Comment by nkrisc
4 hours ago
I really don’t get the strategy here. What do the coins have to do with the project? Why would someone who was “lured” into using the project buy the coins? Why would someone speculating on the coins use the project? What’s the connection? I’m genuinely having a hard time understanding what there even is for someone to “fall for” here. How does any of this trick anyone?
I guess I really am just that out of touch with “AI” and cryptocurrency.
> I guess I really am just that out of touch with “AI” and cryptocurrency.
I get that feeling. I suppose it's more about crypto than AI, where the first translates into "pyramid scheme" and the second to "hype".
Any kind of defraud must be rooted in someone's greed. In this case that's FOMO about some presumably magic discovery that's gonna change the world.
So nothing special you might have missed about AI or cryptocurrencies. It's just that those are relatively cheap and accessible technologies to create and transfer (presumed) wealth.
I feel like I’ve unlocked a magic cheat code here, everyone listen up:
I read that GasTown post, thought it was cool, pulled it down, found out the principles are there but the implementation is still a little glitchy, took a couple IDEAS from Gas Town (beads and the idea of controlling an agent with hooks and tmux), made a small ralph-wiggum-loop-ish thing, and I’m now building my 4th (this is not a joke) Acid3-compliant browser this week (Acid3 doesn’t include HTML5, so this is a large but not unreasonable project).
And I did it all without investing a dime in any crypto, or telling anyone to do so (for the record: stay in school kids, don’t invest in crypto). I have somehow achieved all of the upside with none of the downside. Study me. I’ve clearly figured out something that has eluded all of these pump-and-dump callout bloggers.
Why don’t you do something useful with your superpowers?
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 ;)
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I'm going to fucking crash out if another person says they're making a browser and their inline layout does this shit[1] I swear to god.
I held off on commenting on the last AI browser post because the author said "it's not even good" so they recognized it's trash (it was).
Please educate yourself on how inline layout is supposed to work[2] first. (no, you cannot lay out text span-by-span[3] either...)
[1] https://github.com/chrisuehlinger/viberowser/blob/df6f4a265a...
[2] https://drafts.csswg.org/css-inline-3/
[3] https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/#boundary-shaping
You found it! Yeah the 4th version of the browser is in Haskell and is only a couple hours in, so it’s nowhere near done. The Go version achieved Acid3 compliance in 7 hours, but I expect this one to take a lot longer since Haskell is a bit more difficult to work with and there’s probably less Haskell in the training dataset.
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I don't think you are out of touch. I see this more as opportunistic behavior rather than the main thing. A side show. Some people buy/sell crypto. Most people at this point ignore the whole space and have turned their back on them.
All that's left is serial bullshitters generally not delivering anything real or tangible whatsoever. But of course, them affiliating themselves with whatever is fashionable is entirely in character. That's what serial bullshitters do.
As far as I can see there's little to no overlap in the Venn diagram of crypto tech bro types and AI optimists/utopians. Neither group produces much technology. They mostly just move hot air.
And then there's a rather large crowd of skeptical yet open minded people actually getting some early results using or building various AI tools.
Most AI stuff on HN breaks into the AI bears (it's all bull-shit and going to end in tears, any minute now) and bulls (AGI is imminent and we're all going to be unemployed and then our AI overlords will kill us). And a few occasional rational things in between.
I'm in camp rational. Some cool/useful tools out there. Getting some tangible results using those. Clear and quite rapid progress year on year. Worth keeping up with. I don't worry about employment. I'm quite busy currently. All this AI stuff is generating lots of work and new business potential. And the AIs are not picking up the slack so far. If anything, there's a growing gap between what's possible and what's being realized. That's what opportunity looks like. I see a lot of business potential currently for somebody reasonably handy with AI tools.
People can spin up magic crypto coins backed by other crypto coins at the push of a button.
Dirtbag crypto people will spin up a coin in the name of someone's software product, give the project owner a bunch of coin, make them feel special like they're suddenly part of lots of money, and then astroturf and pump the coin as much as they can before setting up for a rugpull by either the project owner trying to cash out, or the crypto folks trying to finish the job off.
Fraudsters are essentially buying the "whitepaper" (technical/business legitimacy) in the classic crypto pump and dump scheme.
So I guess it’s just FOMO, because I still can’t really relate to why anyone would actually buy any of those coins.
Exactly. People are buying those coins because they believe other people will buy them, increasing their value.
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You didn't answer the question though, you just double downed on crypto=bad.
If someone posts a github link of some LLM tool, clawbot or whatever. You are free to run or fork it and then some crypto bro creates a clawbot $coin.. nobody is forcing you to buy the $coin.
Maybe the idea is that associating a coin with something/anything that has momentum will make some people believe that the coin could take off along with the thing.
Crypto or meme stock pump and dump is a game gamblers can play knowing exactly what they’re doing. They need to coordinate on where they will play the game next, and any excuse will do.