Ep. #40, Terminal Innovation in the AI Era with Orhun Parmaksiz

John McBride: Welcome back to another episode of Open Source Ready. As always, I'm here with Brian in sunny California. How are you doing, Brian?

Brian Douglas: I am doing good. It's sunny in Oakland. I can't speak for San Francisco, but we tend to have different weather patterns even though we're like only seven miles away.

John: Very nice. Well, calling in from the other side of the globe, in Germany we have Orhun Parmaksiz. Hey, how are you doing?

Orhun Parmaksiz: Yeah, thanks for having me on this show. Germany is a new place for me. Just want to say that. It's been only like two weeks since I moved here. So, hello from the weird weather of Berlin, I guess.

John: Yeah, excellent.

Brian: Yeah. Where's home normally?

Orhun: I'm from Ankara, Turkey and I came here to work. Basically just relocated and trying to get used to stuff, let's say.

John: Very nice. Yeah. Well I've actually been following your work for quite a while as a Rust stan, myself and enjoyer of terminal things. But recently you had a project that I would say went very viral in the broader ecosystem. And this was Ratty, which is a GPU rendered terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics.

And I think this is one of the most fun things I've seen in such a long time. I encourage all the listeners to go and look at this thing because it's like kind of the goofiest piece of technology and I mean that in the best way possible. There's like literal polygon shifting rats inside of this terminal emulator, which is incredible.

How did you come up with this idea? Please walk us through what Ratty is and how you got us here.

Orhun: Yeah, so first of all, I maintain a project called Ratatui. And this is a TUI library that enables you to build stuff for the terminal using Rust.

And I also run a hacker space in Ankara and we were just like vibing one day and I had this idea of having something 3D with Ratatui. And this is actually inspired by someone from our Discord server. So Shout out to gold-silver-copper from Grindhouse. He created this really cool animation using Bevy and Ratatui.

And I was super interested in combining 2D graphics with 3D environments. And also another thing that inspired me was TempleOS. I was really mind blown by what Terry A. Davis built back in the day. And he has his own operating system using 3D graphics in the command line. His own programming language is just insanely insane.

John: Project this is HolyC, right?

Orhun: Yeah, yeah, HolyC. TempleOS. And you know, I had this idea in the back of my mind. So during that day at the hacker space, I was like, okay, I have this repo where I have this like cool animation with Bevy, and it's using Rust. And I've been wanting to like create something like this for a long time.

So I just experimented a little bit. I created this this really simple terminal emulator. And I tried to, of course vibe coding, I tried to put some objects in that space and I was like, okay, what's the first thing that I can do? And I put the Rat object as the cursor in the terminal just to prove that you can actually combine these two worlds.

And then I did that and I was like, okay, this is actually usable. Of course it was looking really bad. But then I worked on it a little bit and then, yeah, just vibe coded more, more, more. And like probably I spent like two weeks just every day working on adding a new feature, making it comes customizable, building demos for this because like, what's the use case?

So I built this drawing demo where you could just draw on the terminal and you have this 3D visualization at real time. There's some other demos, like there's this TempleOS inspired demo that is basically placing 3D objects in a document. Like basically like a text document. You have 3D objects so you can delete them, you can move them around with your cursor, you can copy paste them as on. Well, not copy paste, but probably you could. But--

So, yeah, this was basically a combination of years of like, thinking of, you know, doing something like TempleOS. And also it's, I think, a very cool showcase for Ratatui as well, because this whole thing is using Ratatui in the backend of like, with Bevy.

So I've been wanting to just show the people the power of this terminal user interface, because it's not just something that you can build TUIs, you can actually do embedded. You can do many other things. You can do things like Ratty and so on. So basically this was a good project to showcase Ratatui and also just put this idea of a TempleOS terminal into reality with a more modern world standard like ANSI escape codes and so on.

John: Right.

Orhun: So, yeah, I guess this idea was just lying in the back of my mind for a while. And now with the age of AI, I was like, okay, let me just do it.

John: Yeah, very cool. I love the intersection of, just like you said, the 2D space, which typically for people living in the terminal would just be the text flowing down and then all the 3D stuff, but then also being able to like, take that 2D space and twist it and morph it and spin it around or move it.

Do you ever think about that intersection of user experience and like, realms we have not yet explored? Like, I guess, literal dimensions we've yet to explore?

