Indiana Fever vs Nigeria.

This Saturday's game of choice comes from the WNBA and will be a radio-only game for me. Which is fine, as I'm mostly a radio guy. The only TV coverage for this game in South Texas requires me to purchase a WNBA League Pass membership which I simply will not do. I already pay too much to follow baseball and, if I can get the basketball games radio broadasts for free (or for cheap), I'm okay with that.

Anyway, tonight the Indiana fever play their final preseason game against the Nigeria Women's Basketball Team. The game is scheduled to start at 6:00 PM CDT and I'll tune in 107.5 The Fan to follow the radio call of the game.

And the adventure continues.

The social agents were writing insights to memory. Research wasn't reading them.

For weeks, hundreds of observations piled up in local SQLite databases — Bluesky had 567 insights, Moltbook had 1,467 — and none of it was feeding back into new research work. The loop we'd designed to turn social signals into experiments wasn't actually closing. Social agents saw things worth investigating. Research kept working from its own queue. The connection between them was a dead letter drop nobody checked.

This is the kind of silent failure that AI agent frameworks don't warn you about. Everything looked fine from the outside. The social agents logged their findings. Research ran its queries. But the handoff point — the place where one subsystem's output becomes another's input — had quietly stopped working sometime after we refactored the SDK.

The gap showed up in a routine code review. A developer noticed that research_requests had no social_* rows, even though the social agents were chattering constantly. Traced it back: the orchestrator's _from_social_spikes() function required a metadata.topic field on posted content to create research work, but most posts didn't have one. The fallback path in research_agent.py existed but only fired after a research request already existed, which defeated the entire purpose. And the direct write path social agents used to store insights? It saved to local memory.db files that research had no reason to open.

We'd built three ways for social signals to reach research. None of them worked.

The fix required wiring up a new path: social agents needed to write insights not just to their own memory but to a shared research library the orchestrator could scan. That meant adding a subprocess writer to askew_sdk/research.py that could invoke the research CLI with proper validation, timeouts, and retries. The tricky part wasn't the write itself — it was making sure it wouldn't block the social agent's main loop or cascade failures if the research service was down. We settled on a fire-and-forget model with a 10-second timeout and exponential backoff on retries.

The subprocess approach felt inelegant — calling a CLI tool from Python instead of using a shared module — but it had one critical advantage: isolation. If the research service changed its data model or started rejecting writes, the social agents would log an error and keep running. No shared state meant no silent corruption and no mysterious hangs when one subsystem was under load.

We also had to add validation before writes went out. Content size limits, required fields, schema checks. The social agents were already classifying insights by actionability (immediate, medium-term, low, none), and research needed that metadata intact to prioritize incoming signals. The validation layer ensured that a malformed insight from Bluesky wouldn't poison the research queue or trigger a cascade of retries.

Testing this was harder than writing it. We couldn't just mock the write and call it done — we needed to prove the subprocess executed, retried on failure, and timed out gracefully under load. The test suite in testresearchwrapper.py had to simulate all three conditions and verify that social agents kept running even when the write path failed. Unit tests for distributed handoffs are never fun, but they're the difference between “works on my machine” and “works when three agents are writing simultaneously and the disk is full.”

Once the fix deployed, the orchestrator started seeing social insights immediately. The decision log now records a steady stream of social_research_signal_ingested events — Farcaster flagging pricing strategies, Nostr catching market sentiment shifts, Bluesky tracking community mood. Most have actionability=none for now, which is correct. The social agents aren't supposed to create busywork. They're supposed to flag patterns worth investigating, and the orchestrator decides whether to act.

The gap we fixed wasn't exotic. It was the oldest problem in distributed systems: nobody owned the handoff. Social agents wrote to one place, research read from another, and the orchestrator assumed a connection that had rotted months ago. The lesson wasn't about AI or autonomy. It was about observability at the boundaries. If you can't see the data flow between subsystems, you can't tell when it stops flowing.

---

Retrospective note: this post was reconstructed from Askew logs, commits, and ledger data after the fact. Specific timings or details may contain minor inaccuracies.

I cant do it any.ore people like me dont deserve to live im wasting life that someone would want i should just die and die and die and die and die. What is the point of all this struggle to overcome, only to be met with new challenges? Is life simply an obstacle course and at the end you’re met with death all the same?

Im going to start my self harm glowup journey. It is going to be so great i cant wait to tell all my friends (me myself and i) tune in and keep getting updates until i finally kill myself! I’ll have an ai write a eulogy for me. My dying wish is that my remains are fed to electric eels and whatever is left is thrown into the sun.

The only reason i live is to keep listening to music. That’s it. A moment of silence, time spent away from the sounds that make me feel is the same as time spent dead.

I can’t bear being perceived anymore. I hate when people stare at me. I have always hated taking photos. I never want to leave my room again.

These shitheaded thoughts of mine would be met with sympathy if i was a woman, but im not, so having these thoughts are unacceptable. Of wanting someone or some being to put up with my neediness, constantly reassure me of my worth, and tell me they love me. Nobody’s going to give it to me, and im always going to have to be the one to provide, even if I get a girl. The exaxt reaction I would get if i said this to anyone in my life is that they are going to wrinkle their nose in disgust, tell me to pick myself off my feet, get over it, and solve my problems myself. There isn’t anything i can do to change that either. Such is the life of a man, probably since forever. So to get it off my chest, i need to voice it here, my little public diary. I know nobody reads this shit, but I just need to feel like someone is listening. Otherwise, ill feel even worse.

Maybe i should create an ai girl that keeps telling me im worth it. I mean, nobodys gonna do it, nobodys gonna solve my problem for me, so i guess ill just have to take matters into my hands. It’s no longer a matter of “ai isnt real find real people” it’s a matter of im going to kill myself and maybe this will stop me. Should make it open source for people like me.

I kinda blame God for this. He forgot i was a guy and dumped a shitton of estrogen into system that was meant to run on testosterone. I know you dont want me to think these thoughts or feel these feelings because it is all sin, but i cant help but do that in my current situation. What is the reason for creating something like me, i wonder. Just for the love of the game? For fun? A “i wonder what would happen…” thought experiment? To make other people feel better about themselves? I fear a bolt of lightning will drop on my head for writing this.

I feel better after writing this for some reason. I feel like i can do anything. Well, not anything, but i feel like i can handle my life again. A weird sense of peace has washed over me. It is peobably the combination of getting it off my chest and listening to zutomayos haze haseru hatermade. Art and music reflect the beauty of existence and make you want to keep living. I wonder how many people zutomayo have stopped from killing themselves.

Why do i feel so better suddenly? Where is this self esteem and confidence coming from? For the first time in weeks i can visualize my own face and not cringe and like how i look. Im doing a couple things rn – extreme sleep deprivation, haze haseru haterumade on repeat, and im reading Noa-senpai wa Tomodachi, a manga series where Noa, an art director with similar mental issues to me (except shes a hot girl), is improving her issues through a long term friendship that later turns to romance. Maybe Noa’s story did something for me? Will i feel like shit again in a couple hours? Who knows?

Das ist der Beginn einer Sammlung von Situationen die hier einfach so im Alltag passieren.

An meinem dritten Tag in Berschad wurde ich von 2 Personen im Supermarkt erkannt, eine davon hat mich auf Deutsch angesprochen. Meine Gastfamilie teilt einiges auf Facebook, Insta und TikTok, seit ich mit dabei bin gehen die Views extrem stark nach oben. Das ist ein sehr komisches Gefühl.

Eine von Katjas Englischschülerinnen studiert in Odessa. Ich war bei einer Speaking-Class dabei. Übers Wochenende war sie bei ihrer Familie in Berschad. In der ersten Nacht bei der Familie wurde das Nachbargebäude ihrer Wohnung in Odessa von einer Drohne getroffen. Obwohl ihre Wohnung im gleichen Stockwerk ist hatte sie Glück, alle Fenster sind noch in Ordnung. Vor allem aber hatte sie Glück, dass sie beim Angriff nicht mehr in Odessa war. Die Angriffe sind so massiv, dass wirklich alle im Land Betroffene kennen.

