That's a bit harsh! I go to mass every Sunday (in France) and rarely have political stuff. When there, it's most often about abortion or euthanasia (of course in a pro-life (or anti-choice) direction, "you shall not kill")

But dull, empty homilies are (alas) very frequent.

I have heard phoned in homilies from some priests but this is not accurate in the United States based on my travels and weekly local attendance. Sorry that you had a bad experience.

To be fair, faith is the crux of Catholicism.

we have vibe coding priests before GTA VI

Not to write homilies though. The real danger of risking exposing private information would be pastoral work.

Gemini 3.1 – I don't remember that verse. Is that from the old testament?

Forgive me father for I have sinned. It has been three minutes since I shit posted on HN, and my greentext stories are famous on 4chan. Also, after lunch today I send 300 emails to Jeffrey Epstein using my work email and signed with my real name. What a great guy!

Its more than a nit. It only applies to confession so putting in other private information would not break a vow, but it would still be a very bad thing to do.

Was the number of partners you picked random or you chose 2137 on purpose? As it's actually somewhat related to the topic...

>>Bro as a kid I used to go to church every Sunday

I mean, not to dismiss your experience, but in my weekly Sunday going to church in Poland the priest would write an actual homily that felt relevant to the community. But then our small town had 3 churches, and each one had a different style - people would talk about preferring one over the other because they had more interesting "content".

But yeah, there was the message from the regional Bishop or the Archbishop of Poland or sometimes directly from the Vatican, then the reading from the old testament, then the homily which I'm 99% was written by the priest giving the mass.

>> I guarantee that not a single person from my entire village understood what the priest was saying

Well, I wouldn't say not a single person did, but yeah, we had those 3 churches, probably 10k seats each, every one was rammed on the sunday, but I'd say 90% of people there were only there to tick it off and snoozed through the whole thing. But it's not because the homily was boring, it's because going to church on sunday was(maybe still is?) a thing you have to do or people will make fun out of you.

Again, not defending the use of AI. My comment was more as a general response to people who maybe don't have a real life experience of listening to Catholic homilies and have unrealistic ideas of how much effort priests would normally put into them pre-ChatGPT.

In retrospect, I probably should have replied to a specific comment.

> It's very common for people to ask others questions that could be easily googled or clauded.

I'll admit I do this, asking people questions that could be answered by Google, and sometimes even if I know the answer myself, sometimes to make conversation, sometimes because I want to hear the person's perspective on it.

If I'd never ask questions I could find the answers to myself in some other way, I think I'd never ask any person any question, which sounds kind of boring.

This is true but seems to be orthogonal to the post you replied to. At a further tangent, I encounter people saying "well it's on Google" as they seem to think Google has some authority or quality threshold.

What an absolutely awful take. Asking people questions, even if it’s less efficient or has the chance to be misleading, is the absolute number one way to a) learn, and b) make connection. Even if you’re just asking a stranger the time, you don’t know what you might learn.

> first wrote "not sent to the cloud", but if God is all-knowing, records of all sins are already in the cloud, just not accessible by support staff.

I heard there is a GDPR'esque Right of access(SAR) to see your records if you ask for it nicely in person.

The system in question is a distributed system, an interaction within that system such as "confession" involves ridiculous amounts of distributed processing, far beyond two nodes that were participating in that original exchange.

I am sorry if you read it as an attack on religion, it was an attack on big AI. If religion sends or even needs to send data upstream is not part of my knowledge, but AI does. But church did have the best understanding of who is who in a local society and AI companies will use this data in a more concrete way. I just drew the parallel to get the gears spinning. I agree that the organized religion was crucial glue to society trough history.

Being older, I remember homework involving a trip to the library to look through lots of books for 1 tiny bit of information needed for the homework.

For IT-related info, dial-up was expensive, and finding things either involved altavista or Yahoo indexes. Computer magazines were also a great source of info, as were actual books.

The key difference from today is persistence, and attention span. Both of these are now in short supply.

