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ludicity | 1 month ago

I thought it was harmless(ish) fun, but David Gerard put out a post stating that Yegge used Gas Town to push out a crypto project that rug pulled his supporters, while he personally walked away with something between $50K to $100K from memory.

I suppose that has little to do with the technical merits of the work, but it's such a bad look, and it makes everyone boosting this stuff seem exactly as dysregulated/unwise as they've appeared to many engineers for a while.

I met Sean Goedecke for lunch a few weeks ago, who uses LLMs a bunch, and is clearly a serious adult, but half the folks being shoved in front of everyone are behaving totally manic and people are cheering them on. Absolutely blows my mind to watch.

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/22/steve-yegges-gas-town-vib...

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skybrian|1 month ago

That was very weird. In the post where he was arguably "shilling," he seems to have signposted pretty well that it was dumb, but he will take the money they offered:

> $GAS is not equity and does not give you any ownership interest in Gas Town or my work. This post is for informational purposes only and is not a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any token. Crypto markets are volatile and speculative — do not risk money you can’t afford to lose.

...

> Note: The next few sections are about online gambling in all its forms, where “investing” is the buy-and-hold long-form “acceptable” form of gambling because it’s tied to world GDP growth. Cryptocurrencies are subject to wild swings and spikes, and the currency tied to Gas Town is on a wild swing up. But it’s still gambling, and this stuff is only for people who are into that… which is not me, and should probably not be you either.

In the next post he said he wasn't going to shill it any more, and then the price collapsed and people sent him death threats on Twitter. It probably would have collapsed anyway. Perhaps there was supposedly some implicit bargain that he shouldn't take the money if he wasn't going to shill? Well, there's certainly no rule saying you have to do that.

I think he's not very much to blame for taking the money from degenerate gamblers, and the cryptocurrency idiots are mostly to blame for their own mistakes.

gavin-1|1 month ago

> I think he's not very much to blame for taking the money from degenerate gamblers, and the cryptocurrency idiots are mostly to blame for their own mistakes.

I empathize with the disdain for crypto idiots, but I still think the people running or promoting these scams deserve most of the blame. "There's a market for my poison" is every dopamine dealer's excuse.

cannonpr|1 month ago

“Degenerate gamblers” is the kind of stigma that stops people and their families getting help for addiction. Even if you believe it’s a moral failing, the families deserve better.

dpatterbee|1 month ago

I'm fairly certain those disclaimers were added after he got some pushback from the original post.

andrepd|1 month ago

> I think he's not very much to blame for taking the money from degenerate gamblers, and the cryptocurrency idiots are mostly to blame for their own mistakes.

So drug dealers are not to blame for taking the money from degenerate addicts! Let's free everyone and disband the DEA, we'll save billions of dollars.

Oh wait nvm this line of thinking only applies to sv people

matkoniecz|1 month ago

He is still an evil scammer scamming people.

In the same way signposting and credibly warning "I murder people" does not make ok to murder people.

cap11235|1 month ago

Maybe I'd care about his opinion if he didn't take the money. I consider this worse than OSS taking VC money. At least those don't have a scam auto-builtin to the structure beyond normal capitalistic parasitism.

Also, 275k lines for a markdown todo app. Anyone defending this is an idiot. I'll just say that. Go ahead, defend it. Go do a code review on `beads`. Don't say it's alright, but gastown is madness. He fucking sucks.