this post was submitted on 12 Mar 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.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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[–] pulsewidth@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Why are people hating on / blocking dgerard?

Fill me in, I've never heard of that user.

[–] self@awful.systems 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

oxy is a mastodon user who follows David so they’re most likely telling the AI startups in question to GTFO and lemmy has kindly reinterpreted that as a tag

however,

Why are people hating on / blocking dgerard?

let’s go down the list! depending on the subculture, you’re blocking dgerard because:

  • you’re a Scientologist and interacting with dgerard will cost you your Operating Thetan rank
  • you’re a Rationalist and have read the Lightcone Infrastructure memo about how dgerard is the devil, beating out all other contenders for most evil being on the earth
  • you’re a cryptocurrency gambler and you think dgerard’s critiques lost you money
  • you run an AI startup and you think dgerard’s critiques lost you money
  • you’re on the far right and dgerard won’t let you edit misinformation straight into Wikipedia

there are more, we can go deeper

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

You're an AI addict who has been one shotted and you are deeply in denial about the technology. DGerard is calling your favourite drug "a bad thing"

[–] oxyhyxo@mastodon.bsd.cafe 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

@pulsewidth I have no idea. I was reacting to the shenanigans reported in the video

[–] pulsewidth@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Well I've definitely misinterpreted.

This might be a UI issue, because I see the post as coming from 'David Gerard@awful.systems' and then I see your comment as

@dgerard gtfo. Lol

Which to me I interpreted as 'lol this is David Gerard - gtfo here'. Especially with the reply from second user, "thanks, blocked".

[–] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Mastodon just adds the username in the comment when replying to a Lemmy post or comment. It seems to be possible to remove the @-tag manually, but many people don't do that.

P.S. It's also kinda an exposition of how people tend to reply to the imaginary correspondent, even with rather rude language, when actually their replies go to the OP.

[–] self@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

adding to the confusion, the shithead who replied with “thanks, blocked” is, I’m fairly certain, already banned from our instance

anyway yeah the lemmy/mastodon interop has many sharp edges

[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago

at least the federation works even with auth fetch these days. (and yeah, it's a nice jank, the very different reply styles, the way the posts + replies are handled etc.)