this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
18 points (95.0% liked)

TechTakes

2155 readers
83 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
 

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 soo 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.)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 6 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

maybe sunk cost fallacy is an unstated/un(der?)accounted part in his True Believer thing?

Probably. Beyond throwing a shitload of cash into the LLM money pit, Willison's completely wrapped his public image up in being an AI booster, having spent years advocating for AI and "learning" how to use it.

If he admits he's wrong about LLMs, he has to admit the money and time he spent on AI was all for nothing.

[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 3 points 12 hours ago

he's claiming he is taking no llm money with exception of specific cases, but he does accept api credits and access to early releases, which aren't payments only when you think of payments in extremely narrow sense of real money being exchanged.

this would in no way stand if he were, say, a journalist.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 18 hours ago

if you call him an AI promoter he cites his carefully organised blog posts of concerns

meanwhile he was on the early access list for GPT-5