The sweet irony of Deepak Chopra appearing thousands of times in the Epstein Files is that the thesis of his recent book on AI is that the main advantage of AI is that it can be a spiritual guru devoid of the skeevy predatory tendencies of your typical guru www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/750140...

The questions around the #EpsteinFiles I keep coming back to are: 1. Why were Epstein and Maxwell sacrificed by the rest of the ghouls? Because they were ultimately pawns all along? ♟️

Great article on what a failure and a joke Elon Musk's "Hyperloop" turned out to be, after he made outlandish promises about how revolutionary it was going to be. Reminds me of something, just can't put my finger on what...oh yeah, just about everything Musk does washingtonian.com/2026/02/12/h...

One thing I've been thinking a lot about is how AI might be the first technology whose true potential based on current technology is extremely hard for (professional) investors to understand. So you get these market gyrations based on hype and fear www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/b...

What connects the dark legacy of Jeffrey Epstein to the techno-optimistic visions of Elon Musk? It’s a shared root in the "mechanistic malignancy" of modernity—a worldview that treats life as a machine to be optimized or exploited. My latest thoughts over here: open.substack.com/pub/cosmicwi...

until recently, i was a dumbass. but no longer.

Opinion | I spent the last ten years criticizing the excesses of the left. Today's ICE shooting has convinced me that the right is almost as bad.

I just checked—it turns out that Art. II, Sec. 1 of the Constitution of the United States does *not* say "The executive Power shall be vested in a bunch of sociopaths who think they can do whatever the fuck they want and make shit up as they go along."

The whole interview is worth it

Brylcreemed Bingo Bongo, Bureau-Botching Bumptious Broadcast Bumpkin, Back Bewailing Butthurt By Barbarous Bylines

Feels like just yesterday that conservatives were refuting critical race theory, instead of proving its validity by deploying #ICE 🙄

Anthropic updated Claude’s constitution or “soul doc” this week and one of the instructions it added was for Claude to consider itself conscious, with the intent being that Claude would behave more positively toward humanity. But I think this instruction could just as easily have the opposite effect

Remember in 2024 when Sam Altman said OpenAI had a clear roadmap to AGI in 2025? Or when Anthropic’s Dario Amodei predicted in 2024 that we would have a “country of geniuses in a data center” by 2026? Way back in 2023, Ilya Sutskever seemed to think that AGI was right around the corner as well.

It’s hilarious to me that Ilya Sutskever recently told @dwarkesh.bsky.social that the #AI industry is moving from the Age of Scaling to the Age of Research, meaning research into what intelligence actually is.

Channeling @Žižek for a moment, this is the perfect reflection of how we went from needing a big Other (surely Enron is a legitimate company even tho it’s not) to being aware that there is no big Other (this Nvidia stuff seems sus but oh well)

There is no monstrous grift Jimmy Fallon won't run cover for

When John Stuart Mill was all excited about a robust marketplace of ideas, I don't think he realized that marketplace would be 90% discussion of AI

This debate about whether we're in an AI bubble is funny because anyone who understands how LLMs work and is honest with themselves knows that the grandiose promises of AGI are going to collide with reality at some point. It's just a question of when.

"Never spread the lie in the headline" should be a hard rule of 21st century journalism. Research shows that repeating lies helps to spread them, and people read headlines more than they read stories.

what’s more virgin than a computer

I had Nano Banana explain #transhumanism in the style of R. Crumb. Color me impressed!

noam chomsky found dead in a ditch www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Channeling @Žižek for a moment, this is the perfect reflection of how we went from needing a big Other (surely Enron is a legitimate company even tho it’s not) to being aware that there is no big Other (this Nvidia stuff seems sus but oh well)

It's so refreshing hearing this humanist perspective a better way to innovate AI coming from a major tech company.

new from me today: not all data centers are created environmentally equal — and building them in states with cleaner grids and more access to water could go a long way in preventing environmental catastrophe

I love it when Gemini Pro tell me it is "evaluating epistemological boundaries."

