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Gas Town Decoded

alilleybrinker.com

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Re: Gas Town Decoded

#31

Post by mattgreenrocks »

bobjordan wrote: post #28
danpalmer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a joke, but I think it's an example of the same thing we're seeing with folks who think they're talking to god when they talk to ChatGPT, or those who spiral and in some cases, sadly take their own life. These chatbots create an echo chamber unlike that which we've ever had to deal with before. If we thought social media was bad, this is way worse. I think Gastown and Beads are examples of this applied to so…

Not sure you’ve actually tried using it, but beads has been an absolute game changer for my projects. “Game changer” is even underselling it.

How do you handle the dogs ignoring the deacons and going after the polecats though? Seems like the mayor should get involved to me.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#32

Post by Cedricgc »

I'm developing concern for Steve. He's been a well known developer and writer in the industry for years now (See his popular 'Google Platforms Rant' essay from years ago) [0].

Now, Yegge's writing tilts towards the grandoise... see his writing when joining Grab [1] and Sourcegraph [2] respectively versus how things actually played out.

I prefer optimism and I'm not anti AI by any means, but given his observed behavior and how AI can't exacerbate certain pathologies... not great. Adding the recent crypto activities on top and all that entails is the ingredients for a powder keg.

Hope someone is looking out for him.

[0] https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse452/23wi/papers...

[1] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/why-i-left-google-to-join-gra...

[2] https://sourcegraph.com/blog/introducing-steve-yegge

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#33

Post by fdr »

I use beads quite a bit, but not as steve intended. And definitely the opposite of "Gas Town," where I use the note-taking capability and integration with Git (that is, as something of a glorified Makefile and database) to debug contexts, to close the loop and increase accuracy over time. Nevertheless, it has been useful for large batch runs over my code base: the record has been processing for thirty hours straight while getting something useful, and enough trace data to make further improvements.

Steve has gone "a bit" loopy, in a (so far) self aware manner, but he has some kind of insight into the software engineering process, I think. Yet, I predict beads will break under the weight of no-supervision eventually if he keeps churning it, but some others will pick up where he left off, with more modest goals. He did, to his credit, kill off several generations of project before this one in a similar category.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#34

Post by wenc »

bobjordan wrote: post #28
danpalmer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a joke, but I think it's an example of the same thing we're seeing with folks who think they're talking to god when they talk to ChatGPT, or those who spiral and in some cases, sadly take their own life. These chatbots create an echo chamber unlike that which we've ever had to deal with before. If we thought social media was bad, this is way worse. I think Gastown and Beads are examples of this applied to so…

Not sure you’ve actually tried using it, but beads has been an absolute game changer for my projects. “Game changer” is even underselling it.

I'm not entitled to your time of course, but would you mind describing how?

All I know is beads is supposed to help me retain memory from one session to the next. But I'm finding myself having to curate it like a git repo (and I already have a git repo). Also it's quite tied to github, which I cannot use at work. I want to use it but I feel I need to see how others use it to understand how to tailor it for my workflow.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#35

Post by driverdan »

Cedricgc wrote: post #32

I'm developing concern for Steve. He's been a well known developer and writer in the industry for years now (See his popular 'Google Platforms Rant' essay from years ago) [0]. Now, Yegge's writing tilts towards the grandoise... see his writing when joining Grab [1] and Sourcegraph [2] respectively versus how things actually played out. I prefer optimism and I'm not anti AI by any means, but given his observed behavio…

The Gas Town post reads like some type of manic psychosis. I hope he snaps out of it and gets help.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#36

Post by refulgentis »

Cedricgc wrote: post #32

I'm developing concern for Steve. He's been a well known developer and writer in the industry for years now (See his popular 'Google Platforms Rant' essay from years ago) [0]. Now, Yegge's writing tilts towards the grandoise... see his writing when joining Grab [1] and Sourcegraph [2] respectively versus how things actually played out. I prefer optimism and I'm not anti AI by any means, but given his observed behavio…

He was right about Google in [1] when I was still drinking the Kool-Aid, in big and tangible ways that aren't discussed publicly.

[2] is 100% accurate, Grok was the backbone / glue of Google's internal developer tools.

I don't disagree on the current situation, and I'm uncomfortable sticking my neck out on this because I'm basically saying "the guy who kinda seems out of it, totally wasn't out of it, when you think he was", but [1] and [2] definitely aren't grandiose, the claims he makes re: Google and his work there are accurate. A small piece of why I feel comfortable in this, is that both of these were public blogs his employer was 100% happy about when hiring him to top positions.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#37

Post by zmmmmm »

It seems like one of the key events that needs to happen for any professional domain to take off is for it to develop an "inside" language that nobody else understands. For example, I still don't know what a kanban or a scrum is. So I'm very ill positioned to challenge their use or question how they are done. Hence they got to dodge a whole lot of opposition that would probably have brought it all down. The invention of a new mysterious terminology I think was critical for agile to take off.

The problem with this phenomenon is that the same freedom from critique that is seemingly necessary for new domains to establish themselves also detaches them from necessary criticism. There's simply no way to tell if this isn't a load of baloney. And by the time it's a bullet point requirement on CVs to get employed it's too late for anybody to critique it.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#38

Post by wild_egg »

bobjordan wrote: post #28
danpalmer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a joke, but I think it's an example of the same thing we're seeing with folks who think they're talking to god when they talk to ChatGPT, or those who spiral and in some cases, sadly take their own life. These chatbots create an echo chamber unlike that which we've ever had to deal with before. If we thought social media was bad, this is way worse. I think Gastown and Beads are examples of this applied to so…

Not sure you’ve actually tried using it, but beads has been an absolute game changer for my projects. “Game changer” is even underselling it.

Beads was phenomenal back in October when it was released. Unfortunately it has somehow grown like a cancer. Now 275k lines of Go for task tracking? And no human fully knows what it is all doing. Steve Yegge is quite proud to say he's never looked at any of its code. It installs magic hooks and daemons all over your system and refuses to let go. Most user hostile software I've used in a long time.

Lot of folks rolling their own tools as replacements now. I shared mine [0] a couple weeks ago and quite a few folks have been happy with the change.

Regardless of what you do, I highly recommend to everyone that they get off the Beads bandwagon before it crashes them into a brick wall.

[0] https://github.com/wedow/ticket

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#39

Post by chrisjj »

astrange wrote: post #15
ohazi wrote: post #12

Real, genuinely confused human here: Can someone please clarify whether or not gas town is/was a joke? I've searched repeatedly and can't find anything that looks like an obvious tell, and I'm not sure if this is because it's actually real and people are taking it seriously, or because the pages and pages of discourse surrounding it is AI generated and taking itself literally. If it's not a joke... I have no words. Y…

It doesn't have to exclusively be one or the other. > If it's not a joke... I have no words. You've all gone insane. I think this is covered by the part in Yegge's post where he says not to run it unless you're so rich you don't care if it works or not.

How rich do you have to be not care about the environmental cost?
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