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fp64 commented on Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded, now they want to silence him   electrek.co/2025/08/25/sc... · Posted by u/xbmcuser
tovej · 3 days ago
Astroturfing has been the favorite MO of harmful industries like tobacco, oil, and defense for a long time now.

It's sad that this has become so normal, and that they can pressure opponents into silence. I'm wondering if we'll ever get rid of this.

fp64 · 2 days ago
Remove defense from that list, they are the good guys now. I see you already omitted pharmaceutical industry so you're at least almost up to date
fp64 commented on Llama Fund: Crowdfund AI Models   llama.fund... · Posted by u/mountainriver
Imustaskforhelp · 3 days ago
well a great point, I have no skin in the game and genuinely just want to discuss, but you don't really have to add anything substantial in such cases.

Like, What do you expect him to add, create a distributed training system, well that is orders of magnitude inefficient than normal training where people donate their money

If you want him to get some reputation, that's fair but I have always believed in building in the public kind approach. Maybe I am wrong, but yes the website definitely might be made better and honestly I might create some checkpoints from this website like never ever use some other persons trademarks,

make the website pleasant to see

just use some mail service, its not worth it showing the gmail sign. The people mocking this is wild

These are things that are easy to do imo.

As I said in the other project, transparency feels like the key to such problem. And honestly the fact that you could ship it in 20 minutes might be valid but I mean :/ cmon man.

What are your thoughts? I also thought of such idea and wanted to build something like this but gave up, Might build it in a year or two but what would you suggest him to do? Instead of giving him harsh responses, lets be productive since I don't care who implements my idea. I just want a place where people crowdfund models. I don't care if some patrick person builds it or I build or you build it. It should be good though

fp64 · 3 days ago
As I said in a different reply, I would not know how to address the engineering and management aspect, let alone the legal aspect, which are the biggest blockers and likely the reason this is not already done.

It's fine to develop "in the open" but this is a pitch for several million dollars, and handing that out without any credentials or track record is just not happening.

At least provide rough estimates for what is needed to get this done. What architecture? What training data? Where does the training happen? Who manages and administrates the cluster? Volunteers who try this the first time or paid experts? What solutions to failure recovery, to storage, to tracking and monitoring? Who has the last word on fundamental decisions? How will the legal component be handled? Do they already have a good law firm, how much would that cost? Will the first training be successful right away or how many iterations will be required? Can you even get access to the required GPUs at a reasonable price point? Train on older architecture? How much effort is required and planned to save cost by making training more efficient, ........

fp64 commented on Agent-C: a 4KB AI agent   github.com/bravenewxyz/ag... · Posted by u/liszper
liszper · 4 days ago
Yes, it is fun to create small but mighty executables. I intentionally kept everything barebones and hardcoded, because I assumed if you are interested in using Agent-C, you will fork it an make it your own, add whatever is important to you.

This is a demonstration that AI agents can be 4KB and fun.

fp64 · 3 days ago
You should still not compromise on error reporting, for example. The user would not know if a failure occurs because it can't create the /tmp file, or the URL is wrong, or DNS failed, or the response was unexpected etc. These are things you can lose hours to troubleshooting and thus I would not fork it and make my own if I have to add all these things.

I also disagree that it's small but mighty, you popen curl that does the core task. I am not sure, but a bash script might come out even smaller (in particular if you compress it and make it self expanding)

fp64 commented on Llama Fund: Crowdfund AI Models   llama.fund... · Posted by u/mountainriver
Imustaskforhelp · 4 days ago
I think that uh they are shipping a platform through which crowdfunding can happen for AI models, which is an inherently cool idea imo.

Man, I understand the implementation might have some rough edges but that's besides the point because the idea is cool, not sure why people are almost picking up on this guy.

Maybe I am wrong, I usually am, but I have been on hackernews for almost an year and HN is usually not like this. Most comments here feel like bully comments, literally being too harsh is not necessary and just reflects our personality back imo.

those are my 2 cents atleast.

fp64 · 3 days ago
I can only speak for myself and here it hits a nerve. Yes, the idea is fine, but the idea is only "crowdfund training", and not how this can be actually and practically implemented. It shows this exact ignorance of people who have no idea about anything but are sure that just with enough funding they can change the world, people just need to see how smart they are. I am not saying that this fully applies to OP, more that this is a regular occurance and can get people rather annoyed, at least it does for me, and thus lead to such harsh and blunt responses.