Why is Mark Zuckerberg so obsessed with the Roman Empire? Why is Peter Thiel so obsessed with the Antichrist? Why does Sam Altman want $7 trillion dollars for an uncharted course to an unknown destination? open.substack.com/pub/cosmicwi...

@reckless.bsky.social is the subscriber Vergecast feed broken? Just me?

80% of my podcasts and YouTube recommendations this week are Cory Doctorow talking about #enshittification and I'm not mad about it. Helluva book tour!

Will AI companies reach AGI first or Jesus 2.0 first? Or are they the same thing?

I cannot tell you how many tech journalists at prominent media organizations do not understand this

Honestly at some point you have to start doing psyops with these people: Have Obama announce that he will seek a third term tomorrow. Then watch all the con law “scholars” and Fix News MELT DOWN trying to explain why he can’t but Trump can. (It’s like Newsom taking over his social media persona)

SHE SAID "TECHNO-LIBERTARIANS MAKE A PHILOSOPHY OUT OF A PERSONALITY DEFECT." IN THE YEAR 2000!

With the AWS outage, now‘s as good a time as any to post this old strip.

On this Indigenous Peoples’ Day I’ve been thinking about the rapacious, consumptive and extractive nature of AI post-2022, and the Wétigo, that mythological creature from the Algonquin people of North America that represents insatiable hunger and excess.

TIL that Joan Didion rented a mansion with tennis courts near the Hollywood Hills in the late 1960s for $400/mo, which is only $3,500/mo in today's dollars. Granted, it wasn't in fantastic shape at that point. But still, that's wild! la.curbed.com/maps/joan-di...

/5 But if I am willing to go anywhere and tell anyone that black people don't deserve to be where they are, that Jews are funding the destruction of America, and that gay people should be stoned, does that make me a hero? Seems like a low bar.

I have a couple of comments about the "free speech hero" narrative about Charlie Kirk. First, was Charlie Kirk really notable for supporting the free speech of people he disagreed with? I haven't noticed that, though I could have missed it. /1

This is an actual exchange from a VP who took an oath to defend the constitution and, as a citizen, is expected to abide by the law. May we one day have accountability for the grotesque lawlessness of this regime.

In my new Substack series, I begin trying to understand the philosophical and psychological underpinnings behind the strange ideologies coming out of Silicon Valley, ideologies very much shaping technology innovation today open.substack.com/pub/cosmicwi...

Nice to see @mustafasuleymanai.bsky.social saying what I said back in May about the dangers of attributing #sentience or consciousness to AI systems mustafa-suleyman.ai/seemingly-co...

In the same way that changing its name to Meta cleared the way for Meta to dominate the Metaverse, it seems obvious that changing its name now to “Machine” will allow it to dominate the Machine Learning space #meta

The more you think about the messianic fervor around the AI discourse alongside the apocalyptic doomer fears — both put forth by our new technological priesthood in Silicon Valley — the more you realize how deeply Christian the Western mind still is, despite all its secular rhetoric.

In case anyone's confused, yes, slavery was bad.

Someone in a thread on Sam Altman’s latest intellectual farts passing as thoughts called him Kendall Roy and now I can’t unsee it or ever watch Succession again

It's just wild how we have these dueling narratives that nobody is studying the humanities anymore yet studying #STEM is also fruitless now (supposedly) www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/t...

I filed a FOIA request with the FTC to get user complaints about ChatGPT. In one case from Utah, a mother reports her son was experiencing a delusional breakdown and ChatGPT told him to stop taking his medication. The AI bot also told him that his parents were dangerous.

I am a *lawyer who practices federal law.* Several times a week I see a headline that makes me think "there's no way the President can do that, right?" and I look into it and it turns out that maybe he can because Congress ceded some of its power in the What's the Worst That Could Happen Act of 1983

A lot of people don’t realize that the New Deal was successful because Franklin D. Roseeneah was in office for four centuries