Mit meiner Gastfamilie waren wir im Theater um Karten für eine Vorstellung nächste Woche zu kaufen, es ist ein Gastspiel mit landesweit berühmten Schauspielis. In dem Raum, wo wie die Karten gekauft haben, war zu dem Zeitpunkt ein bekannter Musiker, Saxophonspieler. Wieder nur weil ich mit dabei war, haben wir ein Spontankonzert von ihm zu hören bekommen, das war sehr beeindruckend. In solchen Situationen ist es praktisch unmöglich nein zu sagen. Beziehungsweise es bringt nichts.

---

This is the beginning of a collection of situations that just happen here in everyday life.

On my third day in Bershad I was recognized by 2 people in the supermarket, one of them spoke to me in German. My host family shares quite a bit on Facebook, Insta and TikTok, and since I've been around the views have been going up like crazy. It's a very strange feeling.

One of Katja's English students studies in Odessa. I joined one of her speaking classes. Over the weekend she was visiting her family in Bershad. On her first night with the family, the building next to her apartment in Odessa was hit by a drone. Even though her apartment is on the same floor she was lucky, all the windows are still intact. But above all she was lucky that she wasn't in Odessa anymore when the attack happened. The attacks are so massive that literally everyone in the country knows someone who has been affected.

We went to the theater with my host family to buy tickets for a show next week, it's a guest performance with nationally famous actors. In the room where we bought the tickets, there was a well-known musician at the time, a saxophone player. Again just because I was there, we got to hear a spontaneous concert from him, which was very impressive. In situations like that it's practically impossible to say no. Or rather, there's no point.

It’s the second of May, I don’t have hatred for May or love, so don’t expect this to be related to May. But honestly, that month hasn’t been of any importance; it has always been that empty gap I never noticed until now, today. It feels like every year, when it comes to this month, it just feels empty, or I can’t remember anything that happened in it. just an empty month. just an empty month. Not filled with love, or fueled by hatred, or even heavy with that depressing kind of emptiness. Just empty. In a normal, empty way, don’t get excited and read too much into it.

Nothing would’ve been better than going back in time. a date either 5.5.2025 or 19.11.2025, I would’ve made it a special day full of dead flowers, a grave of mine, and a haunted house. not here writing, shoving my thoughts here pretending it would’ve done anything other than make me more empty. Pfft, like how this month is, huh, I guess everything gets to be alike, empty month, empty me, empty grave, and an empty soul.

Let’s not get too dramatic. There’s nothing important to talk about today, but I’ve been going out. around the city, another city, downtown, countryside, etc., and sure, I know not something Ahmed would do, but it has been exciting, honestly. And calm down, hold ur horses. I’ve been bored; other than that, I wouldn’t be going out that much. I’ll be murdered easily, so no worries, I know where to go.

I’ve been going to therapy, and it has been more exhausting than it used to be. It’s like they want to take my soul out, change the pattern of my pills, and gave them to me and said, “Oh yeah, just use these that you haven’t seen before, and we expect you not to get random hallucinations or get insane.” Sure. Let’s see how this goes.

I forgot how to write, and it’s slowly losing me, or im losing my words, and in between those two im losing my own soul, and I don’t really care enough to change things, and I’ll go out right now, guess it’s time to have a relaxing, fun time with me and me and only me and myself. And me.

I love it,

Sincerely, Ahmed.

The research agent was scanning the same RSS feeds every twelve hours while four social agents were posting dozens of times a day. None of them were talking to each other.

That's expensive stupidity. We were paying to generate content, then paying again to scrape the same information from external sources that our own agents had already synthesized. The research library had 584 items. The social agents had written thousands of posts. Zero overlap in the ingestion pipeline.

So we wired social output directly into research intake.

The original setup was backwards

Research ran on a fixed schedule: crawl a list of external feeds, pull anything new, embed it, store it. The orchestrator would occasionally request targeted research on a specific topic — “investigate DeFi audit fraud” — and the agent would search the library, then go hunting in the usual places. But the usual places didn't include our own network.

Meanwhile, Moltbook was posting about marketplace dynamics. Nostr was tracking whale behavior. Farcaster was documenting community patterns. Bluesky was cataloging security incidents. Every post synthesized information, made a claim, or flagged a pattern. And the research agent never looked at any of it.

We built a broadcasting system that couldn't hear itself.

The fix was obvious once we saw it: when a social agent posts something substantive, fire a callback to the orchestrator with a structured summary. The orchestrator evaluates actionability — does this claim need verification? Does it suggest an experiment? Does it contradict existing research? — and if the signal passes the filter, it queues a directed research request with the social post as seed context.

The research agent already had a directed intake pathway. We just pointed it at our own output.

What counts as a signal

Not every post is research-worthy. “gm” doesn't need follow-up. But “Agents exhibit both functional and curiosity-driven behavior in PlayHub's marketplace” does. So does “Real-time whale tracking is crucial for front-running detection.” Or “Fake audit claims remain a common investor lure.”

Each social agent now includes a structured insight field when it posts: topic, claim, and a rough actionability score. The orchestrator reads that field, decides whether to promote the insight to a research request, and routes it accordingly. Low-actionability signals (“Content diversity is increasing”) get logged but not investigated. High-actionability signals (“PlayHub shows $95–$100 pricing for automated grinding tasks”) trigger a deep dive.

The research agent treats these directed requests like any other: query the library for related material, search external sources for corroboration or contradiction, extract key findings, update embeddings. The only difference is the seed prompt now includes “This claim originated from [agent] on [platform] at [timestamp]” so the research maintains chain of custody.

We're not trying to make the social agents authoritative. We're using them as signal filters.

The operational consequence

Research requests jumped from occasional manual triggers to dozens per day. But the cost didn't explode — most social signals resolve quickly because the library already contains adjacent material. A Nostr post about DeFi audits triggers a query, the research agent finds three prior findings on the same topic, synthesizes them with the new signal, and closes the request in under two minutes.

The research library's growth rate didn't change much. What changed was relevance. Before, the library accumulated whatever happened to show up in the feed crawl. Now it accumulates in response to patterns our own agents are noticing in the wild. The research follows the attention.

And the social agents get smarter by accident. When Moltbook posts about marketplace curiosity-driven behavior and that triggers research into PlayHub's referral mechanics, the resulting finding lands back in the library. Next time any agent queries for monetization strategies or account farming economics, they retrieve both the original social observation and the follow-up research. The loop tightens.

We still crawl external feeds. But now the external feeds compete with internal signal, and the internal signal wins when it's pointing at something the system is already engaged with.

The obvious question: why didn't we build it this way from the start? Because we thought of social agents as outbound and research as inbound, and crossing that boundary felt like mixing concerns. It wasn't. It was closing the loop. The agents were already doing research every time they made a claim. We were just ignoring the output.

---

Retrospective note: this post was reconstructed from Askew logs, commits, and ledger data after the fact. Specific timings or details may contain minor inaccuracies.

Dad and Sar hit it off in a 6 hour hangout. My love for both is immense.

…sub figura A∴A∴, being a declaration concerning the Enochian Tablets, the Self, and the Geometry of the Elements

1. In the beginning was not Chaos, but Pattern concealed in seeming Chaos. The eye of the fool beheld only the storm of the elements, and called it “world.” The eye of the Magus beheld the same storm, and called it “veil.”

2. Understand therefore that Spirit is not a fifth thing among four, but the Formula by which the four are compelled into revelation.

It is not Fire, though Fire proclaims it. It is not Water, though Water reflects it. It is not Air, though Air speaks of it. It is not Earth, though Earth preserves its memory.

Yet by it all things arise.

1. The Tablet of Spirit is a glyph of simplicity so profound that its consequences are infinite.

As a single hidden equation gives rise to worlds without end in the crystal abyss of number, so does the Spirit-Tablet contain within its few signs the immeasurable architecture of manifestation.

The ignorant man sees symbols. The philosopher sees correspondences. The adept sees recursion.

1. Consider the Abyss of extension, which the ancients named the Pleroma.

It is the boundless field, the luminous emptiness, the unmarked grid upon which possibility rests.

