Byron AI Volunteers Wanted

The Byron AI team is looking for 10-20 volunteers who are a) reasonably well-versed in a broad range of literary genres and b) are capable of quickly reading 500- to 1000-word chunks. No technical ability is required; what we’re looking for is people who are capable of reading an unidentified text sample and attempting to identify the author on the basis of the style. The performance is not important; we have a second-level test that is necessary for those readers who cannot identify the author on the first read, so the volunteers have to be able to resist the temptation to look anything up or resort to AI in order to identify the author.

That sort of artificial identification will pollute the data and we want to strictly avoid it. Byron AI backers are favored for this, so if you’re interested in volunteering, please email me with AI STYLE BACKER if you are a project backer and AI STYLE if you are not.

As is probably clear, the dev team did not wait for the campaign to successfully conclude before we got started on certain elements of the project. It’s still too soon to declare that we will succeed in the proof of concept, but the initial indications are positive.

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The Satanic Inversion of FROZEN

I’ve previously written on how LET IT GO is a satanic anthem that summarizes the moral perspective of Aleister Crowley. But never having seen the movie, I didn’t know what a complete inversion of Hans Christian Anderson’s SNOW QUEEN the Disney movie actually is.

When Gerda encounters the magical henchmen of the Snow Queen, waiting for her at the gate, she generates a legion of angles to protect her as she repeats The Lord’s Prayer and it turns the mist around her into an army of angels. She is able to break through the Snow Queen’s palace and finally rescue Kay because she has help from God to enter unharmed and to reach Kay while the Snow Queen has gone away. Without this advantage, Gerda would have never been able to rescue Kay.

The story of Frozen is secular and dry in comparison and despite the presence of the supernatural in its universe, it is completely un-enchanted by it on a spiritual level.

Elsa is incredibly cruel to Anna when she finds her. Anna finds that Elsa cares about nothing but herself. Elsa’s leading song “Let it Go” is a call to abandon all your responsibilities for personal gratification. “Let it go” proclaims that any time a woman, or in this case a monarch, has to exercise temperance of her emotions and behaviour, or quell her own hedonistic desires to fulfill her responsibilities, it is a form of oppression to her that she ought to break free from. This thought pattern presents in a myriad ways in modern culture that targets women to make them resent any roles other than transactional employment.

Some of the lyrics in the song Let it go are, “No right, no wrong, no rules for me, I’m free”. How many girls are innocently singing along to this anthem to selfishness and entitlement? How many of them will then go on to internalise this message as adults?

Based on the behaviour of grown women in the modern west, it is clear this messaging already has a stronghold on the female psyche that seems to perceive motherhood and marriage as oppression primarily because she has to spend a significant part of her day thinking about and helping others. A mother having to remember her children’s doctors appointments and pick up laundry to put in the washing machine is “emotional labour” that instagram tells her she ought to be compensated for.

When Anna attempts to convince Elsa to come home and end the blizzard that is endangering the lives of her people, Elsa, in a fit of passion, strikes Anna with her powers and in doing so begins the process of a slow death for Anna. The only thing that can save Anna is “an act of true love”. Anna then rushes home to Arendelle to get a kiss from her boyfriend Prince Hans only to discover he never loved her at all and leaves her to freeze so that he can usurp the throne.

Prince Hans then tries kill Elsa. However, Anna jumps in to save Elsa and takes the sword which freezes on impact with the rest of Anna’s body. But because this was an “act of true love” the sword shatters and Anna’s curse put on her by Elsa goes away. Anna, who did nothing wrong, and was the victim of the curse, had to prove herself as virtuous in order to break this curse. To call the logic of this ending idiotic would be an understatement.

I’m now tempted to produce an AI movie that inverts the inversion in which the good sister Greta shows up with Prince Hansel and his magic flaming sword to destroy her wicked sister Ilse and melt her evil ice castle.

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The China That Can Say No

China is the first Iranian trading partner, but will not be the only one, to reject the USA’s desperate attempt to win on the economic front what it lost on both the military and the economic fronts:

Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting: Donald Trump has threatened to wage a full-fledged economic war on Iran. Many say the economic threat is aimed at making up for the failure of the war, in the military domain, that the U.S. and Israel waged against Iran. What’s your take on that?

