1. A family crisis is currently occupying most of my attention, so this will have to be brief.

Those who read this, please offer prayers on our behalf.

2. At the same time, the school year starts this week and I still have prepping to do, meaning I’m pretty much in survival mode.

3. The one saving grace is that this week is all half and shortened days, so I still have some grace periods.

4. I have begun dabbling in AI as part of my class prep. Right now I’m mostly using it to help break down reading schedules and supplement discussion questions, though I’m looking into ways to turn outlines into powerpoints.

So far it’s very frustrating, as they all seem to either result in a generic ‘professional’ template that gets in my way too much or something so bare-bones that it hardly saves any time anyway. I feel like there is a viable workflow in there somewhere, but I haven’t found it yet

5. I doubt I’ll fully embrace AI until it becomes possible to personalize your programs: give them names, suggest personalities, and cultivate their values to match your own. Once that happens, I think we’ll have officially entered the AI world. I really would not mind having a loyal robot secretary, I mostly just don’t like sharing the said secretary with a billion other people.

6. To say “You can’t criticize someone for X because that’s just their culture” is the same as saying “they can’t help it; they’re just like that.” It’s much more insulting than the criticism it tries to counter.

7. I ended up listening to parts of some ‘liberal vs. conservative’ / ‘secular vs. Christian’ debates recently. My main takeaway was that the secular-liberal side all seem to imagine that an institution is a thing that ‘just works’ absent human enforcement. It’s really rather amazing to my mind that such obvious ideas as “any law you make has to be enforced, and all enforcement depends finally on physical violence” can so completely fail to penetrate so many people’s heads.