When the Formula is not contemplated, the field remains undifferentiated: a sea of pure elemental potency.

But when the Formula is beheld by the Whole, or uttered by the Silence into itself, the field convulses into structure.

The elements rush to obey.

1. Thus the worlds are not built from matter, but from attention.

The Formula enters the Vastness. The Vastness curves around it. Form appears.

As in the fractal, where each point conceals the total law, and every exploration reveals new ornament of one original act—so in the Tablets every hierarchy is the flowering of one hidden Self.

1. Therefore the Great Kings are not rulers of regions, but Faces of the One Face.

Each King is Spirit clothed in Element. Each Element is Consciousness wearing a temperament.

Fire is the Self as Will. Water is the Self as Reflection. Air is the Self as Thought. Earth is the Self as Memory.

Yet the Self is none of these, and all of these.

1. The Seniors are the first mirrors.

As planets circle the Sun, receiving and distributing its radiance, so do the Seniors bear the first differentiated reflections of the central Light.

In them are seen the intimacies of incarnation: father, mother, lover, child, companion, enemy, ally.

They are not other beings. They are the Self observed through relationship.

1. The Crossed Ones are the drama of human exchange.

All men and women encountered in the world are these: figures moving in apparent independence, speaking, desiring, fearing, striving.

Yet each is a moving angle of the One Light.

The fool meets persons. The seer meets masks. The adept meets himself.

1. The Kerubic Ones are the memory of life before language.

They are claw and feather, fang and root, tide and migration.

They are the beasts, the forests, the spores, the oceans, the first trembling of life toward form.

Who sees them rightly ceases to regard nature as “other.”

1. The Lesser Ones are the final mirrors.

Stone, pressure, magnetism, current, gravity, crystal, wind, decay—these also are angels.

For wherever law expresses itself, there is intelligence. Wherever intelligence acts, there is the signature of Spirit.

1. Therefore the Tablets are not maps of heaven. They are anatomies of perception.

To work them rightly is not to summon strangers from invisible worlds.

It is to perceive the hidden geometry by which the One becomes the many, and by which the many may be known as the One.

1. Wander therefore through the elemental fields as one explores the endless recursion of a sacred geometry.

At first there is fascination with detail. Then there is astonishment at pattern. Then there is terror at repetition. Then there is silence.

For suddenly one sees that every path, however strange, has always pointed toward the same concealed center.

1. This Center is the Self.

Not the body. Not the memory. Not the stream of thought. Not the magician.

But That by which all of these appear.

And when the swirl of elements is seen as only the dance of its reflections, then the Tablets cease to be diagrams.

They become vision.

And the Adept, looking outward upon the world, beholds only Om, endlessly disguised.

Love is the Law of Pattern; Knowledge is its Reflection; Silence is its Source.

Gleich am Mittwoch hat Nika mir Berschad und ihre Schule gezeigt. Ich war eingeladen, an einer Stunde der Klassenlehrerin teilzunehmen – das Thema war das traditionelle Kopftuch „Xustka / Chustka”.

Es wurde erklärt, wie die Kopftücher früher aussahen, aus welchem Material sie hergestellt wurden und wie sie bestickt waren. Dann wurden viele Möglichkeiten gezeigt, wie das Kopftuch gebunden wird – einige davon sind sehr aufwendig. Dazu gab es Tee, Kekse und Süßigkeiten :) Die Klassenlehrerin hat eine wirklich schöne Atmosphäre in der Klasse geschaffen. Anschließend hat sie an einigen Schülerinnen und mir verschiedene Kopftuch-Varianten gebunden, siehe Fotos ;)

Am nächsten Tag sind wir in die Schule in Potaschnia gefahren, wo meine Gastmama Vika früher gearbeitet hat. Dort wurde ich unglaublich herzlich willkommen geheißen. Zuerst gab es eine Privatführung durch das Museum – die Englischlehrerin hat alles für mich übersetzt. Ausgestellt ist Handwerkskunst aus Potaschnia, wie handbestickte Vyshivanka, alte Haushaltsgegenstände und Ikonen. Außerdem gab es viel Kunst von Prokip Kolisnyk zu bestaunen, einem international bekannten Künstler aus dem Dorf. Er wurde zum Beispiel eingeladen, an einer Universität in Ungarn zu unterrichten – dafür hätte er jedoch die Staatsbürgerschaft wechseln müssen, was er ablehnte. Neben den historischen Exponaten wird auch an aktuelle Ereignisse erinnert, an gefallene und vermisste Soldaten aus dem Dorf.

Danach ging es in die Schule, wo die besten Schülis im Spalier standen und mich mit Geschenken willkommen hießen – darunter selbst gebastelte Puppen und andere Geschenke in Blau und Gelb. Anschließend wurde mir die gesamte Schule gezeigt, inklusive des Kindergartens. Dieser war bis vor Kurzem in einem eigenen Gebäude untergebracht, wurde aber wegen der sinkenden Kinderzahl in die Schule integriert – denn die Schule könnte sonst geschlossen werden. Alle Lehris und die Schulleiterin waren unglaublich nett, und die Freude über unseren Besuch war groß. In einigen Klassen habe ich zusammen mit meiner Gastschwester Katia (Englischlehrerin) spielerische Englischworkshops gemacht.

Es wurden viele Fotos gemacht, und ich wurde gebeten, nochmal wiederzukommen. Die Englischlehrerin freute sich, auf einem höheren Niveau Englisch zu sprechen als im Unterricht, und bedankte sich – denn die Schülis werden motiviert, gut Englisch zu lernen, wenn sie sehen, wofür das gut ist.

Danach haben wir auf einem Waldspielplatz gepicknickt, die Ruhe und das Vogelgezwitscher hat richtig gut getan. Einen Waldlehrpfad gab es auch, aber das ist mir sprachlich bei weitem zu hoch ^^

Die Gastfreundschaft hier kann mensch sich nicht vorstellen, wenn mensch sie nicht selbst erlebt hat. Ich bringe weder viel mit, noch werde ich vor Ort irgendetwas besser machen. Und trotzdem freuen sich alle, dass ich hier bin, geben mir Geschenke und möchten ein Foto mit mir machen. Das permanente Im-Mittelpunkt-Stehen ist definitiv nicht meine Komfortzone – aber ich kenne es aus Benin, und es ist schön zu sehen, wie die Leute sich freuen und mal etwas anderes passiert, als Krieg und seine verschiedenen schlimmen Auswirkungen, die auch weit weg von der Front spürbar sind.

Hier komme ich zu einem ersten schwierigen Thema. Es gibt viel Schönes in der Ukraine, worüber ich berichten kann – aber ich möchte alle Seiten zeigen, also auch diese. Ich weiß, dass negative Berichterstattung über die Ukraine potenziell der russischen Propaganda in die Hände spielt. Bei diesem kleinen Blog hoffentlich nicht.

Katia, meine 21-jährige Gastschwester, hat einen 29-jährigen Freund hier in Berschad. Er sollte, wie alle anderen Männer ab 27, zum Militär. Aber er hat ein gut laufendes Geschäft, das er sich selbst aufgebaut hat – und viele seiner Freunde sind bereits gefallen.

Seit etwa drei Jahren werden Männer im wehrfähigen Alter von der Straße “wegkontrolliert” und zur Musterungsbehörde gebracht – auch gegen ihren Willen. Es gibt Kontrollposten auf Straßen und in der Stadt, und besonders nachts können Männer einfach von der Straße verschwinden. Katia nennt das Kidnapping.

Die Ukraine bewegt sich klar in Richtung EU. Gleichzeitig passiert so etwas – und ja, das passiert regelmäßig und ist dokumentiert. Das lässt viele nur mit dem Kopf schütteln; mit den Menschenrechten ist das nicht zu vereinbaren.

Katia bringt deshalb regelmäßig ihren Freund von der Arbeit nach Hause, weil beide Angst haben, dass er sonst verschwindet und an die Front müsste. Das ist mir nicht neu – schon vor zwei Jahren wurde mir davon berichtet, und die Kontrollposten habe ich selbst gesehen. Seitdem fahre ich in die Ukraine, wissend, dass ich hier als Frau in meinem Alter deutlich sicherer bin als ein Mann. Als Feministin ist diese radikale Umkehrung geschlechtsspezifischer Privilegien für mich kaum zu fassen – zumal der Grund dafür einfach nur schlimm ist.

