This is really incredible work. And the fact that you are 15 is blowing my mind. You have a really bright future ahead of you, and your parents must be really proud (at least I would be if you were my kid.) Hit me up if you want a summer internship finding security vulnerabilities at a hotel software startup (access control, property management, etc)
You're right, I don't know anything about his family intially, but it doesn't make me wrong. You can't do the kind of stuff he did without having a lot, a lot of time at hand. I'm not saying he is a problem, but I disagree with the path he has chosen.
Well, to some kids (I used to be one of them), the world outside is hostile, unfair and pretty much depressing. I used to basically just have my "keyboard", and it was a wonderful way of escaping the reality and dullness of human interactions as a visually disabled kid. My "keyboard" brought me a job that I love which also pays my bills and made me indepenent. Why would you have wanted to take my keyboard away? To force me to interact with other kids that basically hated me, abused me, or were basically dull and dumb? This condescending attitude of yours almost makes me cry.
Well, people that judge others from a distance and immediately throw in their opinion basically always come across as bullies. Likely because they are, maybe without noticing.
Ironic? I tend to disagree. While the internet and especially social media have a very bad reputation amongst "boomers" these days, it is still far easier to pick a community you actually feel welcome in then in real life. It is easy to deal with trolls, just close the window and move on... Besides, when I used computers to escape the harsh reality of younger kids, the internet wasn't even a real thing yet, FidoNet was the way to go. We had forums, sure, but communication and posting comments wasn't the primariy use case for a computer. Tinkeering, and learning how the machine actually worked, was the primary time sink. Hacking INT 21H, learning qbasic from reading the manual... All things you would have taken away from me if you had anything to say. And the result would have been an adult without special skills and a ton of job opportunities right away. I guess 10 years or going to university after school, basically loosing 10 years of income, would have been prefered by you as a parent?
I wouldn't take anything away, just less time on the digital world. I'm surprised that you don't think spending a lot of time on a computer isn't healthy.
This is amazing—made even more impressive by the fact that the author is just 15 years old!
Also, it's nice to see this mentioned:
> For this 10k-word write-up, I spent around a month finishing up the main parts, and refining/editing it took an extra while. Writing this is indeed a painful process. I spent the entire day on the weekend and 4-5 hours during the rest of the week working on it for around two weeks.
It's the kind of behind-the-scenes effort that often goes unspoken.
10k words was the word count for my 3rd year undergraduate dissertation in the UK. Typically, this is tirelessly worked on over months. The quality of this far exceeds anything I produced during that time and anything I saw from my peers.
I'm also detecting hints of non-native English in his writing which may make it even more effort. Though his Twitter account says he's based in Connecticut.
Edit: Wow, shocked that I'm being received so negatively about this, non native English is not "bad". It isn't meant as judgement but praise for what he's accomplished.
He's 15. Many adults whose native language is English can't write it correctly, or what are you referring to if not grammar errors? Can you give me examples?
The way grammar works is that it is hard to describe the rules of your native language. I am parsing this as non native. My older kid is a few years younger than this guy, and her text messages to me sound more native than this corpus. No I can't describe it concretely. It's just how I parse word choice and sentence structure.
it can be both because of the unsuccessful leak / wrong `libggml-base` offset. We're building a fake `ggml_backend_buffer` table from the leaked base + offset (the hard-coded offset of `libggml-base` should be adjusted with the compiled release) However this exploitation is not actually `libggml-base` version dependent, the partial-writing space is always one byte, and you can leak the `libggml-base` version with after a successful leak if you build every release's `libggml-base`, and map the last-two-bytes with each version.
I am happy you read it and liked it; more glad you tried it yourself :D
Hi! I am the developer of Retr0's portfolio. I used nextjs for the framework, with framer motion + gsap for animation. The blog is powered by hashnode headless api with serverside rendering.
prodigies are amazing, but I often wonder what they end up doing later in life when the intelligence gap between them and their peers converges to zero.
If they're lucky, the gap converges to zero because they surround themselves with more and more intelligent people as time passes. That's a recipe for success.
If they're unlucky, the gap converges to zero because they get used to not having to do much work, "fail upwards" because of the raw intelligence, and then can't keep up when surrounded by similarly intelligent people who actually do the work.
Failing at something you were told you were extremely good at, and hence based your entire identity around, is extremely difficult and demoralizing. Some people can never really recover from that, and AFAIK depression / suicide isn't unheard of.
Definitely not a problem for this particular kid though, "lack of hard work" and "coasting" is evidently not what this person is about.
THe middle scenario is kids that do the work, but stay in their community for economic / political / class / "born in the wrong place" reasons. Their talents are mostly squandered, but they might end up doing something very significant for the communities they're part of.
This used to be extremely common, a medieval peasant or ancient slave would most likely stay in their village, regardless of how much of a genius they were. The modern world made it much less so, and that's something worth celebrating.
Agreed, you put it well. It's really hard to develop a work ethic or learn how to study properly so late.
You lack all the foundational habits and are just used things working out naturally. There are zero consequences, only positive outcomes despite doing the bare minimum. And then it all goes to shit.
In my teens I was in an IRC community full of various hacker/script kiddie miscreants. Some of these people I would call actual geniuses.
The trajectory of everyone ranged from early Facebook employees, a CMU CS PhD, to one literally going to prison for an exploit lol. You can never tell where life will take you.
easy: how many genius people do you know who were also prodigies? early intelligence only gets you so far, the rest depends on hard work, passion, etc.
"Prodigy" and "genius" both lack rigorous definitions, so your problem might simply be one of cherry picking. Going with my own gut on each definition, here are a few examples to add to those already provided by sibling comments:
* Magnus Carlsen (chess grandmaster by 14, world champion for 10 years as an adult)
* Frédéric Chopin (concert pianist at 7, one of the top composers for piano)
* Blaise Pascal (rediscovered Euclid on his own at 12 with no training, went on to become one of the most famous mathematicians of all time).
* John van Neumann (could divide two 8-digit numbers in his head at age 6, learned calculus by 8, went on to be a founding figure in computer science).
In fact the llama.cpp codebase is well-developed and actively maintained. It has undergone iterative security hardening, intensive low-level security checks have been implemented in both the core inference engine and RPC components.
This standard of security is what made the exploitation such challenging and rewarding.
It’s actively maintained but I wouldn’t classify it as a clean codebase. Neither the abstractions it has within ggml, the structure of llama.cpp, effective use of modern c++ etc. it can’t even really make up its mind as to whether it should be c++ or c and there’s a lot of dirt because of that. Heck instead of using a submodule they’re copying ggml between projects making it very difficult to keep track of what’s actually happening where and what the ground truth is. It’s sloppy engineering. Parts are better designed for sure.
None of that is meant to take away from your effort or the success of llama.cpp, but I have spent quite a bit of time reading and working with the internals across layers and have a good eye for quality c++ patterns.
