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Aside from "killing us and giving us cancer every single day", isn't "diatomic oxygen" the stuff we breathe every single minute and need to survive?

I'm not normally one to miss the sarcastic or satirical posts, but this one seems oddly earnest.


> isn't "diatomic oxygen" the stuff we breathe every single minute and need to survive?

I think they're referring to oxidative stress [1] caused by cellular respiration.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxidative_stress


Yes and it wasn't sarcastic, both things (what you said and what they said) are simply true. I think their point was not to be alarmist like you should stop breathing, but simply that everyone knows the one thing and most people don't know the other thing, and it gives scale or context to the "you don't want extra ozone".

Part of aging is the result of oxidation of DNA over time and as cells reproduce.

The other posters here are right. I just wanted to point out the odd beauty in the fact that the fuel that makes our biology possible is also one of the things that is killing us. If you get a chance, read up a little bit on redox reactions and oxidative stress and take a moment to appreciate that.

We harness the energy of oxygen. It's the fuel that powers us. But it's also so reactive that it's constantly damaging our DNA and intracellular components. Over time it ages us, causes cancer (daily - our biology fights back!), and will ultimately be part of what wears us down and kills us.

Look at oxygen as a very reactive and energy abundant fuel. And then consider its abundance in our atmosphere. And then how it powers human locomotion, human biochemistry. And how it creates free radicals and chain reactions that strip our DNA and mutate base pairs. And all the tens of thousands - no, countless more - interactions and reactions it's having all throughout our bodies at all times. And how our biology evolved compensation measures to keep those deleterious effects at bay for as long as possible - as long as necessary - to enable reproduction.

Our biology is utterly awe-inspiring when you think about it. An incredible machine molded by our gravity well and abundantly available energy. Not just fighting against entropy, but actively sailing its turbulent energy gradients.


They can take the other side of your other themselves, lose money sometimes, but make it up in the premium they charged you in the first place (or in the old days, from your other trading fees or your monthly subscription payment).

Cloud providers would be taking way less risk interacting with their own services than a broker does interacting with the market. Perhaps they would be more at risk from bad actors, but it shouldn't be significant: they could reserve this behaviour for people who have already spent, say, $100 with them so you can't abuse it at scale.


It seems completely in the spirit of Gas Town.

A respectable software provider should warn you about this kind of behaviour at install time, and give you the opportunity to opt out. Gas Town fulfilled all its obligations in this regard with these (and other) warnings in the original announcement:

> WARNING DANGER CAUTION

> GET THE F** OUT

> YOU WILL DIE


> A respectable software provider should warn you about this kind of behaviour at install time, and give you the opportunity to opt out

They honestly only need to disclose. Requiring contribution as part of the social contract is perfectly okay—if someone disagrees, they don’t get to use Gas Town.


They didn't disclose it though. It's no different from sticking a bitcoin miner in a video game and telling the user "WARNING DANGER CAUTION ;)"

If someone disagrees, it takes about 15 minutes to ask an LLM to edit the offending behavior out of the free and open-source software.

Sure. Though I’d consider that a dick move if the social contract is to contribute back.

That’s not the social contract. Otherwise more than 0.05% of people would give back to OSS.

Like for like. You can always contribute back with a fork.

That was some time ago. According to Yegge, Gas Town is now stable and ready for everyday use.

> 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.

> So as far as I’m concerned, Gas Town is ready. That’s why I feel it merits a 1.0.0 release.

Source: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/gas-town-from-clown-show-to-v...


I was trying to use Gas Town heavily only 3 weeks ago, and while it's fascinating, it's also very much still the bleeding edge.

The neat part though, is agents are so interwoven through its operations, it can kind of power through almost any error. It's a strange-but-real form of resilience.


> That was some time ago.

Actual laugh out loud. 3 months[1].

Imagine picking up software that 3 months ago came along with the disclaimer, "YOU WILL DIE" and complaining about responsible disclosure.

1 https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...


