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Gas Town Decoded

alilleybrinker.com

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Re: Gas Town Decoded

#41

Post by jcims »

pjm331 wrote: post #18
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…

Gas town is the cackling mad laughter emitting from someone who knows they are being both insane and prescient simultaneously. Today, it is insane. But I fully expect to be hearing about a very serious thing in the near future about which people will say “gas town was an early attempt at this”

This is the best take I've seen in here.

I've been tinkering with it for the past two days. It's a very real system for coordinating work between a plurality of humans and agents. Someone likened it to kubernetes in that it's a complex system that is going to necessitate a lot of invention and opinions, the fact that it *looks* like a meme is immaterial, and might be an effort to avoid people taking it too seriously.

Who knows where it ends up, but we will see more of this and whatever it is will have lessons learned from Gas Town in it.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#42

Post by astrange »

chrisjj wrote: post #39
astrange wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's an Internet meme and not a real issue.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#43

Post by bobjordan »

wild_egg wrote: post #38
bobjordan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rollin…

yeah, I generally view the install script (for both this and almost everything else now since it's trivial with claude code) and then ensure I have a sane install for my system needs. But, I'm on the latest beads 0.47.1 and what I did to tame it is, I just walked through creating SKILLS with claude and codex, and frankly I've found a lot of value add to the features added so far. I especially love the --claim which keeps the agents from checking out beads that are already checked out. And after I added SKILLS, the agents do an awesome job networking the dependencies together, which helps keep multi-agent workflows on track. Overall, I'm not feeling any reason to switch from beads right now, but I will also be upgrading more thoughtfully, so I don't break my current workflow.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#44

Post by bobjordan »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #31
bobjordan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I havent tried gas town yet. I have a pretty good multi-agent workflow by just using beads directly along with thoughtfully produced prompts.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#45

Post by singingbard »

danpalmer wrote: post #17
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'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…

I think the underlying approach seems sensible.

The problem with Gas Town is how it was presented. The heavy metaphor and branding felt distracting.

It’s a bit like reading the Dune book, where you have to learn a whole vocabulary of new terms before you can get to the interesting mechanics, which is a tough ask in an already crowded AI space.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#46

Post by Cedricgc »

refulgentis wrote: post #36
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 h…

I should be specific. I think the technical analysis is reasonable and I actually enjoy someone staking on a big vision, which is why I saved these pieces.

An example:

"I’ve seen Grab’s hunger. I’ve felt it. I have it. This space is win or die. They will fight to the death, and I am with them. This company, with some 3000 employees I think, is more unified than I’ve seen with most 5-person companies. This is the kind of focused camaraderie, cooperation and discipline that you typically only see in the military, in times of war.

Which should hardly surprise you, because that’s exactly what this is. This is war.

I am giving everything I’ve got to help Grab win. I am all in. You’d be amazed at what you can accomplish when you’re all in."

This is the writing of someone planning to make a capstone career move instead of leaving in 18 months. It's not the worst thing to do (He says he left b/c the time difference to support a team in SE Asia was hard physically, and he's getting older) and I support taking big swings. I'm just saying Yegge's writing has a pattern.

Crypto and what Yegge is doing with $GAS is dangerous because if the token price crashes and people betting their life savings think he didn't deliver on his promises... I like Steve personally which is why I'm saying anything.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#47

Post by dang »

driverdan wrote: post #35
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.

Please don't do internet psychiatric diagnosis on HN. I know that often the intention is good, but it leads to bad places.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...

(and I realize the GP was the place the line started getting crossed)

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#48

Post by Retr0id »

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's kinda like how edgy political takes are often wrapped in seven layers of meta-irony. If the audience reaction is negative you can say it was just a joke that didn't land.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing, if it allows exploring new ideas with relative safety. I think that's what's going on here. It's a crazy idea that might just work, but if it doesn't work it can be retconned as satirical performance art.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#49

Post by _ea1k »

fdr wrote: post #33

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…

To be fair, he's always been a little loopy. At least, I think this post of his was loopy: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/that-old-marshmallo...

It was also one of my favorite posts of his and has aged incredibly well as my experience has grown.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#50

Post by Retr0id »

astrange wrote: post #42
chrisjj wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's an Internet meme and not a real issue.

It might be an internet meme when you're talking about the odd chatgpt free tier query, but burning through tokens at the rate of gas town can probably saturate a rack worth of GPU.
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