I'd say it's not only the greedy corporations but maybe technical challenges. Compare with clutter on ISS or in earlier spacecrafts - also claustrophobic, narrow and packed with equipment.
Is this supposed to be a specific coding style or paradigm?
I’ve never seen code written like this in real-world projects — maybe except for things like the "business card ray tracer". When I checked out Arthur Whitney’s Wikipedia page I noticed he also made the J programming language (which is open source) and the code there has that same super-dense style https://github.com/jsoftware/jsource/blob/master/jsrc/j.c
> Is this supposed to be a specific coding style or paradigm?
This is indeed Whitney's distinctive coding style, well known for its use in his various array programming language interpreters. His coding style is famously minimalist and idiosyncratic often fitting entire implementations of interpreters in a few pages.
This has been discussed a number of times on HN. I have collected some of the interesting comments on this topic from previous threads here in this meta comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800777#45805346
> I’ve never seen code written like this in real-world projects
Lucky you. I've seen far worse (at least this is somewhat consistent). But this isn't C anymore, it is a new language built on top of C and then a program written in that language. C is merely the first stage compilation target.
It's similar to J and that family of languages (K is another). Those are inspired by APL, which also has this super compact nature but in addition it largely uses non-ascii symbols. Apparently it is something you can get used to and notionally has some advantages (extreme density means you can see 'more' of the program on a given page, for example, and you need fewer layers of abstraction).
Possibly related(ish): video about co-dfns, prompted by a previous HN thread (links in video summary), not written in C but put together in a similarly dense style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcUWTa16Jc0
While this is very cool and llamafiles are quite universal there is anyway a nuance for Window systems which is the size limit for a Windows executable which is 4Gb maximum. As LLM models are tend to be quite large this limit is reached pretty fast. So for such cases llamafile.exe will be required (which is also universal and runs everywhere). And at the end it could be just llama.cpp tools which released for all platforms + the LLM model file itself.
An interesting choosing of words - "It's just normal criminal enterprise for sending SMS spam and anonymous messages." It doesn't look anyway "normal" as for me. I feel that this guy just says me "move along, nothing to see here" and resembles some South Park absurdity tbh. As for me it looks quite advanced (though I'm not an expert here) for just sending spam messages.
You admit to not knowing what tech these criminals have, and then on the basis of that you conclude "it doesn't look normal to me"..
It's like landing in Saudi Arabia and saying, "All the women here wear head covering, that doesn't look normal to me"...
Meanwhile on the flipside the authorities hype it up to be some state-sponsored threat, as if to say "Look citizen, your very competent government is keeping you safe! Trust us!"
Well.. my judgment was based on the facts from the article, which are mostly about the amount and sophistication of equipment. I also read more facts from this link posted there as a reference https://apnews.com/article/unga-threat-telecom-service-sim-9... - they mention 300 SIM servers and 100K SIM cards which is quite impressive as for me. Also, for some reasons all of this is clustered around the UN facilities (in 35 miles radius). Even if all of this is related to spam only activities this is quite a large investment as for me and that's why I'm not really convinced this is just some "normal" thing to see.
Could it be a result of a caching of some sort? I suppose in case of LLM they can't make a direct cache but they could group prompts using embeddings and produce some most common result maybe? (this is just a theory)
