Category: Tech and Coding
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Deep Dive Bible: a new Bible study app
Today I’m launching a new, full-featured Bible study app—not a business enterprise, but a gift to the Church: A full-featured app made in six weeks? While I’m working on other projects? I’m almost as surprised as (I imagine) you are. So, here’s the story of how this project basically popped into existence. Well, maybe it…
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How to set up your LLM as a Bible study tutor
This post gives you a set of project instructions that turn any major LLM into a surprisingly competent Bible study tutor rooted in traditional, small-o orthodox Christianity. It is a companion to my earlier post, “How to Read the Bible All the Way Through for the First Time.” You copy the instructions, paste them into…
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Knowledge in an Age of Black Boxes
This is a keynote delivered June 30, 2026, at the Microsoft conference Infinity 365 in Salzburg, Austria. The assignment was to analyze how the transition from Wikipedia to AI would change how we get knowledge. I began by analyzing these (i.e., Wikipedia and AI systems generally) as two more recent epistemic institutions, each with risks,…
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How I Use AI to Preview Movies
Or, why I hardly ever read movie reviews anymore Several times a week, I want a yes/no answer as to whether I would like a given movie. You see, one of my habits is to spend a 30–60 minutes a day after dinner watching (mostly) old movies. There are hundreds if not thousands of them…
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Zobot: A Third Kind of Self-Sustaining Being
Philosophy and theology posit two kinds of self-sustaining beings: God, who is eternally self-sustaining, depending on nothing outside himself for his being; and living beings or organisms, consisting of many interoperative systems that function to sustain the whole, and which give rise to rough copies of themselves. Advances in robotics and AI now make feasible…
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Why Encyclopedias Are Still Important
Here is a little argument for the enduring necessity of encyclopedias, despite the rise of LLMs. This will have two parts: the first more philosophical, developing principles about the “organic” nature of intelligence and judgment, and the second an application of these principles to the purposes of encyclopedias. LLMs (basically, AI engines that we can…
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The Return of the Coders
Summary: Internet centralization and corporate dominance have increasingly stifled digital freedom. The Encyclosphere project stands solidly against this trend. In this blog post, I invite developers to make this vision a reality, giving them many ideas on how to help. Spearheaded by the Knowledge Standards Foundation, we aim to unify the world’s encyclopedic knowledge under…
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A dialogue with a chatbot
The following is a dialogue I recently had with a chatbot which shall remain nameless. I was curious about the extent to which the chatbot was aware of itself, and if it would acknowledge its errors and give me a cogent explanation of how it arrived at its errors. If you find this interesting, or…
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A first attempt at using WordPress for microblogging
Here is the brand spanking new Larry Sanger Microblog, which lives at a domain I had sitting around doing nothing: http://StartThis.org. As you’ll see, it looks a little like a social media feed. I simply downloaded a theme, then spent the day fixing it up so it looked more or less right like a microblog.…
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What Decentralization is Going to Require
Decentralization. It’s not just a hip happnin’ buzzword. And it’s not just for blockchain. It has been important, and it always has been—I was using it back in 2005 to describe the early Wikipedia—because it uses technology to guarantee, or at least safeguard, freedom. It removes control of public conversations from the hands of would-be…
