Finley, I am.

Blog

#links

Songs as Shelters in Time

I could wrap myself in the warm cocoon of a song and go anywhere. I was invincible.

Johnny Cash

Some great thoughts from Austin Kleon on songs and their ability to snatch you up.

Indoctrinate Your Children

You have a job, Christian. Indoctrinate your children, raise them in the faith. Sending them to be raised by the world for 30+ hours a week and thinking that you can counter all the world’s indoctrination is stupidity. This is your job. If you don’t do it, someone else will. They are more than willing.

Laiwyers

Big yikes.

Hallucinating artificial intelligence can tank a court case by creating fake case citations that leave the lawyers open to sanctions or the proceeding itself vulnerable to being overturned, a former litigator said.

Last month, a judge handed down a $5,000 penalty on a law firm representing Colombian airline Avianca Inc., which used ChatGPT to write its legal brief, but the AI included fabricated judicial decisions.

A similar case happened in South Africa, and the judge and magistrate overseeing the cases ripped the law firms in their decisions.

“There is potential harm to the reputation of judges and courts whose names are falsely invoked as authors of the bogus opinions and to the reputation of a party attributed with fictional conduct,” the judge presiding over the Avianca case wrote. “It promotes cynicism about the legal profession and the American judicial system.”

Fox News

When I was in high school, Internet-powered translation services were just starting to come about. Write up a paper in English, drop it in, select French, and bang goes the donkey. Of course anyone that knew French could tell that the paper wasn’t written in French because of all the obvious mishaps. If you know you know.

It’s much the same now. Relying on AI to do your job requires you then to spend equal amount of time checking over all the work AI did because it’s really super confident that it did the job right. Sometimes you have to be a level or two over your skills to catch the mistakes it made.

This is just one of many reasons I don’t use AI tools for coding yet. They aren’t ready. I’m not sure when they will be ready.

Repugnant

repugnant (adjective)
exciting distaste or aversion

synonyms
abhorrent
abominable
obnoxious

Middle English, opposed, contradictory, incompatible, from Anglo-French, from Latin repugnant-, repugnans, present participle of repugnare to fight against, from re- + pugnare to fight

Merriam-Webster

My wife and I were talking about someone’s actions the other day and I described his actions as repugnant. The nerd that I am, I connected this word to pugnacious which I wrote about a couple months ago. Same origin: fight. Yes, the guy we were discussing is pugnacious as well. Language is a powerful tool.

Mending Nets

George H. Morrison once reflected on all this as he considered the words of 1 Peter 5:10[…] He observed that the word that Peter uses for “make you perfect” is the same word that is used for mending nets. Thus, “It is as if Peter had said, ‘The God of grace, whatever else he may do, will mend your nets for you’.”

Tim Challies, Deeper Than Our Deepest Need

My God mends nets. There is much in this wor;d that will snag and tear your nets. My God mends nets. Get in close, let Him work, and then cast the nets back out.

On Christian Nationalism

Twitter has been aflutter around the term Christian Nationalism over the last few weeks. As I am on Twitter and part of the Christian world, I have seen a lot of the good and the bad. As with all dialogue and debate, definition of terms is extremely important. Even those under the blood of Christ can be subject to misunderstandings and erroneous assumptions, as we are still in a fallen world. Add in that this term brought out some ugly souls— folks that need a lot of prayer— that even I would consider to be racist.

As a 500 page book on Christian Nationalism sits next to me, a group of theologians came together and released a draft statement on Christian Nationalism & the Gospel. There is a long history of Christian statements that help clarify where a group stands in the form of affirmations and denials. This followed that history. I have read the majority of it.

If you are seeing Christian Nationalism being discussed or hear me discussing it, this is the definitive definition.

Now I need to read a 500 page book.

The Statement on Christian Nationalism & the Gospel

The Shameless v. the Unashamed

One of the heartening signs that has resulted from the ascendancy of this creepy clown world regime is that it has revealed to me that there are still seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal. There have been many new voices, deserted by their former leaders, who have stepped into the breach. They are standing up straight, and they are unashamed.

It is true that things look bad. The leadership of Laketown was feckless and self-serving. The whole town is in disarray, and is under attack. The dragon has come and everything is hopeless.

But there is one man, Bard, and he has one arrow. And with that one arrow in his hand, one bird comes and speaks to him. And he sets the arrow to string, unashamed.

The Shameless v. the Unashamed by Douglas Wilson

No commentary needed here. Pastor Doug said it all. Christian, go read Pastor Doug’s post. Or watch the video.

View Transitions Tech Demo

Really impressive demo. First, this is for single-page applications. Second, there is an API for multi-page applications. Check it out in Chrome Canary and look at the code. I discussed this with my team yesterday. The demo is built on Astro. All that is shipped to the browser is 301kB. Of that 291kB is images. Less than 5.5kB for the document, CSS, and JS. CSS is powering the transitions and only a bit of JS intercepts the navigation event, loads the fragment of HTML, injects it into the DOM, and adds the necessary classes to trigger the animations.

This is a truly impressive demonstration. With very minimal effort, one can use an SSG like Astro— which can run as an SSR too— and deliver a fully working application that requires no JavaScript but progressively enhances to dynamic page transitions with easy— something that is extremely difficult even for SPA libraries— and asynchronous page loading. Only 150 lines of JS are in this project— 150 lines that ship to the browser.

For an old curmudgeonly standards guy like myself, this gives me some hope that we can get back to the days of the largest assets we send to the browser are images instead of hundreds of kilobytes of JavaScript.

Source: Bramus

Pugnacious

pugnacious (adjective)
having a quarrelsome or combative nature

Pugnacious individuals are often looking for a fight. While unpleasant, at least their fists are packing an etymological punch. Pugnacious comes from the Latin verb pugnare (meaning “to fight”), which in turn comes from the Latin word for “fist,” pugnus.

Merriam-Webster

I love looking up words that I come across. Looking into the origins. And then you’ll catch me laughing because your said porcelain. I know, I am weird. This word came up in reading through an old Spurgeon sermon this morning.

What Is the Nature of Your Prayer

You are in a public place, praying silently. No one else around. The police approach you and ask the nature of your prayer. They then arrest you because you are not allowed to pray in this public space. Clearly this is a Muslim country where Shariah Law is enforced, right?

No, it is Britain.

Watch the video. I’m not exaggerating this. This isn’t a case of a Christian “praying” but also screaming at people or blocking sidewalks.

Christian, the old howl of “Christians to the Lions” is returning to London, just as Spurgeon feared. Not long before it is here in the States.

Next »