How Does God Say “I Love You”? - Mockingbird:
But the word that shows our need is also the word that loves us in and overcomes our need. The answer to the anguished “Who will deliver me?” is the merciful surprise of grace: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord… There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” This is the well that washes, the word that gives the crucified and risen Jesus and thereby does the divine work that raises the dead, forgives the sinner, and finally says to the fearful and lonely, “You are my beloved child.”
This is my friend Jono Linebaugh talking about his The Well That Washes What It Shows: An Invitation to Holy Scripture. It’s a superb book, especially for people who are new, or relatively new, to the Bible. It’s full of hope.
16 June 1939 the Daily Telegraph ran the following news story:
Village children at Hurst House School, Staplehurst, Kent, are being given regular television lessons in school. Nearly all the children come from nearby farms.
Citizenship and ‘general knowledge’ are taught through the study of news reels and the televising of events like Trooping the Colour and the departure of the King and Queen for Canada
The television lessons have been started by the headmaster, Mr H. Farrington, who says that television and the informal talks that follow the programme are probably of more real educative value to the children than most lessons given in class.
And so it begins.
Me after spending the morning reading the NYT’s hot takes on A.I. Against my usual practice, I’ve actually been reading the Times lately. That stops right now. (Actual image source.)
Finished writing: Paradise Lost: A Biography by Alan Jacobs. Joseph Addison said, “We have an actual interest in everything [Adam & Eve] do, and no less than our utmost happiness is concerned and lies at stake in all their behavior.” Virginia Woolf said, “Has any great poem ever let in so little light upon one’s own joys and sorrows?” Thus my book. 📚
A wonderful explanation by David Bennett of the gloriously eccentric harmony of the Beach Boys' “God Only Knows.”
NYT (gift link): “What does a human slowly going insane look like to a corporation? It looks like an additional monthly user.”
Pet Sounds and a Last Word — for Brian.
I wrote about why I love demos, with lots of examples.
AI as Normal Technology | Knight First Amendment Institute:
The methods-application distinction has important implications for how we measure and forecast AI progress. AI benchmarks are useful for measuring progress in methods; unfortunately, they have often been misunderstood as measuring progress in applications, and this confusion has been a driver of much hype about imminent economic transformation.
For example, while GPT-4 reportedly achieved scores in the top 10% of bar exam test takers, this tells us remarkably little about AI’s ability to practice law. The bar exam overemphasizes subject-matter knowledge and under-emphasizes real-world skills that are far harder to measure in a standardized, computer-administered format. In other words, it emphasizes precisely what language models are good at — retrieving and applying memorized information.
And Gary Marcus:
If you can’t use a billion dollar AI system to solve a problem that Herb Simon (one of the actual “godfathers of AI”, current hype aside) solved with AI in 1957, and that first semester AI students solve routinely, the chances that models like Claude or o3 are going to reach AGI seem truly remote.
As if all of this hassle wasn’t enough, consider the fact that you have to tend the turntable like a fire, flipping and adding logs as needed. And that’s where all of this inconvenience pays off. Like a fire, those records keep you company, asking for nothing but a little reciprocity and attention in return for sharing their warmth. It’s not something unfair and it’s not something unreasonable. They just ask you to care.
My phone asks me to turn on notifications. It also asks me to share my location data, install updates, and rate my in-app experiences. Sometimes scrolling on it literally makes me car sick but it keeps asking me to scroll, ignorant of my displeasure.
Smartphone life makes me miss the good old days when everything was a little more scarce and a little more meaningful. We missed our friends when we didn’t know what they were up to every second. We looked forward to taking girls on dates instead of staring at strangers on Onlyfans. Going to the video store to rent a few movies was an event in and of itself. What could feel more like the good old days than sitting next to the fire, cell phone on silent in another room, while enjoying the annoying crackle of remnant dust stuck in the supposedly ultrasonically cleaned grooves of a used Tal Farlow record?
Via Robin Sloan.