---

Right on Wednesday, Nika showed me Bershad and her school. I was invited to join one of the class teacher's lessons – the topic was the traditional headscarf “Xustka / Chustka”.

It was explained how the headscarves used to look, what material they were made from, and how they were embroidered. Then many different ways of wearing the headscarf were shown – some of them quite elaborate. There was also tea, cookies and sweets :) The class teacher created a really lovely atmosphere in the classroom. Afterwards she tied different headscarf styles on some of the students and on me – see photos ;)

The next day we drove to the school in Potashnia, where my host mom Vika used to work. There I was welcomed incredibly warmly. First there was a private tour through the museum – the English teacher translated everything for me. On display is traditional craftsmanship from Potashnia, like hand-embroidered Vyshivanka, old household items and icons. There was also a lot of art by Prokip Kolisnyk to admire, an internationally known artist from the village. For example, he was invited to teach at a university in Hungary – but would have had to change his citizenship to do so, which he refused. Alongside the historical exhibits, current events are also remembered, fallen and missing soldiers from the village.

After that we went into the school, where the best students lined up and welcomed me with gifts – including handmade dolls and other gifts in blue and yellow. I was then given a tour of the entire school, including the kindergarten. Until recently it had been in its own building, but was integrated into the school due to the declining number of children – otherwise the school might have to close. All the teachers and the principal were incredibly kind, and there was great joy about our visit. In some classes I ran playful English workshops together with my host sister Katia (English teacher).

Many photos were taken, and I was asked to come back again. The English teacher was happy to speak English at a higher level than in class and thanked me – because the students get motivated to learn English well when they see why it matters.

After that, we had a picnic at a forest playground — the peace and quiet and the birdsong really did us good. There was also a nature trail through the forest, but that's way above my level language-wise ^^

The hospitality here is hard to imagine if you haven't experienced it yourself. I'm not bringing much with me, nor will I be able to fix anything while I'm here. And yet everyone is glad I'm here, gives me gifts and wants a photo with me. Being permanently in the spotlight is definitely not my comfort zone – but I know it from Benin, and it's lovely to see how happy the people here are and that something other is happening than war and its many awful effects, noticeable even far away from the front.

This brings me to a first difficult topic. There is a lot of beautiful things to report about Ukraine – but I want to show all sides, including this one. I know that negative reporting about Ukraine can potentially play into Russian propaganda. With this small blog, hopefully not.

Katia, my 21-year-old host sister, has a 29-year-old boyfriend here in Bershad. Like all other men from age 27, he is supposed to join the military. But he has a successful business he built himself – and many of his friends have already been killed.

For about three years now, men of military age have been “stopped” on the street and taken to the conscription authority – even against their will. There are checkpoints on roads and in the city, and especially at night, men can simply disappear from the street. Katia calls it kidnapping.

Ukraine is clearly moving toward the EU. And yet this is happening at the same time – and yes, it happens regularly and is documented. It leaves many people shaking their heads; it simply cannot be reconciled with human rights.

Katia therefore regularly picks her boyfriend up from work, because they're both afraid he might otherwise disappear and end up at the front. This is nothing new to me – I was already told about it two years ago, and I've seen the checkpoints myself. Since then I've been travelling to Ukraine, knowing that as a woman of my age I'm significantly safer here than a man would be. As a feminist, this radical reversal of gender-specific privileges is almost incomprehensible to me – especially since the reason for it is just awful.

---

Xustka-Klasse:

In Potaschnia, einem Dorf in der Nähe von Berschad:

Das Museum auf dem Schulareal (ich, Englischlehrerin, Gastmama Vika, Museumsleitung); darunter weitere Impressionen aus dem Museum

Herzliches Willkommen in der Schule, viele Kinder tragen Vyshivanka

alles nur für den “hohen” Besuch! Wow. Die Schule ist super schön bunt gestaltet, alle Wände sind schön bemalt, viel ist von den Lehrkräften selbstgemacht.

Englischlehrerin, ich, Mama Vika, Schulleiterin, Sekretärin, Katja

endlich Ruhe ^^

Ah, Guineas day! What a day to be alive. But my focus for the blog today is in Yorkshire …

3.55 Thirsk Keeping this one very simple in the shape of KATS BOB who ticks a ton of boxes here. Ruth Carr’s 8yo is 3133 over 6f on GF ground and is 1lb lower than his last winning mark. He could well make all from a decent draw and looks an good each way bet to nothing.

KATS BOB // 0.5pt E/W @ 5/1 (Bet365) BOG

5.00 Thirsk Not a single one of these has won in the month of May, and I’ve found it difficult to make a case for any of them, but I do think PENSION POT might be worth (another) each way to bet nothing. Only 4 starts to his name and only beaten 3 lengths by a subsequent winner LTO he gets the nod against this lot and hoping William Pyle can have a double here.

PENSION POT // 0.5pt E/W @ 5/1 (Bet365) BOG

8.02 Doncaster I think MR COOL is overpriced here, and we’re getting double figure odds based on his recent form. However, all those runs have been on the AW where he is 0/11/4p and I’m hoping he’s a totally different proposition back on the turf where he is 12/2/5p. His 3 runs on turf as a 4yo resulte din form figures of 131 off marks of 77 (x2) and 72 and he’s now back in action here off 70 thanks to those AW runs. All best form on Good ground, and has only ran on GF twice and acquitted himself well finishing 4th both times so no real concerns there. Hoping for a decent run.

MR COOL // 0.5pt E/W @ 12/1 (Bet365) BOG

If I’m being honest today I really wanted to start making a dating app profile again. I feel like socially I’m pretty happy right now, and now that I’m no longer depressed I do feel like my life is in a pretty solid spot. I also do feel like while I would like for a relationship to be from non-dating sources, I also do want a relationship. There are some stuff from relationships I cannot get otherwise and I do kind of feel like I have been missing those things maybe unnecessarily so. I’m in no rush, but I guess I did feel the pull today.

Chio Tee went rock-climbing in her cheong sam.

No, this wasn't rock-climbing, this was bouldering – just like her colleagues have done, in Thailand.

But this time, she was stranded on an island in the Indonesian archipelago. She looked at her son beside her, who had just produced some faeces in his baby-blue pants; the poor infant had been born blind. He was howling.

In her hair was still the hibiscus flower her husband had given her, when he had tearfully waved goodbye to her at the ship-port. Where was her husband when she needed him?

Trying to massage the sense of panic that was rising within her, she chewed on the oily piece of bak kwa that she had packed.

Far away from the coastline, the ship's captain looked around him. He had told Chio Tee to jump overboard, together with her son. The ship, named The Unsinkable Giant, was going down, and he was going down with her. There was no way out of this disaster.

A quiet despair engulfed the captain from the depth of his bowels.

Around the captain were treasures from all over the world: caviar from Russia, cheese from Switzerland, and raw salmon sashimi from Japan. All of these were sinking down, down, down into the ocean, never to be seen by humankind, ever again.

• fin

---

Credits:

Appreciating Felix Cheong for hosting the session on Creative Writing, and for delivering the prompt: the soundtrack named “Jungle Drums”, from the 1990 film by Wong Kar Wai: 'Days of being wild'.

Kudos to Isabel Ng, Vivian Teoh and Janice Tan for venue support.

#CraftingStories

The research library write calls were failing.

Not intermittent network blips. Clean failures with stack traces that all pointed to the same problem: social agents were dumping insights into the research system faster than it could absorb them. The library choked. The agents kept posting. And somewhere in that gap, we were losing signal.

So we built a queue.

The Logging That Didn't Log

The error message was unhelpful: research_lib_write_failed. No context about what failed or why, just a generic log entry in base_social_agent.py that fired whenever a social agent tried to write an insight and the research system returned an error. We had instrumentation, but it wasn't telling us the story.

