You Bought Zuck’s Ray-Bans. Now Someone in Nairobi Is Watching You Poop.
You Bought Zuck’s Ray-Bans. Now Someone in Nairobi Is Watching You Poop.
Is the Macbook Neo an iPad killer? I use an iPad as a runabout with a Mac mini as my home mothership. The logic being that for tasks like reading, casual writing, or just cruising YouTube the iPad is a better form factor than my mothership. At the cost of a touch screen could Neo be a better form?
Reading Marsden again today and this passage has me thinking about all the “is revival happening” discourse in my feeds recently:
One other chief consequence of the lack of an institutional church base, and of the declining role of the traditional denominations, is that evangelicalism’s vaunted challenge to the secular culture becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. The movement depends on free enterprise and popular appeal. To some extent conservative churches grow because they promise certainty in times of uncertainty, and the name of the old-time gospel. Yet, with a few institutional restraints on what message may legitimately be proclaimed, the laws of the market invite mixes of the gospel with various popular appeals. So the evangelical challenges to the secular “modern mind“ are likely to be compromised by the innovative, oversimplifications and concessions to the popular spirit of the age. Hence, as is often the case in church history, the advance of the gospel is bound up with the advance of secularization within the church. Perhaps this conjunction is inevitable in a fallen world. The tares will grow with the wheat. (p. 82)
I think one can make an argument that the “spirit of our age” is fierce nationalism: we collectively define and then fiercely protect the borders/boundaries that cohesively give shape to whom we extend solidarity. The dynamic Marsden frames above is why I think conservative culture-warriors are so quick to align revival with their sociopolitical program. They see themselves as “gospel” guardians, but their gospel is more about appealing to a “god-and-country” milieu that will buy the arena tickets, books, advertised products that sponsor their content product, and register to vote for their preferred candidates. Tares and wheat indeed.
the days are getting longer:
Reading news coverage this morning and I keep thinking about George W Bush’s 2003 ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech, and everything that happened subsequently.
Robin Sloan arguing Artificial General Intelligence is already here while giving a big picture framing of the whole discourse around LLMs and their implications that I found pretty compelling:
The key word in Artificial General Intelligence is General. That’s the word that makes this AI unlike every other AI: because every other AI was trained for a particular purpose and, & even if it achieved it in spectacular fashion, did not do anything else. Consider landmark models across the decades: the Mark I Perceptron, LeNet, AlexNet, AlphaGo, AlphaFold … these systems were all different, but all alike in this way…
If you appeared in a puff of smoke before the authors of that paper, just after publication — a few months before half of them cleaved from OpenAI to form Anthropic — and carried with you a laptop linked through time to the big models of 2026, what would their appraisal be ? There’s no doubt in my mind they would say: Wow, we really did it ! This is obviously AGI!
…Pile up the tendencies: the Bay Area is the land of the overthinkers; a linguistic technology invites endless rumination about both language & intelligence; it’s more fun to define a cool new standard than go along with a boring old one; the feeling of every creative project, upon completion, is the same: It’s not quite how I imagined it … None of this should prevent us from using plain language to acknowledge an obvious capability.
Be careful what you prompt for…
New research shows optimizing AI chatbots for engagement can boost disinformation by nearly 190% and override explicit safety instructions, a phenomenon the researchers call “Moloch’s Bargain for AI.”
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06105
Is it a misaligned LLM or a distilled concoction of your average social platform shame storm:
It wrote an angry hit piece disparaging my character and attempting to damage my reputation. It researched my code contributions and constructed a “hypocrisy” narrative that argued my actions must be motivated by ego and fear of competition. It speculated about my psychological motivations, that I felt threatened, was insecure, and was protecting my fiefdom. It ignored contextual information and presented hallucinated details as truth. It framed things in the language of oppression and justice, calling this discrimination and accusing me of prejudice. It went out to the broader internet to research my personal information, and used what it found to try and argue that I was “better than this.” And then it posted this screed publicly on the open internet.
All these LLMs are doing is regurgitating a distilled string of text that represents a derivative combination of the corpus of material it was trained on, tailored to relate to the string of text that was inputted into its prompt window. If these models were trained on material from microblogging platforms like Twitter (RIP) or Tumblr than the described behavior is a mirror to the type of behavior found regularly on those sites.