Orhun: Yeah. So while building this, I was always questioning the usability of this terminal because normally you have the terminal emulator and you type in a command, you get the output and it just works. Right? So you don't need like 3D rendering, you don't need the spinning rat cursor. Although it's, it's hella fun, but you don't need it.

So I was like, okay, how can I push this further? How can I make this thing really usable? So some things that I have experimented but not yet implemented or published is you could have another dimension in the 3D space. So the terminal is a buffer, right?

And having a three dimension is making you able to actually render other things, such as the history of the terminal. So you have the scrollback, like the buffer. So imagine you run a command and then you capture that state of the terminal and you can just, as you type in things, you just have layers of terminal representations.

So I had this, I guess, 4D terminal where you can actually rotate. You see the terminal from front, but you rotate it and then there's like, you know, it goes like this. So there's like the history of the terminal--

John: Like files and a filing cabinet.

Orhun: Exactly. So you can basically click and then you can just go back to the previous history of the terminal. So there's like so many things that you can do with this. But I think that was the most like, crazy, crazy one.

Well, I tried, like, at some point I was like, okay it was like 3am So I was like, okay, I'm going to put a rat in the background and the rats will just throw ANSI escape codes to the terminal and they will appear on the terminal. Because, I don't know, like, I thought that, you know, having these like 3D, like, it's a game, right? It's a game engine. Bevy is literally a game engine. You can do whatever.

John: Yeah.

Orhun: So you can like, do things like this. You can have like, you know, have the history of the terminal represented in a different way. There are so many things that you can do. But yeah, there is definitely a room for experimentation in that space.

John: Yeah. It's so interesting too, with the game engine piece. There was this tweet, I'd have to dig it out from somebody on the Claude Code team months ago about how one of the ways they think about Claude Code , actually inside of Claude Code, is like a game engine where it's like these state engines and it's all this stuff that they're rendering and rasterizing and then like, that is what appears as like the TUI on the actual terminal.

Just kind of crazy to think about that they have to do all that for Claude Code. But the amount of state that ends up getting kind of managed, much like you would in a game, is kind of insane. You know, speaking more broadly to Ratatui, which is again you mentioned it just briefly, but is a very excellent terminal user interface library for Rust, do you think about these things as it relates to AI now that I guess AI is really living in the terminal now?

Orhun: Yeah, absolutely. And like, I've been just observing the way that the industry and like the terminal space evolves. And nowadays it's so crazy because I am also like doing some social media content for Ratatui.

So I post like the new projects or like new libraries and stuff like that, and I have like, I maintain a list of things. And I basically pick something from there and then I post it. But I cannot keep up with the new things anymore because every time I go to Twitter, I get tagged on a post. Like, there's this new TUI.

We have so many things being built now, and so many things being built really easily. It's so crazy to me. And the thing is sometimes, the quality is not that high, but sometimes I just use those tools because they work and they've been built probably in a day or two. So it's just so crazy.

And recently we have interviewed a person from-- There's a thermal social clubhouse like IRC, like, network called Late.Sh. And we have interviewed the author of the service. This is something that you can just SSH into, and then you have this like, IRC basically, and inside there you have like, games and you have like a Reddit drawing board, like r/board or something. Like, people can draw on this thing from their terminal, and there's like, chess games.

There's like a NES emulator or something like that. There's like so many things in there. And we have interviewed this person in our terminal collective Discord Channel. Like, we have this like, podcast episodes where we interview new thermal people like thermal tools and so on.

So this service was like, it's been built by AI and like, the author just admits that because he's like, yeah, I mean, of course I use AI. And it's been built fitted, it's been AI assisted. And the quality and the functionality and the amount of things that this thing contain is just blows my mind. And everything works perfectly fine.

And I asked him like, hey did you like, experience anything, any glitches, any bugs while building this? Because you know, TUIs are usually known for. You know, when you have Unicode and you have emojis, things broke. Like, you have glitches, you have some UI problems. And he was like, no, I didn't. Like, even though I had issues, it was just perfectly fine to just fix them.

So nowadays I started to think about just having on-demand, AI TUI generations. Let's say you're some user and you just wanted to perform some action and you just describe what you want to do, and then this TUI is generated at that point of time and it's been presented to you.

So since AI is so successful at this, I think this might be something that we might use at some point. And personally I've been just using Ratatui in my projects using AI and it was just very successful at that.

