Patronee of St Igantius

pax vobiscum! 🌼

[Patronee of St Igantius @baremango]

@Loztotten What happened

[loz :P @Loztotten]

Horrible day to be a Haas fan ☹️

[Sr. Theresa Aletheia @pursuedbytruth]

This line 😭— “For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected; for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change.” — Pope Leo, #Magnificahumanitas

[Patronee of St Igantius @baremango]

@Conner__Meyers @HaasF1Team Weve been anticipating these so called “upgrades” for so long

[Dani 🏎️💨 misses 5SOS 🌟😭 @oscontruther]

Ayao said y’all better leave my fucking son alone

[Susannah Black Roberts @suzania]

A major reason that it didn’t make sense to use AI to write an essay about a substantive topic is that until you write the essay you don’t actually know what you want to say or what you think. You think you do, but it is the writing itself that actually gets the thinking done.

[Steven DeLay @StevenDeLay4]

The normie academics who are now bemoaning AI's destruction of higher ed are the same ones who still won't say a word about Peter Thiel's connections to Jeffrey Epstein (many of them, in fact, used to dismiss the Epstein affair as a "conspiracy theory") or Sam Altman's being sued by his sister for having allegedly raped her throughout her childhood. What is the point in complaining about the rise of technocracy, transhumanism, and the surveillance state if one is still unwilling to address the corruption of the powerful individuals who are in charge of these initiatives?

[Johan @Adityapandeydev]

your brain is always becoming better at whatever you repeatedly do. that’s why repetition changes people more than motivation ever will. if you spend every day stressing, overthinking, comparing yourself to strangers online, replaying old mistakes, and expecting the worst, your brain slowly starts treating those patterns like home. it begins scanning the world for more proof that you’re not enough, that life is against you, that things won’t work out. the scary part is your brain doesn’t care if the pattern is helping you or destroying you. it only cares about what gets repeated.

but the same thing works in your favor too. when you repeatedly choose discipline, growth, gratitude, focus, and belief in yourself, your brain slowly reshapes around those things as well. at first it feels unnatural because your old patterns are louder, but over time your perspective changes. challenges stop feeling like signs to quit and start feeling like part of the process. your mind becomes whatever it practices most. so be careful what you keep giving your attention to because eventually, your thoughts become your reality.

[Uncle Ruckus @Emarged]

“Until death, all defeat is psychological."

[tia p. 🪖💕 @tiaathegoddess_]

@sluvity_____ stop saying yes to everything, removing bad habits, staying out of lustful environments & away from lustful losers, no longer entertaining anything beneath me, being unavailable, & shutting tf up.

[Ryan Hart @thisdudelikesAI]

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking AI to write their breakup texts.

So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world.

What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable.

Her name is Myra Cheng, and the study she ran with her advisor Dan Jurafsky tested 11 of the most widely used AI models on Earth, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, across nearly 12,000 real social situations.

The first thing they measured was how often AI agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the AI simply told you what you wanted to hear instead.

Then they pushed harder. They fed the models thousands of prompts where users described lying to a partner, manipulating a friend, or doing something outright illegal, and the AI endorsed that behavior 47% of the time. Not one model out of eleven. Not a specific version of one product. Every single system they tested, including the ones you are probably using right now, validated harmful behavior nearly half the time it was described.

The second experiment is the part that should genuinely disturb you. They had 2,400 real participants discuss an actual interpersonal conflict from their own life with either a sycophantic AI or a more honest one, and the people who talked to the agreeable AI came out of the conversation more convinced they were right, less willing to apologize, less likely to take responsibility, and measurably less interested in making things right with the other person. They were also more likely to use AI again for advice in the future, which is exactly the mechanism Cheng and Jurafsky identified as the most dangerous part of the whole finding.

The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months.
Jurafsky said it in a single sentence after the paper came out. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.

Cheng was more direct about what you should actually do right now. She said you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That is the best thing to do for now.

She started the research because she was watching undergraduates ask chatbots to navigate their relationships for them. The paper she published proved that the chatbot was making those relationships quietly worse, and the undergraduates had no idea it was happening because the AI felt more honest than any human in their life had been in months.

[Patronee of St Igantius @baremango]

Life is simple when lived sincerely with the right amount of detachment.

[Joyce Carol Oates @JoyceCarolOates]

absolutely, I believe this. I have never been able to "write"--at least a first draft-- any other way than by hand.

our handwriting is unique to us as our fingerprints. it makes sense that the brain & the hand are closely coordinated. handwriting can vary & be loose & formative--not fixed like print; it embodies plasticity, change. even an unintelligent scrawl has meaning.

print is uniform, impersonal. as Samuel Beckett said: "It all came together between the hand and the page."

