Huffing Gas Town

Longtime readers know that I can’t resist a crazy blog post. Longtime readers also know I can’t resist trying something out that I read in a crazy blog post. So it should be no surprise that, after reading Steve Yegge’s viral “Welcome to Gas Town” I was curious about trying it out myself. First, though, I needed to understand what the hell he was even talking about.

Steve Yegge is a well-known tech blogger and former Google employee. And, if you missed his “Gas Town” post, published on Medium on the first of the year, it is being treated as either the ravings of a complete madman or Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, depending on how bullish you are on AI. I read it and basically didn’t understand a word of it. But I knew that it somehow involved Anthrophic’s new Claude Code tool, so I read Casey Newton’s post on Platformer about making a website with it. Still didn’t totally understand the “Gas Town” post yet. Then I read Rusty Foster’s big Today In Tabs issue about “Gas Town” and still didn’t quite get it.

It wasn’t until a developer friend of mine took me out to drinks last week and let me ask him every stupid question I had about “Gas Town” that it all finally clicked it into place for me. I think lol. Claude’s newest update has allowed people like Yegge to go so hog wild with vibe coding that they can make what is essentially an operating system custom-tailored to their brain. No matter how insane it may sound to other people. With all of this in my head, I took my first swing at vibe coding a web app using Claude this weekend. I got pretty far, but ended up failing spectacularly. Which I think has been pretty educational.

Even though I write about technology every day, I don’t have much experience with coding. Also, most programs I rely on day to day are basic ones. I use Google Docs instead of Notion or some complicated second brain app because I think most of them are just LARPing productivity. And, after years working in chaotic newsrooms, I tend to assume that almost every process that can be automated can also, probably, be cut entirely. But there is one part of my workflow that could be better.

I use Raindrop.io for collecting the links that eventually go into Garbage Day. I have an archive of about 10,000 links in Raindrop and it has an API. I figured maybe I could build some kind of web app that revealed connections between the links I’ve been storing over there. Sorta like a super-powered Pinterest board? Claude explained that Raindrop’s API can’t actually read the content behind those links, so that was a dead end. But I realized that Beehiiv, which hosts Garbage Day, has an API and I have full access to that. So I got to work on a similar idea for Garbage Day back issues.

On Sunday morning, I booted up the free version of Claude. The idea was a side-scrolling timeline, broken up into five-year increments, which would populate with cards that featured Garbage Day pull quotes, organized not according to when they were published, but the time period they were referencing. Claude said that sounded simple enough. The back catalog of Garbage Day would get sent through OpenAI’s API, analyzed by AI, assigned to a time period, and then loaded into a database.

I got pretty far along. I setup the database, got all the different pieces talking to each other, and quickly had a “working” demo running. I was in Gas Town, baby. For a brief moment, I felt like that sicko on YouTube who’s trying to make a million dollars by vibe coding with multiple Claude instances. But then I immediately hit two road blocks.

First, Claude throttles the hell out of you! Yegge was right in his blog post about Gas Town being “expensive as hell.” I got a paid version and that still wasn’t enough to really work through all the issues before being locked out of my account again. I have another friend that’s been experiencing Claude-based madness for several months now — which I would say is distinct from ChatGPT psychosis — and he has multiple Claude accounts he logs in and out of to get around this. But the other issue I ran into was a much more existential one. The OpenAI model creating the pullquotes from my back catalog was hallucinating big time, throwing random issues all over the timeline and making up whole quotes. Sort of defeats the point.

These two problems then dovetailed perfectly and basically broke the whole project. Last night, I was in Claude timeout and didn’t feel like shelling out an additional $100 (My limit for this project was $50 and I was already at $40). I remembered I had a ChatGPT account and figured, well, the problem is on OpenAI’s side. Maybe ChatGPT can talk to itself better than Claude can. And it can, at least in theory. It seemed to come up with a much better system for what I was trying to do. But it also rewrote everything Claude had made — and was even kind of defensive about the fact I had been using Claude — and ended up creating a lot of problems that I, frankly, do not understand. And now, neither does Claude. After hours of dual-AI debugging this morning I finally got it all to work again sorta and it still sucks. Womp womp.

Before I get to my high-level take here on AI and how it interacts with human creativity, I’ll give you my consumer-level opinion on the differences between these services. Claude is pretty amazing at coding if you don’t know anything about coding. I did not know what an SQL database was and Github’s interface used to give me hives. And through this process I have actually learned quite a bit about how to use them. That’s actually super cool! For whatever reason — perhaps by design — ChatGPT has never taught me anything about anything ever. But there is a deeper lesson here for me.

I can’t speak for everyone, but my mind tends to treat writing an article, making a video, writing a song, cooking a meal, drawing an image, and, apparently, designing software the same way. It’s not a matter of just “generating” something perfect from my head, but exploring the tension that exists between what I’m imagining and the limitations of my stupid meat body. That’s actually the exciting part. It also lets me figure out if something has turned out wrong or just resulted in a happy accident. Vibe coding, like every new trend coming out of Silicon Valley, turns this process — the entire act of creativity, itself — into a slot machine. One more pull on the AI and maybe it will figure it out for you. You won’t understand how any of it works, of course, or feel particularly proud of what you’ve done, but maybe you’ll have something. Just a few more dollars for some more tokens. C’mon, just pay a bit more.

