LWer to Big Yud: Please be serious
they're just jelly Elezier has all the cool hats and gets all the ~~chicks~~math pets
this post was submitted on 03 May 2026
16 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
2565 readers
64 users here now
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.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
-3 upvotes and 0 karma, but the article is absolutely right (they hate this post because it tells the truth). If Eliezer wants to influence public discourse and policy on an international level, he absolutely does need a respectable image (with maybe a touch of eccentricity in an allowable way). But apparently (what he thinks is) the literal end of the world isn't enough to make him actually try for normie public image. Or maybe he has some galaxy brain plan about how looking like a weirdo actually helps his cause? If he does, I strongly suspect it is a rationalization.
this seems like a great time to bring back AI disagreements by Brian Merchant where a rationalist AI convention spends more time arguing about AI takeover scenarios then they do discussing plans to actually stop AI and implement anti-AI policies
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.
that image of Yud made me laugh out loud
Looks to me he took the debate the correct amount of serious.
Edit: the link to the debate nobody seems to link: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FIg4zQKBpAs 15k views in 3 days
yeah if anything this is making yud look good T_T amazing stuff
The top comments under the yt vid:
"If people like 47fu build it, everybody dies."
And
When I saw Eliezer's attire in the thumbnail, I was a bit disappointed. However, after listening to the first five minutes, I'm wondering how the hell he knew to dress so appropriately. Now I'm convinced he is a genius.
Unrelated to that, but is it just me or does Liron Shapira look weird? Did he use some sort of genAI overlay on his own looks, or some weird postprocessing something? His older vids don't give me that vibe. The bowtie looks oddly floaty. (But can be that they always do that and I'm just not around enough people who wear that).
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 her prediction market on the relationship she says that they started dating in September 2022 and they moved to the same city in January 2023.
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. She says she left by the end of 2025, but she still has a Staff page on the MIRI website. "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 partners and an invitation to proposition her by email because of course she does. And she organizes orgies with Aella. Yud sometimes seems flirty with Aella on twitter.
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.
My dominant MtG colors are blue and black.
Basically admitting to being evil
The newest addition to her polycule "got my attention by radiating Dark Lord energy while actually trying to save the world. He’s ruthlessly excellent."
When he funded Manifold, Scott Alexander said that it was "Chaotic Evil." These people keep switching between cutesy language and rawr I am the dark lord language, and their examples of evil are often bathetic while their serious plans are things like "expel brown people so they don't pollute our blood" and "better nuclear war than giving sand anxiety." They reject history, and they reject real-life adventures and contact with people with diverse experience, so evil is a very abstract concept to them.
The newest addition to her polycule
Isn't this mostly a pretentious way of saying someone I recently fucked?
Polycule implies some level of ongoing relationship that probably involves more than just meeting up for sex.
Source: I live in Somerville, Massachusetts
There is a difference between "sleeps or plays around" and "has extended physical and emotional relationships outside of cohabitation and shared bank accounts." It sounds like she has four ongoing long-term relationships and attends kink events, and that her partners know she has other partners and attends kink events.
I think this means we need a moratorium on fantasy TTRPGs until we figure out what's going on
This is exactly what a white MtG main would say.
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.
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.
Yud:
I didn't stick to merely the culture I was raised in, because that wasn't what that culture said to do. The characters I read didn't keep to the way they were raised. They were constantly being challenged with new ideas and often modified or partially rejected those ideas in the course of absorbing them.
Also Yud: ewww Neuromancer is icky
Yud:
But if you consider me to be more than usually intellectually productive for an average Ashkenazic genius in the modern generation
It's not just a load-bearing if, it's a conditional that manages to be vaguely racist under all the smug. C-c-combo move!
Despite the explicit exhortation to take the good parts from new things and integrate them into your own thinking, and the assertion that Campbellian SF teaches this, neither Yud nor any of the commenters seem to appreciate the possibility of doing this with cyberpunk. For them, if a story does not include a scientist expositing his ideas, it cannot be a story with ideas. The slightest amount of flourish in the prose makes even rather blunt themes like "the street will find its own uses for things" and "the rich are not even human" completely invisible.
When I was a youngster (before I had developed any such notion as "taste"), my SF reading ran the gamut from A Wrinkle In Time and The Giver, to The Caves of Steel, to The Ophiuchi Hotline. (I didn't finish The Difference Engine for the same reason I didn't finish Foundation: Stopping the book and starting over with all new characters confounded and discouraged me. So, I expect that Valis would have been too much for me, but that I might have finished A Scanner Darkly or Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.) When I tried to write an SF novel myself, it obviously ended up trying to do all those things. The native Martians had destroyed themselves and ruined their planet in nuclear war; one tiny faction tried to survive by turning themselves into data patterns in the computer of a subterranean city from which they could be resynthesized. One of the scientists on the human team investigsting the city millions of years later is the victim of social bias because he has a rare illness that both causes blindness and makes his body reject cybernetic implants. It eventually turns out that this illness is due to an ancient, noncorporeal life form trying to form a symbiotic relationship. Et cetera.
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.
nakedly fantasizing
Worst mental image of the day
neuromancer is brilliant prose first and foremost, and yudkowsky not being able to realise this is so very symptomatic
Yeah, all that "style over substance" nonsense is really strange given that those early sci-fi authors were more notable for cleverness and sheer volume of output than for consistent literary quality (and I say this as someone who also read and enjoyed a lot of Asimov and friends growing up). Like, Sturgeon may have coined the "90% of everything is crap" law, but when you write the amount that they did for the pulps you end up with some real gems in that 10%.
I liked it and I'm not really into sci-fi because I need good prose to read more than the content.
Cliff Stoll (author of The Cuckoo's Egg and maker of real-world Klein bottles) declared dead by AI
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
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
I saw the emails where Musk and Altman treated Hassabis like some great evil, but I didn’t know a Scott blogpost was involved
To be fair, 2015 was definitely after he was a red flag, albeit for very different reasons than anything Saltman or musk care about
TOTO pivots from bidets to, well, you know by now. https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/toilet-maker-toto-ai https://archive.is/wip/rzLqn
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
view more: next ›