116 points
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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.

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49 points
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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?

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15 points

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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True to his name, his bank got fried.

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110 points

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

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88 points
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Scriptkiddies doing the bare-minimum to profit over other’s hard-work. They’re not going to survive, because they don’t know shit about the internal workings of their product, they won’t be able to scale it quickly, and sooner or later, they’ll run out of money, if it’s not the poor publicity killing their product.

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60 points

But they made half a million.

And there are literally hundreds of similar companies raking in billions in investments that magically vanish while the founders live a luxury live and move on.

The real question is: why do VCs shit so much money into obvious frauds? Are they this stupid or do they just hope to pass it on to the greater fool?

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33 points

$500,000 is nothing to billionaires, or even people who make hundreds of millions a year. It’s a lot to average folks like us, but to them it’s the equivalent of going to the casino with money they can afford to blow.

But I do think you’re right about passing it on to the greater fool. They bet it’ll be the next hot product, regardless if they know it sucks or not. Then some bigger bag of money will come in and buy it up, thinking they’ll be able to somehow milk a sustainable profit out of it. You’d think by now that VCs would be smarter about the boom and bust of tech startups, but alas…

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34 points

They’re not going to survive

Are you kidding me?

Alexander Bell stole the telephone.

Edison regularly stole inventions from Tesla among others.

Steve Jobs fucking mind raped Woz.

The American Dream is taking someone else’s hard work and profiting off of it.

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15 points

I’m considering stealing your comment and selling it to the highest bidder. How much ether do you think it would take to knock you out?

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-3 points

These are all examples of why having the tech alone won’t make you money because you need to be able to sell it. Doesn’t relate to this article at all.

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79 points

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.

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54 points

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.

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33 points

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

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15 points

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”?

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74 points
*

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?

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82 points

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.

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21 points
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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!

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4 points

Dunning-Kruger is a hell of a drug…

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73 points

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

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38 points

we don’t either.

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27 points

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.

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25 points

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.

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8 points

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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2 points

and then the government fucked up and tried to save some of the filthy corps.

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6 points

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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0 points

how did they get access to other people’s money?

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2 points

You know it’s bad when the guy previously worked at Coinbase

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