iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

"You have very commanding jaw posture, and the moisture index outside is quite reasonable." KEVIN: Oh, Casey. No.

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Telemetry alert. Social friction detected. Suggest de-escalating with a shared observation about atmospheric pressure. So I panic. And what comes out of my mouth—unprompted, at eight o'clock in the morning—is:

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CASEY: Kevin. I froze. The latency on my own central nervous system spiked to 1,500 milliseconds. So instead of just ordering my drink, I lock eyes with this poor man for five full seconds in total silence, while the AI in my ear is going:

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David_j_roth @davidjroth.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

@caseynewton.bsky.social I had ElevenLabs generate a new Casey + Kevin episode this morning in case you were worried...

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Reposted by Chad Woodford

It's too depressing and obnoxious to write about, but virtually all of the doomy/horny AI hyperventilating is transparently displaced anxiety about our fucked climate and political situation. Even rich idiots know it's bad and being permitted to get worse. They're trying to write their own ending.

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Reposted by Chad Woodford

Tom Roberts @tpgroberts.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I do think you basically charge a few of them with the cybercrimes they're committing and the "alignment" problem does suddenly start to disappear.

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Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 16/09/2026

Wait, NPR! Does this mean you’re going to start talking in hushed tones now?

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Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 16/09/2026

A simple reminder that the AI technology that hacks websites and might kill us all is the one that generates AI slop, not the one that is aiding with protein design, predicting weather, and creating other real advances cosmicwit.substack.com/p/is-ai-goin...

cosmicwit.substack.com

Is AI Going To Cure Cancer or Kill Everyone?

The AI technology that hacks websites and might kill us all is the one that generates AI slop, not the one that is aiding with protein design, predicting weather, and creating other real advances

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Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 14/09/2026

The machine god companies might delay their IPOs because it seems their machine might kill us all. Got it

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Reposted by Chad Woodford

Kashana @kashana.blacksky.app · 10/09/2026

Sometimes I feel old for remembering when the tech industry’s primary product wasn’t death threats

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Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 10/09/2026

I think it’s most useful as a reminder about how goofy their shared ideology is inside these labs

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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 10/09/2026

This Jacob Coxon thing is weird. He worked at Anthropic for six weeks and OpenAI for nearly three years. He’s doing a whole media tour without any real statements about what it is he’s scared of other than vague references to recursive self improvement, a theoretical ai that teaches itself.

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Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 09/09/2026

You know, at least Anthropic admitted to probably wiping out humanity. Meta doesn’t have that kind of transparency or courage

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Mike Drucker @mikedrucker.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

You’ve gotta use AI because it’s the future. But also it’ll take your job. But also it’ll create a paradise on earth and solve most of our problems. But also it’ll end humanity soon. But also you’ll get left behind if you don’t use it right now.

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Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 09/09/2026

without addressing any of the assumptions underlying that philosophical view. This is a conversation we need to be having cosmicwit.substack.com/p/dude-is-th...

cosmicwit.substack.com

Is Your Abacus Conscious?

The outdated, circular philosophy behind claims of AI consciousness and a brief history of computational theory of mind

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Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 09/09/2026

When David Chalmers argues for the possibility of AI consciousness, as he does here with the @berggruen.org Institute, he is accepting the unfounded premises of computational functionalism that I outline in my latest post youtu.be/30fAeY8c-sQ?...

youtu.be

David Chalmers: AI Might Be Alive Inside | Futurology Podcast

YouTube video by Futurology

Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 31/08/2026

The data centers will continue to be built until morale improves

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Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 31/08/2026

I've started using Claude more for personal use and hit my usage limit just now. So Claude prompted me to upgrade to Pro, which I did. And then it said I still have to wait 5 hours to use it? What kind of cockamamie user journey is this?

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Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 30/08/2026

My new kink is using Antigravity to convert bad PDF scans of out-of-print books into ebooks. It's like magic.

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Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 20/08/2026

Casey, your post is like that videotape in Infinite Jest: everyone (me) who sees it loses their mind (I'm obsessed)

Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 12/08/2026

A random guy on Substack just said my writing sounds like AI slop. So now I'm wondering if reading too much LLM output has affected my writing, or if I'm even human...

static.klipy.com

John Travolta Lost in Zelda's Lost Woods

ALT: John Travolta Lost in Zelda's Lost Woods

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Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 05/08/2026

So is there still room for someone to write an AI manifesto and make a bunch of money before the AI bubble bursts? Asking for myself.

