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Alex Newhouse

@alexbnewhouse.bsky.social
2.4K followers 359 following 3.9K posts

PhD candidate in Political Science at CU Boulder. Biker, climber, runner, skier, homebrewer, writer, coder. email: alex [dot] newhouse [at] colorado [dot] edu

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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
My 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!
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Totally 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
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
a 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
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
faine is clearly arguing for a massive increase in funding for tactical defense gherkins and the related pickle air defense force
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
CU has a free repair shop for students and Boulder has @communitycycles.bsky.social and they're both treasures here
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
to 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!
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
to 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!
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
bostrom 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
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
as 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!
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
bostrom 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
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
what'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
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Sharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
i 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
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
i 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
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Matt Gabriele @profgabriele.com · 09/09/2026
Great day to talk to some scholars of religion!
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Wild pentachoron correspondent @crossslide.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
re 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...
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
one 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.
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Alex 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.
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
alright 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
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Collin 'Appears To Be A Typo' Woodard @collinwoodard.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
look 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
rear view of the farer stratton moonphase showing an elabore-grade sellita sw200
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
this is where I'm at. Yudkowsky is horrifically wrong on the merits but right on the policy proscriptions (at least narrowly)
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I 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
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
alright 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
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
friction in one’s life is good!
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
I 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
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
liberal 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
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
id 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
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
this is the kindest thing I’ve ever gotten On Here also for those who do not know I am indeed Tall (6’8’’)
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
as @jamellebouie.net always says, these actions are indistinguishable from a segregationist's
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
This plus a mandatory 5-min cool off period after every video watched would solve our problems
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
We 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
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
yes 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.
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
This 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
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
This 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
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
this is actually what I think is happening
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
continuing 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
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
also 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
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
one 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
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
this is obviously an attempt to funnel all grant money into AI too
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
currently 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.
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
they explicitly say they want to traumatize public servants
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
one might even call fascism a modernist movement composed of reactionary impulses
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
by god that's @drkowert.bsky.social's music
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Do good things and talk about them
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
real ones go for big dumb bike rides without routing them ahead of time
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
i 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
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
do good things and talk about them
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
This 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
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Dr. 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.com
No Screens Isn't the Safe Option
YouTube video by Psychgeist
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
the memoryholing of a violent insurrection and self-coup remains the most enraging thing in this current era
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Alex Newhouse @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
this 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.
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