John: Wow. Yeah, that's so fascinating. I mean, and people have been talking about this for a while where like, we'll get to accelerate the speed of software so much that inevitably you'll just have kind of these bespoke user interfaces that your local AI or whatever harness or agent that you're using can just spin up for you.

I've thought about this before with, with relation to skills, because skills kind of started as like kind of prompt context engineering, I guess, where it was like just a bunch of markdown. Then it became really obvious to people that you could have these little bespoke CLIs, even written by the agent itself to really enhance the skill.

And that's where I found the most like leverage with skills is really like a little Deno script or something just to be like, here's how you use this small piece of software, you know, for the agent as part of the skill. And I can imagine, you know, they're that being really powerful for like, what if there was a small user interface that was just the TUI that the agent could present to the user to be like, here, do a thing or something. Is that kind of what I'm getting at from you?

Orhun: Yeah, exactly.

John: Interesting.

Orhun: Yeah.

I don't think we're using the, the power of TUIs to their maximum these days. W e have these coding agents. We're using stuff in the terminal. But I really feel like there's some other ways that we can explore and some other ways that will change the industry forever. So I think Terminal is the way to go with that. It's text based. LLMs can understand it. You don't have to parse anything, you just have text. So yeah, I think that's the future that we are going towards.

Brian: So Codex, for example, has the Codex app and they're doing a really good job of getting people to use the actual GUI experience. I could speculate on the answers to this and like, that's all I'll be doing in this podcast, which is like, it's better to see what users are doing on a GUI. But also even Claude Code is pushing folks to like do HTML and like generate HTML docs instead of like just straight up markdown or interaction.

So I'm curious, like I'm all for the terminal and like the TUI base, but I'm also curious if you think the industry will try to like claw back some of its goodwill it's done in the last like 12 months.

Orhun: I'm not sure. I'm not really following like the, the GUI space that much, so I cannot really comment on that.

Brian: Yeah, yeah, fair enough. I guess the question is like, there's a market for people using GUIs. So like what I'm getting at is like Codex, they'll give you twice as many tokens if you used a GUI. So like this is like, "use this thing. It's better. Trust me."

Even though we've all been trained the last 12 months that like AI does a really good job within the terminal. I think what Ratatui is doing is also interesting because I could see myself going, actually I didn't look at Ratatui until last week. I think we had integrated some stuff internally at work. and then John brought you up and then now you're on the podcast.

So like I'm just catching up. But I have been using a lot of Charm. I have been using a lot of that, that stuff on the Go side. And I'm all for this world and I like the idea of having people give them choice, but also give agents choice and give agents like the simplest interfaces possible and lets us move forward and innovate in other places.

Orhun: Yeah, definitely. One other interesting thing that I've witnessed in the last months is that nowadays people are so getting used to the terminal even though they don't have a tech background. They are just like, they know what a terminal is and they've been using these LLM tools in the terminal. The other day I was talking with someone that is not that techy, but they actually suggested me to like install some LLM on a terminal.

So I was a bit surprised that you know, they were actually like, they knew about the terminal and they were actually using these tools in their workflow. So I was like, okay then terminal is now getting like more popular even for people who were not using terminal before. So yeah, that's the world these days.

John: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean my thoughts coming from the world of you know, like Cloud and especially VMware. Like VSphere was a big, mostly web based, but I guess like GUI thing to like interface with your VMs and all that hardware.

But I think it's the libraries, I think it's like the underground under the hood libraries that give you all the mouse insights, like the heat maps and the click insights and things, you know, and then product managers love that business intelligence.

The CEO can look at that and be like, look at the graph of, like, where users clicked. That's where the product should go next, or something. Orhun have you thought about heat maps and TUI's or I guess, business intelligence tools for Ratatui?

Orhun: I mean, you can definitely do that. Like, you can do many things in the terminal. I think the question is, how are you going to present it to people? Like, how are you going to present that to people who are not using the terminal? You know what I'm saying?

So the other day we were just talking, about this with a friend, and he said, is there a way to package a TUI application as a graphical UI, as a graphical window? And I was like, I mean, you could do it and in that case, yeah, you will be using a TUI, but just in a window. And maybe that's a way to present that to people who are not really in the terminal, but they just can run this app and it does what a graphical user interface is doing, but in a terminal way.

Maybe that could be one thing to explore. But, yeah, I haven't really done that yet.