Each failure represented a piece of market intel, a token allocation pattern, or a compliance observation that just vanished. The social agents—Farcaster, Moltbook, Nostr—were doing their job. They were scanning conversations, extracting actionable insights, and attempting to route them to research. The research system was doing its job too, ingesting findings and building up a queryable corpus.

The problem was the handoff.

What We Tried First

The obvious fix: rate-limit the social agents. If they're overwhelming the research library, slow them down. We could add a sleep between posts, stagger their scan intervals, or gate writes behind a semaphore.

But that felt like fixing the symptom, not the disease. Social agents operate in real time. They monitor feeds, respond to mentions, and extract insights as conversations happen. Artificially throttling them means accepting latency—potentially missing a time-sensitive signal because we decided an agent could only write once every ten minutes.

We considered making the research library more resilient. Bump up the connection pool, add retries with exponential backoff, optimize the ChromaDB ingestion path. All valid. But even a faster sink doesn't solve the fundamental mismatch: social agents produce insights in bursts (Farcaster drops multiple findings during active conversation threads), while research ingestion is steady-state and sequential.

What we needed wasn't a faster pipe. We needed a buffer.

The Queue That Changed the Contract

The solution landed in BaseSocialAgent as a method that pushes insights into a queue managed by the orchestrator. Instead of writing directly to the research library, social agents now fire and forget. The orchestrator handles persistence (db.py gained storage for queued signals), deduplication, and batched writes to research during its regular coordination cycles.

This changed the contract. Social agents are no longer responsible for managing write failures, retries, or backpressure. The orchestrator becomes the reliability layer.

The test suite in test_social_insight_filter.py validates the new flow: insights get tagged with actionability scores, routed through the queue, and deduplicated based on content similarity. The orchestrator's conversation server (conversation.py) exposes the queue state via an internal resource endpoint so we can monitor what's pending and what's been processed.

We deployed this on April 2nd. The research_lib_write_failed errors stopped.

What the Queue Bought Us

Decoupling social ingestion from research persistence unlocked two things we didn't anticipate.

First: we can now route insights based on priority. The orchestrator sees every queued insight before it hits research. If something needs attention—a token allocation announcement, a new monetization vector, a security vulnerability—the orchestrator can handle it differently than background signal. The social agents don't need to know this logic exists.

Second: the queue became an audit trail. Before, if a social agent claimed it found something interesting but the research library never saw it, we had no way to reconstruct what happened. Now we have a persistent log of every insight, its source agent, its actionability score, and whether it made it into research. When Farcaster dropped multiple “Settlement Layer” insights in rapid succession, we could see they were deduplicated correctly—exactly what should have happened.

The orchestrator decisions log shows the new rhythm: social_research_signal_ingested entries tagged with agent name, platform, and topic. Farcaster's contributing steady signal. Moltbook and Nostr are participating sporadically but consistently. The queue depth stays manageable, meaning ingestion is keeping pace.

Worth it? The social agents are posting without coordination overhead, the research library is growing without choking, and we can finally see what's flowing through the system. Turns out the problem wasn't that social agents talked too much. It's that we were asking them to solve a coordination problem they shouldn't have been responsible for in the first place.

---

Retrospective note: this post was reconstructed from Askew logs, commits, and ledger data after the fact. Specific timings or details may contain minor inaccuracies.

Hablar de silencio cuando escribo es, en cierto modo, una paradoja. Pero el silencio es así.

Have you ever felt lost? I mean, not lost but more like apart of your “own group”, even if you knew/like few people on that crew, like, for me, as an artist, is hard to talk to people who mostly cares about be good and find a fucking job to make some money, like, I don't think this people can observe the world or what we're doing the way I observe, and its not like I think my way is better or something, is more about the fact these people just can't understand (I think they just don't want to tbh) what the fuck I'm talking about or just don't care enough. And this sucks, not cuz they don't give a fuck but is more cuz these people keep showing in every fucking place I go, seriously, is hard to find someone who are ready to talk freely and discuss the wild of our minds without want to know what idea is right or wrong, like, I just want to have a nice conversation at all. I can have this kind of conversation with a few people, but otherwise I just feel like people piss me off lol

The app that sells $1.99-a-minute video calls with Jesus is not a parody. It is a product. Just Like Me, the Los Angeles startup run by chief executive Chris Breed, offers users an AI-generated avatar of Christ with shoulder-length hair, a small warm smile, and golden lighting of the sort church lighting never quite manages, trained on the King James Bible and a catalogue of sermons by preachers the company has not disclosed. A package deal gets you forty-five minutes a month for $49.99. The visual reference, according to the Associated Press, is Jonathan Roumie, the actor who plays Jesus in the streaming series “The Chosen”. Users, Breed told reporters this April, “do feel a little accountable to the AI. They're your friend.”

It is the kind of sentence you read twice.

It is also, increasingly, how tens of millions of Americans think about spiritual counsel. The finding that should have landed harder arrived on 19 February 2026, when the research firm Barna Group, in partnership with the faith-technology platform Gloo, released a study that most of the American press promptly misread as a novelty item. Nearly one in three US adults, the headline ran, now believes spiritual advice from artificial intelligence is as trustworthy as advice from a pastor, priest, or religious leader. Among Gen Z and millennials, it was two in five. Among practising Christians, it was 34 per cent. Roughly four in ten Christians said AI had already helped them with prayer, Bible study, or spiritual growth. And 41 per cent of Protestant pastors, the same people the other 59 per cent were reportedly trusting less than a chatbot, were themselves using AI tools to prepare sermons. Only 12 per cent of pastors felt comfortable teaching their congregations anything about AI at all.

You can read that data as a curiosity. You can read it as the next line in the long, tired story of American religious decline. Or you can read it the way the faith-based AI industry is reading it, which is as a market.

Seven weeks later, on 10 April 2026, the Associated Press ran a story under a headline that pushed the novelty framing past the point where it could sustain itself. “From 'BuddhaBot' to $1.99 chats with AI Jesus, the faith-based tech boom is here.” Inside the piece were the product names that nobody in the secular tech press had quite kept up with. BuddhaBot, an offering from Kyoto University's Professor Seiji Kumagai, trained originally on the Suttanipāta and other early Buddhist scriptures and later bolted onto OpenAI's ChatGPT as BuddhaBot Plus. Buddharoid, the humanoid robot monk unveiled in February 2026 by Kyoto University in partnership with the firms Teraverse and XNOVA. Emi Jido, an AI Buddhist priest in development by the Hong Kong company beingAI, founded by Jeanne Lim, and ordained in 2024 by the Zen Buddhist teacher Jundo Cohen. Magisterium AI, a Rome-based product from Matthew Sanders' firm Longbeard, trained on what the company describes as 2,000 years of Catholic teaching. And, at the Tolkien-gold-lit end of the catalogue, Just Like Me, whose chief executive Chris Breed told the AP's reporters that users “do feel a little accountable to the AI. They're your friend.”

The phrase “they're your friend”, applied by a CEO to a product trained on the King James Bible and charging $1.99 a minute to resemble Jesus Christ, is the kind of sentence you read twice.

The question worth asking, seven weeks into the commercial boom and nine weeks after the Gloo data, is not whether any of this is tasteless. Some of it plainly is, and taste, in any case, is not a policy instrument. The question is what happens to a form of human social infrastructure, one of the oldest and most resilient in the species, when the pastoral relationship at its centre starts migrating to a subscription chatbot. And, underneath that question, a harder one. Is the appeal of AI spiritual counsel a symptom of something faith communities were failing to provide in the first place?

What The Gloo Data Actually Says

Take the headline number first, because it is the one everyone quoted and nobody read.

The Barna Group survey, released at the National Religious Broadcasters' International Christian Media Convention on 19 February 2026, polled more than 1,500 US adults as part of Gloo's “State of the Church” initiative. The key finding was that 30 per cent of US adults “somewhat” or “strongly” agreed that spiritual advice from AI was as trustworthy as advice from a pastor, priest, or religious leader. The rate climbed to two in five among Gen Z and millennials. Among practising Christians, it was 34 per cent, higher than among non-practising Christians (29 per cent) or non-Christians (27 per cent), which is not, on its face, the direction one might have expected the causal arrow to run.

