That's not the original PR. jart was working on a malloc() approach that didn't ...

empathy_m · on April 5, 2023

Hmm, based on what you've quoted here and knowing nothing else but a few messages on AI Twitter I would invest in jart.

This is BillG-style product skill -- there is a ton of work that goes into representing a piece of software as something important and valuable that people should buy into.

smoldesu · on April 5, 2023

Jart is a pretty exceptional engineer, even if she wrote this patch single-handedly it would hardly be a footnote in her list of professional accomplishments. This is the author of Cosmopolitan libc, redbean and APE we're talking about, after all.

That being said, it's important to attribute work properly. It can be easy to mix things up (eg. "my patch" is excusable) but repeatedly insisting authorship when you're not the author of the change just seems disingenuous. I'm sure it was in good faith, but since they didn't address the issue or clear anything up, it's come to this.

Dramatic, and hardly the conclusion people wanted to the story of a free performance improvement. It's not entirely contrived though, and I think the maintainer handled this exceptionally well given the circumstances.

zamnos · on April 6, 2023

> This is the author of Cosmopolitan libc, redbean and APE we're talking about, after all.

Is this? If she so easily misrepresented slarens work as hers in this case, what other work isn't actually attributable to jart?

smoldesu · on April 6, 2023

I'm all for detracting from suspicious authors, but it's unlikely Justine just steals their code wholecloth. She's been an active community member for a while, and wrote a lot of impressive software before LLMs and script kiddies democratized the whole process.

In this specific instance, jart had a communication error that she failed to clarify, and so things compounded from there. The part that she didn't author is clearly defined in Git, and the most-plausible explanation is an honest mistake. Assuming ill-intent requires you to ignore the original context of the disagreement and focus on the outrage, which pretty much says it all.

That being said, I'd love to hear what evidence you have to the contrary. Maybe you've got a link to an FTP server from 2001 with the Blinkenlights source code on it, I can't say for sure. A fraud probably doesn't write in-depth patch breakdowns on their personal blog for fun, though.