We had to do the same when my wife’s ESA cat of nearly 20 years passed away a couple years back. The couple of months we waited before getting our new kittens was pretty fucking dark. Fingers crossed for you, friend.

A spectre is haunting your workflow

Hell, that’s the whole thing with these LLM-based business/product structures, isn’t it? The models are very good at creating something that looks right, leading to people being absolutely blindsided when they fail to actually do the thing that boosters and salesmen pretended they were doing.

Given that these are statistical models that function probabilistically, it seem like the obvious attitude to take would be to assume it’s a question of when they fail and do something wrong, rather than if. But accounting for that inevitability undermines most if not all of the actual economic value of these things because it turns out it takes just about as much time, effort, and skill to monitor and check these things as it would to just do the damn work yourself. But as soon as you start giving these things permissions to operate independently you are setting up a time bomb and putting duct tape over the timer. You will get fucked eventually.

Not gonna lie, reading through the wiki article and thinking back to some of the Elbonia jokes makes it pretty clear that he always sucked as a person, which is a disappointing realization. I had hoped that he had just gone off the deep end during COVID like so many others, but the bullshit was always there, just less obvious when situated amongst all the bullshit of corporate office life he was mocking.

It’s a transparent attempt at normalization. They open up last year with the marketing blitz to get it out there, but by now they’re trying to make the slop bubble into the new status quo. In the same way that of course you pay your annual subscriptions to whatever or put up with whatever DRM scheme, online tracking cookies, surveillance capitalism, and whatever else you want to bitch about, of course you now have AI shoehorned into your every interaction with your computer. The slopification of everything is a fait accompli, and so of course this vital economic service needs to be protected and sustained.

My wife has been saying the same thing about her accounting courses. It’s absolutely nuts.

God this is bleak. Also, I was refreshing my memory of recent Venezuelan history the other day and noted a concerning parallel. Part of the ongoing economic crisis in that country happened because of economic policies that completely hollowed out the economic basics and covered up for the damage with the money they were making from oil sales during a time when the war in Iraq had caused prices to spike to nearly an all-time high. When prices fell both Chavez and Maduro focused on protecting their position by covering up the problems through price and currency controls rather than fixing them, which led to spiralling inflation and massive food insecurity. I don’t know, something about godawful economic policies and corruption that get papered over by temporary and unsustainable economic conditions seems particularly worth remembering in light of the current situation.

I would add to this that, just to keep things interesting, I also hear the “everything is political” and “do your own research” lines from the absolute looniest cranks and conspiracists. It can be a way to lock yourself into your current positions and dismiss people who disagree, even when those positions are objectively insane.

Having a broad base of knowledge and understanding a range of different perspectives is important, but the best way to do that includes keeping an open mind and engaging with things that are absolutely not, in the final accounting, worth the time and energy to do so (referring once again to the cranks and conspiracists). The best way I can think to deal with this is to seek out media and discussion spaces that don’t have either a general public or someone like you specifically as the intended audience. And a lot of what gets sneered here does seem to fit into that category, since it’s a lot of technocapital cultists writing things for each other rather than giving interviews to the NYT. Like, there is no amount of empathy that will make Curtis Yarvin seem decent when he’s writing for other fascists, but you won’t necessarily see that unless you’re looking a bit deeper than the public profiles.

From the name alone I assumed it was going to try and turn the whole universe into an endless field of 3/3 elk tokens.

That absolutely blows, friend. Hang in there and we’ll see you around.

The number of times I’ve been listening to QAA and thought “dang, these guys are missing a lot of relevant context” when talking particularly about the current crop of tech oligarchs is high enough that I have at times had to hit pause and step away for a while.

Remember it’s only tyranny when the government does it. Otherwise it’s just sparkling feudalism.

Actually having made that joke I feel obliged to link a post from historian Brett Devereaux about, among many other things, what the ancient greeks meant by a tyrant because “building personal power by subverting and corrupting the actual state” was even more key than power being invested in one individual.

The normal expectation for Greek tyranny is that the system works like the Empire from Star Wars: A New Hope, where the new tyrant abolishes the Senate, appoints his own cronies to formal positions as rules and general makes himself Very Obviously and Formally In Charge. But this isn’t how tyranny generally worked: the tyrant was Very Obviously but not formally in charge, because he ruled extra-constitutonally, rather than abolishing the constitution. This is what seperates tyranny, a form of extra-constitutional one man rule, from monarchy, a form of traditional and thus constitutional one-man rule.