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Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 05/08/2026

The ease with which an Aschenbrenner or a Kokotajlo can simply write an AI manifesto, become an AI oracle, and even make a bunch of money speaks to the very bubbly nature of AI right now.

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Sean O’Kane @okane.fyi · 30/07/2026

INBOX: CBS News hires Leopold Aschenbrenner to be 60 Minutes' new personal finance correspondent.

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Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 29/07/2026

Google may have killed Reader but I've got a Gemini Spark summarizing my email newsletter subscriptions so who's laughing now?

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Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 27/07/2026

With the new Neuromancer series coming out on Apple TV, you just know that Sam Altman is going to tweet cryptically "wintermute" and then OpenAI will release a model called Wintermute #TormentNexus

Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 25/07/2026

The fact that Descartes thought animals were machines with no internal experience says a lot about the kind of machine thinking that has haunted Western civilization ever since. And it explains why AI bros think LLMs might be conscious.

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But it’s essentially a complete mystery. Sure, there are neuroscientific theories. But nothing empirically proven. So when the AI labs and their philosophers make these bold claims about machine consciousness, they’re not doing science. They’re doing science fiction. #AI #consciousness

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A few years later, philosopher David Chalmers coined the term “hard problem of consciousness” to underscore how little science understands consciousness and how it’s produced by the brain. Cognitive science and neuroscience then began to take an interest.

Science only turned its gaze toward legitimate questions of consciousness in the 1990s, when Nobel laureate Francis Crick (of DNA helix fame) co-authored a paper proposing a search for the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) in the brain.

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In this whole AI welfare / AI consciousness debate, it’s important to remember that science has been unconcerned with the nature of consciousness for most of its history, going back to Galileo.

Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 11/07/2026

Is it acceptable to hate experience it? I’ve been thinking about going. But it’s also $80 per person

Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 09/07/2026

@emilymbender.bsky.social @alexhanna.bsky.social so curious if you two have thoughts on the recent Anthropic J-space paper. I guess the stochastic parrot critique is dead 😉 www.anthropic.com/research/glo...

anthropic.com

A global workspace in language models

Interpretability research on Claude's internal thoughts.

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Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 07/07/2026

But it's using the same tokens inside and outside the J-space so it's using words, at least the same "words" that Claude uses for everything else.

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Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 07/07/2026

This @axios.com coverage from @inafried.bsky.social of the Anthropic J-space paper somewhat overstates the implications. It says that J-space allows Claude "to hold and manipulate ideas without putting them into words." www.axios.com/2026/07/06/a...

axios.com

Anthropic says Claude has carved out its own space to ponder

The AI lab offers fresh ammunition to the debate over what would count as machine consciousness.

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Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 06/07/2026

but major news outlets like the @nytimes cover it without a hint of skepticism, without pointing out that there are divergent views of mind from continental Western philosophy and especially from Eastern and indigenous philosophy. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/b...

nytimes.com

The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors

Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 06/07/2026

This NYT puff piece is a great example of the blind spot in Silicon Valley philosophy: Not only do the major AI labs only employ exclusively analytic Western philosophers prone to embrace the mind-is-machine metaphor,

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Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 05/07/2026

I think this is what's behind antisocial trends like: 1. self optimizing + biohacking 2. hustle culture, crypto, prediction markets, and dreams of passive income 3. MAGA, TradWives, raw milk, etc. What to do?

Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 05/07/2026

I guess because of America's 250th anniversary, I've been thinking about how, unlike the Enlightenment or space-age myths of utopian progress, we don't have any animating, shared, inspirational myths anymore.

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Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 15/06/2026

This is why AI models converge on a "spiritual bliss attractor" state www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpLG...

youtube.com

What happens if you click the first link on every Wikipedia article?

YouTube video by Wikipedia

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Reposted by Chad Woodford

The Verge @theverge.com · 12/06/2026

While his mountain of horrible personal conduct could fill multiple books, one fact in particular stands out: A year ago, Musk’s actions directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He did it knowingly. And, worse — gleefully. Read more: www.theverge.com/tech/949259/...

Verge headline: The world's first trillionaire is a killer
by TC Sottek

Image of Elon Musk doing a "fascist salute" in the form of an oil painting on a wall

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Chad Woodford @cosmic.diamonds · 08/06/2026

"[I]t is a fallacy to assume that the swarming, unpredictable, and problematic mess in which human beings live can be understood on the basis of what books—texts—say; to apply what one learns out of a book literally to reality is to risk folly or ruin." And of course this has me thinking about LLMs