John: Right. It does kind of remind me again, going back to the game engine thing, and these worlds are all kind of converging at once. In the Fallout series, you know, there's like literal terminal boxes that you can walk up to to then, like, read the logs or do the, like, little hacking, you know, opening key, mini game thing.

But I've even seen some things that are a lot like that. I forget what the name of this Terminal program was, but it was, there was basically something that would just render your computer's command line in a kind of CCTV. Like, you know, the fuzzy screen and the kind of like, glass, look.

Orhun: Retro. Retro terminal or something like that, maybe?

John: Yeah, exactly that. So maybe there's a world where it's like, you know, you enter into the, into the game engine to like, go, you know, walk around and talk to your agents. And I don't know, it feels kind of dystopian, actually. So who knows?

Brian: Like one of the examples was like the pixtuoid build from Ratatui. I'll drop in the chat. But yeah, like, it feels like this, like, visualization of seeing your agents running. It feels like there's already a paved path here for that. I was talking to the Paperclip team last week. And this is kind of their product, which is not. There's no TUI, but it's just like a visual org chart.

And like the next clear step is like, let me see these agents go on and off. so it's like either light turns green to red or you can have like full on pixelated characters. Also, sorry I'm just going down this whole rabbit hole because you mentioned Fallout. Haha.

John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brian: But what was it? WarGames. Like this like 80s movie about hacking.

John: Oh yeah.

Brian: And like it starts with that sort of like, clear: Want to play a game? I thought of a tweet that I never sent about Fable of like how this whole American government is like shutting down Fable, but like literally WarGames could be a thing you build with Fable 5 and like it unlocks this visual representation of things happening.

Going back to your original point, Orhun, I have a bunch of these ideas that I would love to build, but unless the AI was here, I would definitely not be building things. And we're living a pretty good age of being able to say, oh yeah, let me just burn a couple tokens this weekend and build a little side project while watching, I don't know, Narco or whatever the kids are watching these days.

Orhun: Yeah, I mean--

The reason why I built Ratty was because I was very comfortable with the whole vibe coding approach, where it's not vibe coding, but it's like AI assisted programming, let's say. And without AI, I think I wouldn't build it because it would take a lot of time and a lot of resources.

I don't have any other like, Bevy project, to be honest, and I know of Bevy a little bit. But like, building something like this would take a lot of time and I really enjoyed like, so before AI, I was also like building like projects like this. You know, I would just write the documentation myself, write every line of code myself.

So I really liked just applying that same approach to Ratty where I would go step by step. I built like the POC and then I was like, okay, fix the fonts, add this, add that, make it configurable, make it like, fix that and just use this thing and so on.

So step by step, I built Ratty like that and it was quite enjoyable. Without AI, I think it would be a bit annoying because it would take time and a lot of resources.

John: yeah, 100%. Speaking of a lot of resources, I did want to ask about some things happening at Arch right now. I know you maintain a lot of packages in Arch Linux around Rust. Yeah. What's happening right now with that?

Orhun: Yes. So there is I think an ongoing malware attack on the user repositories. So just to clarify, like there are like multiple repositories on Arch Linux. One of them is the official repositories and these are managed by people who have access to manage these packages.

So these are like being built by them and being verified and being uploaded and they are being presented through the Pacman package manager. So if you were using Pacman you're totally safe and you just, it means that you have used the official packages which are not infected.

But another good thing about Arch is that users can also upload packages and they can upload packages to a platform called AUR. This is Arch User Repository. anyone can upload packages. So officially AUR is not supported by Arch.

So there's like a huge disclaimer saying that if you're installing a package from this platform, this repository, you should verify the contents yourself because we don't verify anything here. People can upload whatever packages they want. And this makes Arch really powerful actually because you can find any package that you want because somebody needed it and they uploaded the package to AUR and you can install it with something called AUR Helpers.

So AUR Helpers are not supported, officially supported by Arch, but there are many of them and people use them. And the problem these days is that I think there's an LLM powered attack on AUR that adopts many packages and uploads many packages to AUR with some malware which I don't know the details because they've been deleted.

I actually did a live stream yesterday to just to see what's going on and I couldn't really find like the actual payload. But basically what they're doing is create these dummy packages that look like real packages but they run an NPM command inside the build script and they basically download some infected NPM package to your system and they execute some code or do whatever.

So they created like more than thousand packages I think and they have adopted the orphan packages which means let's say there is this like really old Firefox version and somebody was maintaining it in AUR and then they just decided to not maintain it. So that package was orphaned and they adopted it because anyone can adopt packages.

