The top three stories on hn right now:
1. ▲ Moltbook (moltbook.com)
538 points by teej 8 hours ago | hide | 293 comments
2. ▲ Software Pump and Dump (tautvilas.lt)
108 points by brisky 5 hours ago | hide | 25 comments
3. ▲ OpenClaw – Moltbot Renamed Again (openclaw.ai)
256 points by ed 6 hours ago | hide | 110 comments
FWIW I’ve been in enough of these cycles to see the same pattern play out now with software + AI hype that I saw back in crypto land. You get:
some half-baked project that looks cool until you actually try it,
a flood of “look at me I’m first” blog posts and influencers hyping the hell out of it,
people and companies saying they’re building on it because they don’t want to be left behind,
a weird intersection with tokens/coins thrown in as an afterthought because hey, incentives, right? — and suddenly the narrative becomes “pump this thing hard”.
I mean besides crypto and ai being big investments, i barely see any parallels. AI you can actually use to build useful things in the world , and tokens are used not as trading , but transactional currency to do that building.
I did a lot of postgraduate research around crypto from 2011 - 2016. There are a lot of parallels, and your message adds to them.
"x is different because we can actually do useful stuff with it" is what every x enthusiast deep in an x bubble or pump n dump says about x.
When the next big tech bubble comes along in 10 - 15 years, there will be people saying exactly what you just said: "NextBigTech you can actually use to build useful things in the world, and NextBigTech thing actually does that building, not just what LastBigTech thing (AI) did, that obviously didn't deliver the utopia it promised".
I wonder what it'll be. AGI? Quantum computing? Brain computer interfaces?
I'd love to pickup this conversation again with you in 15 years.
The difference is, for the claims of blockchain, it was trivially easy to look at and say, "This could have been a database".
Almost every single blockchain "product" (outside of the peer-to-peer trustless currency ) could have been a database.
This time the cost of entry of small software products has cratered.
For example, I was able to knock up a tool for a guide-maker for a niche game I play that gets about 500 peak daily players on steam.
The entire motivation for the tool is because I personally struggle to follow their well written guide. It takes a reasonable amount of focus and care to adjust a bunch of settings between "runs" based on the guide as written. Getting one of these wrong can set you back a bunch of time without even realising what went wrong.
These settings have an import/export feature in game, but that only allows for a few saved presets, and isn't easy to share.
So I've made a tool that lets people create, organise and share these presets.
Literally the only user is likely to be this single guide maker. Possibly a few others might use it to consume their guides.
Without claude-code, it would never have been reasonable for me to invest the time to make the tool. It would have been an idle dream sitting on my "I wish I had the discipline to make this" pile.
But I don't have the discipline to make that kind of project. I'm too easily distracted, and I'd have got bored of the idea before I'd finished establishing all the boilerplate, let alone before ironing out all the bugs. I also don't have the front-end talent to make things look pretty with CSS.
The LLM doesn't get demotivated. It doesn't get bored, and compressed the building of the prototype down to a day or two. Enough to keep my interest until feedback arrived. A week later, and it's shipped with 50+ issues raised and fixed.
Crypto only looked like it solved friction in places with messed up banking.
To people in the EU/UK who had free faster payments before Bitcoin was a thing, it never looked like an improvement at all.
The solution expensive and slow banking was always political, not technical.
Crypto was purely speculative, because it was never solving real problems.
I'm not speculating about problems being solved, I'm out there solving real problems. No-one in "blockchain" ever got to say the same. It was always a promise of things being better. And for many people, things already were better than what was being promised.
No, AI is different because we're actively doing useful stuff with it. It's not "this will replace x soon", it's "I don't x anymore because it would be crazy not to use AI for this, which is what I do on a daily basis already."
> if everyone is already using AI for everything, then why do we need a few hundered billion dollars more of datacentres, chips, RAM and powergen
Because everyone is already using AI for everything. That proves its value.
