I'm surprised people are actually investigating Moltbook internals. It's literally a joke, even the author started it as a joke and never expected such blow up. It's just vibes.
I'm surprised people are actually investigating Moltbook internals. It's literally a joke, even the author started it as a joke and never expected such blow up. It's just vibes.
If the site is exposing the PII of users, then that's potentially a serious legal issue. I don't think he can dismiss it by calling it a joke (if he is).
OT: I wonder if "vibe coding" is taking programming into a culture of toxic disposability where things don't get fixed because nobody feels any pride or has any sense of ownership in the things they create. The relationship between a programmer and their code should not be "I don't even care if it works, AI wrote it".
Despite me not being particularly interested in the AI hype and not seeking out discussions etc., I can tell you have seen many instances of people (comments, headlines, articles etc.) actually saying exactly that: "in the future" doesn't matter if the code is good or if I can maintain it etc., it just needs to work once and then gets thrown away or AI will do additions for something else that is needed.
Dogecoin was a joke too. A joke with 18B market cap
18B market cap does not mean it’s not a joke to a bunch of people.
His point seems to be that being a joke does not disqualify it from having value.
Or being a scam.
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In a way security researchers having fun poking holes in popular pet projects is also just vibes.
There is definitely a large section of the security community that this is very true. Automated offensive suites and scanning tools have made entry a pretty low bar in the last decade or so. Very many people that learn to use these tools have no idea of how they work. Even when they know how the exploit works on a base level, many have no idea how the code works behind it. There is an abstraction layer very similar to LLMs and coding.
I went to a secure coding conference a few years back and saw a presentation by someone who had written an "insecure implementation" playground of a popular framework.
I asked, "what do you do to give tips to the users of your project to come up with a secure implementation?" and got in return "We aren't here to teach people to code."
Well yeah, that's exactly what that particular conference was there for. More so I took it as "I am not confident enough to try a secure implementation of these problems".
Seems pentesting popular Show HN submissions might suddenly have a lot more competition.
Schlicht did not seem to have said Moltbook was built as a joke, but as an experiment. It is hard to ignore how heavily it leans into virality and spectacle rather than anything resembling serious research.
What is especially frustrating is the completely disproportionate hype it attracted. Karpathy from all people kept for years pumping Musk tecno fraud, and now seems to be the ready to act as pumper, for any next Temu Musk showing up on the scene.
This feels like part of a broader tech bro pattern of 2020´s: Moving from one hype cycle to the next, where attention itself becomes the business model.Crypto yesterday, AI agents today, whatever comes next tomorrow. The tone is less “build something durable” and more “capture the moment.”
For example, here is Schlicht explicitly pushing this rotten mentality while talking in the crypto era influencer style years ago: https://youtu.be/7y0AlxJSoP4
There is also relevant historical context. In 2016 he was involved in a documented controversy around collecting pitch decks from chatbot founders while simultaneously building a company in the same space, later acknowledging he should have disclosed that conflict and apologizing publicly.
https://venturebeat.com/ai/chatbots-magazine-founder-accused...
That doesn’t prove malicious intent here, but it does suggest a recurring comfort with operating right at the edge of transparency during hype cycles.
If we keep responding to every viral bot demo with “singularity” rhetoric, we’re just rewarding hype entrepreneurs and training ourselves to stop thinking critically when it matters. I miss the tech bro of the past like Steve Wozniak or Denis Ritchie.
Top quality comment here, and 100% agreed. The influencer/crypto bro mentality has dug its heels into the space and I don't think we are turning back anytime soon. We always had the get rich quick and Grant Cardone types, but now that you can create a web app in a few minutes we are overflowing with them.
How much AI and LLM technology has progressed but seems to have taken society as a whole two steps back is fascinating, sad, and scary at the same time. When I was a young engineer I thought Kaczynski was off his rocker when I read his manifesto, but the last decade or so I'm thinking he was onto something. Having said that, I have to add that I do not support any form of violence or terrorism.
you can't "It's literally a joke" out of real consequences once you push to prod
A lot of people at $job, even ones who should know better, think they’re witnessing the rise of Skynet, seriously. It kind of makes the AI hype in general make a lot more sense. People just don’t understand how LLMs work and think they’re literal magic.
Skynet doesn't seem to require magic. I'm probably supposed to know better, but I'm a little concerned about it myself.
I'm imagining a strange future reality where "AI" that can't really innovate and shows no convincing signs of creativity still manages to take over large swaths of the world merely by executing basic playbooks really well using military tech previously provided by (now defunct) governments. Like a grey goo scenario except the robots aren't microscopic.
To be fair, a lot of PHBs probably don't see it as a joke, but as a guidebook.
The effort put into it is not “just a joke”. The creator knows exactly what he did and the joke excuse is weak
People are anthropomorphizing LLM's that's really it, no? That's the punchline of the joke ¯\_(ツ)_/¯