Software Pump and Dump

> The "dump" on their end was to use this as marketing bait and a way to inflate their valuation.

Maybe a bit different but I think it's worth pointing out how this parallels the state of the job market right now.

It is so hard to get hired, with so many moving and diverse frameworks, libraries, and technologies you are expected to know, that it's almost impossible to keep up and stand out.

The only way to do it is to develop "projects" that demonstrate your abilities in each target domain, and in these days of vibe coding these need to be more than sketches but like full fledged applications that can draw real attention to you, if your lucky get on the front page somewhere.

And with vibe coding it can be done relatively quickly.

So we're in this state of new projects, very impressive looking projects, getting posted every day, all the time, and about 1% of them will see any kind of longevity because the vast majority will be dumped as soon as the author gets a job.

This makes it increasingly difficult to select dependencies for downstream work.

I could be building a game, a home blog, any sort of OSS.

The point im making is that crypto exists purely as this alt investment, trading tokens to get rich. Im skeptical its actually being used as a currency in any real currency-fashion. But now seems to be stuck in pump and dump schemes.

Meanwhile, AI is enabling people right now, today, to help build and learn things they normally wouldnt do.

You're telling me big data went away?

> I'm not sure I understand the point of OpenClaw -- in the sense that its benefits are not immediately obvious, while its dangers are making big red flashes and fire sirens.

I only skimmed the OpenClaw post, but unless I completely misunderstood the README in their GitHub repo, to me the benefits are stupidly obvious, and I was actually planning to look at it closer over the weekend.

The value proposition I saw is: hooking up one or more LLMs via API (BYOK) to one or more popular chat apps, via self-hostable control plane. Plus some bells and whistles.

The part about chat integration is something that I wanted to have even before LLMs were a thing, because I hate modern communication apps with burning fashion. All popular IM apps in particular[0] are just user-hostile prisons whose vendors go out of their way to make interoperability and end-user automation impossible. There's too much of that, and for a decade or more I dreamed of centralizing all these independent networks for myself in a single app. I considered working on the problem a few times, but the barriers vendors put up were always too much for my patience.

So here I thought, maybe someone solved this problem. That alone would be valuable.

Having an LLM, especially BYOK, in your main IM app? That's a no-brainer to me too; I think it's a travesty this is not a default feature already. Especially these days, as a parent, I find a good chunk of my IM use involves manually copy-pasting messages and photos to some LLM to turn them into reminders and calendar invites. And that's one of many use cases I have for tight IM/LLM integration.

So here I thought maybe this project will be a quick and easy way to finally get a sane, end-user-programmable chat experience. Shame to see it might be vaporware and/or a scam.

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[0] - Excepting Telegram, which has a host of other problems - but I'd be fine living with them; unfortunately, everyone I need to communicate with uses either WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger these days.

In the past year I’ve used AI coding assistants on a life-saving medical device product (no, followup commenter, I did not ship unreviewed vibes in a medical device product), a tool for editing documentation used in healthcare (no, followup commenter, it does not use LLMs to generate documentation), a piece of custom cue calling software for theater and to reverse engineer a TCP protocol to help modernize a piece of water quality measuring equipment.

But hey, every once in a while I like to have a little fun ;)