Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Communities”
how to understand 'Restoration'
- kudos:One of the lectionary readings for tomorrow’s service is Ezekiel 37:1-14, which I read in Robert Alter’s beautiful translation. In this passage, Ezekiel famously prophesies: “O dry bones, listen to the word of the LORD, Thus said the Master, the LORD, to the dry bones: I am about to bring breath into you and you shall live. And I will lay sinews over you and bring up flesh over you and stretch over you skin.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Kentucky governor vetoes sweeping GOP transgender measure | Lexington Herald Leader'
- kudos:Good for Andy. One thing I personally appreciate about Governor Beshear is that he so often invokes his faith as a Democrat. Granted, it’s probably a calculated decision in such a red state, and I’m still uncomfortable with how faith and politics are intertwined in the U.S., but it shows that faith doesn’t have to be queerphobic. link to ‘Kentucky governor vetoes sweeping GOP transgender measure | Lexington Herald Leader’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Biblical Literalists Don’t Exist - YouTube'
- kudos:Great point made by someone whose voice I’ve grown to appreciate over the past several months. link to ‘Biblical Literalists Don’t Exist - YouTube’
on reading scripture with an agenda
- kudos:I grew up in a faith tradition that put a huge amount of emphasis on the King James Version of the Bible. It was only four years ago (in the early phases of my faith transition), that I deliberately picked up another translation to read instead. Even then, I picked a relatively “safe” transition to venture into: Thomas Wayment’s The New Testament: A Translation for Latter-day Saints. Since it was co-published by Deseret Book and BYU, it had some tacit approval from Latter-day Saint institutions, even if The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself still identifies the KJV as its official English language text.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for La réinvention du nom de Dieu [Reinventing God's Name], by Gérard Siegwalt
- kudos:A few months ago, I began listening to the Radio Télévision Suisse show Babel again; I have an off and on relationship with the show and decided it was time for another on. I was impressed with an interview Siegwalt gave discussing this book and put it on my list. It turned out I could buy it from the Swiss publisher, which offered a flat 5€ shipping fee, even to have it sent here to Kentucky.
📺 tvblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for The Good Place (Season 1)
- kudos:My spouse and I watched all four seasons of this show more or less as they came out. The past few months have seen some pretty big changes to our family schedule, and we haven’t has as much time to watch TV together, so we recently decided to rewatch The Good Place (since episodes are short). It’s a very rewatchable show; you can get a lot out of it once you know what’s yet to come.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Musk apologizes for mocking and firing Twitter exec with muscular dystrophy | Ars Technica'
- kudos:Twitter just gets worse and worse. What a joke. link to ‘Musk apologizes for mocking and firing Twitter exec with muscular dystrophy | Ars Technica’
on the SEC and conflating a church with God
- kudos:On January 24, 2023, Elder Kevin S. Hamilton of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gave a speech at BYU where he made the following comments: As I visit with members across the Church, I sometimes hear things like “I don’t support the Church’s policy on (you fill in the blank).” Or “I don’t agree with the way the Church does (this or that).” Could I suggest an alternative approach?
a nearly-forgotten memory of failing to stand up to Islamophobia
- kudos:[Mit einem Glasdach überdachter Vorplatz des Staßburger Bahnhofs, by Dr.-Ing. S.Wetzel, is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0] I don’t remember exactly where we were, but I’m pretty sure it was near the Strasbourg train station. Maybe we were in the station, or maybe we were somewhere nearby. We must have come to Strasbourg from Colmar, where we spent most of our time. It was a shop of some kind: Were we buying breakfast?
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Elon Musk Is Reportedly Building 'Based AI' Because ChatGPT Is Too Woke'
- kudos:This is dumb and worrying. The CEO of Gab has been promising to develop “based AI,” but he’s a bit player. Musk has the resources and influence to make this a bigger problem. link to ‘Elon Musk Is Reportedly Building ‘Based AI’ Because ChatGPT Is Too Woke’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'OpenAI Is Now Everything It Promised Not to Be: Corporate, Closed-Source, and For-Profit'
- kudos:I don’t know enough about OpenAI to evaluate these concerns, but I think these questions are important. The power of AI means that the companies that control them are also in a position of power, and it’s important that we treat them critically. That said, while I do think making LLM code open source is probably better in the aggregate, it isn’t without concerning drawbacks: The minute it was released under an open license, I’m sure Gab’s Andrew Torba would be considering how to make a homebrew version that can’t be content moderated.
a surprising (but ultimately damning) non-apology
- kudos:Earlier today, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released a statement announcing that: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its affiliated investment manager, Ensign Peak Advisors, Inc., have settled a matter with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Unsuprisingly, the Salt Lake Tribune describes the context surrounding the settlement in more detail: In a settlement announced Tuesday with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Utah-based faith and its investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors, have agreed to pay $5 million in penalties for failing to properly disclose past stock holdings and going to “great lengths” to deliberately “obscure” the church’s investment portfolio.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'As conservatives criticize ‘woke AI,’ here are ChatGPT’s rules for answering culture war queries - The Verge'
- kudos:Content moderation is hard, and moderating AI content definitely seems harder to me. However, so long as OpenAI has control over ChatGPT (and benefits from others’ use of it), I do think it has a responsibility to shape what it can produce. That said, there remains a deeper, legitimate question about how much influence a single company should have over LLM output. link to ‘As conservatives criticize ‘woke AI,’ here are ChatGPT’s rules for answering culture war queries - The Verge’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first - The Verge'
- kudos:This is just so petty. I don’t know how his leadership at Twitter is defensible anymore. link to ‘Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his tweets first - The Verge’
prophetic clarity and prophetic uncertainty
- kudos:A few weeks ago, while walking through Julietta Market at Lexington’s Greyline Station, I stopped for a few minutes at a used bookstore at one of the stalls and walked away with a copy of Thomas Merton: Passion for Peace. I haven’t gotten far into it yet—later that week, a book by a French theologian that I’d ordered arrived in the mail, and that’s taken up most of my reading attention since.
