Why… why don’t we better anticipate better misuses like this? Are technological “progress” and market opportunities more important than these side effects?

I bounced pretty hard off of Walkaway a year or so ago, but I recently decided to give it another try. I felt like I needed a boost of hopeful thinking, and I’d seen Doctorow post about the book as being hopeful. Did it ever deliver! Walkaway is hopeful on a nearly religious level, and it was exactly what I needed. The book is not naïvely optimistic but rather tenacious in its belief that we can still make this a better workd. The audiobook was excellent, too, which I think made it easier to get back into it—and to read it so relatively quickly.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I am currently giving Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway another try after bouncing off of it a while ago. Because I bounced off of it so hard the last time, I’m surprised by how much it’s resonating off of me as I give it another go. This past week, I’ve been listening to a lot of Walkaway on top of doing a lot of religious reading: assignments for the Ministry of the Disciple class I’m taking through the Community of Christ Seminary’s Center for Innovation in Ministry and Missino, Gérard Siegwalt’s Reinventing God’s name [La réinvention du nom de Dieu], and various scriptures for today’s liturgical readings.

Tonight, I suddenly remembered my sister’s BYU roommate who insisted on calling ketchup and mustard “toppings” because saying “condiment” would require her to say “condom” along the way.

Is there any way to complete a CAPTCHA without providing free labor for ML/AI developers? Makes me angrier every time I have to do it.

Welp, all the more reason to leave birdsite behind.

Glad this story is still getting attention, because it so neatly demonstrates why facial recognition is scary. We shouldn’t tolerate this level of surveillance—by private or public actors.

Looks like the job of AI training is as awful as the job of content moderation.

Ah, the kind of answer that only raises more questions.

Here, as with autocorrect and citation managers, my personal opinion is that any human who knows enough to use the tool critically knows enough to do the job themself. Maybe slower, sure, but slower isn’t always bad.

As I’ve blogged about a couple of times recently, I’m currently reading R. Sikoryak’s Terms and Conditions, a graphic novel adaptation of the 2015 iTunes Terms and Conditions document, which no one ever reads.

I was struck (if not surprised) by something stated explicitly in the document, which appears on p. 59 of Sikoryak’s volume:

The software products made available through the Mac App Store and App Store (collectively, the “App Store Products”) are licensed, not sold, to you.

Fascinating read on potential threats posed by AI—and potential solutions.

Ashamed to admit that until this week, I ’d never really thought about the origins of this name. This seems like a pretty straightforward argument, though, and I can’t think of any compelling reason not to change the name.

Libraries are perhaps the most important public institution out there. We can’t afford to cut their budgets.

Hey, look, workplace surveillance doesn’t work.

I’m skeptical of many technologies, most of which I can concede have some real value. In contrast, I have a lot of trouble seeing any value in facial recognition that outweighs the obvious, large-scale harms that can come from it.

Repeat after me: Content moderation is a good thing.

It’s a long interview, so I didn’t read the whole thing, but what I did read made me want to read this book even more. I have a copy, I just need to open it up.

A good reminder that analog is often better. Digital often benefits others (including bad actors) more than ourselves.

What a weird, profound, and beautiful book. This is a very Mormon novel, and in all the best ways. It takes Mormonism seriously—even literally—but not uncritically. I’d wager that Peck has read Grant Hardy, and my favorite bit in an amazing book is a throwaway joke about farewell expressions in French in a way that only someone who knows and loves the Book of Mormon would do. More than all of that, it is a profound and optimistic (but never naïve) story about redemption knowing no bounds. I can’t recommend it enough.

I’ve been making a real effort to be less pessimistic about ChatGPT, and I imagine this makes a better headline than actual threat, but this is still the sort of thing that makes me wonder about AI. What is missing from our world that ChatGPT fills? And is it worth these increased risks?

I grew up in a faith tradition that—with the exception of major holidays like Christmas and Easter—didn’t follow the Christian liturgical calendar. So, shortly after I began attending Community of Christ regularly (and, given the circumstances, virtually) in 2020, I decided I was going to learn more all of the seasons and holidays that I wasn’t familiar with. A few months earlier, I’d heard an interview with the Swiss abbot Urban Federer on the Babel podcast by Radio Télévision Suisse. During the interview, Federer talked about a book of his that had recently been translated into French from his native German: Sources of friendship with God [Aux sources de l’amitié de Dieu]. I honestly don’t remember much about the interview, but it stood out to me enough for me to write down the title of the book—perhaps because I knew that its chapters followed the liturgical calendar. So, that summer, I ordered that book (and two others) from a French bookseller, and when November 2020 rolled around, I began using it as a guide to my first liturgical year.

Two years later, and we’re still learning just how bad this event was. Only two years later, and large parts of the country are ready to sweep it all under the rug.

Steve Shields does good work and has an interesting perspective on things. It’s fun to hear from him.

I’ve read this short novella at least four times already, but I received a physical copy for Christmas and couldn’t help but give it another read. Despite being existentially horrifying, it’s one of my favorite books of all time. The protagonist is a Mormon man who dies and wakes up to his surprise in hell. This hell is specifically promised to be finite, but it’s a vast kind of finite: It’s a Borges-inspired library that consists of every possible book (as if written by monkeys on typewriters), and once you find the book that tells your life story, you get out of hell. It turns out, though, that this library is mind-bogglingly huge, so you could live billions of lifetimes before finding your book. The point of the book is to problematize eternity: If a “finite” hell is this awful, how much worse is an eternal hell? Heck, even an eternal heaven doesn’t necessarily sound great when you’re done with the book. For such a depressing premise, though, it’s so well done—and leaves so much to think about.