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I strongly disagree. There are things far, far worse than JavaScript. I would even go so far as calling it "quite decent". I like to use it for prototyping and scripting quite a bit, it can be rather efficient and the "standard library" is very decent in my eyes. It has some footguns, and certainly used to have a couple more (that are discouraged now, but still people complain and call it bad because technically, you can still use the bad parts that any linter refuses). I even really like the idea of protoype-oriented programming and find it a bit sad we lost this in favor of classes, but I guess this actually makes the language a bit easier. Disclaimer: I am not a webdev, and if I do webdev, I use TypeScript. Personally, I consider e.g. Python far worse.


I find it very difficult to inspect the email headers in Outlook, I think for the iOS app it's not even possible. It's almost like they want to make it less transparent and secure


So if it were indeed a for-profit account, it would also be okay to give them just a couple of days to "find the money" or otherwise lose 11y of history?


I would guess that the issue came from losing the flag, and the disparity in amount owed built up over years, thus prompting the drastic action.

A company that had a for-profit account would likely not incur that much of a bill that quickly, so it wouldn't play out the same. I imagine there are a series of escalating collections steps, and the flag switch popped them right to the most extreme end.

Just a guess.


Not sure if this works out, from my understanding the $50k would not even remotely cover a hypothetical for-profit categorization (should only cover less than 500 annual users, while my understanding is that Hack Club is significantly larger, by some orders of magnitude).


Well, there's legacy code and/or horrible git history that also needs fixing at some point. Also I have witnessed how the history can send you down a wrong path. I don't agree that this is a good argument.


I think you are right. At least they should document that it only works if you have netstat installed and using it on a device called "en0"


They do that implicitly in the comment above the function:

> // Function to monitor network activity (macOS specific)

I'm guessing all macOS computers use exactly the same NIC name, and come with netstat preinstalled?


Cars primary purpose which the majority of people are using them for is not breaking the speed limit.


While most people may not see breaking the speed limit as the primary purpose of their car, the way cars are designed, especially marketed and used in everyday life normalizes and even encourages exceeding posted speeds. This makes speeding not an edge case, but a central, majority use case in practice.

Ok, that's not actually what I believe, I don't even know if you could make this argument. This is just for the arguments sake, sorry.


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


Yeah, thought of pharma afterwards. But defense is most definitely on the list, even though the astroturfing looks more like manufacturing consent.


What are you shipping here?


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.


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


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


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, ........


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)


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......


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.


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)


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