Jim Morin on AI and the church: A Disembodied Gospel

This seems quite reasonable to me. As someone who uses LLMs daily for my coding work, I have been intrigued by tools like Magisterium AI and Truthly AI for study and research. Morin comments:

And in some cases, engagement with other sources may even promote a kind of remote communion with their authors. Perhaps a priest could use A.I. in this way, without slowly abdicating his personal vocation to preach the gospel as an act of love. I doubt it. Power and comfort have long been the enemies of the priesthood.

I’m not preparing or delivering homilies but this caution about a “slow abdication” of vocation or, in my words, personal agency, is a real fear. I feel it creeping up on my in my coding work even though I have almost 30 years of experience in that endeavor. Why wouldn’t it sneak up on me when I’m engaged in an activity with which I have much less experience and much higher expectations?

For now, I keep the faith-focused LLMs at a long arms reach. Occasional use for very specific research questions mostly to point me to primary sources where I can continue using my brain to read and engage with the topics I’m studying. Is it little more than a friendlier search engine? I don’t know. It feels dangerous and that’s why I’m wary.

I gathered some ideas of how to convert more folks when they visit my clothing store at Deathless. I was not prepared to “feel” some kind of way about these sorts of updates. It all feels so smarmy. I think I’m going to try something quite different. Zero sales is still zero sales so why not?

The Madison is probably the best work Taylor Sheridan has done. What stands out the most is how good Kurt Russell is. When he’s on screen, you can’t look away. When he’s not on-screen, you can’t wait for him to come back. I’m looking forward to the second season.

Whipsaw brain day today. Mass -> Work -> Confession -> Work -> Volunteer Committee Meeting -> Work -> Holy Week Prep

Switching my brain gears between these things is tough. I get stuck ruminating on the last thing and miss the now thing.

How is there not an HVAC controller that has any logic to it? I want my house to be 68 degrees all the time. Why do I have to tell the thermostat when to shift from A/C to heat?

When they start smashing up bells made in that exact building 140 years earlier, it really makes for quite a story.

Tom Scott smashes a bell

Gambling on Everything

I’ll admit to being somewhat surprised at how quickly Polymarket and Kalshi have been able to become so commonplace in daily discussions. “Let’s see what the quants on Poly say” was amazing to hear last week in my small, Midwest town. There is evil afoot in these markets.

Father Longecker pulling no punches on Prince William

Prince William was asked about his religious commitment in an interview last week. The heir to the British crown, and therefore the future head of the Church of England and “Defender of the Faith” remarked that he doesn’t much go to church, but he has a “quiet belief” whatever that means. Is it too radical and rigid to ask whether he is able to affirm the Nicene Creed? One doesn’t expect the man to be a theologian, but he comes across as having inherited the depth of his mother. In other words, “Tim nice but dim”. Prince William seems a perfectly ordinary modern 21st century upper class Englishman. A mild mannered, default agnostic. By “default agnostic” I mean he never really gives God consideration. “God—-if he’s there—is the idealization of our values” sort of thing. As such he will be the perfect head of the Church of England—a once noble sect that has now devolved into a pleasant community of pleasant people trying to make he world a pleasant place. An Australian friend once commented in that refreshingly brash way some of them have, “The Church of England? That ain’t a religion mate. It’s a set of table manners.”

You’ve settled into Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov for 900 pages of Russian love triangles and a billion nicknames and Fyodor hits you with a chapter of excruciating witness to the horrors that man can perpetrate on man. Wow.

A couple of weeks ago, the Bishop of our Diocese said, “Last year, we had a record-breaking 250 people join the Church. This year, that number is 400.” In my bubble, I see a lot of talk about a resurgence of the Church. I’d love to see this validated from some outside perspective.

Here’s one article that shares some real data but not exactly impartial: Record numbers join the church

Is modern technical clothing really better?

I love the big takeaway here: better skill and knowledge of your gear and tools leads to better outcomes. It’s the experience and wisdom that matters, not the stuff.

