Look, maybe this is a genuine misstep on OpenAI’s part, but it still feels to me like the company started with the guardrails off so that it could use this kind of user backlash to push the Overton Window in conversations with rightsholders. Also, remember that we small potatoes rightsholders will never be able to have our voices heard like Disney or Nintendo.

Something feels off here. An AI CEO who claims they genuinely didn’t anticipate copyright and deepfake concerns is either dumb or playing dumb. I can’t help but suspect the latter, which is arguably worse, since it suggests an effort to shift the discourse before complaints come in.

Oh là là, comme il a beaucoup exigé ce livre ! Ça fait des mois que j’essaie de le lire, et les écrits d’Ellul ont souvent dépassé ma capacité de comprendre le français philosophique. Je pardonne beaucoup à ce livre pour trois raisons. D’abord, c’est surtout un brouillon, n’ayant jamais été publié, et ce qui était surtout pénible aurait sans doute été corrigé lors d’une vraie édition du livre. Deuxièmement, il y a beaucoup de pépites d’or là-dedans, même s’il faut beaucoup creuser pour les atteindre.

This is a good article; it would be easy to just roll eyes at Cruz, but this goes further in explaining how Wikipedia actually works.

Just bookmarking everything I read on Sora for future grumpiness.

Wish I’d made more of a stink about Lexington adopting Flock cameras. It’s a creepy-as-hell technology, and we need to get rid of them.

Platformizing AI video generation in the way OpenAI is doing right now just makes me grumpier than I already am.

As a member of Community of Christ, I’m supposed to be a Trinitarian, but if I’ve learned one thing in recent years, it’s that I have very little patience for insistence on Trinitarianism. It doesn’t make much more sense to me now than it did when I was a practicing Latter-day Saint, and if I can recognize value in the theological reflections that emerge from an assumption of Trinitarianism, I am just not sold that it’s the only (or even best) way of understanding God.

Good connection of the worrying story about removing anti-ICE apps to bigger problems in tech.

Fun profile on Doctorow; I’m excited for my preorder of his book to arrive this week!(?). Gift link.

Ellul can be hard to review, and especially in this book! The core metaphor here is interesting and useful—I plan to draw from it personally and professionally. It’s also combined, though, with wild assertions, exegesis and theology that don’t land (for me), and moral panic that might be intentional hyperbole or might just be off base. So, there are some parts of this that are excellent and some parts that don’t really work.

Look, I know I’m predisposed to not like any new AI product, but this seems horrifying. Gift link.

Truly, we live in the dumbest (and pettiest) timeline.

Depressing read but very well put.

I continue to believe that cracking down on intellectual property is not the right way to resist AI, but Koebler does a great job of describing how maddening it is that big companies are going to get away with worse infringement than individual people taking advantage of fair use.

I think it was an episode of the Reply All podcast that opened my eyes to the fact that not listening to microphones and still placing creepily relevant ads is actually the worse possibility.

I’m completely serious when I say that Peter Thiel makes me want to get a seminary degree, because if we’re going to have theology about AI, I want it to be better than his.

Don’t know if this is better or worse than what I worried about.

Love this.

I backed this Kickstarter project several years ago, when a comic about Mormonism felt like it was right in the center of the Venn diagram of my interests. That’s still not far from the truth, but my relationship with Mormonism—and my experience as a Latter-day Saint missionary—is a lot more complicated than it was then. In fact, I’ve been thinking about rereading this for ages but have bounced off of it a few times.

I’ve wanted to get a seminary degree for a while, and I’ve often wondered if my seminary thesis would be on theology and technology, but I never expected to be in dueling theologies with Peter Thiel.

Pour vraiment atteindre l’égalité, il faut non seulement ouvrir « le masculin » mais aussi valoriser « le féminin »

Wow! Sure, coming from outside the LDS tradition, I have some theological quibbles with parts of this book, but what an amazing example it is of what I love about this series. It uses a close reading of the Book of Mormon—and some of the most obscure and overlooked parts of the Book of Mormon—to draw lessons that I can really get behind. It makes me want to already revisit the book and to the passages that it’s working with.

Il est souvent utile de lire une perspective étrangère sur tout ce qui se passe actuellement aux États-Unis, même quand ça me déprime.

Nick Fuentes is trouble.

I can’t remember how much of this series I’ve actually read, but I remember this one being my favorite of those I have read, and wow does it deliver on that memory. It’s a powerful example of what responsible, justice-oriented Book of Mormon theology can look like. It takes more effort to engage with than some of the previous volumes (especially considering how sleepy I was as I finished it this afternoon), so I think I need to revisit some of these arguments in more detail, but even though I was predisposed to enjoy this reread, I was still surprised at how many parts of the Book of Mormon it warmed me up to.

Rand Paul continues to be right on this.

Ça faisait des années que j’avais l’intention de lire cette bande dessinée, et j’ai enfin trouvé un exemplaire en français il y a quelques semaines, grâce à mon beau-frère. On a tellement l’habitude de diaboliser l’Iran aux États-Unis qu’il est même facile d’oublier qu’il y a de quoi diaboliser ! L’histoire personnelle de Satrapi est très émouvante, et je suis bien content de l’avoir lu. Je vois pourquoi c’est une classique parmi les bd.

More money for libraries, less for LLMs.

If I didn’t like the first book in this series as much as I remembered but was generous in my rating because I appreciate what it’s doing, I liked this second book more than I remembered but am harsh in my rating because I don’t appreciate what it’s doing. This book reads less as an extended conversation with 2 Nephi than as a wide-ranging, largely apologetic treatment of Latter-day Saint theology that happens to frequently reference 2 Nephi.

I love it when different books I’m reading come together in interesting ways. That happened recently while rereading Joseph Spencer’s 1st Nephi: A Brief Theological Introduction and restarting (this, time, in English) Jacques Ellul’s The Humiliation of the Word. In this post, I want to take up a distinction that Spencer makes in his book, suggesting that: Question’s about the Book of Mormon’s truth tend to be of two sorts. First, we want to know whether it all really happened.

There’s a really interesting quasi-theological question at the heart of this book, and I’m rereading it for the first time in over a decade because I think it will be useful for a sermon I’m scheduled to give in a couple of months. What “imaginary versions” of Jesus do we create for ourselves and how do they get in the way of our connecting with the heart of Christianity. There’s also a goofiness to the book that almost works.

It is September 13th. I am already buying myself a tea advent calendar and hating myself for it. I am thinking about how much more offensive capitalist Christmas should be to Christians than secular Christmas.

I remembered liking this book a lot when I first read it five or so years ago, so it was actually kind of disappointing to reread it now. There was a lot of it that didn’t feel relevant to me or that I felt I disagreed with. That said, I appreciate Spencer’s work a lot, and there are some great observations in here, so I’m trying to give it some grace in my rating.

If there’s one cause I truly aspire to be more radical about, it’s non-violence.

Good overview of recent Grok nonsense.