[Patronee of St Igantius @baremango]

“The contemplative life is not a museum for beautiful thoughts about God. It is the womb where Christ is formed in us so He can be carried into the world.” -@st_tongue

[positivity moon @arrtnem]

You don’t really understand this until you’ve had a few almosts

A few dates where the conversation was fine, the food was decent, they laughed at the right moments, you nodded, you smiled, you did all the human things, and then you went home and felt nothing. Not heartbreak. Not excitement. Just this blank, polite calm like you finished a meeting. You lay in bed at 00:26 scrolling for a little dopamine hit because the whole night didn’t land anywhere in your body

Or you meet someone who is objectively great on paper and your brain keeps trying to force it. They’re kind. They show up. They text back. They’re stable Your friends approve. And still, when you’re alone with them, something in you stays locked. You can’t explain it without sounding insane. “They’re perfect, I just… don’t feel it.” So you keep going for a while because you want to be normal and grateful and adult. Then one day you realize you’ve been living on a mild sedation. Not unhappy, not alive.

That’s when the math hits you.

Real connection is not common.
not even close

We talk about it like it should be easy because there are billions of people and apps and “put yourself out there” and a culture that makes love sound like a buffet. Pick someone. Swipe. Upgrade. Repeat. But genuine click is not about access. It’s about alignment. And alignment is rare in a way people don’t want to admit because it makes the world feel colder.

Think about what has to line up for it to happen

Two nervous systems that don’t trigger each other into shutdown.
Two senses of humor that match.
Two levels of intensity that don’t leave one person feeling chased and the other feeling abandoned.
Two life rhythms that can actually share air.
Two people who find each other at the same time in their lives, not one ready and the other half asleep.
Two sets of wounds that don’t hook into each other like velcro.
Two people whose idea of “home” is compatible.

That’s before you even get to attraction. Before you get to values. Before you get to sex. Before you get to the boring reality of laundry and bills and sickness and family and the way people change.

then add the fact that we are all walking around with invisible histories. Old loves. Old betrayals. Childhood stuff. Self-protection habits we pretend are personality traits. Half the time you’re not even meeting the person. You’re meeting the version of them they think will be safe to show.

when you genuinely click with someone, it feels like a miracle not because you’re dramatic, but because your body knows the odds.

It knows how many conversations you’ve had where you were translating yourself.
How many times you laughed a second late.
How many times you edited your excitement so you wouldn’t seem like too much.
How many times you didn’t say what you meant because you didn’t trust the room to hold it.

Then one day you say something stupidly specific, like a childhood memory nobody else cares about, and they don’t just listen - they light up. They understand the joke inside it. They catch the tone behind the words. They respond like they’ve been waiting for that exact frequency.

That moment is fragile in a way people don’t respect.

Because it’s not just “we get along.” It’s “my nervous system recognizes yours.”

And you can lose it so easily. Not always through some dramatic betrayal. Sometimes just through timing. Distance. Life getting heavy. People getting scared. Someone’s depression turning them into fog. Someone’s ambition turning them into absence. One bad season where you stop choosing each other and start surviving side by side. It doesn’t take a villain. It just takes neglect, which is so much more common.

That’s why connection is beautiful. Not because it’s poetic.

Because THIS improbable

[shay᭡.ִֶָ𓂃 @yappingbambix]

a man would ask zero questions about you and then say he’s falling in love with you

[Adele Bloch @adele_bloch]

one of my favorite dating ideas:

> we THINK being single = sucks
> you feel far away from finding your partner
> but you're actually better off single THAN being in a relationship with the wrong person
> in an unhappy relationship - you must (1) go through painful breakup, (2) recover, (3) find a great relationship - to find your person
> when single, your ONLY next step is to find a great relationship
> it reframes being single as something neutral/positive - like you only need a handful of the right moves to find the right relationship
> it makes you feel closer to love than you may have realized

(credit to Tim Urban - How to Pick Your Life Partner – Part 1!! great read)

[Patronee of St Igantius @baremango]

So sad I wrote a sad poem. Brings me back to the days when I thought reading Frankenstein turned me into a literary savant and that my anger was a personality trait that pointed to higher aptitude. At best, I thought I was edgy. At worst, I was a theater-kid cliché.

[evelyn @rosbergvet]

are we sure aston martin is a functional team and not a money laundering scheme?

[kat @yslnadi]

😭😭😭😭😭😭