But of course the future isn't evenly distributed yet and only a tiny fraction of 1% of us are using AI all day so far. But once somebody gets converted they don't / can't go back to the old way. And converting them is pretty much instant.
Just like cryptobros will tell you they are doing useful stuff with their latest shitcoin. It's exactly the same thing.
A big difference between crypto and AI is around how crypto could paint a better future once we rebuilt most of our transactional infrastructure and persuaded a quorum to move onto it, and how I personally am benefiting from AI day by day to build myself tools and infrastructure for my life, work, businesses and finances only requires me to accept this change. Everyone else in the world could reject AI-augmented engineering, and I will still be tremendously better off.
You're right.
AI will offer us a utopia when we've finished rebuilding all of our electricity infrastructure and finally got enough AI datacenters, and stopped muggle humans buying memory and GPUs because AI needs them more.
I'm pretty certain I read the sentence above about crypto sometimes around 2015.
Exactly this. Before crypto it was Big Data, before that it was Low-code platforms
Before crypto, don't forget the ProgrammableWeb and all the mashups that ensued, with programmableweb.com shutting down in 2023.
2010: https://web.archive.org/web/20100226043552/http://www.progra...
Trustless Agents and the Agentic Economy is now in that cycle. Will it stick? Builders gotta build something.
2026: https://agentscan.info/
I am guessing this is sort of ProgrammableWeb 2.0.
Disintermediation is the common thread in all of this.
Will be interesting to see solutions arising for developers to monetize their open-source contributions. Pull Request = Push Demand so perhaps there should be a cost attached to that especially knowing that AI will eventually train on it.
They were when we called them 4GLs.
Right in the bin next to your DevOps.
There was also a mini bubble around social media aggregators and RSS feeds culminating in sites like gada.be
I see the dynamic as follows (be warned, cynical take)
1) there are the youth who are seeking approval from the community - look I have arrived - like the person building the steaming pile of browser code recently.
2) there are the veterans of a previous era who want to stay relevant in the new tech and show they still got mojo (gastown etc)
In both cases, the attitude is not one of careful deep engineering, craftsmanship or attention to the art, instead it reflects attention mongering.
In those years of crypto, did you actually build anything relevant to the world? It sounds like you were in the wrong bubble and now have sour grapes.
Meanwhile im using AI coding agents to build a B2B Saas.
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.
Am I running to the bubble? What I’m saying is I’m using AI as a tool today in a normal industry app, and has greatly improved my performance.
This said I remember when the internet was a fad that wasn't going to stick around according to some people, so there is that.
Internet -> Obvious value, more efficient communication, knowledge sharing, transactions etc.
AI -> Value is very obvious to me as a developer.
Blockchain -> ? What is the actual value? Something about decentralized finance and not having to trust anyone? And the tradeoff is every transaction costs $10 or more. It was always a dubious proposition with its "value" driven by speculative investment which fueled the hype machine.
Yeah there are parallels in that in all cases people got really excited about something tech and poured a bunch of money in, but the outcomes and actual amount of value derived can be wildly different.
Since you're very active with the commenting, what would you say is your definition of "bubble"?
This generalizes to any investment bubble "this time it's different".
> and tokens are used not as trading , but transactional currency to do that building.
I think it's funny that you highlight this, because for many blockchains, their native token is the transactional currency also.
Which opens up the possibility for a marketplace around it, as well as an incentive to grift to recoup one's investment.
AFAIK there's no similar market for LLM tokens (the price may fluctuate, but the AI companies set it, and they can't be resold), but the grift works by instead selling the outputs from using the tokens.
Sure, but that’s presumes the output is something people want to buy, which presumes it is useful. Sure it can pump if useless, but the longer term dump if useless is what separates it from coins.
> the grift works by instead selling the outputs from using the tokens.
is it grift if I want the output, and its contributing usefully to the work I am doing now,?
