iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I've been calling it "Bad Fathers' Day" in my head

At which point Anthropic/OpenAI have pulled an incredibly clever magic trick: after plundering the collective output of 70 years of programmers — they now sell it back to companies instead of programmers. Enclosure of the commons as a service!

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AI is very expensive, but once you've reached the point that all your code is being written by AI, it actually becomes *cheaper* to have a skeleton crew who direct (expensive) AI to try to continuously patch it up than it is/was to have real programmers building it.

i.e., the faster-but-worse approach is viral; it spreads so quickly that everything else has to be built on top of it. Their gamble is that subsidized AI is *so* viral that the whole tech industry backs itself into a place where it *needs* AI tools to understand its AI-tool-generated software

I recently re-read the original "Worse is Better" from 1989 (see dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBette...). It reminded me a lot of current discussions around AI in programming. In particular, it seems to me that Anthropic and OpenAI have built a whole business plan on building things "New Jersey style" —

dreamsongs.com

Worse Is Better

Greg Johnston @gbj.dev · 10/06/2026

ASA/plate-pledge/membership are public for every parish here: generalconvention.org/explore-paro... TEC is working with individual dioceses to provide them with interfaces for complete parochial report data for their own parishes

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gives a whole new meaning to John 1:14 really (sorry, Lord)

Interestingly this one's actually true — because Greek has no Sh (cf. Shlomo → Solomon) it was received into Greek as Sark Week (properly, ἡ τοῦ σαρκός ἑβδομάς), and gave rise to what's sometimes known as a "Logos-Sharks Christology"

sorry you've left me with a brainworm and it's "get in loser, we're plundering the Egyptians"

tfw when you (b. 1953) are the first person in 19 centuries to truly understand the teachins of Jesus Christ

Greg Johnston @gbj.dev · 31/05/2026

"Plato" and "Aristotle" : theology :: "Constantine" and "Nicea" : church history?

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That's very kind—thank you!

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Greg Johnston @gbj.dev · 30/05/2026

Ooh! I will read this

The most effective way to become more efficient at preaching prep is not to automate your prep more fully. It's to learn the material—the sacred texts, the human mind, the English language—more deeply.

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if you're feeding a sermon into any of them because you're not sure whether a particular point is going to land, or whether you're going down the wrong track—stop! ask a buddy! phone a friend! There is someone in your church or in your life who you can ask.

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if you're finding that Gemini is really helpful for polishing your sermon text and fixing up sentence structures and rhythm, you need to start closing the laptop and start reading more novels and poetry and listening to more songs by good songwriters

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if you're asking Claude for 3 sermon ideas and then picking one of them to flesh out by yourself, you need to read the texts, make a cup of tea, and go out for a walk instead

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if you're turning to ChatGPT to provide exegetical context for your sermon because you get better results than you would from (pre-AI) Google, then sorry—what you actually need to do is to work on fundamentals. Go back to a study Bible (digital or physical!)/seminary textbook/lecture notes

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I think my response is that if you put these tools on a spectrum - LLMs/AI - non-AI online resources - offline digital resources (Accordance, Logos) - non-digital resources (books) When you think you need to move a level "higher" for preaching prep, you often need to move a level *lower* instead

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I've seen lots of conversation recently about AI and preaching, both online and in my own social circles, in part because of this week's encyclical, in part because my two worlds are church and programming, and in part because things are moving so fast that people are talking about AI everywhere.

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Greg Johnston @gbj.dev · 18/05/2026

I thought this was quite interesting. I'd suggest moving the section on the role of Claude/Gemini in writing it up toward the top — several of the TL;DR sections contain specific Claudeisms, and it might be helpful to foreground the process (rather than people assuming it's entirely AI-generated)

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(And it's not at all clear to me why it would point to a Semitic substrate in particular, but I haven't read the original arguments here!)

Greg Johnston @gbj.dev · 18/05/2026

Ok not to take the bait BUT Having done some comparative Semitic philology I'd say it cuts the other direction. Systematic consonant changes between neighboring related languages are totally normal. i.e., Grimm's Law exists but isn't a level of change that requires an interesting explanation

Greg Johnston @gbj.dev · 02/05/2026

Have you ever read the book Consider the Fork? You might really enjoy it... (It's not specific to forks but a kind of global history of all kinds of cooking and eating utensils.)

