About a week ago, I felt like I was going through an audio drought—I wasn’t listening to any audiobooks, my podcast consumption has continued to go down in recent months, and I just wasn’t listening to anything while doing the dishes or whatever. This wasn’t necessarily a problem (it’s been good in terms of mindfulness, for example), but it had gone on long enough that I decided that I wanted something to listen to.

Darkly hilarious.

There are few phrases grosser than “monetizing our user base.”

This made me laugh out loud while reheating my leftovers for lunch.

Look, even academics cite the wrong papers sometimes, but if the researchers you cite to support your crime bill don’t actually support your crime bill, that should be a warning…

Musk’s pettiness knows no bounds.

We live in a dumb timeline. Why are we turning TVs into surveillance machines?

Look, I’ve never been really into Reddit, but I’m still really disappointed in the company. This sucks.

I’ve never voted for Michael Adams, but I appreciate his being a voice of reason within his own party.

I recently started following The Onion again, and it’s already paying off.

C’mon, Reddit.

On peut pleurer la mort de quelqu’un sans oublier ses problèmes. Je ne savais pas tout cela, et j’avoue que je vois Navalny différemment maintenant. C’est toujours quelqu’un qui a mené une lutte importante, mais on ne peut pas ignorer ces propos non plus.

Very interesting case.

Depressing but important read.

Look, it’s hard to oppose legislation that purports to be “for the kids,” but with the EFF, Mike Masnick, and other voices I respect still firmly against this, I’ll be calling my reps—and encouraging others to do the same.

Russia is in the wrong in this conflict, but that also means that Russians are among those being wronged.

You know, instead of assuming that we must grow AI data centers and asking how we should power them, we could look at the costs in terms of power and ask whether we should grow AI data centers.

Heck yes.

Hmm. Unsurprising but all the more frustrating for it.

Fascinating read on web crawlers and robots.txt

Good article on some dumb fearmongering.

Masnick’s perspectives on free speech are always helpful.

Domain name infrastructure plays a bigger role than we might think.

I bought this book with a gift card and to thumb my nose at an obnoxious visiting authority at a Latter-day Saint stake conference from over four years ago. This guy spent the Saturday evening session of the conference complaining about young adults who supported gay marriage and parents who pushed back against school discipline instead of giving their kids a whuppin’ (his words, not mine) and then still had the gall to talk about how great Mormonism is because it doesn’t believe in a fire and brimstone angry God.

Wondering how long it will be until implicit praise of her family values gets taken down from the LDS and BYU websites.

Bookmarking for later reference. I get that there are some complicated factors at play here, but this still seems wrong to me.

Hate to see Swift taking a page out of Musk’s book here.

Fascinating post. Grateful for Doctorow’s honesty at his being scammed and interested in the idea that lowering quality of services through AI trains us to accept fraud.

Une très mauvaise idée, celle-ci.

A week and a half ago, I wrote a post arguing that the Bible is actually more of a weak point than the Book of Mormon for fundamentalist, literalist attitudes toward Latter-day Saint scripture. That post—like this one—was inspired by an Introduction to Scripture class that I’m currently taking through Community of Christ’s Temple School. The first lesson did a lot of work to play up the Bible as the main scriptural foundation of Community of Christ and is doing some respectful but firm downplaying of the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants.

I first read this book a few years ago, making my way through Ruff’s books after enjoying Lovecraft Country. I might like this one just as much—it’s bizarre to the point of absurdity but in a way that gets you to think. This reread was inspired by picking up a copy of my own from the clearance section of my favorite independent bookstore, and I’m really glad I own it.

I defined myself for a long time as a moderate or centrist, and despite my leftward march in recent years, it still feels weird to be aspirationally reading a book on anarchism. As Branson points out early in this book, there are plenty of people who would never identify with the word but agree with anarchist ideas in science fiction, and I guess that’s how I got here. Twice in 2023, I read Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway, and on the second read, I realized that there were some strong anarchist themes in that book.

I owe Pete Enns a lot. Reading his books in the years before I hit a faith crisis helped that experience go a lot more smoothly, as did continuing to read his stuff and listen to his podcasts during the process of faith transition. Around the time this book was coming out, though, I needed a break. I felt like I knew most of his stuff, his media efforts felt like they were getting bigger and more corporate, and as much as I owed him, I wasn’t feeling it anymore.

This is a fascinating book written by two authors who began the project wanting to write about how cool it would be to settle space… but after consulting all the evidence, concluded that it might not be a great idea. It’s kind of a downer book in a way—I’ve always been excited about space, and it’s a bummer to think of it as an awful place where we might not have a future.

I’d love to complete a seminary degree one day, but I’m also having to convert the ten hours of video lectures for the non-credit church class I’m taking to audio so I can squeeze them in at 2x speed while I do dishes, so I doubt I’ll get to that part of my bucket list anytime soon.

Interesting Book of Mormon reading here.