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The age of Pump and Dump software

tautvilas.medium.com

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Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#11

Post by polishdude20 »

I recently had cursor basically make me a web interface to detect skiers in a live stream at my local mountain. The stream shows skiers coming off the lift with their back towards the camera. I wanted to know the average lap time of skiers to better estimate the lift line wait time since the lift itself has no camera.

It did a really good job with some prompting for fixes along the way. Turns out, it's really hard to individually ID people who are basically wearing the same thing and with similar colors.

All that is to say, I used it for an hour to see if my idea would work and be feasible.

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#12

Post by sergiotapia »

justonceokay wrote: post #6

The framing of the title makes me wonder what we as humans will think of software from this time 100s of years from now. Will the future be a complicated, dense ecosystem of interconnected intelligent systems, putting our current complexity to shame? Or in the future will we look at the current time as the Wild West, the time when software moved more swiftly than the law. Where oil was there for anyone with a big eno…

The future hopefully is more Star Trek, where we go "Computer, x y z" and it just happens.

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#13

Post by mentalgear »

Excellent article! Let’s also not forget another major category where they dump the vibe-coded crap: the AI-hype social-media “developer” influencer FOMO posts. Essentially a life-coach pyramid scheme repackaged for tech, selling “how to become a life-coach” playbooks to the next wave of would-be life-coaches to sell their course.

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#14

Post by pjc50 »

justonceokay wrote: post #6

The framing of the title makes me wonder what we as humans will think of software from this time 100s of years from now. Will the future be a complicated, dense ecosystem of interconnected intelligent systems, putting our current complexity to shame? Or in the future will we look at the current time as the Wild West, the time when software moved more swiftly than the law. Where oil was there for anyone with a big eno…

The Vernor Vinge SF novels have the profession of "software archaeologist", someone who digs through the layers of systems in order to extract understanding.

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#16

Post by _pdp_ »

esskay wrote: post #7
_pdp_ wrote: post #5

Noticed the same. Doing a quick analysis of clawdbot myself I figured there are many spam domains that are used to backlink. Now there is a new domain being advertised as a replacement of the original. It points to the same landing page though it is hard to say if this comes from the original authors. All of it seems to be related to a crypto scheme. The astroturfing on reddit is also pretty bad. This is obviously in…

Fwiw the new 'maltbot' (molt.bot) is the legit one and can be verified on the official github repo which has had its org changed and loads here: https://github.com/moltbot/moltbot (the original redirects for some added reassurance). My understanding it was a very quick rebrand due to Anthropic sending a takedown notice so theres still references to the old name.

molt.bot is connected to the same spam network - growing number of backlinks and reddit shilling just in the past 24 hours.

I saw at least 2-3 security reports as well pointing to various critical vulnerability.

Looked at the source as well - it makes zero sense. A lot of random commits. I suspect it would be trivial to introduce a backdoor the way this project is managed.

Too many red flags.

I would personally not touch this project.

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#17

Post by Leynos »

Here's a counterthesis:

This is people having fun with a new technology that is far from perfect, is full of unknowns, but is ripe for exploration and discovery.

Gas Town itself is a piece of speculative fiction: throwing out a hypothesis as to what might be possible were inference to drastically drop in price. Its supervisor + isolated worker + merge factory approach is an experimental spike into how agentic coding could play out at scale.

And funnily enough, it is also the approach that Anysphere arrived at through their own experimentation.

Karpathy's alien technology metaphor is particularly apt. No one knows how to use these tools properly yet. We're having some success and a lot of fun, but really we're only going to find out by experimenting in public and sharing our results. Which means the positive and negative.

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#19

Post by Leynos »

_pdp_ wrote: post #16
esskay wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw the new 'maltbot' (molt.bot) is the legit one and can be verified on the official github repo which has had its org changed and loads here: https://github.com/moltbot/moltbot (the original redirects for some added reassurance). My understanding it was a very quick rebrand due to Anthropic sending a takedown notice so theres still references to the old name.

molt.bot is connected to the same spam network - growing number of backlinks and reddit shilling just in the past 24 hours. I saw at least 2-3 security reports as well pointing to various critical vulnerability. Looked at the source as well - it makes zero sense. A lot of random commits. I suspect it would be trivial to introduce a backdoor the way this project is managed. Too many red flags. I would personally not t…

Would you be willing to share these links? ROT13 or base64 encode the URLs.

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#20

Post by askl »

skybrian wrote: post #9

How it normally works is that founders sell their vision to VC's (if they go that route). I guess there are crypto people who want a piece of that now? But they don't want any actual stake in a business, they just want their crypto coin to be magically connected to it somehow, hopefully with some encouragement that is at least adjacent to shilling. Founding startups is about making money, but I believe it's possible…

So true. VC startups are the original pump and dump software. The dump is just called "successful exit".
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