He "ships" a website with a gmail address and nothing substantial. I could do the same, likely better, in 20 minutes. How could I even tell this from a scam, there is nothing of substance. And the great idea is just obvious and all the painful details to make it work are completely ignored

fp64 commented on Llama Fund: Crowdfund AI Models   llama.fund... · Posted by u/mountainriver
mountainriver · 4 days ago
Thanks for the feedback!

I would also say this is early stages and I don’t think it’s necessary to have every piece of this solved.

This isn’t a fund really it’s crowd funding, and we are looking to gauge interest as we reach out to investors and early clients.

I’m generally surprised by how many people on HN don’t follow their advice. Ship early, get validation

fp64 · 4 days ago
What are you shipping here?
fp64 commented on Llama Fund: Crowdfund AI Models   llama.fund... · Posted by u/mountainriver
fp64 · 4 days ago
Training a model is not only expensive, but also technically challenging on a pure engineering level. Cluster management, storage, backups, access, fault recovery, and so forth. While crowdfunding training of a LLM is a nice idea, personally I would not invest in something this "uncooked". Why do you believe you are able to properly manage $5M+ and the infrastructure necessary? I've met several people that believe if you just get the funding the rest is super easy, and it's slightly infuriating.

Apart from that, I agree with the other comments that the website looks unprofessional and llama is a bad name to use for this.

If I would want to give this a shot, I would first get engineers committed with a plan to start as soon as there's funding, set up a non-profit to handle the operation, and make sure that potential investors get the impression I knew what I was doing by providing a full plan and timeline, including addressing the legal challenges (among those, make it clear that the resulting model will be commercially usable and not sued to death. Are you planning on guaranteeing indemnification or do you want to release the model as-is? Etc)

fp64 commented on Agent-C: a 4KB AI agent   github.com/bravenewxyz/ag... · Posted by u/liszper
fp64 · 4 days ago
Why do you compress the executable? I mean this is a fun part for size limit competitions and malicious activities (upx often gets flagged as suspicious by a lot of anti virus, or at least it used to), but otherwise I do not see any advantage other than added complexity.

Also interesting that "ultra lightweight" here means no error reporting, barely checking, hardcoding, and magic values. At least using tty color escape codes, but checking if the terminalm supports them probably would have added too much complexity......

fp64 commented on The X.Org Server just got forked (announcing XLibre)   github.com/X11Libre/xserv... · Posted by u/throwaway1482
firesteelrain · 3 months ago
Never coded, made a change or updated X11. It always just works. But reading this thread that spawned some of the feelings around the ‘fragile’ codebase sounds like it is really hard to work on

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797

fp64 · 3 months ago
This is hilarious, can totally understand the fork and will take a look
fp64 commented on Root shell on a credit card terminal   stefan-gloor.ch/yomani-ha... · Posted by u/stgl
numpad0 · 3 months ago
wtf? are you saying the shell can be hypothetically drilled for root access without triggering the tamper detection? that'll be ACTUALLY bad...
fp64 · 3 months ago
I think in the article it was even stated that the port is even accessible without drilling!
fp64 commented on Root shell on a credit card terminal   stefan-gloor.ch/yomani-ha... · Posted by u/stgl
lelanthran · 3 months ago
> Was my guess as well, maybe it's even possible to use it to flash new keys so the device can be used again?

What keys would you flash them with? Anything encrypted with your "new" keys can't be decrypted on the other end of the transaction anyway, so what would be the point?

fp64 · 3 months ago
Pretend that I have to pay to watch TV at home? I don't know, sounded fun to me in my head

Plus I meant for the manufacturer to "repair" it. Maybe tamperproof gets triggered if you accidentally drop the device in an unfortunate way

u/fp64

KarmaCake day136February 23, 2024View Original