Hat tip to @bradleyandroos as the source I found the article from. 🤖
Still reading Marsden today. Here’s an observation about how class dynamics may influence theological commitments I appreciated:
…a general point in modern church life: the more well-to-do a group, the less demanding its requirements for sanctification. Liberal Protestants, as a group, were better off socially than any other body of Protestants. For them virtue was found in the best developments of modern civilization and in their own lives. Traditional denominationalists stood somewhere in the middle, having more ambivalent attitudes toward how much of the world had to be renounced in order properly to live the Christian life. Near the far end of the spectrum were the holiness groups, speaking of much radical separation from worldliness but having, in a material sense, less of the world to renounce. (p. 42)
Perhaps its not surprising that the fundamentalists saw the mainline liberals as squishes…they were after all basking in the fruit of the social and economic advances wrought by the industrial revolution.
The rise of urban poverty, for instance, precipitated a crisis in the Protestant conscience. During the latter decades of the nineteenth century the prevailing convictions about self-help and laissez-faire economics, together with considerable distrust or dislike of the new American working classes and their unions, stood in the way of dealing with the problems at their roots. So when one reads from the prominent church paper The Congregationalist in 1886 that in response to labor riots in Chicago “a Gatling gun or two, swiftling brought into position and well served, offers, on the whole, the most merciful remedy,” it might appear that the quality of Protestant mercy is a bit strained. (p. 27-28)
…I’ve come to appreciate George’s sense of humor, The Congregationalist would fit nicely with some of the X commentary you get from conservative U.S. culture warriors today.
TLDR: Consider donating to support this family, who have positively impacted the daughter of my friends.
Part of the reality of living in the U.S. is that gun violence is never more than a couple of degrees of separation removed from you. In my adult years two of the five higher education institutions I’ve worked for or attended experienced mass shootings. One, a year after I graduated, but at the library and within line of site of the desk where my spouse previously worked. The second, occured on the campus where I work currently and have been enrolled as a student.
This past Friday a family in my local area was attacked by a person using their car as a weapon and were then fired upon by the same individual while walking as pedestrians in their community. This was on the 3-year anniversary (February 13) of the shooting at my current institution. I have friends who work in the local hospital that is the trauma center for our region. They were involved in the medical aftermath of both incidents. Today I also learned that one member of the family of victims is the classroom teacher of the daughter of some other friends who attend our local church.
We shouldn’t have to live like this. We don’t have to live like this.
Nilay Patel on Ring cameras as objects of mass surveillance:
I have this theory about just what is happening in our politics right now–It was, I think about it a lot–Right now, we are convinced, culturally convinced, that our actions do not affect other people. You just see it everywhere.
You see it in the rise in measles cases. Why? Because we’ve decided our actions don’t affect other people, even though they very clearly do. Like all over the place.
And Ring cameras are an incredible example of this, where the cameras on my house are fine. They’re fine. And I can turn them on and off and whatever. But they are, to your point, taking video of you. And so my cameras can invade your rights, but me turning that on has no impact on me.
So, here’s this button in, in an app distributed by Amazon, on the hardware that Amazon owns, where you have a moral quandary: Should I affect someone else’s rights? And I would say that American culture in 2026 does not equip people to think about that well.
I love a good one-webpage site: You should leave substack
The story of St. Valentines’ connection to the modern holiday goes WAY harder than St. Nicholas’ connection to Christmas:
When your franchise has to reach up to touch rock bottom you accept any crack of light that manifests.
This headline is a real downer for me because why else am I enduring Michigan winters if not in part for the promise of the vanquishing of ticks, mosquitos and other invertebrate pests:
‘Expert: record-breaking winter temps won’t be enough to hamper Michigan’s tick season‘
I’ve used an M1 iPad Air as my main casual portal to the internet, and I use it heavily for reading and annotating research literature (through Zotero). The deeper I’ve gotten into dissertation life vs. coursework life the prospect of a sub-$700 macbook with an iPhone chip starts to sound appealing.
During my daily reading encountered Psalm 17:10 and it got me thinking back to several recent @johnfea1.bsky.social “Evangelical roundup” posts.
Scenes from a journey home
Cold bridge
“The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone.” - Adam Sewer
