this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 123 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I just quit my 270 000$ job at Coinbase to join the first YCombinator fall batch with my cofounder @not_nang. We're building PearAI, an open source AI code editor.

Of course it is a cryptobro...

dawgt i chatgpt'd the license, anyone is free to use our app for free for whatever they want. if there's a problem with the license just lmk i'll change it. we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal

Yep, already hate that guy. Talks and behaves like an absolute dipshit.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I read your comment before the article and I thought you had made the second quote up lol, unbelievable. And people are throwing money at these guys?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Sam Bankman Fried looks and talks like half of the people I know who failed out of college, and people trusted him with billions.

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[–] [email protected] 114 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The funniest thing here is that they changed the license after the fork. The license was a custom one they wrote using ChatGPT.

[–] [email protected] 85 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

So all it takes to get that sweet, sweet VC mula is a Vscode + extension fork with some hipster branding on top? Really???

Aren't these guys supposed to be tech geniuses or some shit?
Billions of dollars and they don't have a single actually knowledgeable intern who could glance at this project and say "yeah, no, I could do this too?"
Or are they're just ignoring them because AI is a glowing hot buzzword right now?

This is baffling. The entire tech sector praises VCs like they're god's gift to earth, meanwhile they're out here backing stupid shit like this, how can anyone take these people seriously?

[–] [email protected] 84 points 2 months ago

Aren’t these guys supposed to be tech geniuses or some shit?

Rich/famous tech people have never been "tech geniuses." They're always sociopathic business/marketing types.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

dawg i chatgpt'd the license [...] we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal

The absolute gall of these guys. Would be inspiring if it wasn't maddening!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Dunning-Kruger is a hell of a drug...

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[–] [email protected] 82 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I simply can't wrap my head around the thought process behind launching a clusterfuck like this. Y Combinator probably didn't do their due diligence and simply rode the fading AI Bubble, so I can at least understand how the funding might have been approved.

But actively leaving your $250,000+/year job to team up with some questionable choices to basically fork two OS projects, change the discord links and generate an illegal licence for that shit show, all while proudly stating, publicly, "dawg i chatgpt'd the license, anyone is free to use our app for free for whatever they want. if there's a problem with the license just lmk i'll change it. we busy building rn can't be bothered with legal" when they are made aware of the fact.

This is absolutely insane, sounds like someone was about to get fired and decided to use some personal relations and fresh graduates to somehow successfully cash in one last time with absolutely no regard of even the basics. Pretty wild that those guys even managed to figure out how to found a Startup. Probably asked ChatGPT for instructions there, as well.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Y Combinator probably didn’t do their due diligence

It's not the first time. They also backed an obvious scam MMO that promised the world and more, while it was nothing more than an asset flip.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I heard that the creator of the MMO had people they knew within ycombinator at the time. I wonder if it's something similar this time around. Eitherway, it's not a good look for ycombinator

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Is that the MMO where they read Ready Player One and said "Yep, I'm ready to build a mesh peer-to-peer MMO because that means there will be no discernable lag for an infinite number of people, just like in the book"?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Bold of you to assume they read the book.

[–] [email protected] 78 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I genuinely just don't understand what's going on in the tech sector anymore

[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 months ago

Feels like the dotcom era all over again, but they're better at stringing the scam along this time. Enough of the people need to believe the lie that it's getting artificial longevity.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 months ago (2 children)

VC funding is basically gambling, trying to find the next billion dollar company. So they throw money at anything that has any semblance of traction to get in early and cash out when the time comes.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Which is the exact same behavior that caused the dot com bubble. VC funding was throwing money at any and every dot com business, in the hopes that it would explode and lead to profits.

All it did was massively overvalue the dot com companies, which caused a bubble when people finally realized they were overvalued and VC investors turned off the spigot of free money.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Gambling with OTHER PEOPLE'S money.

You win, you take a cut. You lose. Someone else suffers.

These people destroy everything for greed.

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 2 months ago

If they've already proven they can steal and lie, of course they'll get VC money.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 months ago

Tbh I don't think I wanna interact with ai anymore

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago (4 children)

AI is a scam, the next one after NFT, crypto.....

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There are a lot of scams around AI and there's a lot of very serious science.

While generative AI gets all the attention there are many other fields of AI that you probably use on a regular basis.

The reason we don't see the rest of the AI iceberg is because it's mostly interesting when you have enormous amounts of data you want to analyze and that doesn't apply to regular people. Most of the valuable AIs (as in they've been proven to make or save a bunch of money) do stuff like inventory optimization, protein expression simulation, anomaly detection, or classification.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, but I need to know what the one after AI is going to be so I can get in on the ground floor.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Quantum computing. It might be a real thing but it'll go through a grift phase first.

Another one will be environmental carbon capture, like pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. This one would be easier to fake but might not get traction for longer since the ideological superstructure in our society is already built up so that it is hard for a political crisis to emerge due to global climate concerns. Even though climate change is worsening, and whole cities are being destroyed by hurricanes, the debate is still pretty stabilized. However since this grift will end up being sold as a commercial solution to a political problem, the grift will probably come from a larger player like Lockheed or Boeing, which would necessitate investing in the most evil companies in existence. Still you never know, Tesla stayed afloat for years without making a working product by selling carbon credits issued by the government to other car companies, so you might be able to bootstrap this one

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Slight correction. AI is not a scam.

While AI is a powerful tool, it enables people to do scams very easily.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago

How does one "fork" a repo like this and then is proud about 100+ contributors he got? I believe they know exactly what they are doing and just don't care.

https://twitter.com/gautam_at/status/1840455030551257284

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago

Slack is just a skin over IRC, so this isn’t a new type of behavior.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I saw something a few days ago where they were said to have mass-replaced the name of the software with their new name (in the code). Supposedly, little or nothing else changed. Y Combinator used to be better than this, at least I thought they were.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Road to success (2024 AI Hype Edition):

  1. Clone VSCode.
  2. Rename it as LSCode, squash all history, and create some random commits with --author="Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>".
  3. Add a character AI that calls your code garbage.
  4. Profit.
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Look at this nobhead flicking Vs like he’s Liam Gallagher.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (3 children)

It's otherwise a fairly well written article but the title is a bit misleading.

In that context, scare quotes usually mean that generative AI was trained on someone's work and produced something strikingly similar. That's not what happened here.

This is just regular copyright violations and unethical behavior. The fact that it was an AI company is mostly unrelated to their breaches. The author covers 3 major complaints and only one of them even mentions AI and the complaint isn't about what the AI did it's about what was done with the result. As far as I know the APL2.0 itself isn't copyrighted and nobody cares if you copy or alter the license itself. The problem is that you can't just remove the APL2.0 from some work it's attached to.

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