Michael McDowell

Faithbridge

[Drew @drewdyck]

"What AI produces is an impressively polished, usually helpful, sometimes cheeky string of words. But it’s just instantaneous pattern recognition and data organization. It’s soulless slop that can mimic and masquerade as brilliant writing. It’s aggressively efficient, speedily rendered, sycophantic information.

But it’s not writing."
https://t.co/Ifyv6EV83m

[The Gospel Coalition @TGC]

We don’t want AI’s tentacles on any of the written works we publish. We want our audience to trust that what they get at TGC is human-made, human-edited, human-assessed, made in human community for other humans—as an act of love, fellowship, and worship.

https://t.co/MEpH109LxX

[Jason Mikula @mikulaja]

Over the course of a year, Americans are more likely to place a gambling bet than read a single book. Seems fine! (via @TheAtlantic) —

[Evan @evan7257]

Personal takeaway from the World Cup is that Texas should do a statewide bid for the Olympics

[♱ @utddahnny]

we were lied to about the united states

[swagner @BayouBikeyBoi]

Say what you will about Houston but it’s got more lizards than you might think

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.

[Dave Langille @cdnusboy]

To think Fleming Rutledge is AI generated.

[Tom Holland @holland_tom]

"But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and absolutely bonkers to Gentiles."

https://t.co/qGdVAjWxZd

[one dozen rats at a keyboard @PanasonicDX4500]

this is unironically how the other disciples were talking about Paul at Antioch

[Andrew Wilson @AJWTheology]

What a paragraph from @jake_meador:

[Houston Texans @HoustonTexans]

A SWARM is coming

[Ben Sasse @BenSasse]

Friends-

This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.

Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence. But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do.

I’m blessed with amazing siblings and half-a-dozen buddies that are genuinely brothers. As one of them put it, “Sure, you’re on the clock, but we’re all on the clock.” Death is a wicked thief, and the bastard pursues us all.

Still, I’ve got less time than I’d prefer. This is hard for someone wired to work and build, but harder still as a husband and a dad. I can’t begin to describe how great my people are. During the past year, as we’d temporarily stepped back from public life and built new family rhythms, Melissa and I have grown even closer — and that on top of three decades of the best friend a man could ever have. Seven months ago, Corrie was commissioned into the Air Force and she’s off at instrument and multi-engine rounds of flight school. Last week, Alex kicked butt graduating from college a semester early even while teaching gen chem, organic, and physics (she’s a freak). This summer, 14-year-old Breck started learning to drive. (Okay, we’ve been driving off-book for six years — but now we’ve got paper to make it street-legal.) I couldn’t be more grateful to constantly get to bear-hug this motley crew of sinners and saints.

There’s not a good time to tell your peeps you’re now marching to the beat of a faster drummer — but the season of advent isn’t the worst. As a Christian, the weeks running up to Christmas are a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come.

Not an abstract hope in fanciful human goodness; not hope in vague hallmark-sappy spirituality; not a bootstrapped hope in our own strength (what foolishness is the evaporating-muscle I once prided myself in). Nope — often we lazily say “hope” when what we mean is “optimism.” To be clear, optimism is great, and it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s insufficient. It’s not the kinda thing that holds up when you tell your daughters you’re not going to walk them down the aisle. Nor telling your mom and pops they’re gonna bury their son.

A well-lived life demands more reality — stiffer stuff. That’s why, during advent, even while still walking in darkness, we shout our hope — often properly with a gravelly voice soldiering through tears.

Such is the calling of the pilgrim. Those who know ourselves to need a Physician should dang well look forward to enduring beauty and eventual fulfillment. That is, we hope in a real Deliverer — a rescuing God, born at a real time, in a real place. But the eternal city — with foundations and without cancer — is not yet.

Remembering Isaiah’s prophecies of what’s to come doesn’t dull the pain of current sufferings. But it does put it in eternity’s perspective:
“When we've been there 10,000 years…We've no less days to sing God's praise.”

I’ll have more to say. I’m not going down without a fight. One sub-part of God’s grace is found in the jawdropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more. Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived. We’re zealously embracing a lot of gallows humor in our house, and I’ve pledged to do my part to run through the irreverent tape.

But for now, as our family faces the reality of treatments, but more importantly as we celebrate Christmas, we wish you peace: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned….For to us a son is given” (Isaiah 9).

With great gratitude, and with gravelly-but-hopeful voices,
Ben — and the Sasses

[The Middle-earth Mixer @MiddleearthMixr]

The Venn diagram of LOTR enjoyers and Muppets Christmas Carol enjoyers is one circle

[Scorigami @NFL_Scorigami]

JAX 29 - HOU 36
Final

That's Scorigami!! It's the 1094th unique final score in NFL History.

[Blood Memory @AnemoiaAmerica]

Snoopy would never put Christmas decorations up before Thanksgiving because he is an American and a Patriot.

[Eugenia Kuyda @ekuyda]

I’ve been thinking about this David Foster Wallace quote more and more recently

“The technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're going to die."

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

Within the next year or two -- probably sooner -- anyone who hates you will be able to generate any kind of defamatory video of you doing or saying something awful, and it will be so indistinguishable from a real video that you simply won't ever be able to prove that it's fake. Literally nothing is being done to prevent this from happening. We can all see it coming and our leaders are doing precisely nothing at all to stop it.