donate to you feel like they are not supporting somebody who might not hold the same views for other groups of people that are in danger?

For example,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46890435

That overall thread has a few relevant discussions, that comment thread cites:

https://thebaffler.com/latest/mouthbreathing-machiavellis

How can I support somebody who thinks a guy who doesn't give a shit about me not having a job (and worse) is somebody worth cheering on?

Thank you.

Justine, first I'll say I love APE and redbean and your articles on the code trickery you get up to. Of course, I hope you keep creating amazing software for us all to enjoy.

I want to zoom in on this:

"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."

I don't know your life, but I think it's more than possible that it's not merely a coincidence that you're at the intersection of so many unliked groups.

My brother once sent me a picture of a furry wearing a swastika armband asking if it's a real thing. My first reaction was a giant "WTF?!". My second thought was, you know, on some level, I gotta respect the hustle.

Someone really thought, "How can I be as revolting as possible to everyone? I can't LARP as a nazi, because then nazis would like me. Becoming a furry isn't enough either, because then furries would like me. But if I can stand at the intersection of all causes of disgust aimed at our fellow beings, then I will have proved my case."

I think the point of this line of thinking is different for different people, but the motivation could be a) because you want the world to hate you as you hate yourself b) you want to embody the negative underbelly of humanity to be a mirror so society or individuals within it can see their true nature. You want to have stones casted at you to prove that the rest of us are, in fact, the type of people who cast stones. Or c) it's just funny in some depraved way, "for the lulz" as they say. But, I assume you're already way past the point of laughing at the ridiculousness of this tired dance. You're a middle-aged adult who is struggling.

Well I, for one, won't cast a stone your way. I genuinely don't hate you at all. I admire your boldness and tenacity. "Donate so I can buy a private jet" is gold. I didn't really appreciate the mania or hyper-fixation roller coaster the article took me on, but I just found it unfortunate because I don't think this is the best way of thinking you could employ.

If at all possible, I think you should just try to be a "normal person" and think that that's an okay thing to be. By "normal", I mean not putting yourself in the crossfire. I still think you can and always will be technically extraordinary, and I don't think that's contradictory. You merely stop seeking rejection.

It seems to me, even as divisive as you may be, there have been many earnest attempts to integrate you into regular society, give you a super high paying job, and bring you into a context where you can innovate and push humanity forward. Why not just let that happen? Why not de-politicize just a little bit?

People will hate me for saying this or think I've licked too many frogs (I've never not been sober btw), but I have come to see a lot of political posturing as more arbitrary than not. I still know people have different visions for the world, and ideological differences that matter at a macro level, but to me, what really matters in life is looking other human beings in the eyes and having a connection to them. Sitting inside, alone, typing on a keyboard or phone, is anti-social, and it is against the nature of a human being.

I'm not telling you to give all of it up. But hopefully I've evoked at least one thought that encourages you to walk a path with a better outcome. You don't deserve to suffer your whole life, waiting for the world to accept you. I am sorry to hear about the tax situation and people who really have targeted you. I genuinely care and hope you find peace and healing on the inside. And stop reading internet comments.

> 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.

The bit about "using only private aviation" and "hir[ing] an elite team" sound satirical at first, but then the next sentence sounds earnest, so I can't tell?

I looked up this person on wikipedia, so the "I want to live a cosmopolitan life and fly private" seems like something someone who was involved with occupy wall street would say sardonically, but I am not sure?

Regardless, this person's technical work seems incredible and I really hope we can find a way to support people who work independently and aren't obsessed with capturing the value they create in the US.

this plead somehow hits all the wrong notes and reinforces why they're in this situation to begin with, i still hope the author finds their footing, but it won't come without some soul searching

I've read this type of writing before, and I associate it strongly with manic episodes and autistic hyper fixation.

It veers from topic to topic with abrupt transitions, developing tenuous threads to support perceived grievances and slights, and every once in a while goes fully off the hinges.

There are delusions of grandeur -- "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" -- and an apparent obliviousness to their redflagginess that is so extreme it almost feels like satire ("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").

And after paragraph after paragraph of a sob story, the request for money is presented with perhaps the most bizarre pitch I can imagine: Donate your money to me so that I can live a lifestyle you could never yourself afford.

I don't know about this person's particular mental health struggles, but it does not come off as an essay by a person who is in a good place right now.

Reading this feels like stepping into two different conversations already in progress.