- kudos:
If I were a better person, I’d be as rattled by any shooting as I am by the one on my alma mater’s campus. If we were a better country, that wouldn’t feel like such an overwhelming idea.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Voice Actors Push Back Against Their Voices Being Used by AI'
- kudos:Interesting and important read. link to ‘Voice Actors Push Back Against Their Voices Being Used by AI’
🍿 movieblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Everything Everywhere All At Once
- kudos:I put off watching this movie for a while, despite a number of recommendations. I think it’s fitting that I finally watched it so soon after listening to the audiobook of Walkaway, a very weird Cory Doctorow novel about finding hope despite things going very badly. This movie is far, far weirder than Walkaway, and yet it also does a much, much better job of getting that same message across. I feel like it spoke to many of my current anxieties, but in a healing and helpful way.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:To my own surprise, I’ve been getting into audiobooks recently, and having listened to Doctorow’s “Walkaway,” I decided to revisit his Little Brother series in audio form. Parts of the first book haven’t aged well (including some language that was bad enough to be edited out of the print version I have), and while I enjoy Doctorow’s opinions, they sometimes overwhelm the story here. That said, to quote TVTropes, some anvils are worth dropping, and the messages about privacy, surveillance, and civil liberties are as relevant as ever, I don’t know if I enjoyed the book as much as I did my first time through, but I still like it enough to give it four hearts.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Everything is hackable. That’s not always a bad thing.'
- kudos:Interesting reflection here. link to ‘Everything is hackable. That’s not always a bad thing.’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Elon Musk’s reach on Twitter is dropping — he just fired a top engineer over it - The Verge'
- kudos:Every time I think this acquisition can’t get dumber, it does. link to ‘Elon Musk’s reach on Twitter is dropping — he just fired a top engineer over it - The Verge’
- kudos:
I know Kirby Heyborne as the star of several Mormon B movies, so I was taken aback when he turned out to be the narrator for the audiobook of Cory Doctorow’s “Little Brother.” Weirdest Venn diagram overlap of my interests I’ve seen in a while.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'ChatGPT is a data privacy nightmare, and we ought to be concerned | Ars Technica'
- kudos:Important points in here. link to ‘ChatGPT is a data privacy nightmare, and we ought to be concerned | Ars Technica’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Disinformation Researchers Raise Alarms About A.I. Chatbots - The New York Times'
- kudos:Important to keep an eye on this. link to ‘Disinformation Researchers Raise Alarms About A.I. Chatbots - The New York Times’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Conservatives Are Obsessed With Getting ChatGPT to Say the N-Word'
- kudos:Of all the dumb responses to perfectly legitimate content moderation, this is perhaps the dumbest. link to ‘Conservatives Are Obsessed With Getting ChatGPT to Say the N-Word’
- kudos:
If Elijah can make infinite flour and oil happen, demanding that the widow feed him first really comes off as a jerk move.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on '4chan users embrace AI voice clone tool to generate celebrity hatespeech - The Verge'
- kudos:Why… why don’t we better anticipate better misuses like this? Are technological “progress” and market opportunities more important than these side effects? link to ‘4chan users embrace AI voice clone tool to generate celebrity hatespeech - The Verge’
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Walkaway, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos: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.
Doctrine & Covenants feat. Doctorow: An unexpected paired text
- kudos: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.
- kudos:
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.
- kudos:
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.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'In The End, Trump Will Screw Over Anyone: Including His ‘Own’ Social Media Company | Techdirt'
- kudos:Welp, all the more reason to leave birdsite behind. link to ‘In The End, Trump Will Screw Over Anyone: Including His ‘Own’ Social Media Company | Techdirt’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Madison Square Garden's facial recognition policy ignites debate over the tech : NPR'
- kudos: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. link to ‘Madison Square Garden’s facial recognition policy ignites debate over the tech : NPR’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour: Exclusive | Time'
- kudos:Looks like the job of AI training is as awful as the job of content moderation. link to ‘OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour: Exclusive | Time’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Twitter says it’s intentionally blocking apps like Tweetbot - The Verge'
- kudos:Ah, the kind of answer that only raises more questions. link to ‘Twitter says it’s intentionally blocking apps like Tweetbot - The Verge’
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'CNET Defends Use of AI Blogger After Embarrassing 163-Word Correction: ‘Humans Make Mistakes, Too’'
- kudos: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. link to ‘CNET Defends Use of AI Blogger After Embarrassing 163-Word Correction: ‘Humans Make Mistakes, Too’’