[dmurray]

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

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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.

[slopinthebag]

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 ;)"

[LoganDark]

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.

[JumpCrisscross]

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

[ohyoutravel]

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

[LoganDark]

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

[monooso]

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...

[KingMob]

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.

[potsandpans]

> 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...

[dheera]

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.

[drakythe]

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)

[fg137]

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)

[dheera]

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.

[fg137]

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.

[dheera]

Framework laptop running Ubuntu

[RobotToaster]

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.

[slopinthebag]

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.

[_verandaguy]

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

[alwa]

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.”

[_verandaguy]

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

[speedster217]

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