I recently re-read the original "Worse is Better" from 1989 (see dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBette...). It reminded me a lot of current discussions around AI in programming. In particular, it seems to me that Anthropic and OpenAI have built a whole business plan on building things "New Jersey style" —

I've seen lots of conversation recently about AI and preaching, both online and in my own social circles, in part because of this week's encyclical, in part because my two worlds are church and programming, and in part because things are moving so fast that people are talking about AI everywhere.

This is true but the most fun part is that there's a typo* in the Greek

Reading the news in 2026 is like:

I check Fox semi-regularly to see what people I disagree with are being told. Just now: "The New York Post reported that an accidental discharge of Pretti's...pistol, which was being held by an agent after it was taken away from him, may have made authorities believe their lives were in danger."

Their defense, by the way, is "We didn't know we were essentially paraphrasing Hitler, we were just expressing a common nationalist sentiment." I'm not sure that "We weren't being edgelords, we just substantively agree with some of the principles of National Socialism" is that effective an argument

ICE kidnapped a 7th-grader with a pending asylum claim and spirited him out of state without notifying his parents, seemingly with the cooperation of the local police in Everett, MA. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/12/m...

Choose your fighter.

I feel like this photo of masked, armed men pepper spraying a pastor protecting his community is going to be a defining picture of this moment in America for a long, long time.

The funniest and most frustrating part of old Twitter/new Bluesky is that it consists largely of smart and well-educated people having arguments about things outside their areas of expertise, in ways that rehash the contents of intro classes in the subject, with no self-awareness about it.

unbothered. moisturized. happy. in my lane. making friends for myself by means of the mammon of unrighteousness. flourishing.

Many people don’t know that Kristallnacht was unleashed in response to the assassination of a German diplomat in Parish by a German-born Polish Jew living in Paris. His parents were Polish migrants whose legal status had just been revoked by both Germany and Poland, leaving them trapped in a camp.

I'm willing to believe that the best chatbot spiritual counsel could be *better* than the worst human forms. There are plenty of clergy who will say things that are net harmful. On the other hand, it comes nowhere near the *best* human spiritual counsel, which is also grounded in empathy.

ok everybody get ready 30tgrs.ffm.to/armiesofthel...

Honestly, this is one my favorite church buildings in the entire world, in every season. What an odd thing to be the Rector. I randomly took the photo on the left yesterday to replace the one on the right on our website, after our administrator pointed out it was a bit snowy for September.

I've lived in Boston my whole life, and people really are like this... and it's what makes Massachusetts great. +++ "The only thing that really needs to be done at South Station is clean the bathrooms, they really need some attention," said Linda Radzvilla of Mashpee.

From: Donald John Trump Subject: I want to try to get to Heaven. ... That's why I've launched a 24 HOUR TRUMP FUNDRAISING BLITZ, and I'm asking everyone to chip in $15 to make it one for the record books! ... Sincerely, Donald John Trump

One of the potential problems with the rapid adoption of LLMs in fields like education is that the entire ecosystem depends on a handful of products by very large companies that are currently losing huge amounts of money on them, creating a classic “too big to fail” situation. Perversely (1/2)

There hath been a disturbance in a church in Friday Street; a great many young people knotting together and crying out “Porridge” often and seditiously in the church, and took the Common Prayer Book away; and did tear it; but it is a thing which appears to me very ominous.

Today was example number 137 of the principle that the longer you give something to cook in your brain, the less time it takes to type at the keyboard. It turns out spending all week thinking about something without having a chance to write it does in fact make the writing much faster!

There is a crisis of masculinity in America, and it’s that a large number of men are terrified, all the time, of ordinary life. Like these guys are… so scared of being asked for money in a train station that they have called out the National Guard to protect them? Man up, bro.

Tried the new “EpiscoBOT.” I don’t think I need to throw out my diploma yet, chat. (Or my calendar, I guess.)

Posting on Bluesky, if you are active in circles related to your vocation or profession, is not like texting your friends. It is like writing a letter to the editor of your local paper. Discerning whether something is for a public post or the group chat or your journal is a really important skill!