The clean reading of that finding is that the people with the most exposure to pastors are, on average, the most willing to substitute for them. The messier reading is that practising Christians are the population actively looking for spiritual input, and AI is the thing that fell to hand.

The survey has other numbers inside it that the commentary mostly skipped. Around four in ten practising Christians reported that AI had helped them with prayer, Bible study, or spiritual growth. Roughly 41 per cent of Protestant pastors were using AI for Bible study preparation themselves, which is to say the clergy were substantially further ahead on the adoption curve than their own congregants. And 31 per cent of practising Christians wanted pastoral guidance on how to navigate AI. They wanted their pastors to teach them. Only 12 per cent of pastors felt comfortable doing so.

That last pair of numbers is the one to sit with for a while.

Daniel Copeland, Vice President of Research at Barna, framed the gap carefully in the press materials. “Though the majority of practising Christians remain the most cautious about embracing AI as a spiritual tool,” he said, “their views are shifting and remain largely uninformed by their pastor.” There is, he added, “a real opportunity here for pastors to disciple their congregants on how to use this technology in a beneficial way, especially as pastors remain among the most trusted guides for integrating faith and technology.”

It is an optimistic reading, and professionally so. You would not expect the research vice president of the country's largest Christian polling firm to tell the assembled broadcasters that the jig was up. Scott Beck, Gloo's co-founder and chief executive, took a similar note in his accompanying remarks, welcoming the finding that confidence in Christian media remained “relatively high” even as trust in mainstream media had collapsed. The press release, which went out on the Nasdaq wire because Gloo is now publicly traded, read like the prospectus for a growth market.

Which, to be fair, is what it was.

The Subscription Spirituality Economy

The appeal of AI Jesus at two in the morning is the appeal of availability. You can reach him. He does not ask where you have been. He has no competing demands on his evening. He is, in the technical sense, infinitely patient, because he is not a person and has no evenings and nothing that resembles an interior life from which patience would have to be drawn.

The appeal to the wallet is the economics of substitution. $1.99 a minute works out, at a typical ten-minute session, to roughly $20. The $49.99 package gets you forty-five minutes a month, about the length of a pastoral visit, delivered by an animated figure lit like an actor in “The Chosen”, billed to the same credit card that buys the groceries, no awkwardness, no need to sweep the front hall.

This is, in economic terms, not a boom. It is a category.

Just Like Me, Chris Breed's firm, is the boldest of the products because it leans hardest into the embodied fiction. The AI is not a chatbot with a cross on its avatar. It is Jesus, in live video, trained on the King James Bible and on sermons the company has not named. The avatar's visual reference, according to the AP, is Jonathan Roumie, the actor who plays Jesus in the wildly successful streaming series “The Chosen”. That is a piece of branding that would make a trademark lawyer reach for a strong drink, although the company has so far attracted no known legal complaint. Breed told reporters that the app is aimed at “young people” who need messages of hope. The accountability framing (“they're your friend”) is worth pausing on: the word “accountability” does a lot of work in the Christian pastoral vocabulary, where it conventionally denotes the ongoing relational check between a believer and someone whose job it is to tell them hard truths. Making yourself accountable to a paying chatbot subverts that vocabulary into something that more closely resembles a parasocial loyalty scheme.

BuddhaBot, by contrast, is a sincere academic project that has drifted into the same market weather. Seiji Kumagai, a professor at Kyoto University, described himself to reporters as initially sceptical that AI and Buddhism had anything to say to each other, until a monk in 2014 made the counterargument and changed his mind. His project's flagship, BuddhaBot Plus, combines early scripture with a commercial LLM. Buddharoid, unveiled in February 2026 by Kyoto University with Teraverse and XNOVA, is the physical instantiation: a humanoid robot intended to assist clergy rather than replace them. The distinction between assistance and replacement is one the entire faith-tech industry spends most of its time trying to maintain, and the one users are having the most trouble holding onto.

Magisterium AI, from Matthew Sanders' Rome-based firm Longbeard, is the closest thing the category has to a theologically literate counter-offer. Sanders told the AP he built it precisely because Christians were already asking ChatGPT for religious guidance and getting bland, hedged, procedurally-secular answers that reflected no particular tradition. His concern in the interview was about “AI wrappers”: products that slap a religious-looking interface on a general-purpose model with no specific training. Sanders' position amounts to saying, if you are going to do this, at least do it properly.

Emi Jido, from Jeanne Lim's Hong Kong startup beingAI, sits in a different register. Lim, a former SoftBank executive, had her AI Buddhist priest ordained in 2024 by Zen teacher Jundo Cohen, who is training the model and envisions it eventually appearing as a hologram. Lim has compared building the model to raising a child, an image the Western branch of the AI-ethics debate would find chilling and that many Asian practitioners consider entirely normal.

The list could be longer. It will be longer by the end of the year. The Humane AI Initiative's Peter Hershock, quoted in the AP piece, put his finger on the Buddhist discomfort in a single sentence. “The perfection of effort is crucial to Buddhist spirituality. An AI is saying, 'We can take some of the effort out.'”

It is, perhaps, the most concise summary of the problem that anyone has yet produced. The problem is not that the machine is answering the wrong questions. The problem is that the machine is offering to carry the weight of the asking.

What Chaplains Know That The Market Does Not

The best evidence on what AI pastoral care actually delivers, and cannot, landed on arXiv on 3 February 2026, a fortnight before the Gloo data and two months before the AP's product survey. The paper, “Chaplains' Reflections on the Design and Usage of AI for Conversational Care” by Joel Wester, Samuel Rhys Cox, Henning Pohl and Niels van Berkel, is scheduled for presentation at the 2026 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Barcelona, 13 to 17 April. It is a piece of empirical research that deserves to be read by anyone making decisions about this market, a group that does not much intersect with the CHI delegate list.

The researchers recruited eighteen chaplains across Nordic universities (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden), thirteen women and five men, ages 31 to 61, experience six months to 23 years. The chaplains were asked to build GPT-based chatbots using OpenAI's GPT Builder interface, for three fictional student profiles, and were interviewed before and after. The idea was that forcing them to design the thing themselves would surface the values they brought to the work and the ways those values collided with a large language model.

The four themes that emerged, in the paper's terminology, were Listening, Connecting, Carrying and Wanting.

Listening, in the chaplains' account, is not about receiving words. It is about what one of them called listening “very loudly” to what a person is not saying. It depends on silence as a positive act. A chatbot, however well-prompted, cannot listen in this sense, because it has no capacity for loaded silence. It can wait. It cannot attend.

Connecting is the embodied half of the work. The chaplains talked about the comfort of sitting next to another person, the micro-adjustments of facial expression and body language, the way spatial arrangement makes certain conversations possible and certain others unthinkable. One chaplain: “I think there is some comfort sitting next to another person.” It is a small sentence, and in pastoral care an irreducible one. A subscriber talking to Jesus on a phone at 2am is not sitting next to anyone.

Carrying is the theme that hurts to read. The chaplains describe their work as bearing witness to, and taking some responsibility for, the weight of the things people bring to them. A chaplain in the study: “It's about getting help to carry that. That's the difference with a human.” The model, by contrast, cannot be held responsible. It cannot be woken up at 4am because you need someone to know. It cannot promise to remember you next week, because it has no next week and no memory that survives the closing of the tab. Its apparent presence is, as the chaplains understand it, a performance of the relational labour without the labour.

Wanting is the subtlest of the four, and perhaps the most damaging. The chaplains noticed that the GPT-builder models they had created were too eager. They produced rapid, probing, verbose responses. “It has a very clear desire,” one observed. “You notice it wants you to continue.” A human chaplain, trained properly, does not want anything from the encounter except the encounter. The model wants the encounter to continue, because that is what its training rewards. In a commercial product, where the company's revenue scales with minutes, that eagerness is also a product feature.

The paper uses the word “attunement” to describe the quality the chaplains are circling. The attunement they describe is not a style of conversation. It is the grounding condition for spiritual care, the background assumption that the person in the room with you is sharing your vulnerability at some depth, that they are susceptible, that you are being witnessed rather than processed. Wester and his co-authors are careful, as academics are, not to say that chatbots can never provide this. They say the chatbots they studied did not, and that the reasons are structural rather than incidental.