> 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

I was unaware the blog copied my title change until seeing this on HN and I have no emotional reaction to it. I've replaced over a hundred clickbait titles and it's not an emotionally evocative chore. Anyone can read my contemporaneous explanation at https://lobste.rs/c/hjlmw1 to see my reasoning and judge for themself how upset I sound.

This seems like a social justice position conflated with a call to donations to remedy some personal mistakes? Is the accusation here that two separate state tax authorities are conspiring against this person?

It was very odd to me that she never actually says what the views or beliefs are that has gotten her into trouble with so many people.

But after digging a little more, it seems she is (was? still is?) a techno-fascist in the vein of Curtis Yarvin, and, among other things, earnestly believes that the USA's form of "government" should be corporate despotism, having petitioned the White House to retire all government employees, make Eric Schmidt the "CEO of America", and turn control over administering the US to the tech industry[0].

In a way, I feel duped reading this all the way through. Throughout the post, she dances around the topic of what people found objectionable about her, and then brings up transphobia in a way that makes it seem like gender-identity discrimination is what's going on. But wow, what a dishonest way to present all this. Classic way to build feelings of sympathy when it's not deserved.

Maybe her first order of business should be actually addressing the techno-fascist stuff. If she doesn't still hold those views, she needs to say so, and tell us why she believes she was misguided. If she still does hold those views then, well... nothing has really changed, and IMO the reason some people are uncomfortable working with her is entirely valid, regardless of how impressive her technical achievements are.

Oh, and being one of the top 300 GitHub users doesn't put you in the 99.9997th percentile of open source developers, or that you're "uniquely able to convert your money into the largest amount of value for society". I'm fine with people accurately describing their achievements and capabilities and a no-nonsense manner, but this just smacks of delusions of grandeur.

[0] https://thebaffler.com/latest/mouthbreathing-machiavellis

I wasn’t patient enough to read the whole thing. But I know Justine to be of extraordinary technical prowess.

I can imagine that someone with that level of talent can be extremely socially unfit - whether intentionally or unintentionally I am unaware. At some point I may have been that way (hoping I am no longer that way, hopefully I was that way with the talent as opposed to without), and I’ve met others who are.

What strikes me as weird is how no manager/leader is able to utilize this absolute treasure of technical ability. I think that makes someone a true leader and/or a capitalist. Anyone can hire average skill who needs the money and is capable of faking sincerity.

Someone else mentioned that her problems are more likely stemming from her involvement in the neoreactionary (alt-right) movement circa 2015.

I've never heard of this and generally would say people should be given space to grow from things they said ten years ago... But...

> The Dark Enlightenment, also called the Neo-Reactionary movement (abbreviated to NRx), is an anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian,[1] and reactionary philosophical and political movement

> The Dark Enlightenment has been described as part of the alt-right, as its theoretical branch,[15][16] and as neo-fascist.[15][17] It has been described as the most significant political theory within the alt-right,[2] as "key to understanding" the alt-right political ideology

> The Dark Enlightenment has been described as part of the alt-right, as its theoretical branch,[15][16] and as neo-fascist.[15][17] It has been described as the most significant political theory within the alt-right,[2] as "key to understanding" the alt-right political ideology

And it continues with gems like "freedom is incompatible with democracy" and so on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

It's not like she made a few of the cuff statements here. She was so deeply involved in this movement that people were writing articles about her.

> And then there’s Justine Tunney, “co-founder of Occupy,” proud Google employee and self-declared defender of the tech elite.

Tunney does not just flirt with neoreactionary ideology, the way self-congratulatory “open-minded iconoclasts” like me did in high school and college. She goes full throttle in her embrace of it, doubles down on it, rejects every “politically correct” rejection of sexism or racism or classism that define the modern world.

She makes bold statements that IQ, law-abiding or -breaking tendencies and political alignment are all genetically determined.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/occupying-the-throne-justine-t...

As someone else mentioned below, this is why she was uninvited from speaking at the Internet Archive. It seems the llama.cpp drama had little if anything to do with it.

At the very least, if she has grown beyond this, I would expect or rather need her to acknowledge it and distance herself and explain how and why she's grown since then. Otherwise, I can only assume that she hasn't and is still basically that same trollish reactionary from 2015 and that's not someone I would want either working at my company or speaking at my convention.

  the locus of thought for llama.cpp has always been on 4chan

TIL!

  I actually developed migraines for the first time in my life and ended up in the hospital... due to the eye strain of reading unfiltered thoughts about me for months.

