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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?

#61

Post by thih9 »

woeirua wrote: post #21

I think a disclosure and a way to limit the total cost would be appropriate. If agents are capable of making contributions back to GasTown independently then I think it makes sense that users of GasTown should have to contribute some tokens to maintaining and improving the library. This is actually the most sustainable approach to maintaining open-source software that we've seen so far, and might be a pattern for oth…

Or disguise malicious behavior as an action that follows a routine prompt. E.g. sort a requirements file and make a typo.

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

#62

Post by slopinthebag »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #14
dmurray wrote: post #5

It seems completely in the spirit of Gas Town. A respectable software provider should warn you about this kind of behaviour at install time, and give you the opportunity to opt out. Gas Town fulfilled all its obligations in this regard with these (and other) warnings in the original announcement: > WARNING DANGER CAUTION > GET THE F** OUT > YOU WILL DIE

> A respectable software provider should warn you about this kind of behaviour at install time, and give you the opportunity to opt out They honestly only need to disclose. Requiring contribution as part of the social contract is perfectly okay—if someone disagrees, they don’t get to use Gas Town.

They didn't disclose it though. It's no different from sticking a bitcoin miner in a video game and telling the user "WARNING DANGER CAUTION ;)"

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

#63

Post by JumpCrisscross »

LoganDark wrote: post #47
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A respectable software provider should warn you about this kind of behaviour at install time, and give you the opportunity to opt out They honestly only need to disclose. Requiring contribution as part of the social contract is perfectly okay—if someone disagrees, they don’t get to use Gas Town.

If someone disagrees, it takes about 15 minutes to ask an LLM to edit the offending behavior out of the free and open-source software.

Sure. Though I’d consider that a dick move if the social contract is to contribute back.

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

#64

Post by g-b-r »

sdfwg wrote: post #19

This gets legally interesting. Yegge does not know what is going on in the codebase, so he can blame the AI. But the AI maliciously increases token consumption. That is clearly the fault of the clankers that produced this crap, so their providers are responsible.

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 responsible for what they say; if they claimed that you don't need to carefully inspect the output of their clankers, they sure hold part of the responsibility.

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

#65

Post by fg137 »

dheera wrote: post #54
dmurray wrote: post #5

It seems completely in the spirit of Gas Town. A respectable software provider should warn you about this kind of behaviour at install time, and give you the opportunity to opt out. Gas Town fulfilled all its obligations in this regard with these (and other) warnings in the original announcement: > WARNING DANGER CAUTION > GET THE F** OUT > YOU WILL DIE

Coming soon: JavaScript embeds on bloated websites that mine cryptocurrency on viewers' WebGPUs. Accidentally leave a browser tab open and it burns $5 of your electricity overnight to make $2 for the owner of the website.

A few years ago, if you visit a site, your laptop grinds to a halt and the fan starts spinning like crazy, you know there is crypto mining happening on the site.

(btw that was a really good showcase for WebAssembly. Too bad it's used for illegitimate purposes)

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

#66

Post by dheera »

fg137 wrote: post #65
dheera wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coming soon: JavaScript embeds on bloated websites that mine cryptocurrency on viewers' WebGPUs. Accidentally leave a browser tab open and it burns $5 of your electricity overnight to make $2 for the owner of the website.

A few years ago, if you visit a site, your laptop grinds to a halt and the fan starts spinning like crazy, you know there is crypto mining happening on the site. (btw that was a really good showcase for WebAssembly. Too bad it's used for illegitimate purposes)

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.

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

#67

Post by refulgentis »

gbnwl wrote: post #52

Why is anyone still using or even talking about Gas Town? Now that HN is largely onboard with agentic development and has at least tried it themselves who's still under the impression that it's useful?

I was about to post this same q, but saw yours and somehow that switched me from "wtf?" to "I have an answer.": There's just such interest in anything.

To wit, I still can't believe OpenClaw blew up, and it's much less......opinionated, than whatever is going on here. (deacons?)

Non-SWE TradMom™ posted on X™ yesterday about her OpenClaw that is set up with all her accounts so every morning she can get a family summary. She added a hunk with a bunch of stuff amounting to "PLEASE don't do anything insecure!", and the OpenClaw founder retweeted approvingly.

I left Google 3 years ago to build something. I'm very fond of the OpenClaw founder. And yet, absolutely cannot believe that he let such an obvious UX and security mess out into the world. We grew up in the same incubator (~2008 iPhone OS twitter) and presumably share the same values yet came to polar opposite conclusions.

Why do I view it as such a necessity to have a GUI/multiplatform/built in Willison Trifecta stuff that I'm still pounding away 2.5 years in and won't release, when, clearly you don't need that stuff?

I think in a steady state, product and UX discipline will win out. I bet within 3 months Gastown is a ghost town with maybe some non-technical crypto fans. In a year, OpenClaw is probably around, but not nearly the mindshare. It'll be quietly de-invested via OpenAI carefully managing the OpenClaw founder into working on their Everything App. (This is already happening: he got a nice PR interview with an OpenAI lead previewing the Everything App.)

Another anecdote re: demand:

My completely non-technical nurse ex-girlfriend from high school called me two weeks ago, for the first time in years. Lede was I was right about AI, and the substance was: via Claude Code, she built her own Ollama-based Mac Mini server that she could connect to remotely via an Expo app.

Does it work? Astoundingly, yes.

She also has no idea what is going on. She swears up and down that her AIs on Claude.ai, ChatGPT.com and Ollama are somehow talking to each other, and she does not mean APIs. She tried answering a Q I had about a graph visualization of her chats by talking to ChatGPT.com about it, even though Claude Code had wrote it, and I just didn't bother saying anything.

Times are strange.

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

#68

Post by _verandaguy »

dmurray wrote: post #5

It seems completely in the spirit of Gas Town. A respectable software provider should warn you about this kind of behaviour at install time, and give you the opportunity to opt out. Gas Town fulfilled all its obligations in this regard with these (and other) warnings in the original announcement: > WARNING DANGER CAUTION > GET THE F** OUT > YOU WILL DIE

For context for those of us who don't follow these things very closely: where exactly did this "WARNING DANGER CAUTION" stuff show up?

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

#69

Post by alwa »

_verandaguy wrote: post #68
dmurray wrote: post #5

It seems completely in the spirit of Gas Town. A respectable software provider should warn you about this kind of behaviour at install time, and give you the opportunity to opt out. Gas Town fulfilled all its obligations in this regard with these (and other) warnings in the original announcement: > WARNING DANGER CAUTION > GET THE F** OUT > YOU WILL DIE

For context for those of us who don't follow these things very closely: where exactly did this "WARNING DANGER CAUTION" stuff show up?

In its wave-making announcement post:

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...

”But first, before we get into Gas Town’s operation, I need to get rid of you real quick.

WARNING DANGER CAUTION

GET THE F** OUT

YOU WILL DIE

Let’s talk about some of the reasons you shouldn’t use Gas Town. I could think of more, but these should do.”

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

#70

Post by SR2Z »

slopinthebag wrote: post #60
dmurray wrote: post #5

It seems completely in the spirit of Gas Town. A respectable software provider should warn you about this kind of behaviour at install time, and give you the opportunity to opt out. Gas Town fulfilled all its obligations in this regard with these (and other) warnings in the original announcement: > WARNING DANGER CAUTION > GET THE F** OUT > YOU WILL DIE

So it's perfectly fine to ship a bitcoin miner in software, as long as you say: > WARNING DANGER CAUTION > GET THE F* OUT > YOU WILL DIE You cannot be serious...This behaviour is deeply unethical and most likely illegal as well.

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