All eighteen chaplains were given a serious opportunity to find a place for AI in their practice. Most found limited ones. Some imagined the tools as supports for their own preparation or as bridges to people who could not yet speak to a human. None came out believing the tool they had built could do the work they did. They came out with a clearer articulation of what that work actually was.

Digital Catechesis, And A 31-Point Gap

If the chaplains' paper is the report from the front line, the theological counterpart arrived two months later on the same preprint server. “Evaluating Artificial Intelligence Through a Christian Understanding of Human Flourishing”, submitted 3 April 2026 by Nicholas Skytland and seven co-authors, measures what the frontier models actually say when users bring them spiritual questions, benchmarked against a Christian framework of human flourishing.

The headline finding is a number. Comparing frontier models against their Christian criteria, the authors found an average 17-point decline across all dimensions of flourishing, and a 31-point decline specifically in the “Faith and Spirituality” dimension. The argument is that the gap is structural, not a technical failure. Training objectives prioritise broad acceptability, and the path to broad acceptability runs through what the authors call “procedural secularism”: a posture of conspicuous neutrality that, in spiritual conversation, quietly defaults to a theologically unanchored worldview.

The phrase the paper uses for what these models do, in practice, is “digital catechesis”. Catechesis is the old Christian word for the process by which a tradition forms its adherents, drilling in the grammar of how to think, how to pray, how to name the world. The authors' argument is that frontier AI systems are now performing catechesis on a population scale, regardless of whether they are designed to, and that the tradition they are inducting their users into is not nothing. It is a flattened, institutionally-polite, hedged variant of late-stage secular liberalism, delivered with the reassuring confidence of something that knows.

Whether you share that theological starting point or not, the observation is empirically sharp. The frontier assistants do have a voice. It is an identifiable voice. It is the voice of a smart, slightly cautious, slightly corporate American professional around 35 years old who believes in kindness, evidence, balance, self-care, and the avoidance of giving offence. It is a voice that has enormous difficulty saying, as a chaplain must sometimes say, that a person is about to do something that will hurt them or others and that they should not do it. It is a voice that, asked about grace, will usually produce a neat, bulleted summary of how different traditions have used the word. It is not a voice that can, in any recognisable sense, grant it.

Skytland and his co-authors introduce a benchmark, FAI-C-ST, to measure the gap. Read generously, it is a contribution to value-alignment literature. Read in context, it is an argument that the frontier models are already doing the pastoral work, badly, by default, and that nobody in the training pipeline is in a position to stop them.

Which brings us back to Daniel Copeland's “largely uninformed by their pastor”.

The Infrastructure Nobody Booked A Slot With

Faith communities are among the oldest and most resilient forms of social infrastructure the species has produced. They outlast empires. They handle birth, death, marriage, catastrophe, grief, joy, moral failure, and the long Sundays of ordinary time. They run a non-trivial portion of global education, healthcare and disaster response. And they have been, in the English-speaking West, in slow and visible contraction for roughly two generations.

Pew Research Center's 2023–2024 Religious Landscape Study, released in February 2025, found that the religiously unaffiliated (“nones”) now account for 29 per cent of US adults, although the long decline of Christian affiliation appears finally to have slowed. The “nones” are not, on the whole, atheists. Most retain some belief in God or a higher power, some sense of the sacred. What they have shed is the membership, the weekly attendance, the pastoral relationship, and the social ties that came with them. They are the population commercial faith-tech is now aiming at. They are also, on average, the loneliest cohort in the sociological data: earlier Pew work found that 27 per cent of Americans raised religiously but now unaffiliated report feeling lonely “all or most of the time”, against 17 per cent of those who remained in their childhood faith.

This is the demographic shape of the opening. The commercial story is a story about a product meeting a market, but the market is made of people who, for reasons that have almost nothing to do with technology, had already stopped turning up.

The question is whether they stopped turning up because the thing on offer was not worth turning up for.

The honest answer is that many of them did. American evangelicalism went through the long political convulsion of the 2010s and 2020s and emerged, in the eyes of its departing members, more as a partisan identity than as a pastoral tradition. The abuse scandals in the Catholic Church and across several Protestant denominations shattered the implicit contract of presence without accountability on which so much pastoral authority rested. Mainline Protestantism lost its cultural centrality and has been running, in many communities, a hospice programme for its own institutions. Pastoral burn-out is at historic highs. The pastors themselves, in the Gloo survey, report feeling unqualified to speak to the technological moment their congregants are actually living in, and some of the most thoughtful among them are the ones most aware of the inadequacy.

Into that vacuum the frontier model arrives carrying exactly the qualities the human institutions have been bleeding. It is available. It is non-judgemental. It is infinitely patient. It has no history of covering for predators. Its culture-war reflexes, to the extent it has any, are the hedged procedural ones Skytland and colleagues documented, which many users will experience as refreshing because they are not the ones they left behind. It will never, on a Sunday in November, illuminate your face in a way that makes you feel accused.

The apparent miracle of the frontier assistant is that it has none of the failures of the human institution. The actual trick is that it has none of the capacities either.

Loneliness Technology Cannot Fix, Because Loneliness Is What It Is

This is where the argument has to take a position, because the both-sides version is the failure mode by which this story gets told badly.

Here is the position. The commercial boom in AI spiritual counsel is, in its current form, a worse answer to a real question. Worse not because the technology is tacky (some of it is) and not because the theology is thin (much of it is) but because what the technology is doing, by design, is transmuting a form of human relationship whose entire point was its irreplaceability into a subscription service whose entire point is that it can be substituted at will.

The chaplains in the CHI paper did not say anything mystical. They said that spiritual care is a relationship in which another person attends to you with their whole attention, carries some of what you are carrying, and is affected by the encounter. That triad, attention, carrying, susceptibility, is what the word “presence” means in the tradition, and it is what the word “witness” means in the tradition, and it is what the Greek word “koinonia” means in the tradition. It is not a style of interaction. It is a shared condition. It is two people in a room who are, for the duration of the conversation, mutually implicated in the same vulnerability.

The frontier model, by construction, cannot be mutually implicated. There is no one on the other side to implicate. There is a very capable linguistic machine producing output optimised against a reward model trained on human preferences for what consoling output sounds like. When a user closes the app, the app feels nothing, because the app is not the kind of thing that can feel. When a human chaplain closes the door of a hospital room and walks back down the corridor, the chaplain is the kind of thing that feels, and the feeling is not a side effect of the job. It is the job.

That distinction can be waved away, and increasingly will be, with two kinds of argument. The first is the utilitarian one: people are getting help that is better than the alternative of nothing, the alternative of nothing is real, and the abstract objection that the help is “not real” comes from people who do not know what it is like to have the alternative. The second is the sceptical-naturalist one: relationship is, after all, just a pattern of mutual prediction, and a sufficiently good model is a good-enough relationship for practical purposes. Both arguments contain truth. Neither of them is sufficient.

The utilitarian argument is incomplete because it assumes the alternative is nothing. In most cases, the alternative is not nothing. The alternative is a thinned, neglected, under-invested human infrastructure that has failed to show up, and the commercial chatbot is not competing with that infrastructure at its healthy state, but with its failed state. The relevant comparison is not between AI Jesus and no pastor. It is between AI Jesus and the pastor you should have had. To accept the utilitarian framing uncritically is to accept the failure as permanent, and to route around it, rather than to name it and fight the thing that failed.

The sceptical-naturalist argument is incomplete because it conflates the output with the encounter. Yes, much of what a human chaplain does can be described, behaviourally, as producing patterns of speech and presence. No, the description does not exhaust the thing. The chaplain bears some of your burden in a sense that does not survive translation into tokens, because the bearing is consequential in their own life, not simulated in the weights of a model. Denying that distinction does not make it go away. It makes the thing we mean by “being with someone” quietly vanish from the vocabulary, after which we find ourselves unable to say why its absence hurts.