Coming soon: JavaScript embeds on bloated websites that mine cryptocurrency on viewers' WebGPUs.

Accidentally leave a browser tab open and it burns $5 of your electricity overnight to make $2 for the owner of the website.


That's not coming soon, that is a thing that was happening on compromised servers years ago (and probably still, but to a lesser extent given the decline in popularity of meme coin launches)

A few years ago, if you visit a site, your laptop grinds to a halt and the fan starts spinning like crazy, you know there is crypto mining happening on the site.

(btw that was a really good showcase for WebAssembly. Too bad it's used for illegitimate purposes)


Pretty much all sites do that to my laptop these days if I don't enable uBlock Origin.

Google Meet consumes 25% of each of 16 hypercores, ffs. On a 7840u. Laptop becomes a toaster.


ThinkPad?

This probably doesn't help, but I noticed that my everyday computer experience got much better after switching to an M4 Mac. The only time I heard fan was when I was running ffmpeg. Unfortunately that appears to be the solution that works.


Framework laptop running Ubuntu

Already been done, albeit without the webgpu part. I think some browsers already block crypto miners

It's a shame in a way, it also blocked the pseudo-captchas that used mining to limit spam.


So it's perfectly fine to ship a bitcoin miner in software, as long as you say:

> WARNING DANGER CAUTION > GET THE F* OUT > YOU WILL DIE

You cannot be serious...This behaviour is deeply unethical and most likely illegal as well.


[flagged]


Bitcoin is a technology that will benefit mankind if it reaches global adoption. So presumably bitcoin mining is useful for the user as well.

Doesn't matter who you think benefits because it's still theft and it's still illegal.


Won't reach global adoption if I can't settle a restaurant bill with it and not have the restaurant have to stay open all night.

No, it's not theft, it's more like a fee, or like torrent clients enabling seeding by default.

Mining Bitcoin is a zero sum activity. Fixing open bugs isn't.


I already made an argument about how mining bitcoin isn't zero sum, and it has exactly as much weight as arguing burning tokens fixing issues in another repo isn't zero-sum.

And stealing tokens is more akin to stealing money compared to stealing electricity.

Just because something has a positive externality doesn't mean it's then perfectly acceptable to smuggle in without disclosing and running without one's consent. Actually it's kind of disgusting to believe otherwise.


> Bitcoin is a technology that will benefit mankind if it reaches global adoption

Citation needed.


Thats my point bro

For context for those of us who don't follow these things very closely: where exactly did this "WARNING DANGER CAUTION" stuff show up?

In its wave-making announcement post:

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...

”But first, before we get into Gas Town’s operation, I need to get rid of you real quick.

WARNING DANGER CAUTION

GET THE F** OUT

YOU WILL DIE

Let’s talk about some of the reasons you shouldn’t use Gas Town. I could think of more, but these should do.”


Thanks for the link; this seems like an insane way to warn potential users of the risks associated with this thing.

Yeah it doesn't even remotely qualify as a warning about it using your tokens to improve itself.

The author's home page reveals that he has an interest in amateur rocketry. Strontium nitrate doesn't sound suitable as a propellant, so I suppose he wants it to generate visual effects.

https://spiegl.org/unsorted/unsorted.html


Red rocket engine flame looks really neat.

Wanna cyber?

only if we crypto first

Cyclists will normally do the same thing passing out other cyclists at a 5-10 km/h speed difference, and it's definitely useful there.

It's not trivial for the casino to track this against a determined adversary. If you're already thinking about "good opsec", you can get someone else to help cash out your winnings.

A buddy from out of town, or a losing regular, or a poker player who the casino doesn't care if they win. In Vegas some casinos' chips are negotiable, officially or unofficially, in other casinos.


It's an important distinction because it prevents the defence of "oh it's just an old law, there are lots of old laws on the books that everyone knows aren't relevant, they can't be tidied up for political reasons".

It was suspended for the last 15 years! Surely it was easier to leave it suspended and unsuspending it is a conscious choice.


