So I’m a member of a group of about 70 middle-aged guys who have a discord server exactly like this. We live all over the country, but most of us have met in person, we travel the world together, and we do an annual retreat where usually about half of us meet up. In addition to discord, we have a bunch of groups on Marco Polo, and we have little sub-groups that do zoom calls regularly. Really wish some of them lived nearby, but in spite of that it’s been one of the best things in my life for years now.
It seems like this rarely happens. The fines become another stream of income, and reliance on that income kills any incentive to fully eliminate the behavior the fines are ostensibly meant to discourage.
Random thought: this also accurately describes the financialization of home ownership. It was supposed to provide stability in shelter, and instead created a market that's completely unaffordable to the prime home-buying generations, in favor of protecting those who've come to depend on unconscionable valuations.
No one, gun to their head and hand on a Bible, should defend a status quo where the only way to afford a median house is to have twice the median income.
Given the many restrictions on how the income can be used in this bill, I find it unlikely that will apply here. Feel free to check back in at the end of the pilot.
And more to the point, there is literally no way to make that happen. None. It’s as pointless as suggesting we summon magic fairies to cool the earth.
The totalitarian government required to get humanity to return to the lifestyle you’re suggesting here would itself consume vast amounts of energy and resources.
We can’t go back, and almost none of us even want to. We have to figure this out with the tools we have now.
It's saddening to see folks here on HN direct so much contempt towards this. I have no intention of messing with Gas Town or Wasteland, but I think it's cool that folks like Steve with lots of money and time are using it to build stuff they find cool and interesting. I doubt these projects are the future of AI agent orchestration, but I do think they're probably going to help us collectively learn better how to work with AI.
And if they don't, so what? Who cares? Why be angry at Steve for playing around with a fun hobby project that goes nowhere?
Regardless of whether this particular project goes anywhere, it's at least very interesting that Yegge has discovered a way to make multi-agent setups work better. Giving them discrete personas ("you are a senior database engineer with 30 years of experience") and narrower scopes makes them much more effective. This was surprising to me but makes a lot of sense in retrospect.
The part that always struck me as weird about this stuff is that all of these "agents" with their "personas" are the same baseline LLMs with the same training ultimately, just told to basically pretend they're different. How far can that really get you?
I'm not actually a database engineer with 30 years of experience. If somebody demanded that I pretend to be one, I guess I'd give it a shot, but I would expect any actual employer would be able to tell that I don't have the level of knowledge and experience that you'd expect from somebody like that.
If the base LLM actually has the knowledge of all of these specialties, why can't it just apply them all at once, instead of needing to be told to I guess pretend to be only one of them.
Agreed, would really like to understand what this (setting the LLM up to assume a role to improve performance) is doing under the cover and why it works.
Why aren't the labs training models to pick a mantra appropriate to the task and do this themselves? "Huh, a database question. I am going to pretend I'm a database expert with lots of experience. OK, here we go!"
> Why be angry at Steve for playing around with a fun hobby project that goes nowhere?
People dislike scam artists, hype artists and bullshitters. Especially when said artists had something actually useful to contribute once upon a time. E.g. Yegge's Platform Rant [1] is still required reading IMO.
Now he's uncritically and unapologetically pushes extremely low quality level AI slop while first trying to prop up Amp, then trying to sell a book, then trying to sell a crypto scam, now trying to sell a vibe-coded database. All the while proclaiming his projects have the basest of basic ideas but somehow need hundreds of thousands of lines of AI-generated low quality slop code to barely function.
The contempt here is the same as for idiots who uncritically run clawdbot and other AI bullshitters and grifters.
Compare this to @simonw who constantly evaluates coding agents, explains what he does in a coherent clear language that doesn't use ChatGPT to invent new inane terms for existing things, and stands behind his work and motivations: https://simonwillison.net
I see a lot of folks lamenting how Yegge has ignited a fire under leadership for egoless, factory worker style engineers. I don't think many would care much otherwise, but his post here is lamenting AI is not enough of a factory worker yet. On a site mostly populated by folks who put most of their lives into becoming skilled professionals, hearing "we think your work should be the kind of work we send to the cheapest, least-developed places on earth" like factory work is disheartening. Of course, it mostly seems like Yegge is here to make money off meme coins and selling Dolt plus his vibe-authored book, so why would anyone take this seriously?
I mean, he can't explain what he's building except pickaxes to make more pickaxes, so it's a bit suspicious. It's just incredible how much impact he has had with this little hustle, given his products are basically turtles all the way down.
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