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.

Sam Altman: I see humans achieving omnipotence using dark matter by… 2030 maybe? That’s if OpenAI is given a quadrillion dollars Theo Von: Yeah Altman: Or, we may become a race of slaves, genetically modified to be harvested by robot spiders. That’s if OpenAI doesn’t get the money Von: Right

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

they're being cautious because of the Hitler concerns, you see

This is so good 🤣🤣🤣

It’s important to revisit influential books from the past and evaluate their promises. For example, in Sapiens (2011), Yuval Harari says that we will soon have resurrected Wooly Mammoths, cyborg insects, and cyborg sharks. None of these has yet materialized.

As a long time fan and user of the beloved m-dash, this made me smile — “the OG vibe shift” 😋 www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the...

Does becoming a billionaire turn you into an unhinged sociopath or is being an unhinged sociopath a prerequisite to becoming a billionaire? We may never know www.theverge.com/decoder-podc...

This is not the act of a legitimate government.

Ever since The Studio did that satirical episode on the Koolaid movie, I feel like half the movies I see promoted are basically some variant on that www.theverge.com/analysis/706...

Today I learned that Schopenhauer encountered the philosophy of Yog-Vedanta / Hinduism in the 19th century by reading the "Oupnek'hat," a Latin translation of a Persian translation of the Upanishads. Probably the most impressive game of telephone I've heard of.

This should put to bed the idea that LLM-based AI chatbots are anything other than representations of their creators. Garbage in, garbage out.

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

On top of that—and this is why I think Apple delayed its new Siri—I absolutely do not want a hallucinating LLM running around with my most sensitive data, even if otherwise trustworthy, which is another huge assumption.

Is it just me or is there no killer AI app yet? The foundational models are fun and useful, but beyond them, there’s no high profile application of AI that stands out and makes the mainstream news. It’s odd.

I love reading serious stories about guys who believe AGI is real, it feels like a bunch of millionaires plotting to find and capture Santa Claus

As I read in Emily Hao’s eye opening new book Empire of AI about how Chile is decimated by copper mining because of the endless need for copper in computer hardware, I’m thinking about how Trump wants to kill the American penny. Isn’t there a perfect solution there?

I can't believe Apple made its new version numbers Y2.1K vulnerable 😜 #WWDC

🏆 I love LA.

A thousands monkeys typing on typewriters will eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare. The question of the moment is: Can 273 republican congresspeople pass any legislation? #bigbeautifulbill

Elon Musk: Not The Most Racist South African Ever will forever be my Peak New York Times Moment www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/o...

Waking up to the fact that we live in satire-proof times because everything from government to business is now a self-satire #Mountainhead www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

@caseynewton.bsky.social why do I have a feeling you're using Lazy.so and not talking about it?

Louis Brandeis said that we can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we cannot have both. In 1933. He said it in 1933.

I’ve been thinking lately about how #AI is a great tool for laundering dubious ideas and lending them the patina of objective rationality (Excerpt from Richard Barbrook’s enlightening book Imaginary Futures)

Is ChatGPT the worst brand name in tech history? Can you imagine if Google was called SearchPageRank instead? Or Twitter was called PostHadoop? Quite the testament to the strength of OpenAI’s brand I suppose

In response to all the talk lately by @kevinroose.com and others of AI systems becoming conscious, and Anthropic hiring its first "AI welfare researcher," I delve into the question of AI consciousness www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN-r...

The Sun-Times' AI content also includes made up experts, quotes, and publications. It's the same story, over and over: a news outlet outsources work to freelancers or third-party firms that use AI, and that content is thrown in with actual human work w/o review. www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Oof. I feel this. So well said

When I was a young AI researcher in the 1990s I thought I knew everything there was about intelligence too. But it took me the last 30 years to fully understand what I didn't know and how much nobody knows #AGI www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/t...

Now that Elon Musk has finally succeeding in giving Grok his own anti-woke mind virus I’m bumping this piece I wrote about the importance of developing discernment in the face of LLMs because you never know what a chatbot’s owners will instruct it to do cosmicwit.substack.com/cp/158036375

Twitter users: @grok is it true that coca cola can unclog a toilet? Grok:

In this post I push back on the mounting claims of AI sentience by @kevinroose.com, @dwarkesh.bsky.social, Ray Kurzweil and others, and ask for more discernment open.substack.com/pub/cosmicwi...

To paraphrase Homer Simpson: Donald Trump: the cause of and solution to all of our problems 🙄 www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/b...

33% of my personality is Liquid Television

I did not know that George Lucas was that explicit about Star Wars! From @adambecker.bsky.social ’s wonderful new book about the strange Silicon Valley ideologies driving tech innovation