⚠️ SPOILER WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS

In the desolate wasteland of New Vegas, three survivors and their loyal dog embark on a perilous journey through a post-apocalyptic world where every step could be their last.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4/5 stars)

Episodes: 8 | Aired: 12-16-2025

This season answered a lot of questions and introduced a few new ones. But I actually liked this season better than the first season. I think they did the flashbacks much better this season, and this is thoroughly engaging and enjoyable entertainment. The one negative I would have is that this is not the first TV show or movie that has tried to technologize the 50s after World War 2 and the 60s. I am always astonished at the technology they built but other things that seem like simpler items that they miss, and I say why doesn't the technology they have built work here or there. Oh, and I didn't miss the few references to modern day issues and Trump. I find it amazing how politics of today is meshing into TV shows. Some do it well (like here) and some don't (like the recent Superman of 2025). But one thing on the real life side is the old axiom, history seems to always repeat itself. Looking forward to Season 3.

#review #tv #streaming

There are passages of Scripture you read, and they settle into the heart gently, like a soft rain. Then there are passages you encounter that don’t simply rest on you—they reshape you. They confront you. They invite you into something higher, deeper, and more demanding than you expected when you first cracked open the page. Luke 6 is one of those chapters. It is a mountain of teaching disguised in the plain tone of a gospel narrative, but beneath every line, something volcanic rumbles. Jesus isn’t merely telling stories or offering gentle encouragement; He is reintroducing humanity to the original blueprint of the Kingdom of God, overturning the assumptions of religious culture, reconstructing what spiritual maturity looks like, and pulling His listeners out of the shadow-world of shallow observation into the bright clarity of transformative obedience. And the more I’ve sat with this passage, the more I’ve returned to it like someone who knows they missed something the first five times, and the sixth time feels like the first time all over again.

The imagery of Luke 6 doesn’t unfold politely. It breaks down the door of the soul. It starts with the tension of Sabbath disputes, moves into the calling of the twelve, and suddenly Jesus descends from the mountain and begins teaching people who came to hear Him and be healed. Something about that movement already tells us that what happens here isn’t meant to be confined to the upper heights, the private and hidden moments with God alone—it’s meant to descend. It’s meant to enter the valleys where people are aching, confused, uncertain, and spiritually hungry. The mountain is where understanding begins; the plain is where understanding becomes responsibility. Luke notes that Jesus came down and stood on a level place—not above the people, but with them—delivering words that would either put fire in their bones or send them running. It’s a remarkable picture of the God who goes up to pray but always comes down to transform.

As I read Luke 6, I feel the slow unwinding of every casual assumption about the Christian life. We’ve become accustomed to the idea that faith is personal, private, and mostly inward. But Jesus speaks here as if faith is supposed to echo. As if faith is supposed to be loud—not in volume but in consequence. He begins with blessings and woes that invert the logic of society. Blessed are you who are poor. Blessed are you who hunger. Blessed are you who weep. Blessed are you when people exclude you. Four blessings that would never make a modern motivational poster. And then He reverses the pattern with four woes, reserved for those who have already claimed all the comfort, affirmation, and satisfaction the world can offer. Jesus is pointing out that the Kingdom trades in a different economy than the one we’re used to. What looks like failure to the world often looks like preparation to God; what looks like success to the world often looks like sedation to Heaven.

There’s something in this opening section of Luke 6 that makes me pause every time: Jesus isn’t calling pain virtuous; He’s calling surrender powerful. Poverty, hunger, and sorrow in themselves have no holiness. But when they strip away the false security that blinds people from their need for God, they create the very hunger that Heaven answers. It is the posture, not the pain, that carries the blessing. And likewise, it is the posture, not the pleasure, that carries the woe. It’s entirely possible to have abundance and remain spiritually sharp—but too often, comfort numbs the soul until it no longer hears the whisper of God. Jesus is calling His listeners to recognize the subtle danger of satisfaction and the surprising opportunity of brokenness. When your life feels upside-down, the Kingdom might actually be right-side up.

