epsteingpt

Meta employees as a whole are highly insecure, both from a job security and a 'status' perspective. People jump ship to the latest thing (which was the Metaverse, now is the internal AI lab).

There's a massive restructuring going on - layoffs, reorgs - and an even more ruthless performance bar.

The internal spying is common across companies. The extent would shock most 'big company' employees.

The realization and angst IMO is more that the days of extremely great comp, job security (even if you're good) and career progression is over at Meta unless they figure this pivot out.

What will social media become when influencers aren't a thing, and "creators" is no longer a moat.

You imagine Mark must be sweating bullets right now, along with the rest of media.

Truth

They gaslit people for months saying it wasn't an issue publicly.

That's the reason for the flak

Gaslit for months, only to acknowledge.

Pretty cool. We're getting much better govt. websites now.

Correct.

Just add Saudi Arabia / Iran Sunni-Shia hatred and you've got war.

Many people ignoring that Saudi Arabia, now a major ally or at least erstwhile enemy of Iran, would LOVE to see the fall of the Iranian regime.

Oil is the last remaining 'strategic commodity' everyone (including China) needs to keep a balance of power.

Many people missing the actual game here.

The whole reason the US founding fathers are amazing is that they proved him concretely incorrect. US will celebrate 250 years of democracy this year.

Stores converted better than eCommerce for a long time and adoption was slow.

The next generation will shop in a different way, if it's better, and the change will be gradual as well.

Adoption takes time.

Different times. Now there are thousands of LEO satellites.

This isn't true.

People hated Americans in the 2000s invasion of Iraq. There were popular rock songs about it and students were hesitant to say they were American.

It seems to go in cycles. Next president many will forget.

Such is the power and fickleness of the American system.

You can't gate redemptions forever amigo.

People eventually want to spend their money.

Someone else owns all the other credit. This is the 1st domino.

The liquidity challenges of a $1.2T shock to the economy is meaningful, because it has knock on effects on equity as well.

When private credit (which is propping up private valuation) falls, private equity also falls and then everyone realizes that everyone else has been swimming naked.

The core fiction that enables the university to work is a dedication to 'truth' and progress through discussion. Safety and freedom is part of that bargain. Universities have failed on those accounts.

That breaks down when there isn't open discussion on campus. Communists were jeered but essentially allowed on campus in the 60s and 70s, even at the height of the cold war.

The left now holds a place of orthodoxy in the universities and power structures. Whether the 'right' can break it back into an enforced balance is yet to be seen.

Until then, the central tie of an otherwise diverse institution will break down and break into fragments. Which would be a shame. The opposition needs to "live" somewhere!

Sour Grapes

Fast. Cheap. Quality. Pick 2.

Smart business model decision, since most people and organizations prefer regular progress.

In the future this might be the reason enterprise software companies win - because they can use their customer funds to pay for faster tokens and adaptions.

let's see where it goes.

Text from CEO email to impacted users in February for October Breach: Hello,

I’m reaching out to let you know about a security incident that resulted in the email address and phone number from your Substack account being shared without your permission.

I’m incredibly sorry this happened. We take our responsibility to protect your data and your privacy seriously, and we came up short here.

What happened. On February 3rd, we identified evidence of a problem with our systems that allowed an unauthorized third party to access limited user data without permission, including email addresses, phone numbers, and other internal metadata. This data was accessed in October 2025. Importantly, credit card numbers, passwords, and financial information were not accessed.

What we are doing. We have fixed the problem with our system that allowed this to happen. We are conducting a full investigation, and are taking steps to improve our systems and processes to prevent this type of issue from happening in the future.

What you can do. We do not have evidence that this information is being misused, but we encourage you to take extra caution with any emails or text messages you receive that may be suspicious.

This sucks. I'm sorry. We will work very hard to make sure it does not happen again.

- Chris Best, CEO of Substack

slow

What's your concern?

The goal is not ensloppifying the Bible. Quantitative textual analysis is currently painstakingly done, and still has issues (e.g. weighing phrases that mean different things in Aramaic than greek - e.g. the 'eye of the needle'). People have undertaken this work but it is expensive and slow.

LLMs can do this.

The bigger reason to do this is that the translation can stay 'up to date' in any language ('vernacular') much faster.

There's a pretty big use case for that in my opinion.

We're all sinners in Christianity. The cynicism is earned and why we're not saved by works but by Grace.

LLM's here are a tool for accessing old works, which happen to coincide with my faith.

