2008
This is Alyssa Rosenzweig. She reverse-engineered Apple's M1 GPU with no public documentation and also developed an open-source Linux driver.
(programming.dev)
Its so strange seeing the comments on this post. The lady pretty much did the premise of Halt and Catch fire, only with a modern chip, and made the work publicly available. Its a huge accomplishment and a mountain of work and people are hyper analyzing her gender/sex/religion/means, along with a lot of “well aksully” and clutchmypeRlsapplewillgettizzy talk. Wow.
This sounds a lot like the behavior that a lot of folks were running away from on reddit.
Remember when a foss would drop and folks would talk about the accomplishment, tech, or potential uses of it? And it’s damaging. There are probably a dozen budding and potential programmers you just killed the dreams of, because you just negged any positive feedback or constructive criticism. I can imagine several people reading this with the scratchcode of next os gathering dust on a usb because of this general vibe. Back in the day, there was negging and bad spirits, but there was also a community of active support. And guess what- I sucked. But I had the good fortune to latch onto a few mentors who said, yep, but its okay, and not a bad thing. Twenty years on, I have a coding based job and lifestyle, and guess what, still suck. But so do you, and anyone else in the field. Its not about “getting gud”, but getting better, and supporting others in that journey. And this support is more than ever important than ever in this new hyper-corporatized, angular-ized, gpt-ified environment. </>
If you are feeling empty in this career, studies or hobby, find those mentors. And if you can’t find one, be the person that is, no matter how much you “suck”. And, if the programming.dev community can’t have a good constructive conversation about one of the most epic code compiles by a single person in recent history, can you kindly point me to the thread that is a positive environment?