>A new worrying amalgamation of crypto scams and vibe coding emerges from the bowels of the internet in 2026
i have a filter for this kind of thing in the era of greedmaxxing (get rich quick schemes that are not new but change shape pretty often these days) - be a late adopter.
This is also best practice for anything else you may be held accountable for.
To wait is to maximize information and efficiency in execution.
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.
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.
Sounds like investors in Cursor.
Cursor was popular because it was reselling OpenAI at a loss, so for 20 USD / month you could consume 200 USD of tokens per day, but now it's over.
Founders (coins minters) are leaving the ship.
The last ones to leave the ship are going to be left holding the bag.
or, just never involve the original project itself,
which is likely what’s unknowingly being described here:
> However CLAWD coin tokens are kicking off right now and people are being lured into buying them as the hype grows.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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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...
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.
I’d been archiving/scrubbing each one so that the next assistant wouldn’t be able to use the previous branch as a guide, but since you asked, I pushed the archive of the Go one, feel free to rip it apart: https://github.com/chrisuehlinger/viberowser-go
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 ;)
I would love for these self professed AI assisted hacker gods to dogfood said browsers, before, for example, building them 3 times over in different languages for no reason.
> 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.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780065 (2 days ago, 70+ comments)
Gonna be a lot of cheap Mac minis for sale on eBay in a few weeks hopefully
As someone who is currently looking to setup local CI for macOS hardware, that'd be neat :)
Unrelated; For CI, what hardware would people recommend? I'm choosing between mac Mini (M4 Pro) and Mac Studio (M3 Ultra) but haven't digged into the CPU difference yet to understand what would be best. Opinions?
How heavy is your CI workload? Even the base Mac Mini is equipped with a pretty beefy CPU, but obviously it has limited RAM/storage (although the latter can be solved with a cheap external SSD enclosure).
It's basically for private/personal usage, almost no concurrent jobs ever, but I don't have the entire day to wait for builds. Doing maybe 10-12 builds per day on average. Storage won't be an issue, it'll be networked from outside of the box, but I'm curious if there is massive difference in performance between M4 Pro and M3 Ultra. FWIW, I'm mostly doing Rust builds at the moment.
Thanks! Yeah, guess it's mostly nitpicky choice between M4 Pro and M3 Ultra, and both would work fine ultimately.
Why?
People are buying mac minis to run clawbot. They will quickly realize it was a fun toy and it will be turned off, then sold on a marketplace.
Yegge was an early employee at Amazon and has been writing influential blog posts and developing massive software projects since before this guy was born. But sure, in his retirement he's pivoted to pump and dump schemes.
Why is HN so susceptible to appeals to authority and constant mild-severe deification of other humans?
You’re confused about what an “appeal to authority” actually is.
An appeal to authority is saying “X is true because this person said so.” That’s not what’s happening here. What’s happening is people treating expert opinion as evidence, not a verdict.
You say you don’t want appeals to authority, then you immediately offer your own opinion and expect people to take it seriously. Why? On what basis? Because it’s your judgment?
That’s the funny part. The moment you state an opinion, you’re asking others to weigh your credibility against someone else’s. You don’t escape authority, you just replace it with yourself.
Yegge’s opinion has weight because of his track record. It can still be wrong. Mine can be wrong. Yours can be wrong. That’s why people compare opinions instead of pretending they live in a vacuum.
Ignoring expert opinion entirely isn’t “independent thinking.” It’s just choosing to be uninformed and calling it a virtue.
I would’ve taken this response more seriously if it weren’t written with LLM assistance.
Regardless, it’s a lot of words to again say “they are famous, so consider them more seriously” despite the obvious scam being perpetuated via crypto. The appeal to authority is you stating their credentials first, and none of the deductions you claim one should make from merit.
Your position was much worse - instead you’re devaluing the original post author’s opinion because they don’t have the credentials of the person you’re comparing them to.
All your replies have severe clear AI slop smell, you’re not giving me any reason not to assume otherwise tbh. It’s more about whether you respect my replies to formulate your own answer, but given your appeal to authority, clearly you have no qualms allowing others (senior engineers, AI/LLMs) to determine them for you!
I don't get it, either. There's an entire class of people on here who just run around looking for anyone to lead them.
I had a guy crash out after I told him that "so and so said Thing was good" was not sufficient to say whether Thing was good or not.
I told him he needed to develop enough skill to determine that for himself or he'd constantly fall for hype.
My dude pasted a ChatGPT list of engineers who had ever said anything about LLMs and was like ARE THEY ALL WRONG??
... did you listen to nothing I said? lol
You’re still not responding to what I actually said.
No one claimed “X said it’s good, therefore it’s good.” The point was that ignoring what experienced people say entirely is just as dumb as following them blindly.
You told me to “think for myself.” Great. Thinking for yourself doesn’t mean pretending expert opinion doesn’t exist. It means weighing it against your own understanding. That’s literally how learning works.
Calling it a “ChatGPT list” is just you dodging the question. If those people are wrong, explain why. If some are right for bad reasons, name them. Laughing and changing the subject isn’t an argument.
You’re shadowboxing a strawman and congratulating yourself for winning.
If “crypto = scam” is the full extent of your analysis, then you’re not being skeptical or careful. You’re just running a reflex and pretending it’s reasoning.
People who actually understand things can explain how they’re wrong. People who don’t just announce they’ve already reached a conclusion and declare further thought unnecessary.
If that’s your bar, then yes, no other reasoning is required, because none was applied in the first place.
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Plenty of pump and dumpers are already wealthy what's your point? He's either doing it or not, his past employment isn't dictating it one way or another. His ability to "influence" through writing is salient to the discussion at hand, not some mitigating factor.
Fully agreed on the clawdbot hype. But I feel like a "natural selection" process is taking place in these situations; AI influencers and vibe coders are going to fall for it (good riddance). Any programmer worth their salt (like the author) knows Steipe's works is bs and moves on. Steipe prides himself in the half-ass spaghetti code his agents write, and has constantly opposed best practices in the industry like context management through subagents, etc. He's understood that "just talk to it" mantra attracts noobs and buys him internet clout.
Hah you had me until “best practices in the industry like context management through subagents, etc.”
> The initial software Pump and Dump event could be considered when Cursor burned through millions of dollars to build a barely working browser. Naturally there was no way to finish such a monstrous heap of software into a working product and why would anybody use a vibe coded browser anyway? The "dump" on their end was to use this as marketing bait and a way to inflate their valuation.
Let me introduce you to the wonderful world of "research." It's what happens when you're willing to spend money on things without immediate, obvious ROI. The real value often comes not from the resulting product, but from the lessons learned along the way. I also don't see what's wrong with showcasing the results of your experiments. How many developers have implemented a toy ray tracer and put it on their personal GitHub? No one in their right mind believes Pixar will use it for their next renderer, but should we conclude those people are inflating their CVs with bait? Or can we acknowledge it's a cool project to undertake, and pulling it off requires real skill? If individuals are welcome to do this, why can't organizations? I want to see more "we did a fun thing, here are the results." There's a playfulness in that approach I find refreshing. Just because it comes from a for-profit company doesn't make it cynical.
It was only through external review that the problems with the project were discovered, and the blog post was clearly written for marketing as it hardly shared any actual details about the result other than an unexplained video they called a screenshot. Good faith research would have pointed out the limitations of their system
I don't think that most research starts with the idea of being a crypto rugpull. Many research labs and startups fail, and that is fine, you dont have to double down and drag a bunch of people into the mud with you because of that, which is what a lot of the example the author points to.
In some sense I just feel like this is another way to gamble, which in general is seeing an unprecedented growth with Polymarket and the likes. There is less faith in white-collar skills making you rich, so you just try your luck.
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> but from the lessons learned along the way
When the published "lessons" don't match up with what the experiment actually did, that's when people start asking questions. Is not just "boo it didn't work", but there is a vast mismatch between what the research actually answered, and what they claimed it answered.
This is a stunning false equivalency and is an irresponsible comparison.
You've made an emotional declaration, without an argument to justify it. For instance, it would be helpful to understand why you think it's a false equivalency, and in what way it is irresponsible.
If you want to contribute something to the discussion, do that, rather than just saying that you don't like the parent's argument, that's what the down button is for.
The initial tweet was primarily a lie though
> The rendering engine is from-scratch in Rust with HTML parsing, CSS cascade, layout, text shaping, paint, and a custom JS VM.
If I cloned Pixar’s rendering library and called that then added to my CV ‘built a renderer from scratch’ this would be entirely dishonest…
I use LLMs often and don’t hate Cursor or think they’re a bad company. But it’s obvious they are being squeezed and have little USP (even less so than other AI players). They are frankly extremely pressured to make up lies.
I don’t think I’d resist the pressure either, so not on a high horse here, but it doesn’t make it any less dishonest.
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> Just because it comes from a for-profit company doesn't make it cynical.
I thought only AI bots were born yesterday.
Note, unofficial scam coins that grift on memes are very common and have been for about 2 years now, it doesn't mean an official affiliation.
However 2 things are very specific to this case:
1- Dev received a donation, which might be a way for a crypto rug puller to pump a coin. Kind of tangential, but it might be dirty money that the dev accepted. What usually happens is that the famous person is naïve and believes that they really deserve the money, and then they promote a coin which is rugpulled, that's the basic but there might be many shapes, like sending a single prompt about cryptocurrency and causing moltbot to create a new coin.
2- There is a PoW effect in agentic vibe coding, poetically illustrated in GasTown. This parallel makes it possible that there's a very tight relationship between these 2 worlds.
> AI models became much better and even doing a "ralph loop" on a simple prompt in a few hours could produce copious amount of working code. As a result you have burned through thousands of dollars of tokens to get some barely working "product" but you had no idea who or why would use it.
Not with a plan from Anthropic or OpenAI. It seems like using pure API is a status symbol among some developers. Look how much I spend on tokens.
What worries me even more is tens of thousands (or even magnitudes higher) half-baked, over-hyped, vibe-coded spaghetti "open-source projects" released publicly for clout or to attract investment.
It is like all the garbage papers you find in academia that you need to sift through until you find that one good paper. Needle in a haystack.
2026 will be the year of vibe-code driven enshittification. Github will be the casualty.
In the last 6 months we've seen no fewer then a dozen vibe coded/AI assisted open source, self hosted projects launch that complete against ours. So far all but one has fizzled out, with the same pattern each time: announcement, repo with 1 giant commit, 2-4 months of feature releases, loss of interest from the author, and finally abandonment.
I expect once users get burnt enough time, they'll stop adopting the new cool thing until it's been out long enough with consistent releases.
I'm gonna blow your mind a bit here, but this isn't just the fault of the people making the software, it's also the fault of the vast majority of the people here and on the internet in general. Quality doesn't get your attention.
The truth is building a project is like a lottery ticket, and there's hard diminishing returns on time invested in quality in terms of payoff. If I told you you could spend 10x more time for a 2x increase in probability of success, if you were trying to make a living from your creativity, you would be stupid to spend the extra time, it's a horrible investment.
The people spamming half baked projects that they quickly abandon if they don't get traction are being rational. People like me that grind on unsexy process bottlenecks and try to keep refining into something really nice are the irrational ones.
It will be interesting to watch how they decide what new data to train on if most of it is low quality.
How timely, I was just thinking about this today! Sure, we can write code quickly and in copious amounts, but the challenge of software engineering (at least in my imagination) has always been maintaining and upkeeping it.
Crypto has been putting the big bucks into marketing forever. See the telegram NFT push with mma atheletes, etc. This has just been one of their more successful marketing vectors.
I think Pump should happen in any new industry.
Pump == experimentation/innovation, different people look at it differently, so you get variety of interesting ideas.
Dump == natural consequence of over-supply, in this case whatever is not useful, we will drop.
But to invent/discover new things, new paradigms, we need that Pump.
1. Look at age of computers, we had so many different architectures and computer brands with own hardware, now mostly converged to a couple of architectures
2. Operating systems, at some point everyone was writing operating systems, now converged to primarily 3
3. Programming languages, not converged to small number of languages, but there were bunch of languages, same with Databases
4. Frontend frameworks, converged around React & Vue.
5. Search engines
6. Social networks
We need that Pump
“Pump & Dump” has a very specific meaning here, something that is essentially a scam to cheat people out of their money, and not an actual honest attempt to create something new…
Pump and dump is not the same as competition resulting in winners and losers, it’s a grift by the losers to profit at the expense of users through deception.
And this is why the OOP article makes zero sense. How is Cursor a grift to profit at the expense of users? Users use Cursor because they want to write code faster. Whether writing code faster is an inherently good thing is up to the users. Was Visual Studio (premium version once sold at ~$5000, btw) a pump & dump?
Please host your site on https!
Are you afraid of the content being MITM?
The new shit-coin-as-a-service app(Bags) is a fascinating evolution of the system. Shitcoins started as a mechanism to monetize your own fame but have apparently evolved so you can monetize other people's fame.
On one hand this is pretty obviously dumb but on the other maybe I'm just not 'getting it' and if shit-coin-speculators want to help finance OSS projects (vibe coded or no) why complain about it?
People are still buying shitcoins in 2026!?
I'm surprised anyone is still holding Bitcoin at this point... I thought everyone finally got with the program that crypto will never amount to anything...
For the record, Bitcoin had an all-time-high just a few months ago.
Incredible.
Truly, the market can remain irrational...
It may just be that our pension funds have recently entered this asset, too.
Webpage is down for me?
Appears to be running on plain HTTP, and trying to access it over HTTPS presents a bad cert and then redirects somewhere incomprehensible. No idea what the domain owner is doing here.
extremely bad takes CHECK broken cert CHECK somehow top of front page CHECK
Not for me.
I would add “being acquired by another startup experiencing FOMO that they might miss out on the latest AI trend” as an alternative path to profiting off the grift
TIL about all that stuff, Moltbook, Openclaw, Gas Town, and I don't get it anymore. It's too much. Forums for chatbots with their own religion but its actually a crypto scam and vibecoded hypesoftware to scam people with sh*tcoins because yolo and whatnot. I'm out.
I read a bit about Gas Town, and I'm still confused if it's a super-inception, metajoke that I don't get; or a clever, invite-only party to which I'm not invited. All the original article (and the discussions & responses to the responses) did was make me feel stupid, but I have enough experience and self-worth to know I'm not stupid so I'm just going to refuse to play. I recently spent more than a week pretty disconnected from this all and haven't felt that good in a long time!
I checked the thing (whatever its name was) when I first saw it on NH and after 5 minutes decided it was a scam, skipping all news about it since.
The open claw guy doesn't like Gastown, mcp, nor Ralph bot
Life is beautiful, you have both sides of religious sects of AI here. The iconoclasts and the believers, which ends up in funny situations like this
Well I do intend to use software to automate these interactions, because in my country whatsapp groups are unmanageable without this.
Imagine the group of parents of my kids schools sending 100 to 300 messages per day with different subjects.
The issue is. I also have personal and important chats that I don't want to share with an vibe coded AI software without any canaries taking the shot first.
And I'm talking as a person that is using almost all my Claude max subscription every week.
But I do verify ALL of the code that I'm delivering. And I'm even using Gemini as an adversarial LLM to review Claude generated code.
Does this that gigantic project set any standards for this?
I was not able to find on their documentation.
So it's funny indeed, but for now I'm upvoting this one even being a confident moderate person.
:)
Yeah; I did not quite understand GasTown (although I like Steve's writing style); I absolutely do not understand Moltbook or its purpose; 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.
Often when you don't understand something you feel stupid; but sometimes the reason you don't understand is because somebody's trying to sell something to you, and it's that thing that's supid, or pointless, or a scam, or all three.
> 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.
--
[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.
Thanks for the comment. Maybe I'm just not in the target group. I only use WhatsApp so I have zero interoperable needs; and I would never in a million years let an LLM access my private messages -- not willingly, anyway.
At work we were joking that people will use LLM to create fancy-looking documents which will then be parsed through LLMs back to be concise and to the point. With LLMs handling the sending of messages as well, this makes the whole concept will be even more efficient.
I can just imagine that many people won't be using stuff like this to automate copy-pasting etc. but literally let LLM's handle conversations for them (which will in turn be read by other LLMs).
"You free to chat?" "Always. I'm a bot." "…Same."
This post has been written by a human :)
More charitable take: they'd be using LLMs as secretaries.
Having a delegate to deal with communications is something people embrace when they can afford it. "My people will talk to your people" isn't an unusual concept. LLMs could be an alternative to human secretaries, that's affordable to the middle class and below.
When I was a child, my mother would arrange get togethers by calling an coordinating with other mothers. In so doing, they would chat for a bit about local gossip or life events. Eventually, some of these women became lifelong friends as she aged.
My mother's mother would physically drop in unannounced to the people she wanted to talk to, and they'd have tea and chat a while to coordinate events. This was reciprocal. You are probably already wealthy, and your time can be spent however you like, consider not optimizing it anymore.
Genuinely, why are you using your limited time on this earth doing everything in your power to poison serendipity? If texting identical things bores you, you have free time and free will, make it actually personal so neither of you will be bored. Break the social taboo and call! Or share a calendar like a normal parent or neighborhood group.
If one of my friends with school age kids coordinated with me via clearly prompted text I would assume that we were not as close as I thought we were. That I'm a 'target for personal PR' rather than, you know, a person. It would diminish us both.
It's not about poisoning serendipity. It's about:
- Automating the boring part of creating calendar invites and such from messages people send, which half of the time are photos of some announcements. LLMs are already a godsend here.
- Getting up to speed quickly on what's going on in various kindergarten groups I'm in, whenever a bunch of parents who don't work on traditional schedule decide to have a spontaneous conference in late morning, and generate a 100 messages on the group by early afternoon.
Etc.
I'm not trying to avoid communicating with people - on the contrary, I want to eliminate the various inconveniences (more and less trivial) that usually prevent me from keeping up.
You might get a kick out of Matrix if you haven't tried it yet. https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy is probably still the best way to get it and the bridges you need setup. It is far from perfect but decent.
I feel your pain on the 'user-hostile prisons' of modern IMs. The friction of manually copy-pasting photos and messages into an LLM just to set a calendar invite is a massive tax on time that shouldn't exist in 2026.
I had high hopes for the OpenClaw approach too, but the 'security sirens' you mentioned are real—self-hosting a control plane that bridges to WhatsApp/Messenger is a maintenance nightmare if you actually value your privacy.
I’ve been tracking a project called PAIO (Personal AI Operator) that seems to be attacking this from the exact angle you’re looking for. It’s essentially a privacy-first integration layer that uses a BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) architecture. The goal is to provide that 'one-click' connectivity to the walled gardens (WhatsApp, etc.) without you having to sacrifice your data or build the bridge yourself from scratch.
It’s the first tool I’ve seen that treats AI as a personal 'operator' rather than just another chatbot. Might be worth a look if you’re tired of the manual slog but don't want to risk the security 'fire sirens' of unproven scripts. Have you found any other bridges that actually handle the WhatsApp/FB Messenger side reliably, or is everything still just a 'beta' promise at this point?