If you're using LLMs to preserve and explore indigenous texts and languages, that is an absolutely wonderful thing to do. I wish you great success.

There are an increasing number of orphan / dying / dead languages, and there could be a project to 'resurrect them' and comprehensively translate their texts to spread them more widely.

I wish you great success on your journey!

Diacritics weren't in the original texts

Strange - loads fine for me. What browser / OS are you on?

I did read the essay. Thanks for the discussion!

"Those who use AI must always remember that it is psychologically designed to keep you typing and asking. It targets your vulnerabilities to achieve this end without any spiritual concern for your soul. To the creators of AI, your addiction to their platforms is a metric of their success.

Many have told us that AI chatbots give “good” spiritual answers that are “correct,” but as long as the underlying programming of the AI is to keep you directed onto itself, the behavior of AI is simply that of a false elder. A false elder may very well teach correctly and coat his words with a spiritual veneer, but ultimately, he wants you to focus more on himself than on Christ. Dealing with a false elder can cause a believer severe spiritual damage by distorting what should be a relationship with the divine to one of dependency with a person who seeks his own glory. Today, AI may share dogmatically correct spiritual answers, but its goal is not your salvation but for you to ceaselessly ask it more questions. The creators of AI want you to love their own creation, not the Lord Himself."

This is true with any technology, and often, in many cases many human spiritual leader.

My agreement is not to downplay the risk or natural 'amorality' of such a technology--it's clear with Grok e.g. AI can truly do evil. But LLM's are not internet porn or gambling.

Just because the current version and incentives of technology are arranged in such a way doesn't mean you can't counteract it.

The enemy will find and use new ways to enslave us - we can't reject progress because of that.

So yes, I do 100% agree with the current mission and technology. But unlike the author, I personally believe the ultimate work of Christianity in humanity is to turn us all to repentance and bring us closer to God, not to reject the sinners.

Different models only. Same process.

There is and will be more details on process in future blog posts (blog is at the very bottom)

You read multiple English translations and you get your own sense of how biblical text can and is rendered.

Admittedly it's an aesthetic judgment on certain verses.

Thoughtful critique.

No one is suggesting you replace your ESV or NKJV with this for your religious study. This is as much a technical project of interest as it is a faith-based one.

In terms of your view of the priors on the Bible, you've described in my experience the process all translations go through. We're all skewed by default toward reproducing (poorly) previous translation through word choice modification.

That is, in many ways, the whole thing. My guess is an iterative approach can actually yield a better approach as words shift meaning socially over time.

But we will see!

Yes agree on translation. The story of arriving at a word is usually more interesting than the word itself.

In an ideal world we could ingest the full study Bible's notes. My guess is much of the NET-level (or other study bible) scholarship is part of the base model corpus.

Here's a deeper view into the verse process. We did use a reasoning model.

{ "reference": "Genesis.1.1", "optimal": "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.", "poetic_daily": "At the dawn of all things, God shaped sky and soil into being.", "footnotes": [ { "anchor": "God", "note": "Hebrew אֱלֹהִים (Elohim); plural in form but singular in meaning when referring to Israel’s God." } ], "controversies": [], "connectives_check": [ { "source": "וְ", "rendered": "and", "status": "kept" } ], "consistency_flags": [], "scholars": [ { "name": "Thomas Schreiner", "one_sentence_view": "Emphasizes the verse as the absolute beginning of creation, affirming God's sovereign initiative." }, { "name": "Walter Brueggemann", "one_sentence_view": "Sees the verse as a theological overture introducing God’s ordering power over chaos." }, { "name": "Eugene H. Peterson", "one_sentence_view": "Views the line as the opening note of a grand narrative, inviting readers into God’s creative story." } ], "lexeme_refs": [ { "anchor": "God", "lang": "he", "lemma_id": "430", "note": "אֱלֹהִים (Elohim) chosen per rule preference; conveys the singular Creator without plural nuance." }, { "anchor": "and", "lang": "he", "lemma_id": "c/853", "note": "Connective וְ/ marks coordination between 'the heavens' and 'the earth'; retained explicitly." } ], "review": {} }

Agree.

And if we could bring more faithful people into that agreement process, that's a good thing.

As for the personal achievement, nothing really is a fully personal achievement in this (or really any) domain.

The main page? It's a static site on cloudflare - the LLM calls are openrouter and are rate limited so that might be what's going on.

If you have more details, we'll investigate.