The “brute force” metaphor is helpful here, and the article also draws attention to the vulnerability of algorithmic media to generative AI brute forcing.

I’ve been trying to figure out how angry to be about this move from Amazon, and Doctorow’s thinking is helpful: Very angry. (I don’t own and would never own an Echo, but it still makes me mad).

Acknowledging the ambiguity in Musk’s salute is important: not to let him off the hook, but to recognize how much more dangerous things are when they’re ambiguous than when they’re straightforward.

I believe that scraping the internet to profit off of generative AI is ethically problematic BUT I concede that it should be fair use BUT this is still a soulless and terrible argument.

Worrying stuff.

I still want to read the original comic that this and the radio adaptation were based on, but the Internet Archive copy is hard to read, and I had some work to do this afternoon that made it easy to put this on in the background. I liked this a lot (well, “liked” as much as one can appreciate a black comedy horror story about nuclear war. Some of the experimental animation choices and blending of animated and film footage seemed odd, and I’m torn between appreciating them and finding them distracting.

If I don’t bookmark this article, I will quickly forget how dumb this whole thing has been (not to mention petty and mean).

There’s something especially dark about the voice actor who played Wallace (of Wallace and Gromit) starring as a naïve Englishman in this story about the horrors of nuclear war. I’ve wanted to read the book this is based on for quite some time—and may yet read it now that I’ve found a copy on the Internet Archive—but I got to the radio adaptation first. The couple at the heart of the story are so naïve as to make the story heavy-handed, but it’s also a good literary device for just how helpless one is in the face of nuclear weapons.

I was intrigued when I heard that Mormonism would feature prominently in the third (but first?) Martin Hench book. Mormonism is hard to get right in fiction, and I wondered how Doctorow would do. The answer: Some things were off, but overall, he got things right. It nagged at me some, but overall, I appreciated his take. That’s not the most important part of my review, but it’s representative of everything I want to say about this book.

Honestly, I get the original call, but I’m glad Bluesky backtracked. Content moderation is hard.

What a mess.

What gross software.

Yes please.

Oh, please no. I get (and support) that Community of Christ wants to explore doing digital church, but it also has really compelling theological reasons to not deploy generative AI products, and this makes me sad.

I’ve had many good church experiences in my life, but today’s listening over Zoom to a former pastor give her sermon calling out billionaires by name while filling in the last few details on kiddo’s D&D character sheet ranks hiiiiigh.

I have qualms about the U.S. providing military support to any cause, but if there is such a thing as good U.S. military support, Ukraine is a clear example of it, and either way, this is an embarassment.

Some bonkers details in here.

I soured on Section 230 for a bit, but I came back and largely because of arguments like this one.

If Jordan Bardella thinks it was a Nazi salute… gift link

Taking a moment to remember that the Garden of Enid webcomic is a pinnacle of Mormon arts.

DOGE continues to insist on the dumbest way to carry out its dumb goals.

It’s all bad right now, but it’s still important to call out the particularly bad stuff.

One more thing right out of the Twitter playbook from DOGE: Firing people without understanding how important they are.

When I was in grad school, I was pretty centrist: more liberal than most of the students from BYU (where I’d just finished my bachelor’s) but more conservative than most of the students at MSU. I had an odd experience one day when a fellow student far, FAR to the left from where I was teasingly chided me for a Facebook post I’d made defending Common Core from one of my BYU friends who was convinced it was a communist plot.

Bookmarking this in case I need to show it to a family member.

This is an excellent graphic novel adaptation of the earliest of Mormon history. The art is good, the story is compelling, and I enjoyed reading it. I came close to buying this twice in the past year after finding it in comics shops, and I was delighted to find that my local library had a couple of copies. I do wish that I either knew a lot more history or a lot less history going into this.

McSweeney’s pulls no punches, but Vance has earned no mercy.

This book has been on my radar for a few months, and I’m glad to have found an audiobook I could check out (though I doubt I’d have regretted an impulse buy—this would be a good book to have on hand). Palestinian Christian ministers and theologians always call me to account in a way that I appreciate. I don’t think I should need someone from my own faith tradition (broadly speaking) to tell me how bad the situation in Palestine is (i.

The headline is a little provocative, but it’s scary that we live in a world where it makes some sense. More broadly, though, I found that the first Trump administration converted me to nuclear disarmament—yes, this president is scary, but that any president has access to that much destructive power is scarier still. I expect I’ll go further in that direction this time around.

Starting to sense a pattern.

The rules seem to be that it’s okay to do whatever in the GOP, but no Democrat can even seem to be in a sticky situation. What a joke.

Like everything I’ve read from Graeber, I appreciate the overall argument that he’s making and I find the evidence he marshalls compelling. At the same time, there’s a density to the latter that I admit having trouble following, so I don’t always see how it leads to the overall argument. Even with those caveats, I’m happy to endorse this read. I’m interested in how Graeber explores the relationship between moral thinking and economic modeling—as I posted earlier, I also find his thoughts on the moral dangers posed by abstracting interpersonal obligations into quantifiable debt with the help of money.

Bookmarking for… sigh… teaching purposes.

As usual, lots to like in this post from Mike Masnick.

Resubscribed to WIRED because despite my efforts to focus more on tech news than political news, THEY HAVE BECOME ONE AND THE SAME IN REALLY WORRYING WAYS.

Currently reading David Graeber’s “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” and while it’s really dense, one clear theme is how money has the power to abstract our moral thinking in dangerous directions. This NYT blurb seemed relevant.