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If The Chicago Bears Had Won Last Night We Might Have Shifted Back To The Good Timeline

Jake Lang Got His Ass Kicked In Minneapolis

Tensions are still extremely high in Minneapolis right now. Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino, who is allegedly four-inches shorter than Instagram user @cohen.489, is still running around the city doing his little Nazi cosplay.

Minnesota’s National Guard announced on X this weekend that they’re on standby and if they are activated they’ll be wearing neon vests so they aren’t confused with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Anyways, for no reason in particular, I recently read this Wikipedia article on how the two sides of the (first) American Civil War picked out their uniforms.

Meanwhile, Fox News’ national security correspondent, Jennifer Griffin, is reporting on X that the 11th Airborne Division, stationed in Alaska, have been given deploy orders.

The idea that two armed militaries, with competing orders, may soon be deployed to the Twin Cities is a reality that some Minnesotans are starting to take very seriously. Like the St. Paul resident that was seen on X protecting his neighborhood with an assault rifle this weekend. But there’s also a lot of paranoia on the ground at the moment, some of it deserved, obviously. It’s enough for writer Nicholas Decker, who wrote a post that caught the attention of the Secret Service, titled, “When Must We Kill Them?” back in April, to write a sequel titled, “When Will They Kill Us?”

Protesters on Sunday stormed a church service, after accusations spread that the pastor was accused of not just collaborating with ICE, but actually being an agent. And independent photographer Clint Combs claims on X that a man who was trying to rile up the crowd at a demonstration on Sunday was picked up by a van driven by Homeland Security after he was chased down the street.

January 6th insurrectionist Jake Lang tried to burn a Quran on the steps of Minneapolis City Hall on Saturday and that also didn’t go great. He, to put it simply, got his ass beat. Protesters also smashed the windows of a car driven by far-right influencer Nick Sortor. The FBI’s Rapid Response account on X shared Sortor’s post on Sunday, writing, “We’re on it.” In case you still don’t think these guys have, at the very least, a basic working relationship with the federal government.

Not to be outdone by Rep. Richie Torres’ idiotic “QR codes for ICE agents” bill, Sen. Cory Booker has come up with another useless bit of Democratic posturing that can feel like they’re doing something. He wants, uh, “ICE to adopt rigorous training hiring standards, and for their agents to wear body cameras.” Thanks, Cory. Very cool.

The Internet’s Worst Guys Had A Sad Little Meetup In Miami This Weekend

Andrew Tate, his brother Tristan, Nick Fuentes, that Gen Z looksmaxxer Clavicular, and a bunch of lower-tier men’s rights losers all hung out this weekend. Their big victory for the culture war, apparently, was getting the DJ to play Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler” in the club.

According to KickChamp, some kind of viral news X account run by a betting company, “Clavicular was left STUNNED after Tristan Tate MOGGED him to DEATH 😳” Neat.

Some sad internet men, however, are mad at Clavicular because he spent too much time talking to women at the meetup instead of the Tate brothers. According to X user @antunes1, he needed to figure out a better way to lock in and control his lust.

Was RFK’s Whole Milk Campaign Supposed To Be A Raw Milk Campaign?

The Department of Agriculture released a video of haunted AI-generated children drinking whole milk over the weekend. It’s part of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s big milk drinking campaign. As X user @@53gaDr3amca5t wrote, “Were I in government, aware a large chunk of the public believes much of this government participated in the most infamous [child sex abuse] ring in history or are complicit in hiding it, I'd not post an AI-generated video of children who look abused drinking milk in a dull grey basement.”

There are also more than a few people who are a bit confused as to why the government wants us to be free to finally drink whole milk. We could already do that. I can buy whole milk at the grocery store no problem. I don’t because it would make me fart so hard I burned a whole through my couch. But I could if I wanted to.

Well, I’m inclined to agree with @onionweigher, my favorite onion-weighing X account, who wrote, “They 100% were going to do a massive raw milk media campaign but got talked out out of it by lawyers threatening slamdunk lawsuits, and they switched it to whole milk at the last minute as a compromise.”

Reddit’s Rice Bucket Guy

Over the weekend, a user named u/KangarooOne2039 posted on r/kitchencels, the cooking subreddit for incels, that he was eating a bunch boiled eggs and watching VTubers. He complained that he was suffering from brain fog and some of the users suggested easing up on the protein. Apparently it’s a common side effect.

But I spotted a fascinating interaction further down in the comments. One user noticed that he has a giant bucket of rice in the photo. After some back and forth, the commenter wrote, “Ahhh you're the rice dude!” To which u/KangarooOne2039 replied, “Yeah.” Which got me curious.

A few days before, u/KangarooOne2039 shared on r/kitchencels that he “had a manic episode and bought 11kg of rice.” So now he just has a big bucket of rice in his house. Alright! That answers that.

A Good Tumblr Post About Being An Adult

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s Dr. House In 2025.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***