Abide then bear. Sent out to bring forth fruit. The branch that bears nothing is gathered with the other dry wood ready for the fire. The vinedresser is on his rounds. What is buried for safekeeping is rebuked. The apostles left the upper room. Stepped off the hundred foot pole. The wilderness opens onto the marketplace. Another reminder to myself.

A man stands in front of the Rothko and says he could have painted it. And he could have. But he didn't. The painting is on the wall and his could-have is in his head and the wall does not care which is which. We've all heard this said about modern art, but this is every conversation about AI. Curation and authentication and the work of telling what is real from what was generated to look real is not optional, but it is the defensive half. What you keep and not what you make. The other half is the making. Noticing what ought to exist and building it. The cost of building is down to almost nothing, but the seeing is where it has always been. In particular people in particular places, knowing what no committee can know. The choosing to act is unchanged. Most will not choose. That is where the room is. Yeah, you could have done that. So why didn't you?

Apparently I'm very popular here. Every post and interaction warmly received, entirely by bots. Famous on a tiny social network, but only with the machines.

News outlets are blocking Wayback Machine from archiving their pages and claiming it's out of concern that companies might abuse fair use and use it to train AI models... To prevent AI training or to prevent the editing of the past? The models have already ingested the pages. What a public archive still prevents is the later revision. The headline softened after the criticism landed. The paragraph removed when the reporting turned out wrong. The correction that was never labelled a correction. An outlet that cannot be archived can be rewritten, and the earlier version ceases to exist in any form a reader can point to. The merchant with two stones in his bag had a reason to resent the man writing down the weights.

Tom

News outlets are blocking Wayback Machine from archiving their pages — 23 outlets concerned AI companies might abuse fair use and use it to train their models

In the age of “fake news” and hallucinating AI, access to historical information is more critical than ever.

The early church built something underneath Rome. A parallel structure that pooled goods and buried the dead and cared for the sick and the stranger and did all of this without reference to imperial institutions, without asking anyone whether it was allowed. By the time Rome turned to look at it the thing had become load-bearing in ways that could not be unwound, and Rome had to reckon with it the way you reckon with a foundation that someone poured while you were looking the other direction.

The counter-economic act is the argument. Not the petition. Not the critique. When you build a market the king cannot see, when you exchange outside the channels the state can tax and monitor and revoke, you are not protesting the system. You are demonstrating that it is optional.

PSA: With NordVPN's Firefox extension enabled, WebSocket connections bypass the VPN, so the traffic exposes anyone hoping to maintain their privacy. Support's responses are either indifferent or clueless, mostly the latter. Not the first failure I've seen from Nord. I've got to stop paying companies that continue to disrespect their users...

In commenting on Mark 14:3-9 (ESV) Gospel In Life (Tim Keller) says: "What a waste!" That is the complaint made regarding the woman's use of her expensive perfume to anoint Jesus. Jesus will have none of it. He finds a purely cost-benefit analysis of our actions to be inadequate and bankrupt.

Lent Day 35: The Anointing – Gospel in Life

Fiat money is the dishonest weight. It trains us to run pure cost-benefit calculations. Three hundred denarii is exactly the kind of thinking that a currency designed to lose value every year produces in people. Bitcoin is an argument that weights can be honest again. And the irony is that if people actually believed that, if the cost-benefit calculus gave way to something more like the woman at Bethany, the price would be a great deal higher than it is. Mark 14:3-9 (ESV): And while he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he was reclining at table, a woman came with an alabaster flask of ointment of pure nard, very costly, and she broke the flask and poured it over his head. There were some who said to themselves indignantly, "Why was the ointment wasted like that? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and given to the poor." And they scolded her. But Jesus said, "Leave her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want, you can do good for them. But you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burial. And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her."

The craftsman who uses a jig for every cut stops learning what square feels like. The friction was not inefficiency. It was education. Every technology that removes the cost of error also removes the signal that told you where you were. The desert fathers built friction into their practice on purpose. The cell. The repetition. The staying when you wanted to leave. Not because suffering was good but because suffering was information and information was the only raw material formation could use.