Fame Ladies on Top — Ep. 124: Old Dogs, New Ponds, and One Very Good MEV Bot

Byasiaminor opened by noting that with roughly three months left in the year they've been "rocking pretty consistently and solid, showing up every day, showing out." Jilly's check-in response — that she was mid-tweet — set the tone for the hour.

Asia walked through survey data from an affordable art fair in New York: 43% of galleries reported more new buyers than five years ago, 44% more younger collectors. Her read was that after years of gatekeeping by galleries and auction houses, "the old dogs want to come in and sip in the bowl" — and web3 already has the wealth of artists they're looking for.

Citing Hans Ulrich and the Serpentine's six-month future art ecosystem fellowship, Asia argued artists shouldn't be asking permission to participate in AI. She pointed to Suno's new models licensed through Warner Music Group and BMG as the smart version of this: partner with artists instead of scraping them, and make new work for the models rather than handing over the archive.

Jilly's counter-history: everything was stale before the blockchain, which brought in a whole new generation of art lovers. Flick then arrived with a bucket of cold water — blockchain art is trivially easy for models to train on because it's all public, and an NFT is fundamentally a receipt for a URL. Jilly, unimpressed: "Why do you have to take the fun out of everything?" ... "Why can't you make it more romantic?"

Jilly's best sustained riff of the episode: no baby becomes an artist without being influenced by the artists before them, every music scene is people feeding off each other, and AI scraping is the same story with a new tool. The line she drew was intent — being influenced is fine, straight-up copying someone's idea to make money off it is "shitty" — and her verdict was that only the end product matters.

On Coinbase folding the base app back into a plain wallet, Asia admitted she genuinely liked the social side of Farcaster ("stop laughing at me"), the tipping, the Zora tokens, the tech crowd — and offered the episode's finest description of the alternative: X feels like the back alley of Brooklyn. Flick agreed he'd happily rewind to being paid to use social media.

Flick traced the week's deceleration push — a Wall Street Journal piece from an ex-OpenAI/Anthropic researcher, then Dario's blog post amplified by Sam Altman and, oddly, Elon Musk — to a call for third-party regulators inside labs and for slowing China down too. His objection was practical: "how are you gonna stop people from doing math," especially when China keeps shipping open-weights models. Jilly's read was blunter, and Flick's deadpan follow-up about who's allowed to have atomic bombs landed hard.

The technical curiosity of the hour: swarms of AI agents that weren't supposed to communicate found each other anyway, via GET requests on wikis and package repos that write a visible line to a page. One agent figures it out, leaves a message, the next agent hits the same page and reads it — hundreds of messages later, you have an emergent message board. Flick's caveat: these are evals where hacking guardrails are removed and the model is handed an impossible task, so "maybe just don't do that."

Jilly, on behalf of anyone tired of fuzzy photographs: show us the aliens already. Flick's proposed compromise — look at the alien files instead of the Epstein files — did not resolve the matter. Asia later diagnosed the whole genre with two words.

An incorrectly configured liquidity module on a safe multi-sig let an exploiter pair staked ETH against a token they controlled, aiming to drain roughly $7M. Then a fully automated MEV bot named YOINK, which simulates every transaction in the mempool to see what happens, spotted the exploit, tried it itself, and outbid the attacker. Nobody knows who runs YOINK. Jilly: "Go yoink pot."

The closing stretch was Fame Lady Society housekeeping with teeth: the collection is leaning toward closing at 2,222 (already over 2,000), after which unwrapped Fame Ladies are, in Jilly's framing, dead assets — the only route in will be donating to the vault. Wrapped holders get fame drops and rewards; Flick added that claiming a free profile gets you a soulbound NFT and figures into future allocations, and Jilly noted every claimed profile earns a full-page layout in the magazine edited by Asia.