Joshua Scott Edwards ☀️

Tomorrow is the first day of lent. I’m gonna level with you guys. I’ve not been observant with my faith lately. Just 5 short years ago I was praying every day, several times a day. 6 years ago I was in mass every Sunday and maybe during the week for Eucharistic adoration. These were the most serene times of my life, and I felt so at ease in my own skin. Empirically, it’s undeniable how beneficial orienting my life around God and His love for me is. There’s so much scientific literature about the psychological benefits of gratitude that I won’t appeal to, because I want you to take me at my word when I tell you it helps and I know billions of other people will happily corroborate what I’m telling you now if you just ask them. It’s fascinating, then, how ubiquitous the experience of “falling out” with God reality is. I don’t mean getting angry or upset with Him—although certainly that can happen too. No, what I mean is how quickly we forget. Or put another way, I think it’s interesting how easy it was to take up my habit of smoking (vaping) which was nothing but harmful to me and how hard it was put it down again even when every day with a vape in my hand caused me profound psychological anguish. Contrast that to my prayer life. How hard-won it was to build up a habit of earnestly praying to God 5 times daily, and how rewarding it was! And yet how easily it evaporated into indifference before I even knew it. I haven’t been to mass in like 5 months. I haven’t been to confession in even longer. My soul weighs heavily upon me and I’m in real spiritual peril! Maybe you don’t believe in that nonsense, but take me at my word, please, when I say I recognize that as my state of affairs. It’s interesting too that you don’t need to be religious to see this dynamic at play in your life. It seems to be a universal human experience to watch oneself ruin something with full knowledge of the nature of the ruination yet find oneself powerless to stop it. Lent is essentially a callback to Jesus’ 40 days fasting in the desert. It’s 46 days, but the 6 sundays are “cheat” days not part of the fast—more on that later. Anyway when Jesus was in the desert Satan tempted Him offering Him all the earthly power and indulgences a man could dream of. And Jesus sends him away. It’s a powerful story because even knowing the terrible consequences of sin and the immense benefits of virtue it’s the lived experience of every person on this earth to find it difficult to reject sin and embrace every virtue. Later He says “what good does it to a man to gain the whole world if He should forfeit his soul?” Yet how many of us have sold ourselves out for next to nothing? Lent is a time of penance, so I’m going to be using this time to reflect on my shortcomings. Not an insignificant shortcoming of mine is selling myself—hours of my day, my dignity in what I write and how I write about it, and my mental health, honestly—for the trifling some of a ~$250 biweekly payout. Shameful, really! To be moved to desperately write such bait as I do, jestermaxxing as they say, motivated by nothing but a trifling sum and a false sense of clout. Among other things, I’ll be taking this time to work on improving my relationship to virtue and scorning my long-time false friends of vice and sin. I’ll be deleting this app from my phone for the duration in the hopes it might spur me to have a thought uninfluenced by a recommendation algorithm. I’ll try to publish 6 longform pieces on each of the Sunday’s of Lent, because that’s the kind of writer I want to be. But I might fail. I know to well how easy it is to return to comfortably bad habits. I also know that if I do, it’s important not to despair and give up. That’s the devil talking, accusing! Every moment is an opportunity to try to change for the better. ❤️

First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed. But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads says that we won’t do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that. I guess it’s on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren’t real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it. More importantly, we believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access, because we believe access creates agency. More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do. (If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we don't show you ads.) Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions. Maybe even more importantly: Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI—they block companies they don't like from using their coding product (including us), they want to write the rules themselves for what people can and can't use AI for, and now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be. We are committed to broad, democratic decision making in addition to access. We are also committed to building the most resilient ecosystem for advanced AI. We care a great deal about safe, broadly beneficial AGI, and we know the only way to get there is to work with the world to prepare. One authoritarian company won't get us there on their own, to say nothing of the other obvious risks. It is a dark path. As for our Super Bowl ad: it’s about builders, and how anyone can now build anything. We are enjoying watching so many people switch to Codex. There have now been 500,000 app downloads since launch on Monday, and we think builders are really going to love what’s coming in the next few weeks. I believe Codex is going to win. We will continue to work hard to make even more intelligence available for lower and lower prices to our users. This time belongs to the builders, not the people who want to control them.