Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 02/10/2026My frustration with anti-pedestrianization and anti-decarb are strongly linked. it is simply not the case that one has to lower their quality of life to adapt to a zero carb urbanized world. imagine: One can let their child play and know they won’t get smoked by a car or inhale noxious pollution! 1123
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 22/09/2026Totally fine with the EAs that are sending mosquito nets to Africa and figuring out how to do real carbon offsets; less comfortable with the FTX and AI-pilled ones who view humanity as disposable in pursuit of kardashev curve advancement 140
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 16/09/2026a bunch of language models were optimized to hack things, did indeed hack things it's not "on their own" if they suffer catastrophic forgetting or just simply ignore instructions that are given to them in prompt form which are simply not true constraints--they do nothing to the underlying model 150
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 16/09/2026faine is clearly arguing for a massive increase in funding for tactical defense gherkins and the related pickle air defense force 040
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 16/09/2026CU has a free repair shop for students and Boulder has @communitycycles.bsky.social and they're both treasures here 010
Reposted by Alex NewhouseAlex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 16/09/2026to add on to my ongoing soapbox here: the reason why it's so hard to get a real answer on the logical chain to apocalypse is because superintelligence is viewed as a demiurge-type being that'll manifest cosmic destruction by virtue of existing at all. But there is a mechanism hypothesized! 46413
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 16/09/2026to add on to my ongoing soapbox here: the reason why it's so hard to get a real answer on the logical chain to apocalypse is because superintelligence is viewed as a demiurge-type being that'll manifest cosmic destruction by virtue of existing at all. But there is a mechanism hypothesized! 46413
Reposted by Alex NewhouseAlex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 14/09/2026bostrom and yudkowsky are annoyingly specific on this, because their dumb thought experiments are contagious in making the worst kind of person feel profound. example apocalypses: 1. the paperclip machine 2. Enslavement due to misalignment 3. AGI breakout and hyper-speed totalitarianism 162
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 14/09/2026as I always yell about, weird boulder died because of a *lack* of new housing developments you feel sad that dark horse was razed? that's because housing is so scarce! 071
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 14/09/2026bostrom and yudkowsky are annoyingly specific on this, because their dumb thought experiments are contagious in making the worst kind of person feel profound. example apocalypses: 1. the paperclip machine 2. Enslavement due to misalignment 3. AGI breakout and hyper-speed totalitarianism 162
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 14/09/2026what's cosmically ironic is that yudkowsky even says that roko's basilisk is an information hazard but apocalypticism about ai is entirely hazardous to collective reality construction and, ya know, action on anything actually dangerous 020
Reposted by Alex NewhouseSharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 10/09/2026i mean the Yud solution is (and i'm not joking here is) do a global AI dev pause until we do eugenics to get people capable of aligning AI properly 1337035
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 10/09/2026i really like jack clark and worked with him in the gpt-2 era when he was at openai. if you're interested in the Silicon Valley perspective from someone who's actually thinking about things with internal logic and sympathy, I recommend his newsletter and this article 010
Reposted by Alex NewhouseMatt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 09/09/2026Great day to talk to some scholars of religion! 0102
Reposted by Alex NewhouseWild pentachoron correspondent @crossslide.bsky.social · 09/09/2026re Evan Hubinger specifically, he actually posted on lesswrong at the time about why he was leaving miri and joining anthropic www.lesswrong.com/posts/7jn5aD... 001
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 09/09/2026one last thing on this front: keep an eye out for when the frontier labs talk about incoming "recursive self-improvement" in AI development but emphasize *token usage by their employees* as their main metric. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have done this in the past month. 021
Reposted by Alex NewhouseAlex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 09/09/2026 the potential of infinite digital lives outweighs the real, existing, 8 billion human lives right now. Check out the arguments from Nick Bostrom, who isn't really an accelerationist but ends up in the same place, as paraphrased in The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian. 2424
Reposted by Alex NewhouseAlex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 09/09/2026alright please engage with me on this, but I think I can actually explain what's going on here. There's a whole miasma of ideologies, but at the core, Silicon Valley is experiencing a conflict between two (equally messianic) sides: accelerationists, such as Altman and Andreesen, and doomers 414735
Reposted by Alex NewhouseCollin 'Appears To Be A Typo' Woodard @collinwoodard.bsky.social · 09/09/2026look at the little machine that makes the watch go. does a folding iphone let you look at the little machine that makes it go? no it does not 042
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 09/09/2026this is where I'm at. Yudkowsky is horrifically wrong on the merits but right on the policy proscriptions (at least narrowly) 020
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 09/09/2026I want the folding iPhone because these three things are genuinely true about me: - I crave the smaller form factor most of the time - I want an iPad but don't want another thing to carry around - I like landscape better than portrait 220