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Greg Johnston @gbj.dev · 10/04/2026

I can't quite grasp your tone (I think it's sarcastic?) but human beings copying out manuscripts make mistakes all the time, and there are whole fields of study dedicated to this kind of textual criticism, independent of anyone's beliefs about the inspiration or not of any given text.

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Greg Johnston @gbj.dev · 10/04/2026

i.e., this image shows text that reads roughly FATHERHALLOWEDBE THYNAME THYKINGDOMCOME THYWILL BEDONE ONEARTHAS ITISINHEAVEN (reorganized to match the English order of words) Which is way easier to read than FATHERHALLOWEDBETHYNAMETHYKINGDOMCOMETHYWILLBEDONEONEARTHASITISINHEAVEN

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Greg Johnston @gbj.dev · 10/04/2026

The biggest difference is that this style of writing Greek had much narrower columns (in terms of characters-per-column) so it's relatively quite a bit easier to read than the equivalent English version — fewer words fit into a column, and a larger portion of each word is grammatical markers anyway

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Greg Johnston @gbj.dev · 09/04/2026

** for anyone really curious it's the spelling of βασιλεία as βασιλία, which is non-standard and is the kind of thing historical linguists love to see

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Greg Johnston @gbj.dev · 09/04/2026

* it's not really a typo so much as an example of the way in which spelling varies, but it's also interesting because it reflects the changes in Greek pronunciation over time due to itacism, where about half the vowels/vowel combos end up being pronounced "i"

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Greg Johnston @gbj.dev · 09/04/2026

This is true but the most fun part is that there's a typo* in the Greek

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Greg Johnston @gbj.dev · 27/02/2026

Genuinely interesting to me that Musk seems to have rediscovered, from first principles and lived experience, Karl Marx's fundamental claim that technological advancement can abolish scarcity for all, but without asking the second question "then why does inequality still exist?"

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Greg Johnston @gbj.dev · 27/02/2026

Reading the news in 2026 is like:

Donnie Darko "I made a new friend today" meme, with text: "Elon reinvented communism." "Communism or slaves?" "Slaves."

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Greg Johnston @gbj.dev · 05/02/2026

You can install it on multiple devices -- I have it on my phone, tablet, laptop, have had it on an office computer, etc. It has features like Dropbox sync for highlights and notes so it's definitely intended to be used across multiple devices.

Greg Johnston @gbj.dev · 03/02/2026

I think I bought the software and most of my books in 2012-14, and the interface is all still the same, the resources I bought back then all still work, and it's still snappy and nice to use. 10/10 would recommend it to anyone.

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Greg Johnston @gbj.dev · 03/02/2026

I really like Accordance and have used it for years. You just buy the books/resources you want. They're not unreasonably priced, either; so for example checking their site right now they have the NRSV with Strong's numbers for $20, GNT with complete morphological tagging for $60.

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48 hours ago I was scrutinizing frame-by-frames to make sure it was legitimate for me to say, in my sermon the next morning, that he was killed *after* being disarmed. Now even Fox is simply stating that is true.

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To see Fox and the NY Post straightforwardly state that a) Pretti was disarmed before being killed and b) an agent accidentally shot his gun while holding it is just... blowing my mind.

This is astounding to me. I am so used to seeing every topic immediately polarize 50-50, driven by political and media polarization. To see the *Fox* line becoming "agents thought their lives were in danger and this was a tragedy" REALLY speaks to the enormity of what has happened.

I check Fox semi-regularly to see what people I disagree with are being told. Just now: "The New York Post reported that an accidental discharge of Pretti's...pistol, which was being held by an agent after it was taken away from him, may have made authorities believe their lives were in danger."

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Note that it was not the University but the magazine's own (alumni/advisor) board which shut it down, which really says something about how rapidly young adults are being radicalized right now.

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...England to the English, America to the Americans, and Germany to the Germans.”"

"The article... included the line, “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans.” In a January 1939 speech...in which Hitelr predicted that another world war would lead to the annihilation of Jews in Europe, he said, “France to the French,