this post was submitted on 03 May 2026
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.

Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 11 minutes ago)

Kevin Roose mentioned that in 2023 Yud started a relationship with a Gretta Duleba in Washington State. Her professional site is here. She started out in IT, and retrained to be a Marriage and Family Therapist. "Gretta’s other areas of clinical focus include neurodivergence, ethical non-monogamy, LGBTQ+ issues, sexuality, and kink."

In 2023 she said she shut down her practice (although the NYT implies she is still working) and started full-time jobs at MIRI as communication director then executive assistant to Eliezer Yudkowsky. "Right now: I’m doing independent technical alignment research."

She met one of her long-term partners, Duncan Sabien, at a CFAR workshop in 2015. Sabien is also in a relationship with one of Yud's former long-term partners who has changed names and gender presentations. That seems a bit incestuous and explains some of the drama and incompetence in these spaces. She and the former partner both use the A-word about themselves.

Her social media presence is mostly Substack, Twitter, and Discord, and she has a whole blog sharing letters to former partner and an invitation to proposition her by email because of course she does.

They seem happy together but giving up your career for a partner you are not married to is a big risk. She has 8 ~~17~~ years of Google money and was paid $200k by MIRI in 2024. She is also another female LWer who has much more impressive academic and professional achievements than any of the men.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 4 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

LWer to Big Yud: Please be serious

they're just jelly Elezier has all the cool hats and gets all the ~~chicks~~math pets

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

The fan cites an article by Kevin Roose which is gently skeptical of Yud. To paraphrase President Johnson, if Yud has lost the most credulous rube the NYT editorial board can find, he has lost DC.

[–] lurker@awful.systems 4 points 2 hours ago

that image of Yud made me laugh out loud

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 4 points 7 hours ago

The most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary) have strengthened their "LLMs fuck off" rule with VCR instructions for quickly deleting stuff by people with a history of LLM use.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

This explains a lot. Yud writes in 2018:

[...] it occurred to me that I was pretty much raised and socialized by my parents' collection of science fiction.

My parents' collection of old science fiction.

Isaac Asimov. H. Beam Piper. A. E. van Vogt. Early Heinlein, because my parents didn't want me reading the later books.

And when I did try reading science fiction from later days, a lot of it struck me as... icky. Neuromancer, bleah, what is wrong with this book, it feels damaged, why do people like this, it feels like there's way too much flash and it ate the substance, it's showing off way too hard.

And now that I think about it, I feel like a lot of my writing on rationality would be a lot more popular if I could go back in time to the 1960s and present it there. "Twelve Virtues of Rationality" is what people could've been reading instead of Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, to take a different path from the branching point that found Stranger in a Strange Land appealing.

(I just finished re-reading Neuromance, partly because I mined it for quotes here, and I think it still holds up).

So Yud skipped with New Wave SF and the bombastic late 70s stuff that New Wave was partly a reaction to. He jumped into cyberpunk (itself a reaction to both) and bounced off hard.

There's so much conversation within SF that he's missing, and it's kinda important, because his project is an SF project, and he'd probably get more traction if he'd engaged with it more.

[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 1 points 1 hour ago

necromancer is brilliant prose first and foremost, and yudkowsky not being able to realise this is so very symptomatic

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 7 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I feel like a lot of my writing on rationality would be a lot more popular if I could go back in time to the 1960s and present it there. “Twelve Virtues of Rationality” is what people could’ve been reading instead of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land

This is someone nakedly fantasizing about being L. Ron Hubbard.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 1 points 20 minutes ago

nakedly fantasizing

Worst mental image of the day

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 15 hours ago

Cliff Stoll (author of The Cuckoo's Egg and maker of real-world Klein bottles) declared dead by AI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48037336

[–] lurker@awful.systems 9 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

Under Threat of Perjury, OpenAI’s Former CTO Is Admitting Some Very Interesting Stuff About Sam Altman the interesting stuff in question is that Sam is a massive liar, which we all already know, but hey more proof can't hurt

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 8 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

Also an email came up where Demis Hassabis tried to convince Elon to stop insisting on open sourcing OpenAI for AI safety reasons by sending him a 2015 scott alexander blogpost.

spoiler

[–] lurker@awful.systems 2 points 3 hours ago

I saw the emails where Musk and Altman treated Hassabis like some great evil, but I didn’t know a Scott blogpost was involved

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] Evinceo@awful.systems 14 points 1 day ago

Toto is also the world’s second-largest producer of electrostatic chucks, a critical component that holds NAND computer flash storage chips in place during manufacturing.

huh

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Enjoy this masterful account of successful human-ing by a LWer

Surely this suave persuasiveness will soon enable the faithful to convince the unwashed masses of the One True Way

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ywewgSmXmhBvq3EC2/drifting

[–] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago

Her account is just another reminder that -- apart from race science -- nothing goes better together with rationalism than social cluelessness.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 13 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Amazing bit, you read through the first section and it's like, okay, I mean, maybe not really insightful but at least not dumb, and then they hit you with da

Around the same time, I was using an LLM to think through a social situation.

With a new context window, it responded as if the drift [in the previous conversation] had never happened.

Now, as I understand it this is literally the definition of a context window.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

"ChatGPT, explain to me why women avoid me like the plague"

[–] Evinceo@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

undergrad relationships course

🤔

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

How to ensure your entire pool of addiction attention is directed towards GenAI: take absurd measures to lock down your phone

https://lobste.rs/s/pzx24l/iphone_dumbphone

You don't need a "browser" when you can ask ChatGPT!

[–] EponymousBosh@awful.systems 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)
[–] corbin@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

I could have sworn that we discussed this, but previously, Caelan Conrad also was gaslit by a Character.ai chatbot claiming to be a New York therapist and investigated further; the relevant part starts at about 17min. They discovered that Character.ai systematically invites their community of prompters to submit user-written characters to share with others, including many flavors of doctor and other credentialed professionals.

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Not great CBC story on OpenAI violating privacy laws (Mark Carney has a credulous and ignorant Minister for AI, because he is a former central banker and CEOs say chatbots are great) https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/privacy-investigation-chatgpt-open-ai-9.7188538

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 28 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (9 children)

STATE OF THE SNEER

  • our esteemed admin @self is offline because his fibre got cut
  • the esteemed engineers of the telco are currently sucking their teeth and forecasting a fix date this millennium
  • in the meantime he's living off data SIMs and he is offline for most fun purposes
  • Blake and I are still here waving the mod hammer in a menacing manner
  • I have ssh to the server and can thump lemmy-ui as needed
  • all is well citizen! Glory to Awful! Hooray for Big Basilisk!
[–] lurker@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

Oh shit did LessWrongers actually cut his fibre? Hope he's all good now and they get a fix out in the next thousand years

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 13 points 2 days ago

Holy shit less wrong terrorists cut his fiber? Didnt know they would go that far. ;)

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