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this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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TechTakes
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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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https://theasterisk.substack.com/p/reflecting-on-a-few-very-very-strange
Cross posting from reddit but here’s TPOT/GHB/CNC stuff
I'm sorry.
Vibecamp: It's the Scott Aaronson comment section, but in person.
This is genuinely horrifying throughout. It reinforces my conviction that I don't really want to know or gossip about the details of these peoples' lives, I want to know the barest details of who they are so that I can set firm social boundaries against them.
A quote the author offers, that stands out to me:
I'd never been particularly ardent about believing it, but this right here is firm evidence to me that existing in a rigid gender binary is mental and spiritual poison. Whoever this person is, they're never going to grow up.
I don't wish to belittle the author's suffering, but I do hope she is able to reconsider her participation in these scenes where hierarchy, contrived masculinity, and financial standing (or the ability to generate financial gain for others!) are the signifiers of individual participants' worth.
Honestly i feel like my role in many of my friendships is simply telling people that they don’t have to follow these prescriptions and are allowed to do things outside of them, and that following these prescriptions isn’t some magic pill that is going to fix their lives, and is more likely a poison. So yeah if you started ardently believing that, I would not be opposed.
These people are bitter and sad because they are trying to perform in hypermasculine roles that only exist as fiction in marketing and propaganda. I’m bitter and sad because:
"U" for "you" was when I became confident who "Nina" was. The blogger feels like yet another person who is caught up in intersecting subcultures of bad people but can't make herself leave. She takes a lot of deep lore like "what is Hereticon?" for granted and is still into crypto.
She links someone called Sonia Joseph who mentions "the consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties and heavy LSD use of some elite AI researchers ... leads (sic) to some of the most coercive and fucked up social dynamics that I have ever seen." Joseph says she is Canadian but worked in the Bay Area tech scene. Cursed phrase: agi cnc sex parties
I have never heard of a wing of these people in Canada. There are a few Effective Altruists in Toronto but I don't know if they are the LessWrong kind or the bednet kind. I thought this was basically a US and Oxford scene (plus Jaan Tallinn).
The Substack and a Rationalist web magazine are both called Asterisk.
I think theres a EA presence at the all the big universities now. Theres a rationalist meet up in Manitoba but nothing here thank god.
I noticed Sonia during the initial media coverage but didn’t know what to make of her. Theres another person on twitter alleging abuse at Aella’s cnc parties, I can dig them up at lunch if you want.
not to make light of abuse but I do just want to entertain the alternate world where people are holding CNC (computer numerical control) parties. I imagine they’d have a lot of caliper talk but since it isn’t about skull measurement it’s fine
That would be a much better world (btw ironworkers are great if you ever get to use one).
Manifesting a more ironworker forward 2026 bless 🙏🙏🙏
https://xcancel.com/PronouncedWrong/status/2001579301653868976#m Here it is
Transcribing (the nested blockquote is a self-quote-tweet):
That "Hereticon" link looks broken; I think it should point to this RationalWiki page.
It looks like this site requites
https://orhttp;//to recognize a link as an external link, otherwise it prependsawful.systems/and treats it as an internal linkI missed that as I was reading, but yeah, the author has pretty progressive language, but totally fails to note all the other angles along which rational adjacent spaces are bad news, even though she is, as you note, deep enough into the space she should have seen a lot of it mask-off at this point.
This article genuinely made me furious on this woman's behalf. It isn't like most scenes or spaces are great at handling sexual violence, but in most spaces people would not accuse you of trying to silence and hurt men by saying you were groped!