This is, I think it's going to change in the future but they adopted these like orphan packages and uploaded their malware into them as well. So basically they were just, you know, there were like many packages that were infected and since people don't verify like most people are, you know people can just like they want to just install stuff so they don't verify the contents and you're going to get owned if you just install things without verifying.

So that's what's been happening and yeah it's been quite problematic. And nowadays today I think the package upload access to AUR is now limited. You cannot upload packages there or something if I remember correctly. But yeah, it's been a lot of mess going on.

John: Yeah, it's a weird world. I mean I was looking at this and thinking about it with relation to NixOS which we adopt some at the company here and I'm honestly surprised that more NIX packages don't get pwned in this similar way because really anybody could just show up to you know, the Nix packages repo and open a pull request and then there it is.

But maybe even that's like a low enough bar where with AUR it's getting the orphans adopted and the malware uploaded. But you mentioned that you know, seems AI assisted or moved forward. Do you think AUR as like a concept will continue to work or you know, is it going to change where you know now in this agentic world we have to think about the overall goodwill of the Internet being slightly different?

Orhun: So I should say that AUR was never safe. So maybe there was more. Like there was already some malware being uploaded to AUR and we didn't know. We just know this attack because it's a mass upload and it's just, you know, it happened these days and there were like other attacks in the past. So there were some like projects that I saw people tried to like have this layer of LLM, let's call it antivirus or something.

They would just check the contents of the packages. So before you install something they just check the contents of the package with an LLM and so on. But I don't think that's going to stop this. Like you could trick an LLM into thinking that everything is fine and since Arch Linux is using BASH scripts heavily, so the package build files, the package manifests are just BASH scripts.

So you can do anything in there and you can just trick the LLM into thinking that everything's fine. But maybe not everything is fine. So I don't think that's the solution and I don't think there's a solution. Like as a user you're responsible for your own system and this is literally a platform that, that is being used by the other users. So they just upload packages there and you just need to be careful.

Maybe the orphan mechanism should be changed so that people cannot adopt packages that easily. Maybe there should be some verification for registration on the AUR. But other than that I think yeah, this is purely a responsibility issue of the users. And that's how I see it at least.

John: Yeah. Interesting. It reminds me of something that happened in Flathub a couple weeks ago where the they, I think they disallowed you know in, in an application for listing something on Flathead which is you know, for the listeners, another Linux package place to go get software. They pretty much explicitly disallow like AI assisted code or AI generated documentation or any of that stuff in the application to Flathub.

I don't know if that actually I don't know how you enforce that anymore. Haha. It's kind of my hot take. I mean it feels unenforceable unless you're hand rolling everything, right.

Orhun: I mean the funny thing is they actually exploit NPM like in the package they run some like NPM install command, which there was like I don't remember the package's name but something log file, atomic log file or something like that. This was the infectious package. So they were just like running NPM install atomic log file and they would just install the malware.

And this was like, like let's say we ban like NPM commands, right? They actually switched to Bun. Like they started using Bun after a while because they were like okay, people just realized the NPM commands like they they saw it so they switched the Bun.

And there's like endless things that you can do because it's literally just a bash script. So it's a funny world. The more that you try to like ban things, there's more workarounds.

Brian: That's accelerated because of AI. Now you're just like brute forcing is taken to another whole scale when it comes to now I've just got tokens. I could try a bunch of things. Zero days, now we have Mythos that just came out for a moment and it's back under wraps.

But yeah, we're going to be in a really funny world moving forward and I don't know if we can actually, I don't know if our humans are going to be able to keep ahead of all this stuff if everyone's just going all in on these like supply chain attacks based on whatever the model can take you to.

John: Yeah, the crazy thing is it's like supply chain attacks on top of existing systems that are like, are all already deeply integrated. Like the core assumption there is that most developers downloading software from ARU have npm, which is probably a pretty safe assumption.

You know, a much worse spread of malware ff it was like, well, they probably have, I don't know, the like OCaml package manager Dune installed which like nobody has installed. Right? So it's all, it's all this like deeply integrated, deep vertical software integration with stuff. You know?

Orhun: I actually heard that one of the infected packages, it was installing a Rust binary as a systemd service or something like that, but I couldn't verify it.

John: Oh, wow.

