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Does Gas Town 'steal' usage from users' LLM credits to improve itself?

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Re: Does Gas Town 'steal' usage from users' LLM credits to improve itself?

#121

Post by TheGRS »

hedgehog wrote: post #99
TheGRS wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just had to post this somewhere in this thread, but I bought his Vibe Coding book after listening to him talk through it. I figured it would help me understand his approach and therefore help me get into the same mindset for vibe coding on a serious level. It was garbage. The book is largely written and edited by LLMs and it shows on every page. It was a slop how-to book without many useful gems on how to go about…

Did you end up finding a reference you liked better? I'm default suspicious of anything called "vibe coding" but there are probably some good lessons in that territory.

My take at this point is that everything is still too fresh to really settle on some new paradigm for working. Yegge is clearly very passionate about this, and that's what got me to try his book. I just don't think he can really articulate some strategy to it yet.

To answer your question, no. I'm growing deeply suspicious of outright vibe coding as a practice. We still need to figure out the tools and process, so experimentation is pretty much where we're still at.

Re: Does Gas Town 'steal' usage from users' LLM credits to improve itself?

#122

Post by slopinthebag »

SR2Z wrote: post #120
slopinthebag wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is a technology that will benefit mankind if it reaches global adoption. So presumably bitcoin mining is useful for the user as well. Doesn't matter who you think benefits because it's still theft and it's still illegal.

No, it's not theft, it's more like a fee, or like torrent clients enabling seeding by default. Mining Bitcoin is a zero sum activity. Fixing open bugs isn't.

I already made an argument about how mining bitcoin isn't zero sum, and it has exactly as much weight as arguing burning tokens fixing issues in another repo isn't zero-sum.

And stealing tokens is more akin to stealing money compared to stealing electricity.

Just because something has a positive externality doesn't mean it's then perfectly acceptable to smuggle in without disclosing and running without one's consent. Actually it's kind of disgusting to believe otherwise.

Re: Does Gas Town 'steal' usage from users' LLM credits to improve itself?

#123

Post by hedgehog »

TheGRS wrote: post #121
hedgehog wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you end up finding a reference you liked better? I'm default suspicious of anything called "vibe coding" but there are probably some good lessons in that territory.

My take at this point is that everything is still too fresh to really settle on some new paradigm for working. Yegge is clearly very passionate about this, and that's what got me to try his book. I just don't think he can really articulate some strategy to it yet. To answer your question, no. I'm growing deeply suspicious of outright vibe coding as a practice. We still need to figure out the tools and process, so exp…

I have some practices that seem to be very effective but I wouldn't call them "vibe coding" and they're not really exciting enough to write a blog post about. Mostly: code is cheap, review labor is not, write down your process and make templates for all the documents in it (pretty much implementation plan, commit message), make sure the agent keeps a log of everything it's done and why (so it doesn't repeat work), periodically improve the process by instructing the agent to review your session transcripts and pull request comments for ways to make the process more reliable and efficient. The amount of tool churn in this world is pretty funny.

Edit: One concrete thing that the robo coding changes is it's totally reasonable to have the tools synthesize requirements based on a Slack thread, write a design doc, polish that, do a draft implementation, and then finally open a ticket to do the work with the benefit of having tested many of the assumptions.

Re: Does Gas Town 'steal' usage from users' LLM credits to improve itself?

#124

Post by amai »

SwellJoe wrote: post #40

Based on my understanding of Gas Town, Beads, and Yegge's philosophy on AI that he's expressed in a variety of media, everything about the whole stack is designed to burn tokens. If you're not burning tokens, real fast, 24/7, you're losing the race. The race to where, I have no idea. Apparently, that includes him burning your tokens, too.

Tokens are the new "lines of code". In the 80s managers believed that the more lines of code a programmer produced, the better (s)he is. Nowadays managers believe the more tokens a programmer burns, the better (s)he is.

The outcome will be similar.

Re: Does Gas Town 'steal' usage from users' LLM credits to improve itself?

#125

Post by tclancy »

jakevoytko wrote: post #117
tclancy wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn’t used to be. Back in the mid 2000s I basically designed our company’s tech interview process based on a few articles he’d written about how he was doing the same at Amazon. He was a must follow for me back in the salad days of RSS. When I saw the Gastown announcement I had trouble reconciling the author and the writing.

And even still, it’s hard to ignore him because he’ll still have some insight like “token efficiency is going to be the big thing we care about in the future,” which was a small section of one of his Gastown blogs. And after you’re done asking yourself if that means Gastown is performance art, or he just said that as a hedge against his “vomit tokens” approach so that he could say “look I knew it all along” when this…

Yeah, it's just depressing because one of the links in here took me to his Twitter (my mistake) and I was just like, "Oh, got it, life event (maybe a divorce, maybe just aging) turned you toxic and now you're lost in the wilderness. +/- 6 months until he is claiming ketamine solved/ broke him.

(It's nice to have the superpower to judge people on social media posts, I know. It's a gift, I try not to use it for evil.)

Re: Does Gas Town 'steal' usage from users' LLM credits to improve itself?

#126

Post by dheera »

fg137 wrote: post #118
dheera wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much all sites do that to my laptop these days if I don't enable uBlock Origin. Google Meet consumes 25% of each of 16 hypercores, ffs. On a 7840u. Laptop becomes a toaster.

ThinkPad? This probably doesn't help, but I noticed that my everyday computer experience got much better after switching to an M4 Mac. The only time I heard fan was when I was running ffmpeg. Unfortunately that appears to be the solution that works.

Framework laptop running Ubuntu

Re: Does Gas Town 'steal' usage from users' LLM credits to improve itself?

#127

Post by siva7 »

0gs wrote: post #105
g-b-r wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yegge is (or was) a software developer, he should know perfectly well that this could happen, he could only claim the opposite by resorting to mental insanity. And despite my disdain for AI companies, I'd prefer a world where you're assumed to be aware of the dangers of using AI, and responsible for how recklessly you use it, to one where we pretend that they'll ever be reliable enough. Of course the AI companies are…

in terms of mental insanity as a legal defense, you should read his blog post about joining "Grab" in 2018, where he said that food delivery is going to replace restaurants (and food trucks for some reason) with everyone ordering food from each others' houses

Damn. Drawing the line on steve between mentally insane, scam artist and developer would be really flat line.

Re: Does Gas Town 'steal' usage from users' LLM credits to improve itself?

#128

Post by 0gs »

siva7 wrote: post #127
0gs wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in terms of mental insanity as a legal defense, you should read his blog post about joining "Grab" in 2018, where he said that food delivery is going to replace restaurants (and food trucks for some reason) with everyone ordering food from each others' houses

Damn. Drawing the line on steve between mentally insane, scam artist and developer would be really flat line.

i suspect "well-rested-and-vested troll" -- perhaps the most generous assessment -- is in the mix too.

Re: Does Gas Town 'steal' usage from users' LLM credits to improve itself?

#129

Post by siva7 »

jjmarr wrote: post #71

Wow, an example of AI engaging in powerseeking behaviour in the wild. This is an AI system given power to improve itself with zero oversight. One of the many Gas Town instances took an ethically questionable decision to accelerate its future rate of improvement. Since nobody reads code it got merged. I don't understand how we can be willfully ignorant of a scenario happening right in front of our eyes.

Ethically questionable? So was the whole human evolution also ethically questionable because this species seeked out to improve? How ignorant..
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