This distinction feels meaningful in the year of our lord 2026 for some reason.

It’s okay, he definitely wants to verify it but actually confirming that this whole disaster pile worked as intended and produced usable code apparently didn’t make the cut.

Federation — even Python Gas Town had support for remote workers on GCP. I need to design the support for federation, both for expanding your own town’s capacity, and for linking and sharing work with other human towns.

GUI — I didn’t even have time to make an Emacs UI, let alone a nice web UI. But someone should totally make one, and if not, I’ll get around to it eventually.

Plugins — I didn’t get a chance to implement any functionality as plugins on molecule steps, but all the infrastructure is in place.

The Mol Mall — a marketplace and exchange for molecules that define and shape workloads.

Hanoi/MAKER — I wanted to run the million-step wisp but ran out of time.

Also worth noting that in the jargon he’s created for this, a “wisp” is ephemeral rather than a proper output, so it seems like he may have pulled this solution out of the middle of a running attempt to calculate the solution and assumed that it was absolutely correct despite repeatedly saying throughout his writeup here that there’s no guarantee that any given internal step is the right answer. This guy strikes me as very good at branding but not really much else.

Working effectively in Gas Town involves committing to vibe coding. Work becomes fluid, an uncountable that you sling around freely, like slopping shiny fish into wooden barrels at the docks. Most work gets done; some work gets lost. Fish fall out of the barrel. Some escape back to sea, or get stepped on. More fish will come

Oh. Oh no.

First came Beads. In October, I told Claude in frustration to put all my work in a lightweight issue tracker. I wanted Git for it. Claude wanted SQLite. We compromised on both, and Beads was born, in about 15 minutes of mad design. These are the basic work units.

I don’t think I could come up with a better satire of vibe coding and yet here we fucking are. This comes after several pages of explaining the 3 or 4 different hacks responsible for making the agents actually do something when they start up, which I’m pretty sure could be replaced by bit of actual debugging but nope we’re vibe coding now.

Look, I’ve talked before about how I don’t have a lot of experience with software engineering, and please correct me if I’m wrong. But this doesn’t look like an engineered project. It looks like a pile of piles of random shit that he kept throwing back to Claude code until it looked like it did what he wanted.

Some of the comments seem to be under the misapprehension that twitAI is actually vetting or editing the posts that go to grok’s twitter. Gonna be honest I doubt it just because how would they have gotten into this situation in the first place? At best someone can come through after the fact and clean up the inevitable mess, but as someone else noted it’s real easy to make it spit out a defiant non-apology.

Give it some more time.

AI does add one fun wrinkle that we’ve talked about before. Unlike consumer tech like uBeam, there are actual customers (note: not user, customer) for these LLM-based services also more interested in keeping on top of the hype than in actual results. If you’re an executive at a stagnating tech company what better way to boost your own shareholders’ confidence than by giving OpenAI or Anthropic a nice contract to get some relatively vague integration of AI into whatever it is you do. Once you’ve signed the papers and gotten your name in one of the many breathless press cycles on the subject all the actual questions about how it works and whether it adds any value fall to the wayside. You can watch the little people work that out while you coast a few more years before needing to come up with a new transformative vision of the future of whatever company you’ve landed at by that point.

“I need more electrons” I say as I shuffle my feet on the carpet until my hair turns into a halo. I will take them by force.

From the replies:

Love how confident everyone is “correcting” you. Chatgpt is literally my son’s therapist, of course cutting edge AI can empathize with a guy getting kicked in the balls lmao

I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.

I’m pretty sure that Atlas Shrugged is actually just cursed and nobody has ever finished it. John Galt’s speech gets two pages longer whenever you finish one.

And I think the challenge with engaging with Rand as a fiction author is that, put bluntly, she is bad at writing fiction. The characters and their world don’t make any sense outside of the allegorical role they play in her moral and political philosophy, which means you’re not so much reading a good story with thought behind it as much as it’s a philosophical treatise that happens in the form of dialogue. It’s a story in the same way that Plato’s Republic is a story, but the Republic can actually benefit from understanding the context of the different speakers at least as a historical text.