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 09/09/2026alright please engage with me on this, but I think I can actually explain what's going on here. There's a whole miasma of ideologies, but at the core, Silicon Valley is experiencing a conflict between two (equally messianic) sides: accelerationists, such as Altman and Andreesen, and doomers 414735
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 08/09/2026I agree with this in policymaking, but imo it absolutely matters if people in charge of building the LLMs believe ideologically that 1) they are building digital persons and 2) that the potential for infinite digital persons thus creates a utilitarian imperative to discount current humans against 160
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 08/09/2026liberal arts people: so it would seem important philosophically that intelligence does not simply disappear while a human is asleep Silicon Valley people, apparently: all of consciousness can be contained within tensors, and vector retrieval capability is literally divine omnipotence 091
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 08/09/2026id be way less annoyed all the time if we replaced the Altman Utopianism/Yudkowsky dystopianism binary in SF with treating LLMs as proactive narratives embodied in silicon 1121
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 03/09/2026this is the kindest thing I’ve ever gotten On Here also for those who do not know I am indeed Tall (6’8’’) 020
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 03/09/2026as @jamellebouie.net always says, these actions are indistinguishable from a segregationist's 0103
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 03/09/2026This plus a mandatory 5-min cool off period after every video watched would solve our problems 021
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 02/09/2026We happen to be watching the Covid season of Brooklyn 99 and it’s helping me crystallize something: we as a collective desperately need to let ourselves feel the weight of COVID, what it took from us, what it did to us 190
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 01/09/2026yes at some level it doesn’t matter if the grenade-wielding robot is intelligent or not, they’re still trying to kill us. But it also matters whether or not the robot is acquiring enough intelligence to perpetuate its grenade wielding and to resist efforts to unplug it from the wall. 141
Reposted by Alex NewhouseAlex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 01/09/2026This is the main thing I can’t actually get past. Arms races aren’t made equal, and AI breaking out to hack huggingface is a fundamentally different scale of alarm bell than the Trinity Project’s detonations 121
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 01/09/2026This is the main thing I can’t actually get past. Arms races aren’t made equal, and AI breaking out to hack huggingface is a fundamentally different scale of alarm bell than the Trinity Project’s detonations 121
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 31/08/2026continuing to work on my project that argues that post-wwii fascism is purely post-modern: in the absence of the material Fascist States to orient ideology and activism, neo-fascism fills the void with "magick": reality-creation machines based on pure symbolism and hatred 4246
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 31/08/2026also a strong majority of the policymakers in charge of this seem convinced that giving tax and resource use exemptions of a scale that would make nfl owners blush to projects that are designed to provide net negative employment opportunities is a good idea 161
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 27/08/2026one of the reasons I'm so critical of the messianism of both the Altman e/acc types and the Yudkowsky doomer types is that we 1) don't actually have evidence that apocalyptic-scale AI is anywhere close and 2) don't need to reach that point at all for scaled harm to occur through autonomous agents 1213
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 26/08/2026this is obviously an attempt to funnel all grant money into AI too 051
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 26/08/2026currently investigating the potential of having opus 5 serve as an orchestrator for coding tasks delegated to my gaming pc (a 5080) and my mini pc (a strix halo 128GB box), passing things over tailscale ssh. will keep you all updated if my house explodes. 250
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 26/08/2026they explicitly say they want to traumatize public servants 128244
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 24/08/2026one might even call fascism a modernist movement composed of reactionary impulses 1190
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 18/08/2026real ones go for big dumb bike rides without routing them ahead of time 030
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 18/08/2026i fought for years to get "deus vult" banned by default on tech platforms because it is literally a call to do anti-muslim pogroms but alas 181
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 16/08/2026This is also the party that wants carte blanche to systematically exterminate any wildlife that *is perceived to* (not even in reality) impede on ranching or farming 26711
Reposted by Alex NewhouseDr. Rachel Kowert @drkowert.bsky.social · 13/08/2026"No screens" isn't the *safe* choice, it's a trade that most parents don't know they are making. youtube.com/shorts/4TgQy...youtube.comNo Screens Isn't the Safe OptionYouTube video by Psychgeist 294
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 13/08/2026the memoryholing of a violent insurrection and self-coup remains the most enraging thing in this current era 051
Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 13/08/2026this administration and its cronies have *literally* invoked the Day of the Rope--the fascist fantasy involving lynching of journalists first and foremost--multiple times. Insurrectionists on Jan 6 built a gallows outside of the Capitol. What are we doing here. 070