My favorite gerrymandering fact: Massachusetts has a 60-40 vote split and a 100% Democratic Congressional delegation, not because it’s gerrymandered but because it’s so uniformly divided at around 60-40 throughout the state that you can’t make a single contiguous district that a Republican could win

Patient, sobbing: But Doctor, I AM Pagliacci! ChatGPT: Apologies. I didn't realise when recommending Pagliacci's epic show to cure your depression that you were the genius himself. I'm impressed! With regards to your initial question, I can recommend seeing the Great Clown Pagliacci.

This is a great example of the way in which non-technical people have been duped into pulling LLMs into areas where traditional computing is really good and LLMs are really bad… like generating invoices and payment records.

For my Rust/web programming followers: here’s a short video introducing the code-splitting features released in Leptos this week youtu.be/w5fhcoxQnII?...

I don’t think it’s likely to help us treat humans better if we become more used to talking to computers

Honestly if someone had asked me whether “Yeti Blood Oath Seminary Follies” was a Mountain Goats track title before I’d seen the story, I’d have been like 50-50. Maybe a B-side I didn’t know? Gives “Maize Stalk Drinking Blood” title vibes, you know?

One of the cool things about early medieval history is that there are both many more weird Latin names and many more weird Germanic names than we use today, along w our names. So eg I just read a page that included Bishop Sagittarius (v Latin), Queen Radegund (v Germanic), and also a Gregory.

update: the protagonist has punched the Devil in the face

yes

Simultaneously reading The Fellowship of the Ring (to my kiddo) and Perelandra (myself, for the first time) and I’m reminded of why Tolkien thought Lewis’s writing was a bit too… obvious. “Okay so there’s a WOMAN. She’s the only person except this MAN. And she DOES NOT KNOW GOOD AND EVIL.” k Jack

Turns out a lot of people who actually believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ don't think getting thrown into a concentration camp, deported to a country they're not from, or eaten by gators is a fitting punishment for working under the table.

I am genuinely confused about the Google AI search result situation. Google now regularly shows obviously-inaccurate answers at the top of the page (and less-obviously-inaccurate answers more often), above ads. How does this make $ sense? And how does anyone working on this have any self-respect?

I just saw someone write "Hey can anyone help me with this issue? It's really a blockading point for me" and I was absolutely charmed... "Blocker" = corporate, tech-bro, 🤮 "Blockading point" = chivalric, piratical, 🤩 Then I looked back and saw I just misread it. I'll still be using "blockade" tho

Normal Greeks: “emergency exit procedure.” Me, a late antique Hellenist: “liturgy of the exodus of danger.”

A really great video by John Green that some of my friends in the Narthex ⚓ might enjoy.

Not an original point but worth saying again - there is not a single element in this picture that identifies any of these folks as law enforcement agents. No badges, no uniforms, no vests. Out of context it just looks like a bunch of random guys are kidnapping a mayoral candidate.

Turtle Mutual Aid:

Oh thank God, Susan Collins thinks it's "very disturbing"

Crazy life hack: when the self check out at the grocery store has a long line you are actually allowed to go to the register with human cashiers that has no line. Just skipped the 10-person self-checkout line and had a nice chat with the cashier. (You’re not required to chat though.)

An odd etymological quirk I find interesting and illuminating: “Man” really *was* the gender-neutral term in older forms of English, as opposed to “wer” (male) and “wif.” Today we only have these in compounds like “werewolf” (man-wolf) and “woman” (originally wif-man, “a female person”)

Guys you just need to be better at prompt engineering. The key thing is to project confidence here. No, a computer can’t tell you the year. Don’t be silly. But a computer can pick up on the confidence *you* have about what year it is and isn’t that what matters in the end?

“When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” - Lev. 19:32 #EveningPrayer

Note also that the Trump admin had immediately cut off reimbursements for refugee resettlement, and all refugee entries, leading Episcopal Migration Ministries (whom Matt Y was criticizing here) to lay off all its staff so it could spend remaining funds paying rent etc for refugees.

BREAKING: The Episcopal Church has announced it will end its decades-old partnership with the government to resettle refugees, citing moral opposition to resettling white Afrikaners from South Africa who have been classified as refugees by the Trump admin. religionnews.com/2025/05/12/e...

Hypothesis: church people (in my context in progressive Christianity in the US) tend to both overstate the extent of cultural changes in the status of Christianity and understate the church’s own role in/responsibility for those changes, in a way that leads us to double down on bad choices.

I think people (in the US at least) have a profound ignorance of history, in particular an ignorance of *just how bad* life was until *very, very recently*, in a huge variety of ways.