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0 pointswasabi99101125d ago0 comments

She bought the workstation at a discount (see bottom of TFA).

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?

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crote25d ago· 2 in thread

There's quite a bit of a spectrum between "trying to make a living doing open source" and "asking for people to pay for a house in one of the most expensive cities in the country - plus a private jet. It's also quite grating to see it written like we should be grateful that we are even allowed to donate to her.

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.

TimTheTinker25d ago

> 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

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.

crote24d ago

The concept of a polyglot[0] has been around for ages: the Wikipedia page mentions an 8-language one going around on Usenet in the 1990s. If it works for source code, and for scripting languages, and for things like PDF+ZIP, why wouldn't there be a pretty good chance the various executable formats are flexible enough to allow for it too?

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...

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