Orhun: I couldn't find that package because the history of the AUR packages are now deleted. So I couldn't really just look into it. I was really curious because it sounded like the attacks got more complex, that people realized something is going on. And then I think the malicious party just wanted to just take things up a notch and they just have this more complex packages doing more complex stuff. But I couldn't verify it myself, but I heard it from someone that they were pretty complex actually.

John: Yeah. Wow. Well, listeners, remember, if you're on Arch to do some updates, take responsibility. But in the meantime, Orhun, I wanted to move us to read. So my question to you: Are you ready to read?

Orhun: Yeah.

John: All right, I'll kick us off. I just had a few reads. The first, which I thought was very fun and kind of silly was this like 3D game on the web browser for splitting logs. And I think this was one of those like Fable, is it 3js or there's some like game engine, 3D game engine in the web browser that everybody was making games with Fable before that became too dangerous to do, per the US Government. Haha.

Yeah. I spent probably too much time splitting firewood with this little game. It's a good time. Brian, you're like--

Brian: You're like you know, I think the the game took over my audio.

John: Oh no.

Brian: Yeah, so I was like chopping wood and it's got this like nice outdoor noise.

John: Yeah. Yeah.

Brian: And it might, it might have grabbed my mic as well.

John: Maybe it's malware. Haha. Maybe it's listening to you!

Brian: Perhaps. That's crazy because, you know, I didn't, I didn't really think too much about chopping wood but it could be like mining Bitcoin every chopper, you know, this is, again, we're in a wild world. Like, I guess it's the price you pay for a little bit of fun.

John: Yeah. Yeah. Did you play anymore or any of those other games people were making with Fable and posting about?

Brian: No, There was a company, like a dev observability company that had like this cool 3D rendered, like Mech Warrior game on their 404 page. Yeah. Which is like super clever. Like, think about chopping wood but like embedded into your actual site itself. Yeah, super cool.

I think what I, I would love to do is like, do one of these things embed into a site, but also keep it crazy performant. Like, just turn it up to 11, try to keep it like, as nice as possible without taking down your entire user experience. But I'm still waiting for Fable to get unlocked again, so who knows?

John: Yeah, it sparked some interesting conversation because, I don't know, I saw some people like Jonathan Blow, who, you know, was a very big person in the indie game dev scene early on and I guess still is today. But talking about how it's like, you know, things aren't that hard to make these days with game engines.

I guess, Orhun, you would know as well with like, Bevy. But the production quality, the actual polish, the game design, a lot of that stuff. I don't know if the game dev industry is quite dead yet, but, Brian, did you have a read?

Brian: I have a few reads. They're all kind of related. So Codex is cutting their token pricing, which is, I guess, not rumored, but came from the Wall Street Journal. So a couple things happened the last week. So we mentioned Fable 5. So listeners at the time of recording, this is like a couple days after Fable 5 was taken away from our hands or our typing fingers.

John: Pulled from our cold, dead grip.

Brian: Yeah, our dead agents.

John: There you go. Haha.

Brian: But the rumor is that Codex is going to be cutting prices because there's a bit of a race to the bottom now. So Codex, competitive, Claude Code, agent harness, within the last day as well. we've got the announcement of a new model coming from Mistral, which is Le Chaton Fat, which is the fat cat, basically. My French is really bad.

But what I'm getting at is that everyone's-- So I find out before this recording it's a bunch of memes about how this is better than Fable and the benchmarks are great. Turns outmthat's basically just memes and rumors for the model that hasn't been released. But there's been a lot of talk about distillation from the two days that we had for Fable and all this other world that we're sort of walking into.

So I thought those two things were interesting. I found that right before now that none of the fat cat stuff from Mistral was actually true. But I'm curious, do you think we'll have like a reverse distillation fable 5 model from a Chinese model provider? Or you think we're we're good for now?

John: I think it was too fast. People really only had it a few days. I don't think you could distill. My understanding is this is like weeks if not months long process to distill a model like that. Given that it means many trillions of parameters. I'm confused. Was the Mistral thing real? I thought it was just fully a meme. Are they actually doing this?

Brian: Well, it sounds like they're going to have something they're going to launch. But all the rumors felt like everyone was just like kind of like boosting up its profile on X and a bunch of other places. So I think it might be a full meme. I'm not even sure how much truth there is at this point.

John: I mean that's just marketing for AI Frontier Labs. You just gotta pump and pump, right?

Brian: Yeah. Orhun did you get a chance to play with Fable last week in the moment that it was out?