You do not have to pay anything.

As a massive hedge fund with insane holdings managed by complex legal nuances & historical treaties, juggling critically withheld information, and having an outsize political presence as an independent state (thanks Benito Mussolini!), The Vatican has great financial incentive to have smart quants, historians, lawyers, and others on the payroll.

Based on their balance sheets I think they get it very, very, well.

Steve Jobs took a vow of poverty at Apple, too… somehow, some way, the dividends and stocks and private planes and fancy business dinners and everyone kissing his ass made a $1 salary survivable. Poor guy.

I read the other day that the Roman Empire never fell. Its emperor is the Pope.

Which is an exaggeration, but makes you thinking. This institution still has a ton of power.

Huh, this was an absolutely fascinating read. Kind of feel like the Vatican nailed it with this one lol. Did not have that statement on my 2026 bingo card. Wise words and perspective.

(BS here meaning bachelor's — I misread this at first!)

"On iconoclasm and the Birch-Tate conjecture".

I don’t know about popes, but many prominent mathematicians, philosophers and early scientists were priests or monks: Mendel, Copernicus, Bayes, Ockham, Bolzano... It was pretty much the only way to get the kind of education, intellectual culture, time and focus required for hundreds of years (at least in Europe), until the upper-middle class widened around the enlightenment and industrial revolution.

The friction between the church and science is a relatively new phenomenon, at least at the current scale. There are always exceptions like Galileo, but it took science a long time to start answering (and contradicting) some of the key questions about our world and where we come from that religion addresses.

How much better?

Every honest description of Catholic Church, as any institution of this size and history, needs to be very nuanced. One of such nuances is a fact that it was one of the main, and sometimes strictly main, supporters and drivers of education and scientific progress. Other such nuance is that it very often punished and persecuted attempts to bring education and scientific progress.

Both views of the Church are true. That's what nuance is.

the catholic church has traditionally been pro-science, the contrast with science is a modern development. There's a ton of Catholic clergy who were scientists[0], many of those well known (Mersenne, Mendel, Copernicus, Venturi etc).

Even the epitome of the science-church conflict, the Galileo story, started from a scientific disagreement before the religious one[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marin_Mersenne

[0] https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-sma...

They often were. A lot of history has been retold more in a way to fit contemporary narrative than to maintain historical accuracy. For instance Galileo. The typical tale is something like Galileo dared claim the Earth is not the center of the universe, the Church freaked out at the violation of dogma, shunned him, and he was lucky to escape with his life. In reality the Pope was one of Galileo's biggest supporters and patrons. But they disagreed on heliocentrism vs geocentricism.

The Pope encouraged Galileo to write a book about the issue and cover both sides in neutrality. Galileo did write a book, but was rather on the Asperger's side of social behavior, and decided to frame the geocentric position (which aligned with the Pope) as idiotic, defended by an idiot - named Simplicio no less, and presented weak and easily dismantled arguments. The Pope took it as a personal insult, which it was, and the rest is history.

And notably Galileo's theory was, in general, weak. Amongst many other issues he continued to assume perfectly circular orbits which threw everything else off and required endless epicycles and the like. So his theory was still very much in the domain of philosophy rather than observable/provable science or even a clear improvement, so he was just generally acting like an antagonistic ass to a person who had supported him endlessly. And as it turns out even the Pope is quite human.

A lot of very bad things were historically done by men of science

Please be more specific. Church is 2000 years old.

The Catholic Church was funding a lot of research for a long time. E.g the Elon Musk of his time, Galileo, was famously sponsored by it and when asked to contrast his theories against the established view, sperged out so hard against the people tasked with reviewing his publications, they tossed him under the carriage.

You mean during the Napoleonic wars? Science was already fully embraced by then. Or do you think the Austrians and the French were casting spells against each other instead of firing cannon?

AI Mary, bereft of grace, paid for by sinners.

I left the church a long time ago, but this still makes me sad.