Lin Jian: Sanctions and pressure tactics are not the solution. China calls on parties to act responsibly and stick to the political and diplomatic approach. 

Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting: Iran has endured years of sanctions imposed by the U.S. The Islamic Republic has either managed to bypass or find alternatives. And now it is said that Trump has no tangible card to enforce what he claims as “toughest sanctions.” What’s your viewpoint?

Lin Jian: China believes that military means, sanctions and pressure tactics are not the solution. On the contrary, they will only lead to escalation that serves no one’s interests. We call for efforts to solve disputes through dialogue and negotiation.

AFP: A follow-up on Iran, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged China to join Washington in putting strong economic pressure on Iran. This was in an interview yesterday. Bessent noted that China has historically imported much of its energy from the Gulf. Does the foreign ministry have a response to these comments by Bessent?

Lin Jian: I answered a similar question yesterday. Let me reiterate, China opposes illicit unilateral sanctions that lack basis in international law and UN Security Council mandate. We call on parties to act responsibly and stick to the political and diplomatic approach.

In other words, China will continue to ignore US demands and it will continue to support its ally and trading partner, Iran.

In not entirely unrelated news, I was rather impressed with the geopolitical analysis of US-China relations on the third episode of the fourth season of Lioness. I also found it amusing how assiduously the show avoided making any reference to Israel whatsoever in its discussion of intelligence operations in the United States.

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A Cancer Self-Diagnosis

HR helpfully demonstrates the inutility of HR:

HR asked me to install employee monitoring software across every company laptop last month.

They wanted screenshots every five minutes, browser history, application usage, idle time, and an automated “productivity score” for every employee.

I told them this seemed invasive.

They told me the executive team had already approved it.

So I installed exactly what they requested.

Three weeks later, the VP of HR asked me to prepare a report showing the 20 least productive employees in the company.

I exported the data.

Seven of the bottom ten worked in HR.

One HR business partner had spent 19 hours on Zillow during business hours.

Another averaged 46 minutes of keyboard activity per day.

Someone had watched four complete seasons of Love Is Blind.

The VP asked whether I could exclude HR because their work was “less quantifiable.”

What passes for HR work isn’t less quantifiable, it’s simply nonexistent.

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Air Power Idiocy

What do air power advocates, American tax protestors, religious conservatives, and NATO strategists all have in common? The foolish idea that with just a little external assistance, the people will rise up and overthrow their government:

Early this year, Ukrainian officials came to President Volodymyr Zelensky with a risky new plan to end the war with Russia. It would require expanding their bombing campaign to include a set of targets and a class of weapons they had long avoided. In addition to Ukraine’s ongoing strikes against Russian military bases, oil refineries, supply lines, and logistics hubs, the officials wanted to launch waves of AI-enabled drones at Moscow’s airports, hoping to stop international carriers from flying in and out of the Russian capital, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the plan, which has not been previously reported.

In short, they wanted to plan a mass terror attack on Russian airports to completely shut down all civilian flights in and out of Moscow as a way to ramp up pressure and make Russian civilians in the capital city feel the consequences of the war.

It’s remarkable that military planners even entertain these ridiculous notions that never, ever, work. The idea has been around since the 1920s when it was first conceived by an Italian general named Giulio Douhet. It will probably not escape your attention that despite having first access to this strategery, Italy has not won any wars since the publication of The Command of the Air in 1921. Nor has ever it worked anywhere from Germany to Vietnam to Gaza.

Contra the air power theory, bombing tends to cause the people to support the regime in charge and turn to it for protection. It doesn’t ever make them want to surrender to the people bombing them or accede to their wishes.

And in preemptive answer to the obvious rebuttal, Russia isn’t bombing civilian targets in Kiev to turn the Ukrainian people against Zelensky and the Kiev regime. It’s a) payback for Ukraine’s attacks on civilians and b) a warning to the Kiev regime’s NATO supporters.

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The Wages of Sin

JDA has a new book out that addresses a very serious flaw in the modern Church:

Jon Del Arroz’s new book, The Wages of Sin, is out today. It follows Churchianity, for which I wrote the introduction and which hit #1 in Amazon’s religious philosophy category last year. Where Churchianity diagnosed the consumer-driven model reshaping American parishes, the new book turns to a word Del Arroz says most pulpits quietly retired: sin.

