Love this so much.

I spent a lot of the morning anxious about generative AI after reading about other professors’ struggles with how the technology has upended how we teach. It’s long been frustrating to me that teachers and others bear the burden of adapting to a world that big tech companies have created, seemingly with the goal of enriching themselves. Later in the morning, I read a worrying story about how a company called Flock is building tools that will let customers of their automated license plate readers (including Lexington, the city I live in) do even more invasive surveillance of the people they pick up on their cameras.

Wish I’d done more to resist Flock adoption in Lexington.

Interesting point from Masnick.

None of this is good, and I think there are dangers in using copyright as the bulwark against AI. Conversely, I will take a bit of pleasure in administration infighting, especially if it gets in the way of the AI companies.

More reporting like this. Anti-semitism is a genuine problem, but there is nothing genuine about the Trump administration’s supposed concern about it.

This is the third (or fourth, if you count a quote-pulling skim) time I’ve read this book in the past 2ish years, and I do think that I need to give myself more of a break before trying to come back to it again. I really like the audiobook, though, and I’m glad I now own it in mp3 and epub. I also needed the read, since it’s a hopeful one, and I started it when I was in desperate need of something hopeful.

My workflow for pushing linkposts to my website requires me to include at least two words in each description, which prevents me from posting just a single eyeroll (or vomiting) emoji. [gift link]

Gotta keep asking ourselves whether we truly own our computers.

That this is coming out of Kentucky only makes me more upset.

I like traditional hymns a lot, but yesterday’s service included two amazing Congolese choirs, and I’m starting to suspect that everything Mormonism taught me about guitars and drums not belonging in church is wrong.

What a petty, selfish president we have.

Prison tablets are such an exploitative use of technology. It’s a clear example of using technological development to oppress ratger than liberate. I highly recommend Cory Doctorow’s The Bezzle for its (fictional) riffs on prison tech.

Again, more of religious commentary on AI that emphasizes labor issues.

Spending time at a local library, thinking about how much these institutions offer their communities, and bemoaning that there are politicians petty and cruel enough to want to undermine them.

I haven’t done all the homework on the new pope, and I don’t know how much it makes sense as a non-Catholic to have a take on the new pope, but I’m here for religious leaders who express skepticism about AI specifically as a labor issue, not just in vague spiritual terms.

So, arguing that people of color are genetically less intelligent is fine, but criticizing that argument is radical woke? What a dumb, dumb world we live in. [Gift link]

Some really good reporting from the CBC on a gross site (that thankfully appears to be done).

Some really good reflections in here.

Mitch McConnell is the only one of my elected federal representatives to respond in any way to the concerns I phone or write in, but it’s always with super vague copypasta that makes me more angry than no response at all.

Oof. Not great.

My feelings toward generative AI are strong and negative, and I try not to share everything critical I read so that I’m not beating that drum over and over. This is worth a read, though: Generative AI is a great tool for trolling and Bannonesque “flooding the zone,” and the Trump administration’s use of it in these petty ways is arguably just as worrying as DOGE’s irresponsible appeals to AI. I just don’t like what these tools are doing to us—and as its supporters point out, this is the least powerful they’ll ever be.

That Elon Musk would abuse his government position for his own benefit isn’t at all surprising. That he would use it to argue for an exemption to public records laws to hush up a neighborhood dispute is petty enough to catch my attention. [gift link]

Oh look, it’s all my least favorite things about tech right now, combined in a single, enraging story.

I just spent way too long (even longer because I insisted on doing it in French) writing up a post about movie posters I remember seeing in France and Switzerland while living there as a Latter-day Saint missionary. I have final grading to do and a lawn to mow, but those specific memories of movie posters pop up every once in a while (despite, as I explain in the first post, not really being much of a movie buff?

“Kentuckian” has long been an important part of my identity, but every time I watch the Kentucky Derby, the more it makes me mad.

Look, I have some sympathy for Mozilla because it’s Mozilla… but Mozilla’s dependence on Google is a real problem.

I finally read about the whole tattoo thing. It’s so dumb that it makes me angry. I don’t want to think about it, but I’m bookmarking it because if I don’t, my brain will refuse to remember that Donald Trump made such a dumb assertion. It will get drowned out by so many other dumb things.

Last Sunday, I preached in my Community of Christ congregation, beginning five weeks of messages from Revelation. This sermon came together with more difficulty than the last few that I’ve done, but I took advantage of being the first person preaching on Revelation by setting the stage for a responsible reading of the book as about the past, not the future. I attend a relatively conservative Community of Christ congregation, so it was unsurprising to get some pushback on that, I guess.

This book makes an interesting, important, and compelling argument. I find it personally interesting, and it will be useful for a conference paper that I’m thinking of putting together next fall (it turns out that Jacques Ellul’s ideas overlap with the Book of Mormon in interesting ways!). If I’m hard on the book, it’s because that argument feels scattered. While I appreciate the mountain of sources that the author draws on, I feel like a shorter, tighter book (or even article!

I started the day grumpy about generative AI, but articles like this just make it worse.

I have already been skeptical about Duolingo (as a company—the app is mostly not bad) for a while, but this is the sort of thing that makes me want to find an alternative for kiddo to use fast.

Every fake ad in this month’s print issue of The Onion is making fun of Elon Musk. All of them. What a great news source.

Matthewdown is an implementation of Markdown that has cleaned up the Greek some and included some popular features from Qdown.

Chilling read. gift link

Everything in this article makes me sad.