/ married to a Luke 10:39 woman / Puddleglum's less optimistic brother / steadfast friend of Aslan
Knoxville, TN
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bundyw retweeted
For the record, the real reason AI CEOs keep preaching AI doomerism is that they want to outlaw open-source and local models.
Government regulation will stifle newcomers and local models, not current leaders.
They don't give a flying fuck about "humanity", and they never did.
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bundyw retweeted
Sculpture celebrates purpose. Form must not follow function, but should instead glorify it
Art Deco actually made a power company building look exactly like a power company.
The Niagara Mohawk Building in Syracuse was completed in 1932 as the headquarters of Niagara Hudson Power Corporation.
At night, concealed lights within the façade, illuminated glass panels, floodlighting on the central 'Spirit of Light' sculpture, reflective aluminum, polished glass and stainless steel turned the building into a glowing advertisement for the power of electricity in the age of machine.
This also represented the optimism and beauty that could be incorporated into modernist structures.
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bundyw retweeted
“Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.”
Left-leaning intellectuals treat government as the designer and manager of society rather than as the expression of an already existing society with its own morality and customs.
For left-leaning intellectuals, government is “the creator and manager of a social order framed according to an idea of ‘social justice’ and imposed on the people by a series of top-down decrees.”
—Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left
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bundyw retweeted
One of the great scams of modern life is convincing people that anything old must justify its existence while anything new gets to arrive without evidence.
Sometimes tradition survives because somebody already ran the experiment. For 3,500 years.
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bundyw retweeted
Who gets to own what we create?
On Educating to Be Human, host Lisa Petrides talks with Internet Archive Senior Policy Counsel Lila Bailey about the tension between knowledge as a shared cultural commons & knowledge controlled through copyright, licensing, and corporate platforms.
They also examine what public knowledge infrastructure could look like, including AI tools built and supported by libraries, schools, and civic institutions.
🎧 Listen to WHO OWNS KNOWLEDGE with Lila Bailey:
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcas…
@EdutobeHuman
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Calvinist: "You cannot discuss Calvinism without having read this 500 years of historical arguments."
Me: "Let's summarize that 500 years of arguments,shall we? For 500 years, Calvinist have been finding new ways of claiming God intended evil without being responsible for it ... now, let's return to the question at hand. Can God, in fact, intend evil without being responsible for it?"
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I'd really like to know how many companies go on to succeed after going through the "PE process." I don't think the statistics are "kept," but it would be interesting to know.
PE essentially mines the value out of a company, brings up the revenue via temporary measures to make it look good on paper, then sells it on.
🦔Over 13,500 unsold companies are stuck in private equity portfolios right now. PE firms buy companies with borrowed money, load the debt onto the company, and plan to sell in a few years. That model needs low rates and willing buyers. It has neither.
PE-backed companies accounted for the majority of large corporate bankruptcies in 2025 and first half of 2026. Saks, Eddie Bauer, JoAnn, and hospital chain Steward Health Care all went down under PE ownership. Bloomberg reported this week that dealmakers are now leaving major funds because carried interest payouts have dried up.
My Take
The PE model worked for a decade because rates were near zero and you could flip anything. That era is over and these firms are trapped. They can't sell because no buyer will pay what they need to turn a profit, and they can't hold much longer because the companies are drowning in debt at 5% rates that the PE firm itself doesn't pay. The company pays it. Your hospital pays it. Your dentist pays it. JoAnn paid it until it couldn't.
Thirteen million Americans work for PE-owned companies. When Steward Health Care went down, entire communities lost their only hospital. The PE firm walked away and raised another fund. I think this is going to be one of the biggest stories of 2027. The exit drought ends when rates come down. The Fed just hiked. These companies are stuck with debt they took on at prices that assumed money would stay cheap forever, and every month they sit unsold the finance numbers get worse. The firms that bought them will survive. The companies and the people who work there won't all be that lucky.
Hedgie🤗
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Mining cultural investment, given in love, for profit. This does not end well.
🦔Someone is buying Japanese used books by the ton. Not novels or comics. Philosophy, history, medical law, Edo-period cultural texts. Multiple buyer accounts all ship to one logistics center in Okayama Prefecture that won't answer questions. Export records show over 50 tons, roughly 100,000 volumes, shipped to the US since last year. No buyer has been identified.
Separately, court documents confirmed Anthropic's "Project Panama" bought millions of books in the US, cut the spines off, scanned them, and shredded the originals. An internal memo said the goal was to "destructively scan all the books in the world." Similar operations have been reported across Europe.
My Take
Anthropic's US book operation came out in court filings earlier this year. Project Panama. Millions of books, cut the spines off, scanned, shredded. Their VP chose the codename so nobody outside the company would find out. That story broke and apparently the same operation just moved to Japan. Anonymous buyer accounts, a warehouse in Okayama that won't take questions, and 100,000 volumes of specialized academic texts that nobody buys to resell.
I don't know how you build a trillion-dollar industry on material you had to acquire in secret through middlemen because you knew the public would object. Authors spent years on those books and now they're fed through a scanner and thrown away so a chatbot can sound smarter. If the data was free to use, they wouldn't need codenames and anonymous warehouses. The lawsuits over who owns this material have barely begun and I think the copyright exposure across the whole AI industry is enormous. Anthropic's internal memo said the goal was every book in the world, which describes the foundation of the product.
Hedgie🤗
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Bringing this out of a thread ...
You've described the false dichotomy perfectly. You've only given two false choices.
The first false choice: "...become less in his own eyes..."