Inmate crafts crosses, delivers hope to nursing home residents

It’s easy to be cynical about jailhouse conversions. It’s easy to dismiss them as a means to an end. But, I found this story heartwarming and I hope it brings warmth and joy to the folks in the nursing home and that it entrenches a love for others in the inmate.

It’s hard to compete in online marketing with the AI memers of the world. As a personal principle, I don’t create marketing material that uses AI voices or AI generated human faces. That means my ads are “boring” or “simple” and thus no one pays attention. What’s a principled person to do?

I’m here for this phase of Jonah Hill.

The Oscars’ Unlikely Tribute to Motherhood

Powerful cultural forces have long called for adults to extend adolescent frivolity into their twenties and thirties and downplayed the social value of raising children.

I’ve been saying for years that a lot of the drag on our society from an ethical and moral standpoint is rooted in selfishness, the elevation of the self above everything else. This is a strong indicator of how that selfishness plays out.

Just a bit outside. I’ll get ‘em next year.

Last night, we had a tornado warning amidst a severe thunderstorm warning and then 30 minutes later, it snowed. Weather has no boundaries anymore.

I’ve long worked in organizations with engineers spread around the globe. It’s common to wake up to PRs, incidents, emails, DMs, etc. from colleagues working where the sun rises long before it does where I live. There’s a certain amount of mental and comprehension overload that happens with that setup.

Do I need to jump in and work on any of these things? Which of them takes priority? Will I be helping or just adding noise to the work in progress? Now, we’ve added a new player into this and ,in some cases, it’s a challenge of my own making.

The"night shift" agent seems like a true boon on the surface. It can do what I ask it do while I sleep. I wake up and find entire new features built, tested, and documented. That’s an amazing productivity boost. It’s almost like having two days of work in a single day. This is amazing. Think of all the things we can get done that we never had time for before.

There’s a catch, though. There’s always a catch. The review and comprehension burden that agents have already created for us has now doubled. In this case, we don’t even have the benefit of having watched or interacted as the solution was put together. No chance to redirect the agent or stop it if we see it going astray. It’s just a massive blob of code that we need to understand, troubleshoot, test, and be able to justify to our colleagues and our customers.

We haven’t even considered the opportunity cost of that “fresh eyes” moment that many of us have in the mornings. We wake up with a new perspective on that little nagging concern about yesterday’s work. We open the editor and we see a new, better way to get it done. Where is the space for that when the PR from the agent waits for our approval? Why fiddle with yesterday’s thing that’s “probably good enough” when there’s a whole new thing that’s “already done”?

This feels like a ripe setup for burnout. It feels like a trap for unintended consequences. It feels untenable.

I don’t typically work like this but I know quite a few engineers who do. I don’t worry about the quality of their work because they are good engineers, great engineers even, and I know they’ll ensure the work is up to snuff. I do worry about their happiness, their fulfillment, their joy of having solved a hard problem with a craft they’ve honed over the years. This fear isn’t new because of “night shift” agentic work but that expectation does seem like one more facet being carved into what is quickly becoming a fractured line of work.

Another week. Another round of tornado watches.

I doubt this holds through the end of the competition but I’m proud of myself for being in the top 25 percent or so of all athletes in my age group.

It wasn’t that long ago that I was very overweight and facing an early death.

You know the world is changing when your wildly non-technical spouse sends you a link to a Claude thread where she’s been hashing out the requirements for an app she needs for her animal husbandry business.

Walmart’s Great Value ginger snaps are the best ginger snaps you can buy. You can make better but you can’t buy better.

Coldplay’s Parachutes album still holds up 25+ years later. Anyone of a certain age probably has a story about this album and/or one of its songs.

This folks define “lifetime” a bit differently than I do.

My son is taking the SAT today. He asked me this morning, “Did they have Latin on the SAT when you took it?” I guess he thinks I’m 150 years old.