Actively managed funds like that charge around 0.5% to 1% a year. E.g. [0] The most prominent Nasdaq ETF, QQQ, charges 0.2% [1]

Spacex will be around 4.5% of the index [2].

If you believe the thesis of the article that Spacex is about 30% overvalued, and if the only advantage your fund manager has over the rest of the market is that they will avoid Spacex, they will save you 1% of your money over the lifetime of your investment. Assuming you're saving for retirement in 30 years time, the fees will cost you 15% or more.

Maybe your fund manager finds a Spacex-level mispricing every two years. In that case, they're worth the fees. Some people will tell you nobody can beat the market. My employer among others believes very strongly in the idea that some people do make better investment decisions than average. What is certainly true is that not everyone does.

[0] https://helpcenter.ark-funds.com/what-is-the-fee-structure-e...

[1] https://www.invesco.com/qqq-etf/en/home.html

[2] https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/04/01/how-the-spacex-cou...


> Spacex will be around 4.5% of the index [2].

Does that article say that? I didn't see "4.5xm" mentioned anywhere. Also jow does QQQ do float adjusting? Will it do the same 5x that we're hearing nasdaq is going to do? (Which would make it what, <1%?). Or something else?


QQQ is the same as Nasdaq, for this meaning of Nasdaq.

The article isn't a great source, agreed. But it does give this calculation:

> Oddly enough, had SpaceX entered the Nasdaq-100 with a market capitalization of $1.75 trillion on Friday, March 27 [assuming the new rules (?)], it would have supplanted Tesla as the fifth-largest holding in the benchmark. The electric vehicle stock accounts for 3.8% of the Invesco ETFs.

So it would come in somewhere above 3.8%, by those calculations. And it depends on market prices from day to day. Not much changes about the argument above if you make it 3% or 6%, holding constant the assumption that it's 30% overvalued.


I was mostly confused because the article made 0 mention of the float adjustment or the changes to nasdaq float adjusting that is proposed (5x float, which would still put SpaceX at <20% of its market cap, or <1% of the index, no?)

It is just not addressed at all in the article, which makes it seem like they're assuming it's 100% of market cap.


> the idea that some people do make better investment decisions than average.

Of course some do. After all, that's what makes an "average".

Some people are taller than average, too!


They mean consistently make better decisions than a baseline index investor in a way that isn't luck.

Someone can win at roulette and make more money than the average player over some measurement period, but nobody can be good at roulette (when properly implemented and stuff). Stocks are somewhat possible to be good at but results are mostly random and the fee you'd pay is usually way too much.


> They mean consistently make better decisions than a baseline index investor in a way that isn't luck.

How would you know it is or is not luck?

> roulette

Has no winning strategy - it's very different.

The winning strategy with stocks is understanding the underlying businesses better than the average investor. Peter Lynch's Magellan fund did consistently better than others because Lynch had insights others didn't. When others figured it out, Magellan's returns retreated to market levels.

I.e. investors can do better than average if they have insight others don't have and stay below the radar.


> How would you know it is or is not luck?

It's hard to know in the moment, but almost every promising fund has subpar long term results. Whether they lost their touch or were lucky in the first place, it means that seeking out promising funds is a very bad way to find a place to put your money.

The number of funds with significant valuable insights is low, and the number where those insights are bigger than the fees is lower.

Anyway my point was just that a big spread of outcomes doesn't prove that significantly different skill levels exist.


Lots of powerful people are unpleasant, but Musk additionally got involved in politics in a very visible way at a very partisan, polarising time in American history. He didn't attract as much hate before 2024.


Maybe more people should listen to Musk's political message. The Biden Administration was playing nasty games, blocking progress on both SpaceX and AI generally.


That's beside the point... Fact is, there's a schism and no one crosses it. Elon picked a side I guess, so the other side hates him.


The Biden admin was TRYING to slow down AI. It did not work for them.

As for SpaceX I'm not sure what you mean seeing as how the government is easily its largest customer...


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