Precisely so--this is the goal of spiritual maturity in Calvinism, constantly "making yourself smaller." I don't know why people think this is a good thing, however. Paul doesn't say: "Now stop eating the solid food, and get to the pure milk of the Gospel! Think less! If you ask God to decide who you should marry today, that's a good start, but tomorrow you should ask God to decide the color of your shoelaces! Ask God for every detail of your life!" This treats our entire relationship with God as a transaction. "God, feed me baby food. See how trusting and stupid and helpless I am ... how much this makes me trust you? Look how righteous ..."
The second false choice: "...Christ is his magical wingman."
And here you've presented a willful, arrogant person, who just treats their relationship with God as a transaction, as well. "God, I'll just go do things, and you can get me out of scrapes."
Both of these are straight up lies.
If you want to understand spiritual maturity, look at the examples God actually gave us. The slave who chooses freedom by giving up the things his master has given him, and takes on the responsibility of living. The child who moves from milk to solid food, growing into a mature human.
The correct model is to immerse ourselves in God's character and become like him, but still remain ourselves. Calvinism--right wing progressivism--thinks God wants robotic clones. The progressive left think God wants us to do whatever we desire, just using his power as our own to get there.
The truth is God wants us to desire the things he does--"a man after my own heart"--and then to create, order, love, etc., within that. God wants us to become like him, not to become him, nor to become nothing. God wants an I/thou relationship with a being in his image who reflects his character.
In Calvinism, there is no "thou" to God's "I am." That person just doesn't exist. In the second horn of the false dichotomy (as presented), the "I" of God might as well not exist except as some kind of magical daemon to be called up whenever our power cannot achieve our desires. Again, both of these are just straight up lies.
Another way to put this--God didn't "create for his glory," and self-glorification is not "God's highest goal."
God created out of love, and for relationship--to which we say: "All glory to God." I cannot see how someone reads Genesis, the entire creation narrative, and thinks: "God clearly created to receive glory." God's one and only concern throughout Genesis is creating humans who will relate to him, who will create and order and love. When sin enters the picture, the rest of the book of Genesis is God laying the foundation to retrieve his relationships with humans and his creation /via relationships/.
Anyone who cannot see this is reading Genesis as though they are blind.
Going back to witnessing ... it makes all the difference in the world. What are you asking these people to do, to become? Nothing? Everything? Or a child of God?
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bundyw retweeted
🦔Oracle sent a force majeure notice on Project Jupiter, its AI data center in New Mexico built for the $400 billion Stargate deal with OpenAI. The campus needs a 17-mile gas pipeline to power its Bloom Energy fuel cells. New Mexico denied the pipeline permits twice. Oracle wants the right to delay payments if the site misses its 2028 opening. $18 billion in project loans are at 89 to 91 cents on the dollar. ORCL fell 5%.
My Take
Force majeure is for earthquakes and wars. Oracle filed one over a gas permit they got denied twice. A company with $167 billion in debt and a junk-adjacent credit rating just told its development partner it might not pay on time. I think Oracle's balance sheet is worse than the market has priced in, and this notice is the first public admission.
Twenty banks lent $18 billion for this project and they can't move the debt. Santander and Jefferies are stuck with more than they planned to hold. That loan assumed Oracle's backlog converts to revenue on schedule, but half the backlog is OpenAI, a company that burns cash faster than it earns it. SemiAnalysis has first power at this site in 2029. The banks underwrote 2028. I think the AI infrastructure bet cracks here first, in the loan market, before it ever shows up in stock prices, and the banks who funded the construction are the ones left with the bill.
Hedgie🤗
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Question.
Suppose you are walking down a road, and find someone lying there who needs your help.
This person is your enemy, and you do not owe them anything. Further, you are not only capable of helping them, but you are capable of helping them regardless of whether they want to be helped or not.
Under what conditions is it morally acceptable to pass this person by, leaving them in their current state?
(For the second answer, assume you are on your way to perform some greater good, and you can choose whether that good is greater than the act of helping this person.)
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What happens to "AI" when you run out of other people's intellectual property?
🦔Internal documents from Mother Jones' lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft show the companies knew exactly what they did. A Microsoft director called it "an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions." OpenAI's president responded "ah nice" to a New York Times paywall hack. Microsoft's research found AI search cut clicks to news articles by 90%. After the lawsuits, OpenAI built a filter that blocked output only from publishers who sued, not to prevent infringement but to limit evidence.
My Take
The Buckmaster case hit hard because it was one mathematician and one model. This is the same thing at industrial scale, and now we have the companies' own executives confirming it in internal documents. They knew. They did it anyway. And when the lawsuits came, OpenAI's response wasn't to stop using copyrighted content. It was to stop the companies that sued from gathering evidence.
I think these documents change the conversation around AI valuations. OpenAI wants $1.5 trillion. Microsoft trades at $3 trillion. Both companies built their AI products on content they took without permission, and their own people called it theft internally. If these lawsuits result in licensing obligations or damages at scale, the cost structure for every major AI model changes overnight. The models were trained on stolen labor and the executives knew it while they were doing it. That's not my opinion. That's what their own documents say.
I think any investor looking at AI valuations right now needs to factor in the liability that comes with how these models were built, because the companies clearly weren't expecting anyone to read their internal communications.
Hedgie🤗
motherjones.com/politics/202…
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It's very strange how often some Calvinist tells me to do something Calvinist theology says I cannot do. Do Calvinist actually understand Calvinism?
😅 I actually did answer it. Pray for the wisdom and guidance of the Spirit to receive and know it. 🤷🏻♂️
✍️ “These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.”
- I Corinthians 2:13
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