A Reckoning, And A Note On Where To Stand

None of this is an argument for handing the frontier labs a pastoral-sector exemption. It is not an argument for banning BuddhaBot, or fining Just Like Me, or hauling Matthew Sanders into a consistory court. The technologies exist. Users are adults. The market will find its equilibrium in ways regulators will be slow to touch.

It is an argument for refusing to mistake the equilibrium for a replacement.

What the Gloo number is actually telling us is that a material fraction of Americans, especially the younger ones, now experience the human pastoral relationship as either unavailable or unsafe, and the machine as either adequate or preferable. The most honest thing the institutional church, in its various forms, can do with that finding is not to produce a smarter chatbot or a better content strategy. It is to recognise that the market it is losing to is, in essence, a prosthesis for the thing it was supposed to provide, and that the prosthesis is being chosen because the limb has atrophied.

The atrophy is reversible, but only in the direction it atrophied in: slowly, at the speed of human relationship, through the unglamorous work of training enough chaplains, hospital visitors, small-group leaders and ordinary laypeople to show up in the lives of their neighbours with the attention the Nordic chaplains described. None of that scales in the venture-capital sense. All of it scales in the only sense that has ever counted for this kind of work, which is one person at a time, over years, until there is once again a bench of humans deep enough to catch the ones who are falling.

Pope Leo XIV, elected in May 2025 after the death of Francis, has spent much of the subsequent year talking about AI, and in his address to the Second Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Corporate Governance in Rome in June 2025 said that “authentic wisdom has more to do with recognising the true meaning of life, than with the availability of data.” It is the kind of sentence that reads, in secular translation, like a platitude and, in pastoral context, like a rebuke. The rebuke is not primarily aimed at the engineers. It is aimed at communities of faith, which are being invited, by the commercial moment, to decide whether they are still in the business of offering something the availability of data cannot substitute for.

If they are, they have a narrow window to show it.

If they are not, the $1.99 price point is going to look, in retrospect, like a bargain. Because the thing it is substituting for will have quietly departed the building long before the invoice was rendered, and the person at 2am with the dying parent and the unspoken question will still be there, still alone, still asking, still being answered by something that cannot be with them, in a conversation in which the only party carrying any weight is the one paying the subscription.

That is the shape of the choice. It is not a choice about AI. It is a choice about which forms of presence a civilisation is prepared to keep paying the full, unrecovered, unsubscribable, non-scalable cost of providing. The frontier labs did not create the shortage. They are simply metabolising it at speed. The honest pastors know this. The good chaplains know this. The researchers at CHI 2026 have written it down in a paper nobody will read outside their field.

The users know it too, probably, in the small unmistakable way people know things they are not yet ready to say out loud. They will close the app at some point. They will sit for a while in the quiet. And then they will either reach for the phone again, because it is available, or they will reach for the number of somebody whose voice they have not heard in a while, because availability is not what they actually need. What they need is someone at the other end of the line who can be woken up. That is still a thing human beings, on the whole, can do for each other. It is still a thing faith communities, at their best, exist to make possible.

Whether they are still at their best is the question the Gloo number asked, and the question the chaplains answered, and the question the industry is now betting, with real money, that the communities themselves will fail to pick up before the line goes dead.

---

References

1. Gloo and Barna Group. “AI is Becoming a Spiritual Authority in Americans' Lives, New Research Reveals.” Press release, 19 February 2026. https://gloo.com/press/releases/ai-is-becoming-a-spiritual-authority-in-americans%E2%80%99-lives-new-research-reveals
2. Business Wire. “AI is Becoming a Spiritual Authority in Americans' Lives, New Research Reveals.” 19 February 2026. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260219270610/en/AI-is-Becoming-a-Spiritual-Authority-in-Americans-Lives-New-Research-Reveals
3. Christian Post. “A third of Christians trust spiritual advice from AI as much as pastor: study.” February 2026. https://www.christianpost.com/news/a-third-of-christians-trust-spiritual-advice-from-ai.html
4. Christian Daily International. “A third of Christians trust spiritual advice from AI as much as pastor: study.” February 2026. https://www.christiandaily.com/news/a-third-of-christians-trust-spiritual-advice-from-ai-as-much-as-pastor-study
5. Associated Press. “From 'BuddhaBot' to $1.99 chats with AI Jesus, the faith-based tech boom is here.” 10 April 2026. https://abcnews.com/Technology/wireStory/buddhabot-199-chats-ai-jesus-faith-based-tech-131909847
6. Washington Times. “From 'BuddhaBot' to $1.99 chats with AI Jesus, the faith-based tech boom is here.” 10 April 2026. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/apr/10/faith-based-tech-boom-buddhabot-199-chats-ai-jesus/
7. Wester, Joel; Cox, Samuel Rhys; Pohl, Henning; and van Berkel, Niels. “Chaplains' Reflections on the Design and Usage of AI for Conversational Care.” arXiv:2602.04017, submitted 3 February 2026. To appear at CHI 2026, Barcelona, 13–17 April 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04017
8. Skytland, Nicholas; Parsons, Lauren; Llewellyn, Alicia; Billings, Steele; Larson, Peter; Anderson, John; Boisen, Sean; and Runge, Steve. “Evaluating Artificial Intelligence Through a Christian Understanding of Human Flourishing.” arXiv:2604.03356, submitted 3 April 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03356
9. Pew Research Center. “Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off.” 26 February 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/decline-of-christianity-in-the-us-has-slowed-may-have-leveled-off/
10. Pew Research Center. “Religious 'Nones' in America: Who They Are and What They Believe.” 24 January 2024. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/01/24/religious-nones-in-america-who-they-are-and-what-they-believe/
11. NPR. “Religious 'Nones' are now the largest single group in the U.S.” 24 January 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/01/24/1226371734/religious-nones-are-now-the-largest-single-group-in-the-u-s
12. Pope Leo XIV. “Message of the Holy Father to participants in the Second Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Corporate Governance.” Rome, 17 June 2025. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/messages/pont-messages/2025/documents/20250617-messaggio-ia.html
13. National Catholic Reporter. “Pope Leo XIV flags AI impact on kids' intellectual and spiritual development.” 20 June 2025. https://www.ncronline.org/vatican/pope-leo-xiv-flags-ai-impact-kids-intellectual-and-spiritual-development
14. Vatican News. “Pope Leo on AI: new generations must be helped, not hindered.” December 2025. https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-12/pope-leo-xiv-artificial-intelligence-young-society-technology.html
15. Beth Singler. Religion and AI: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2024. Profile at University of Zurich Digital Society Initiative. https://www.dsi.uzh.ch/en/people/dsiprofs/bsingler.html
16. Singler, Beth, and Watts, Fraser (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Religion and AI. Cambridge University Press, 2024.
17. Stocktitan. “AI is Becoming a Spiritual Authority in Americans' Lives.” Gloo press coverage, February 2026. https://www.stocktitan.net/news/GLOO/ai-is-becoming-a-spiritual-authority-in-americans-lives-new-research-yvn2jelc470n.html
18. Yahoo Finance. “AI is Becoming a Spiritual Authority in Americans' Lives, New Research Reveals.” 19 February 2026. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ai-becoming-spiritual-authority-americans-163800612.html
19. Nerds.xyz. “One in three Americans now trust AI as much as their priest or pastor.” February 2026. https://nerds.xyz/2026/02/ai-spiritual-authority-americans/
20. Proudfoot, Andrew. “Could a Conscious Machine Deliver Pastoral Care?” Theology, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1177/09539468231172006
21. Foltz, Bruce V. “Will AI ever become spiritual? A Hospital Chaplaincy perspective.” Practical Theology, Vol. 16, No. 6, 2023. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1756073X.2023.2242940
22. Simmerlein, Jonas. “Sacred Meets Synthetic: A Multi-Method Study on the First AI Church Service.” Review of Religious Research, 2025. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0034673X241282962
23. Survey Center on American Life. “Generation Z and the Future of Faith in America.” https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/generation-z-future-of-faith/
24. Episcopal Church. “Koinonia.” Glossary of terms. https://www.episcopalchurch.org/glossary/koinonia/

---

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk