TechTakes

I read this yesterday with the most remarkable mix of emotions for a tech post: astonishment, revulsion, traces of hilarity, mounting disgust and disdain, shock, fear, dismay, pity, sadness.

For those who don't know the name... Yegge has been writing (very very long) blog posts about tech for about 20 years now. In his early days he wrote some of the most insightful stuff about Lisp I've seen anywhere. One of his similes is an all-time favourite tech quote of mine that I have quoted before:

Scheme is an exotic sports car. Fast. Manual transmission. No radio.

Emacs Lisp is a 1984 Subaru GL 4WD: "the car that's always in front of you."

Common Lisp is Howl's Moving Castle.

Source: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/11/ejacs-javascript-interpreter-for-emacs.html

Yes, this bloke wrote an Emacs addin that lets it run Javascript. That has implications: it's important, it's almost guaranteed to infuriate the Emacs purists, so he wouldn't get much help, had to do it solo, and fast.

He got all excited about moving to S.E. Asia somewhere a bit before COVID. From a mention in this piece, I guess he married a local woman. That might explain it.

It didn't pan out and he came back. He's worked for a few of the FAANG type giants. Then he was going to revive his hobby videogame and make his millions from that.

Now he drank the Koolaid and his brain's run out from his ears. It's a damned shame. I didn't agree with him about many things but he was very smart and really could write -- text, not code, but code too.

There are a lot of highly opinionated people in tech. Few of them can write. Fewer of them can write short (it's a real skill, hard to learn and hard to do) and few have the sheer patience and stamina to write long (which is the next best thing).

Yegge wrote long, and it was worth it.

I went from "oh hey Steve Yegge I vaguely remember that name, what's he up to these days?" to "Oh." in the space of half a sentence

Was a Yegge fan. Sad to say, looks like he's lost his f'ing mind.

"Gas Town"?

"Gas Town?!"

He unironically made the postapocalyptic wasteland from the cautionary tale, Mad Max: Do Not Make the Postapocalyptic Wasteland

This is the same pre-emptive irony as naming your brand of New Age crap "Goop", only now with voluntarily plugging yourself into the machine that statistically simulates the ravings of a schizophrenic when it's not generating child pornography, while setting up direct deposit to your dealer of meth, jimsonweed and Substance D

Rusty's response nailed it imho:

You sling beads to a hook which activates a polecat according to GUPP. Jesse what the fuck are you talking about?

At first this all seems like gibberish, and it is. But I think Yegge is one of those people with an innate and preternatural sense of the power and purpose of naming things—someone who understands that names are marketing and marketing is not always about attracting the largest possible audience. In this case, the best outcome for Yegge is for Gas Town to appeal to a relatively small number of absolute sickos who vibe hard with his personal brand and who can usefully contribute to the project, and also for Gas Town to actively repel looky-loos and dilettantes like me (and probably you), who will only waste his time with a lot of stupid questions like “huh?” and “molecules?” and “did you say seances?” Oh yeah: there are seances. Don’t ask.

By this standard, Gas Town has apparently been very successful.

https://www.todayintabs.com/p/all-gas-town-no-brakes-town

You know, that's another thing about "AI". I was alive at at time where you had two distinct kinds of people: The dreamers and the doers (although a few outstanding individuals managed to be both for good and for ill). If you were a cunt with nothing but get-rich-quick scheme, you either had learn how to technically realize your latest plan for world domination / massive fraud / broad spectrum robbery / indiscriminate destruction, or... Entice somebody with the required skills to risk everything to do it ~~with~~ for you. That drastically limited a lot of bullshit.

Now? Well.

~~Meth~~ LLMs: Not Even Once

Yegge’s an extremely experienced professional engineer. So he put care into Gas Town, right?

I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to, which might give you pause.

This is a lack of care I've only really seen with vibe coding, and I still struggle to wrap my head around how someone can have an utter death of shits to give about something they're making (if you can even call vibe-coding "making"). Its particularly stark for me when I compare it to the many, many artists I know online, who care deeply about their craft, and whose artwork deeply reflects that.

Just...what the fuck?