Embarrassed to say that this gender dynamic of AI had never really occurred to me before. Interesting read.

I’m being hard on this book, so I want to emphasize that: I think it’s important, I pre-ordered it and have been looking forward to read it for a long time, there are parts of it that I deeply enjoyed, and it is likely to get cited in a couple of papers I’m working on.

That said, while I think there are a lot of good ideas and bits in here, it feels more like a collection of ideas than a cohesive book. I think a stronger throughline and more aggressive structure would have made it even better. I know it started off as essays/blog posts, and I think the individual components are great, but I’m not sure it’s more than the sum of its parts.

Kentucky primaries for the 2026 elections take place a week from today, so it’s not surprising that we’ve been getting some political mail over the past couple of weeks. Today, though, something came in the mail that really took me aback. David Kloiber’s campaign sent us something that was clearly more than a regular mailer, since it came in a letter-style envelope and was addressed to both me and my spouse.

Shouldn’t be reading this before bed because it isn’t calming me down.

Long before I ever knew what generative AI was, I was grumpy about the idea of Grammarly because I was suspicious of deferring to a computer on what “good writing” looks like. I appreciate Koebler’s thoughts here for the way it shows how generative AI—including Grammarly now, apparently—is doing something similar on an even larger scale.

It’s digital labor all the way down. What a depressing read.

I have tried not to think too much about AI bubbles, and Doctorow captures exactly why that is in this essay.

J’ai fait une grosse pause au milieu de cette saison, car comme j’ai déjà dit, je m’intéresse plus aux détails historiques, et les intrigues dramatiques de la série peuvent m’ennuyer au bout de plusieures épisodes. Pourtant, j’aime bien regarder, et j’en apprends beaucoup—il m’arrive même de m’investir dans le drame.

Wait, U.S. states are actually going after VPNs? What a terrible idea.

I’m working on a couple of projects right now (one professional, one personal) that have me asking the question that makes up the title of this post. While working on one of those projects last night (the personal one), I came across the verse that is Alma 5:5 in Community of Christ versification and Alma 7:12 in LDS versification. For this project, I’m reading out of the 1830 text of the Book of Mormon, as captured on WIkisource, and when I read over the verse, something felt off to me:

I backed this book on Kickstarter, intrigued by the idea of a graphic novel that documents and collects difficult experiences on Mormon missions.

When it arrived, I knew that actually reading it would be either healing or triggering for me, and I was happy to find that it was the former. There are a few improvements that could be made, but it met my hopes of being something that captured the Mormon mission experience as I know it (though there were a lot of COVID-19 stories, and how are these RMs so young!) but also spoke to the complex feelings that I and so many others have about those experiences.

I first tried reading this in 2024 and kind of stalled out after a while. It’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer, though! The guy who was executed for resisting Nazis! I felt like I really needed to give this another go, and so I did.

I like what the book is going for: The idea of radical devotion to Christ is something that speaks to me on a deep level. However, for me to be fully comfortable with that, I need “devotion to Christ” to be defined (and mapped onto other values) in a clear, specific way, and I don’t know that this book does that.

As I’ve noted a few times before, I’m a de facto Trinitarian, but I can’t say that I’m tremendously invested in the Trinity as an orthodox doctrine of Christianity. I know that some of this has to do with my Mormonism—growing up in a non-Trinitarian tradition has surely shaped my thinking about this—but I don’t think that’s really what’s going on here. Yes, I’m often sympathetic to the beliefs of the tradition I spent so much time in, but I’m also a non-theist who tends to see God as more of a metaphor for humans’ fleeting experiences with the ultimate than as someone whose nature and consubstantiality can (and must) be understood in distinct terms.

Like the last Tony-authored book I reviewed, I want to concede that there’s a bit of unfairness coming into my review. In some ways, I think it’s an important work that just isn’t what I’m looking for right now. What’s more, it’s kind of a reference work that I tried to read cover to cover, and that affects my thinking, too. However, I also have some grumps about it that I think are valid.

The story itself didn’t captivate me much. I felt like there were sudden developments for the sake of the plot moving forward, and even an twist that comes partway through the book felt like [insert sudden development here] rather than the surprise it was supposed to be. I also didn’t catch some of the character connections and payoffs at first, though I suspect that’s due in part to my own inattention.

Heartbreaking story, all the more so for the first-person reflective voice.

What a depressing read.

Wait, is Open AI naming a science-oriented product after a researcher whose work was famously appropriated by others for their personal benefit?

Just posting to say how much I love the way that Creative Commons licenses are allowing publications (say, Techdirt or States Newsroom) to repost good writing from other sources (say, The Conversation or ProPublica).

Some important observations in here.

I’ve felt for a long time that “what if AI gets sentient and does irreparable harm” is 100% the wrong way of framing things, and Doctorow knocks that argument out of the park here.

This was an enlightening listen on my way into work this morning.

Good line here:

“To Republicans who say that making filing your taxes for free with the IRS is too expensive: for just one day of bombing Iran, we could pay for 20 years of Direct File,” Warren’s remarks say. “And to Republicans defending the status quo, ask yourselves why you’re on the side of TurboTax and H&R Block instead of your constituents.”

Tim Cook is a coward.

I know we live in ridiculous times, and I have a print subscription to The Onion, and this is still one of the most bewildering articles I’ve read recently. I felt like I had to suspend my disbelief to make it on to each successive paragraph.