> They get the team that built it and have more people on the AI initiative who are consumer-centric.
Who are comfortable releasing systems with horrible security, while proudly stating they never read the code? And with metrics that can be gamed by anyone, but that got reported to literally the entire world?
> The lesson here is to spend less time focused on doing what you think is the right thing and spend more time tinkering.
I'd say the lesson here is that clown world keeps on giving, but hey, maybe I'm just jealous ;)
The only currency in a world where AI does everything is your ability to get human attention. So from that perspective moltbook is a huge success.
If Mark hired these people to do anything other than viral marketing, i.e. if he thinks they're visionaries who are going to make amazing apps, he's deluded.
You can already see how the same thing has played out with computer games. With the modern engines such as Unity almost anyone can make a game. And almost everyone suffers.
And as a result there's now a million games most of which are poor quality asset flips. Everybody suffers, creators and consumers. Race to the bottom where the bottom has been reached. Prices are zero and earnings are zero.
If 15 years ago an indie game dev would allocate 80% to making the game and 20% to marketing etc. Today that will not get anything but it's much better to spend 20% on the game and 80% on the marketing, SEO optimization and attention harvesting. It's a shouting match where it's all about winning the shouting match not producing the best content.
There are millions of asset flips, but the top indie games have never been better. It’s hard for indie developers because there’s so much competition: you need to heavily promote a quality game only because there are so many other quality games.
Likewise these tools have enabled many more people to create vibe-coded slop, and may lead to more quality software (making it harder to stand out without marketing), but the best software will only get better.
The implication is that the gatekeeping has become marketing dollars, when it used to be skill at making a fun game. I don't think we're in a better situation today.
There are fun games that succeed without marketing, e.g. Balatro, and there are bad games that fail despite it, e.g. Highguard.
The reason that “skill at making a fun game” doesn’t guarantee success is because there are so many fun games. Much less, if at all, because there is so many slop.
I disagree that accessibility is a detractor here.
There's never been a better time to be an indie dev. I'd rather have 1/1000 indie games be awesome than being force fed whatever storefront disguised as a game 'AAA' publishers poop out every year.
Just look at how slay the spire is doing up against marathon right now. Which of those was shouting the loudest? Highguard anyone?
It is true that the indy game market is brutal but it's always been brutal.
You don't really hear about a crisis at the indy game level though, rather at the AAA game level there is much of "we'd like to use our market power to take out the risk in game development" and then years later we realize they took out all the value before they took out the risk and now they're doomed.
... I think he's got an affinity for other people and organizations that have succeeded in the same way. The idea that somebody out there might have a workmanlike approach to life and be able to get consistent results at something would be a threat to his worldview.
Oh, that actually seems ... bad. On the gripping hand... restricted in which way? I learned to program on the BBC B, for instance.
I keep thinking that computers that are actually made to be good for children should be a thing. Perhaps like "A Young lady's Illustrated Primer" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age )
I can't see how anyone can think "the exporters pay the tariff" makes any sense. TBH, we'll never know how many people thought it made sense because it didn't matter.
In the end money move around. If - for example - the government would just give the citizens the money from the tariffs in equal share (I mean not that I suggest they would, but technically possible), it would be like taking from the citizens that consume more and give it to the citizens that consume less.
So, yes, it is correct in a practical immediate sense that "the exporters pay the tariff" but that excludes many relevant issues like how prices evolve (which are paid by the consumers), what the government does with the money (it could share or not) and what others decide to produce (to avoid tariffs). But definitely many people didn't thought of all that ...
Reading the comments here I see almost everyone posting assumes this is a genuine interaction of an autonomous AI with the repo, not a human driving it.
I think this is important - these topics get traction because people like to anthropomorphise LLMs and the attention grab is 'hey, look at what they learned to do now'.
It's much less sexy if it's not autonomous, if this was a person the thread would not get any attention.
Steve Yegge's a famous developer, this is not a joke :) You could say he is an AI maximalist, from your options I'd go with (b) serious with the idea, tongue-in-check in the style and using a lot of self-irony.
It is exaggerated, but this is how he sees things ending up eventually. This is real software.
If things do end up in glorified kanban boards, what does it mean for us? That we can work less and use the spare time reading and doing yoga, or that we'll work the same hours with our attention even more fragmented and with no control over the outputs of these things (=> stress).
I'd really wish that people who think this is good for us and are pushing for this future do a bit better than:
Matt Lakeman's recent "Notes on Afghanistan" actually covers this as he first-hand experienced a similar situation in Afghanistan where the Taliban had shut off the internet:
"The internet was out. Everywhere. Across the entire country. No cell data, no wifi, no phone service, and as far as I could tell, there are no landlines in Afghanistan [...] But now the blackout was total. Our waiter was complaining to my guide that he couldn’t contact his mother in a western province. I saw other people in the crowded restaurant fiddling with their phones and looking annoyed. I asked my guide what he thought was going on. He shrugged."
"Without internet and phones, people can’t talk to loved ones, businesses can’t function, trade can’t function, and even government offices can’t function. Only the Taliban with their well-established network of short-wave radios can function. But still, if the internet remains off long enough in Afghanistan, the country’s economy and society may very well collapse. Afghans couldn’t get money from banks. Soon enough, would food stop being delivered to cities?"
Russia has been systematically shutting down the Internet for a long time now, to disrupt Ukrainian drones. The effects were very painful intially, especially re payment systems; people were encouraged to withdraw and carry cash. Now they are shifting more and more towards a "whitelisting" approach where a handful of services continue to function while everything else is turned off. As usual in Russia, people complain but adapt.
In recent years they have been trying to build a nation-wide Intranet that can function while international gateways are blocked. It is not perfect and every time they block the Internet, many issues happen but for the most port critical network services (such as payments) continue to function.
Seems like it would be an easy target for the government (or really anyone) to DOS, right? Presumably there's no good way for the nation-wide intranet to exclude government actors? I'm just thinking out loud; I'm glad to hear something is being done and I wish the Iranian people the best.
Correct. I'm more referring to the secondary discussions on HN/Bluesky which have trended the same lines as usual instead of highlighting the unique actions of Sage as Simon did.
I listened to bits of it and I was disappointed by the lack of push back from Lex who was supper excited because he got to hang out with Durov for a couple of weeks in Dubai - the tl;dr I got from what I heard is that Telegram is amazing and Durov is a visionary freedom fighter. Lex's recent history I'm not surprised though.
He claims: 'So, by the time the head of intelligence services met me to ask about Romania to help them silencing conservative voices in Romania, I was already wary of what can be going on next.'
I call bullshit on this. The 'conservative voices' are muppets doing Russia's bidding who broke all sorts of election laws. There was nothing serious happening on Telegram in Romania that would warrant any foreign intervention, it just doesn't make sense.
But it was subject to regulatory approval, that's been completed now.
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