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The age of Pump and Dump software

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Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#31

Post by goinghjuk »

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…

Matt Levine explained this innovation in founding beautifully: we give you money, and you give us... nothing (0% stake)

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#32

Post by CuriouslyC »

Leynos wrote: post #17

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…

I don't understand why people see basic automation of the SDLC and think to themselves "this dude cracked the orchestration code" as if it's something profound.

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#34

Post by storystarling »

Leynos wrote: post #17

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…

The supervisor-worker architecture is standard for distributed systems, but I'm not sure the unit economics make sense yet. Given current latency and inference costs, that specific pattern seems significantly more expensive and slower than a human developer.

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#35

Post by Uehreka »

indigodaddy wrote: post #33

Wonder if we'll get a response from Yegge or clawdbot creator (either here or as a blog post). This is a fairly damning indictment.

Is it? I’ve been experimenting with Gas Town, I’ve learned a lot of new ideas about coding agent orchestration, I haven’t given Steve Yegge a dime or touched any crypto. How am I being scammed?

The article just seems like yet another “look at all the hype around AI coding agents! Since we know AI coding doesn’t work, they must be a scam!” but with a garnish of “crypto is involved in some ancillary way! So watch out!”

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#36

Post by simoncion »

storystarling wrote: post #34
Leynos wrote: post #17

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…

The supervisor-worker architecture is standard for distributed systems, but I'm not sure the unit economics make sense yet. Given current latency and inference costs, that specific pattern seems significantly more expensive and slower than a human developer.

> The supervisor-worker architecture is standard for distributed systems, but I'm not sure the unit economics make sense yet. ... [T]hat specific pattern seems significantly more expensive and slower than a human developer.

Yeggie very explicitly states that Gas Town is for people who give zero shits about how much money they're forking over to their LLM company. If I remember correctly, he said that he had to get a second entire account because of how much money he was spending.

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#37

Post by avaer »

Though I won't discuss specifics here, I've personally witnessed several of these scams firsthand from the inside over the last 5 years, to the sum of ~1 billion dollars -- it's not a new phenomenon, but maybe it's going mainstream.

But I would argue this is as old as the tides, it's just been accelerated by:

1) effectively unregulated gambling in the form of crypto tokens,

2) AI acceleration that the average person is too uneducated (sorry, it's true) to understand or evaluate the capabilities of and

3) pervasive, high-speed unregulated social media that props up insane technological claims and often outright lies for financial gain -- at least long enough and loud enough until the dump

You won't believe the PR schemes that brilliant insiders cook on Telegram for gullible audiences on Twitter, but it's not my story to tell here.

The only reason this has come to software is that ai slop coding has advanced the point where people who have no clue what they are doing with computers but know how to hype up an audience have learned "one weird trick to optimize rugpulls", and normies haven't yet realized they are the suckers at the table (or they haven't lost enough money yet for the bandwagon to move on to the next scam).

All of this actually makes me very sad as a person who's been working in AI + crypto for the better part of a decade because I think the tech is cool. Alas, you cannot beat the capitalist machine or underestimate people's greed or what they will do when given anonymity and freedom from reprecussions.

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#38

Post by Leynos »

storystarling wrote: post #34
Leynos wrote: post #17

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…

The supervisor-worker architecture is standard for distributed systems, but I'm not sure the unit economics make sense yet. Given current latency and inference costs, that specific pattern seems significantly more expensive and slower than a human developer.

They don't make sense yet. It works out very expensive at present. Far too expensive to run as anything other than an experiment.

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#39

Post by indigodaddy »

Uehreka wrote: post #35
indigodaddy wrote: post #33

Wonder if we'll get a response from Yegge or clawdbot creator (either here or as a blog post). This is a fairly damning indictment.

Is it? I’ve been experimenting with Gas Town, I’ve learned a lot of new ideas about coding agent orchestration, I haven’t given Steve Yegge a dime or touched any crypto. How am I being scammed? The article just seems like yet another “look at all the hype around AI coding agents! Since we know AI coding doesn’t work, they must be a scam!” but with a garnish of “crypto is involved in some ancillary way! So watch out!”

Well, accusation then, not indictment
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