lol, Oliver Habryka at Lightcone is sending out begging emails, i found it in my spam folder

(This email is going out to approximately everyone who has ever had an account on LessWrong. Don’t worry, we will send an email like this at most once a year, and you can permanently unsubscribe from all LessWrong emails here)

declared Lightcone Enemy #1 thanks you for your attention in sending me this missive, Mr Habryka

In 2024, FTX sued us to claw back their donations, and around the same time Open Philanthropy’s biggest donor asked them to exit our funding area. We almost went bankrupt.

yes that’s because you first tried ignoring FTX instead of talking to them and cutting a deal

that second part means Dustin Moskovitz (the $ behind OpenPhil) is sick of Habryka’s shit too

If you want to learn more, I wrote a 13,000-word retrospective over on LessWrong.

no no that’s fine thanks

We need to raise $2M this year to continue our operations without major cuts, and at least $1.4M to avoid shutting down. We have so far raised ~$720k.

and you can’t even tap into Moskovitz any more? wow sucks dude. guess you’re just not that effective as altruism goes

And to everyone who donated last year: Thank you so much. I do think humanity’s future would be in a non-trivially worse position if we had shut down.

you run an overpriced web hosting company and run conferences for race scientists. my bayesian intuition tells me humanity will probably be fine, or perhaps better off.