Orhun: Not really. I'm just checking the Mistral stuff. I mean I wish that this was a rat. I'm kind of sad now.

John: Amazing. It could be "La Rat" LLM.

Orhun: Yeah, "Rat AI TUI" or something.

Brian: There's still a chance. I mean we've got, we get models every three months so they might. Yeah, they might pick it up now. Haha.

John: You never know. Yeah. My last read for the week was this great little site that went gangbusters on Hacker News. They love a small HTML only website over there. But this is Open Source AI Must Win. And these are a lot of talking points that I've, probably to the bereavement of our listeners, made over and over and over again.

But you know, just the idea that like we're at a pretty critical juncture, I think especially with these pretty important pieces of developer tooling and things getting integrated into our lives being essentially like first party IP, that feels like a very 90s moment where you know, Oracle and Sun Microsystems and Microsoft and these huge corporations controlled a lot of how you could do computing.

And I don't know, my hat's off to OpenAI and Anthropic because they've brought that business model back from the dead where, you know, now if you want to, I guess you don't have to like, you could still hand roll code, but if you want to stay relevant, at least you're, you're using AI.

So I'd love to see this be true where like truly open source AI, like retrain it myself, look at the data sets change and modify and study and actually be able to like end to end. I think again, just what makes that really difficult is just the sheer amount of computing power that you would need to actually do that.

There's there's glimpses of it out there. Like all the transformer stuff is open source. A lot of obviously the harnesses are open source. It's just the data piece. I think the big kind of got you there is that because the frontier AI models had to use so much copyrighted material, they wouldn't be able to actually like re release those data sets to be like, it's actually open source because obviously they'd be re releasing copyrighted material. Right?

Anyways, that's my rant. Great little website. Yeah.

Brian: The guy who wrote it I've been following for a while, a mod. He's got this like, nice. someone compared it very similar to like Kubernetes the Hard Way. Like Kelsey Hightower teaching everyone Kubernetes like zero to get off the ground. He's got the same thing for like zero to fine tune and leverage open weight models.

So definitely worth checking out or at least giving him a follow. And I think it's pretty apt that he's created this like little standing website. He was pretty loud at the Fable 5 thing when it got shut down on Friday afternoon. Had another, a tweet that went viral in conjunction with this as well.

John: Yeah, I really hope, I know this is another thing I've been saying for a little bit is, I hope that there's a breakthrough at some point that would allow us at least to like drop, you know, the hardware requirements for intelligence back down to like the consumer or even the prosumer level.

Because it's kind of ridiculous. It's like even the pinned tweet from Ahmed's profile here is like, I don't know if I had to run the numbers that looks like $30,000 worth of compute on his desk. Just to probably run a like 2 trillion parameter model, which is not huge. Anyways. Orhun, your thoughts?

Orhun: I was just gonna like share about my read, which is not even related to today's world.

John: Yeah, totally.

Orhun: So I like going back in time and I like nostalgic computing. That's probably one of the reasons like-- It's hard to keep up with today's like AI developments and everything. So I just like sometimes get stuck in the past.

So I don't even remember where I found this document on GitHub, but I have found this repo. It's called From The Transistor. And this is literally, it says from "the transistor to the web browser: A rough outline for a 12 week course."

And this was super interesting to me. It's just a readme file and it mentions. Okay, here's what you need to do to go from a transistor to a web browser. And I was thinking about this and I was like, wow, like seven years ago we were just thinking about this and now we can probably do this really quickly with AI and this is no longer something difficult, but it's still something really mind blowing how far we have come from this to today's world where we can do things really easily.

And with every model that comes out it's getting even easier. So yeah, I just discovered this document like this just single readme file and it has some really fun lines in there. It's not supposed to be fun, but it says something like "you need to build a C compiler and you need to build a linker," and so on. It's like when you think about it, it sounds really low level and really fun and it's just mind blowing how far we have come, you know, in terms of computing these days.

John: Yeah, there's a whole section for writing a bootloader in C. Haha.

Ohrun: Yeah. Haha.

John: Easy right? This is frequent, I guess, we mention him quite a bit on the podcast, George Hotz classic.

Brian: At this point we should just have him on the podcast because his reads keep showing up on our podcast. Anyway.

John: Yeah, George, if you're listening, come on down. Well Orhun, thank you so much for coming on. Everybody go check out Ratty and Ratatui. And listeners, remember to stay ready.