Looking through Wikipedia at least, it's not exactly clear to me. They have separate pages for 'binary recompiler' and 'binary translation' that link to each other, and the latter is more about going between architectures (which is the main objective here).
Marketplaces are famously difficult to start - even Uber just started with black car service in a handful of cities and expanded from that. Find a trusted network of mules as your supply-side and expect to lose some money as you bootstrap.
You should already know what your largest city-to-city routes might be at this point, so why not focus on economy of scale there? If you need to rent a cube van to make it happen, do that.
it's a great reminder that Uber wasn't a 2-sided marketplace to begin with, just an on-demand black car service, and Travis drove early on. The marketplace model came later, copying Lyft, more as a low-cost expansion strategy than a business model.
I run a Rust webserver on a literal Pi3 in my basement and I think I managed to bench it up >1000 rps for standard loads. And that includes a bunch of tanvity querying as well.
I suspect I could do 3000+ rps with some tuning and a more modern CPU or hetzner VPS, but there's some fun cachet from running on an old Pi while there's still headroom.
I think the ideal way for these LLMs to work will be using AST-level changes instead of "let me edit this file".
grit.io was working on this years ago, not sure if they are still alive/around, but I liked their approach (just had a very buggy transformer/language).
This was a super interesting video to watch. I honestly thought SFP required more setup, but this explains why AliExpress is so ripe with USB3 and HDMI over SFP converters that are dirt cheap.
It's been amazing having 6 years of fiber optic HDMI & DP monitor connections, that work so so so well. I bought some no name one on Amazon in ~2019 and was flabbergasted it was real & worked.
Such a huge upgrade from the heavy thick 35 ft HDMI<->dvi cable I've used for so long.
Literally the only downside is figuring out how to roll it up, which I still haven't figured out how to do well with the 150ft cable I have.
It was astoundingly cheap too. I think the first one I got was under $60?! No one really knew the segment existed, they just needed to get some sales, I assume. I heard usb3 has been available but they've been bulky & expensive. Where-as the whole fiber optic cable seamlessly integrates the transceiver on mine. I like Cable Matters, they make some fine ones.
There is no way that this state of things survives long-term. Rationally, it's really no different than any other tool involved in production of your work product.
They’d have to pass a Senate bill modifying copyright and granting corporate-nonperson status with legal rights to hosted, certified by the bar, registered and renewed AIs only. Otherwise the work that’s markov’d as ‘legal advice’ has no origination of record from a legally-recognized entity and therefore can’t be affirmed to be legal advice (legal advice is not public domain, or else protections would be drastically weakened; and, provided by A to B test fails: no such entity A), and anyone could claim the entirety of their email as protected from discovery by ‘cc’ing AI’ for legal advice on every email for a vacation responder reply emitted by a self-hosted trepanned agent (a corrupted lawyer can still give protected legal advice).
Or, they’d have to assert that content generated by AI on behalf of a user is protected — there’s no way to tell whether it’s legal advice so it all must be treated as such (can’t trust the AI to judge this, given how hallucinatory they are in legal filings!) — at which point AI companies would be refused the right to harvest your AI conversations for further training and profit-extraction (which would subject them to prosecution for, of all things, illegal wiretap under
§2511(1)(e)(i) if not others). Google would never allow that to happen, seeing as how that’s literally their entire business.
I fully expect someone to set up the equivalent of HIPAA for legal advice AIs and for that to be found acceptable for instances hosted in protected enclaves, but the big four’s main products aren’t likely to qualify for that until they solve hallucinations and earn back judges’ trust.
(I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice. Ironically, I wouldn’t have to say this if it was AI writing. Heh.)
Serious question - there's a lot of fluff talking about Gas Town, but has Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting?
At this point it should be clear that Gas Town has done something we can evaluate the value of.
>At this point it should be clear that Gas Town has done something we can evaluate the value of.
I see this sentiment often, repeated a couple times in here, but I don't understand why on earth that would be the case. Gas Town was released a little over three months ago. It's an ongoing open-source experiment at the bleeding edge of vendor-agnostic multi-agent orchestration.
I was using gastown for fire-and-forget prototyping of larger projects. It was flaky and scorches tokens but it was able to get larger prototypes done than I could with a single instance of my daily river (claude) alone.
> Having spent six weeks or so using Gas Town across multiple simultaneous projects, I believe I can describe the shift concretely. The bottleneck migrates from coding speed to the rate at which you can generate ideas, write specifications, and validate outputs. You are no longer limited by how fast you can build. You are limited by how fast you can think.
Interesting:
> Kubernetes asks “Is it running?” Gas Town asks “Is it done?” Kubernetes optimizes for uptime. Gas Town optimizes for completion.
I’m not sure I find the testimony of a Bain & Company AI consultant (https://www.bain.com/our-team/eric-koziol/) to be compelling for anything outside of generating fees.
This sounds like every LLM workflow, which is 'you tell the LLM what you want'.
The real distinction is of scale - whether you want a REST endpoint or a fully functional word processor.
But real, actual, complex software is at least half spec (either explicit, or implicitly captured by its code), the question is, can LLMs specify software to the same degree with Gas Town, that you get something functioning?
You provided a quote from someone who seems to be an AI-boosting influencer who claimed to use it, but where's the output in the form of code we can look at, or in the form of an app someone can use today?
I'm not an AI-denier. I use LLMs and agentic coding. They increase my productivity.
...but there is still a very real problem with people claiming that some new way of using AI is earth shattering, and changes everything based on vague anecdotes that don't involve a tangible released output that they can point to.
Yeah if this can truly just autonomously make great software, then where is all the new SaaS that is able to undercut incumbents by charging 10-20% of what they are charging?
you can always fire it up yourself and see what its all about. in my experience it generates a lot of code very quickly, that code is probably only ever supposed to be LLM maintained, not by people.
I don't think the op meant Gas Town itself (if they did, my bad), but what has Yegge done with Gas Town? By now it should have released some amazing thing if Gas Town increases productivity so much.
What has Yegge done with Gas Town? Well for one, he has posted a bunch of blog content about it which has generated chatter like this and increased his geek mindshare.
Just because he's operating in the realm of smart nerds doesn't mean he is immune to the value-inverting effects of social media.
(btw I've been wondering the same thing as you and am not sure if there's another answer besides that he and people following his projects keep building projects on their projects: Beads, to Gas Town, to Wasteland, etc.)
This is my experience as well. At work, our team is 50/50 on 'mastery' of current AI tools. All of us using parallel agentic workflows have our own flavor of tooling. I'm not convinced there's an agreement yet on what the 'ideal' is here, so experimentation is where it's at. Over-indexing on a massively complex system like Gastown for professional work seems unwise. Lots of us have used it for fun at home though.
If the post does not have any use-cases proving value then perhaps this is something yet to be validated, i.e. the burden on the users, not the creators.
In an era where creating such libraries is much cheaper than validating that they're useful or work, yeah you really should validate it before you expect someone to use it. Nobody is going around trying out every slop project they see, they'd be wasting hours and hours for no gain at all.
This all being said, I do find the idea interesting, but heeded it's advice when it said it's hideously expensive and risky to use. So yes, I do want someone braver, richer, and stupider than me to take the first leap
You’re very good at this! I have trouble slopping out more than a day or two!
Treat this like art. There are some neat ideas, maybe not executed particularly well. Somewhere around 7/10 IMDB score. The working implementation makes the blog post more impactful more than the other way around.
If it was art, I would find it really quite neat. However it doesn't seem intended as such:
> Gas Town “just works.” It does its job, it has tons of integration points, and it has been stable for many weeks. People are using it to build real stuff.
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