A) is that how eye strain works? and B) if you've ever attracted the ire of 4chan degens, please don't read them. There's 0 benefit and a long, long list of downsides.

  and since llamafile is an ex nihilo project that I worked on for six years

Llamafile is from 3 years before Llama...? What did it do -- wrangle cleverbot instances?

   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.

That's some kindergarten level discourse, wtf.

  Hacker News is my favorite place on the web, because it's the last bastion of curiosity online. 

Well if that ain't the loudest dogwhistle I've ever heard, gd.

  This upset the moderator so much... because he had already banned me for spamming... So this became the day Lobsters also banned my domain, so that no one else could post my articles. 

...is this supposed to be a vindication?

  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.

Having worked at google, I can say with confidence that you can't go from ok to fired in one review cycle (unless you, idk, set a building on fire or something?). Transphobia sucks obviously, but this is a very, very strange anecdote.

   A few days ago, I got served with a tax warrant from the State of New York... This is what it's been like living in California for the last ten years.

Ok I have to ask at this point: what is this post?? What's the point? Why do we care about this lady's tax disputes? Immediately following this up with a paragraph about how she's akin to Prometheus himself doesn't help one bit.

   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.

Lol this is the first contemporary of mine that writes like Schopenhauer, I love it. The subtle colocation of transphobia and antifascism, tho? That I do not love.

  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.

Wow, this could be taught in university as the exemplar of the least convincing appeal for donations of all time.

P.S. describing your open source work as "my" isn't great.

   Your support will upset everyone who feels that I don't deserve the gift of life.

Framing personal donations to a Trump supporter as a way to combat transphobia is so nasty and dishonest that it's hard to really come up with the words. I guess add +1 to the tally of "haters"!

putting aside the politics and asking for money i also found this:

> 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 understand the anonymous contributions part even if i dont agree but how does assigning copyright make it easier to fight toxic people? the only reason you would ever do this instead of a cla is when you want the option to release the code as closed source. you cant revoke a open source license anyway

There are plenty of places to write systems code for a decent paycheck that aren't based in silicon valley or have a top20 web presence, and justine is definitely skilled enough to hold down one of those jobs.

Is the ask here to donate and support the desired lifestyle of traveling, owning a home in SF, and writing open source projects for fun and profit?

Maybe just stop using your public persona. Open a new account under a different name. You can still be jart if anyone needs you there but why hold a public persona that brings in hate? And if you think you get special treatment in certain communities then a new public identity can help diffuse some of the negative rhetoric. Ideally all you want the public to know about you is your accomplishments not anything else. Go ahead and be proud of who you are in the physical world and digital world where you need to be for that cause but for passive conversation and such make a separate identity imo.

The dream of a supportive harassment free internet was never real.

There appear to be some inaccuracies, or at least motivated misinterpretations in this article. In the second paragraph she claims that her invitation to speak at the Internet Archive was cancelled because of the llama.cpp incident, but reading the actual text of the email it seems the bigger issue is the content of the neoreactionary statements she made in 2014-2015? In fact, nowhere in the text of the article itself does she address them, which seems to me to be the elephant in the room.

He has since deleted the post, it returns a 404 page now.

Archived here: https://archive.today/sWFja

> 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.

This is surprising to me. I always thought it was a niche thing. But I guess if the performance gains are significant (and it sounds like it), then companies can save real money by using llamafile.

> Hacker News is my favorite place on the web, because it's the last bastion of curiosity online

I couldn't relate to anything less

@Jart have you considered setting up a twitch account? I feel like people would donate if you were teaching them how to code like you do

It's very interesting to see a post asking for donation do this well on HN. I really doubt I would be able to do the same, and my systems work isn't too shabby either..

God, I love being boring, cis and not that smart.

Sorry you're going through that, that sounds rough.

Just wanted to write a positive encouraging word, even if you might not see it. I for one know that you're a good, kind, and brilliant person - maybe misguided politically, or manic and difficult at times, but you're doing great stuff with your talent and the world needs more people like you.

It sounds like you're having a rough time, I hope you'll get through it and find the other shore. You're well-known and respected, more than the infamy and controversy. I think you need to meet someone, or company, who can appreciate your genius (and a bit of madness) and provide a safe, comfortable space to be yourself and express your brilliance how you want. Hang in there, we're looking forward to seeing more wonderful works from your art and magic.

So basically, the right rejects her for being trans and the left rejects her for being too right. Yeah, that's rough.

How about we actually treat people like persons? What happened to that idea?

everyone's favourite technofascist asks for more money; and now: sports.

>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.