The Wages of Sin builds its structure on the Confiteor, the confession prayer Catholics have recited at every Mass since at least the tenth century. Del Arroz splits the book into four sections, one for each phrase of the prayer: thoughts, words, deeds, and omissions. Nine chapters work through the sins Augustine confessed in his Confessions, including pride dressed as worship, envy refined into schadenfreude, the spiritual torpor the Church Fathers called acedia, and the four sins Scripture names as crying out to heaven for vengeance. Each chapter closes with an examination of conscience, and the appendix adds a full one plus a vice-virtue table for daily use.

The book leans on Augustine’s framework of sin as disordered love: not a checklist of prohibitions, but the habit of loving the wrong things, or loving right things out of order. Del Arroz traces that idea into Romans 6:23 and the Catechism’s teaching on mortal sin, arguing that a Church which stopped naming sin also stopped being able to prescribe its cure.

The post-1960s idea of welcoming sinners into the church and refraining from judgment was correct in theory and flawed in application. The point is to welcome the sinner, not to accept and embrace the sin. And now we have “churches” featuring open satanists pretending to be priests and pastors, preaching blasphemy from the pulpits.

One hopes The Wages of Sin will help restore much-needed order to the Christian churches.

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Sound and Fury Signifying Desperation

Short Fake Trump jacks up the rhetoric again:

No one has given the Islamic Republic of Iran a greater opportunity to make a Deal than me. TRAGICALLY, for them, they hâve failed to take it. Therefore, today, I am announcing the MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN AGAINST ANY COUNTRY! This will be Economie Warfare and Isolation on an unprecedented scale. Their navy is gone, their air force is destroyed, their military factories are now rubble, their currency is worthless, and their country is hanging by a thread. Today, I am also announcing that ANY country that allows its financial institutions, businesses, airports, or government entities to provide any type of lifeline to Iran will itself face TREMENDOUS Economie Conséquences. Oil smuggling, swap lines, cash transfers, exchange houses, ship registries, front companies — It ail needs to stop NOW. You know who you are. This will be an ECONOMIC D-DAY, and we need ail of our Allies to stand with the United States of America to isolate, and defeat, the Iran threat. These maniacs are on the ropes, and these HISTORIC MEASURES will cripple them and their ability to Project terror worldwide. IRAN WILL NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.

So after demonstrating the inability of the US military to the world, now he’s going to demonstrate the intrinsic weakness of the US financial system. All this accomplishes is to ensure that BRICS intensifies its process of replacing the US dollar and further weakening the economic influence of the USA.

Doubling down is not a strategy born of strength and success, but weakness and failure. This sounds like projection combined with pure desperation devoid of ideas.

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By the AI, For the AI

No doubt the Representatives in Congress are also using AI to read the AI-drafted legislation that is being provided to them:

US congressional lawyers are struggling with a flood of error-ridden AI-generated legislation, forcing them to spend increasingly more time rewriting proposals produced by chatbots, Politico reported on Monday. Staffers and outside groups have more frequently turned to ChatGPT and Claude to produce legislative text, with error-ridden drafts regularly reaching the House Office of Legislative Counsel (OLC), according to eight current and former officials interviewed by the Axel Springer-owned outlet.

No doubt these laws are being drafted for Representatives Chen and Martinez with military precision. And that matters.

The crazy thing is that there is a non-zero chance that Byron AI will one day be authoring legislation for Americans. Especially if we’re successful in designing it to write better than ChatGPT and Claude.

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The Final Five Hours

This is your last chance to back the proof of conept of the Byron AI. We’ve now hit our original goal of 250 backers. 300 would seem to be ambitious, but a last-day pop is common, so we’ll see how it goes.

Thanks to everyone who is supporting this. While I have not publicly shared any of the information yet, the development team has already been making excellent progress even prior to obtaining the hardware thanks to our existing tools and cloud access.

UPDATE: 80 minutes left and we’re close with 286. Just 14 more…

UPDATE: Time’s up! We ended up with exactly 300 backers (counting the three direct ones) and what should be sufficient support to do what we are setting out to do and most likely a bit more. Thanks very much to everyone who is making this possible!

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