Same here. I wish I knew 4 months ago that this CEO gave money to fascist YouTube influencers to promote Proton, then doubled down on their idiocy when called on it. I would have dropped them then and there.

To avoid the censorship and bot-assisted PR campaigns on the official subreddit, there is now a community-managed subreddit dedicated to Proton: r/ProtonPublic.

Meanwhile, over on reddit, Proton has launched a bot-assisted astroturfing campaign to refute the spreading narrative. It takes the form of a missive from a “staff engineer” who’s shocked and angry at how much his dear CEO has been clipped out of context.

In the first 10 minutes after the post went live, it had dozens of comments from posters saying things like, “Wow! Thank you for the truth!”

Five hours later the post’s upvote counter is over 3k.

Totally fake PR damage control.

Busy boy. He probably let ChatGPT write most of it.

His real name is Tarun Gognieri. He’s a TPOT (post-rationalist) and employee of OpenAI.

Thanks for this! Would you consider making a new post in TechTakes? It could be useful to have a more durable place to comment on this topic.

I see you were one of the people whose comment got censored. I presume the censored comments were about the parody of the “pelican on a bike” animation on the OpenBSD 8.0 release page.

So now people can’t even discuss criticism of LLMs on lobsters? Insane.

Not if you’re a Yudkowskian rationalist. He’d call us “deathists”.

He works for google, so he probably still thinks they’re not evil.

Lobste.rs dropped the vibecoding tag because a prominent LLM enthusiast had a sad and huffed off in a fit.

He points out that mathematicians are also rent-seekers (though only 20% rent-seeking). You know, those famously capital-extractive mathematicians.

.

I know this is not a novel insight, but all these people in the comments talking about translating HPMOR into as many languages as possible and funding efforts to spread it all over the world… it’s bog-standard cult behavior. Substitute “Watchtower magazine” or “Dianetics” for HPMOR to make it even more obvious.

HPMOR is the rationalist version of the Nigerian prince scam. It immediately weeds out anyone who isn’t a good mark.

Not a surprise, but the Tarbell Center – a big EA-funded journalism outlet – is funding Kevin Roose’s and Casey Newton’s new podcast, “Machine Gods”. I’m sure it will have no impact on the topics they choose to cover or the way they cover them.

It’s really hard to say because Yud’s being unnecessarily cryptic. Also, I think the “going around telling people I made them do it” might be a reference to the Zizians, which is what he’s describing in the precending sentence. I am not aware that anyone from any rich organization has said anything like that about Yudkowsky, but who knows what they might be telling people behind the scenes.

I think it’s Coefficient Giving (née Open Philanthropy). Yud has made negative comments about them in the past, especially after Moskovitz tried to distance themselves from rationalism.

EDIT: Citation.

Rapey rationalist gets a grant pulled.

More background in this thread.

Reiterating your excellent point.

Creepy rationalist says the quiet part out loud.

(“RMN” = “Red Means No” = CNC parties = Consensual Non-Consent parties = Pretend sexual assault parties)

EDIT: He elaborates.

EDIT: Allegations of sexual assault at Aella’s slutcon.