But the real turning point—the seismic shift of Luke 6—happens when Jesus launches into the command most Christians admire from afar but rarely approach up close: the call to love your enemies. In a world where retaliation made sense, where revenge had cultural logic, and where forgiveness was considered admirable only as long as it wasn’t too costly, Jesus detonates the entire framework. Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you. And suddenly we’re not dealing with simple moral teachings anymore—we’re dealing with a revolution of the heart.

Whenever I meditate on this section, I feel a tug inside me, a reminder that the Kingdom isn’t about behaving better—it’s about becoming different. Anyone can restrain anger for a moment. Anyone can smile politely at someone they dislike. Anyone can maintain a civil tone while the mind rehearses arguments and wounds. But loving your enemies requires something supernatural. It requires letting God into the places you’ve guarded, the hurts you’ve replayed, the memories you’ve nurtured, the small secret corners of bitterness you’ve considered justified. Jesus isn’t telling people to become pushovers; He's telling them to become conduits. Love your enemies isn’t a command to be weak—it’s a command to be so spiritually transformed that retaliation loses its appeal. True strength isn’t in the clenched fist but in the open hand.

Jesus goes deeper still. If someone strikes you on one cheek, offer the other. If someone takes your cloak, don’t withhold your tunic. Give to everyone who asks. Do to others as you would have them do to you. This is the Kingdom ethic. Not fairness. Not reciprocity. Not social negotiation. Radical generosity. Radical mercy. Radical love. But only someone who has been deeply healed can live this way. This is why so few do. Because the flesh resists what the Spirit invites. The ego resists what surrender gives. The world resists what Heaven commands. And Jesus says plainly: if you love only those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. The point is unmistakable—Christian maturity isn’t revealed by how you treat your friends; it’s revealed by how you treat your opposers.

I remember reading this passage years ago and feeling quietly defensive. I wanted to treat Jesus’ words like poetry—beautiful, lofty, symbolic. But Jesus wasn’t speaking in metaphor here. He was laying out a blueprint for a kind of humanity that doesn’t exist naturally. Everything He describes in Luke 6 requires transformation from within. You can’t grit your way into loving your enemies. You can’t force your heart to bless people who wound you. You can’t fabricate compassion for people who despise you. But you can open yourself to a God who changes the interior motives that drive your exterior responses. You can allow God to perform heart surgery on your war instincts. You can allow the Holy Spirit to remove the unconscious contracts you’ve made with resentment. Jesus is calling His followers to a maturity powered by Heaven.

Then comes the part of Luke 6 that always stops me cold: Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Mercy is the currency of Heaven. It’s not a gesture or a mood. It’s a posture, a way of seeing, a way of responding. It requires humility. It requires surrender. It requires acknowledging the mercy you’ve received and letting it flow outward like a river that refuses to run dry. We tend to give mercy in teaspoons, but God pours it in oceans. Jesus says plainly: do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. This isn’t a threat—it’s a spiritual principle. The measure you use becomes the measure that shapes you. When you judge harshly, your heart becomes harsh. When you condemn readily, your spirit grows brittle. When you hold grudges, your soul starts to calcify. But when you extend mercy, something inside softens. Something heals. Something grows. Something awakens.

And then the teaching that echoes through centuries: Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over. Jesus isn’t talking about a cosmic transaction where generosity becomes a vending machine—you put something in, God spits something out. He’s describing a life where generosity becomes a way of being, and in that way of being, you discover that God has been generous toward you all along. Giving enlarges the soul. Withholding shrinks it. The measure you use—toward people, toward God, toward yourself—shapes the life you live. When you live with open hands, abundance flows through you, not because you manipulated Heaven but because you aligned with it.

Then Jesus shifts into a series of images that expose the inner contradictions we all carry. Can the blind lead the blind? Won’t they both fall into a pit? Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye while ignoring the log in your own? These aren’t gentle metaphors. They are targeted diagnoses. Jesus is calling out the human tendency to become experts in the flaws of others while remaining novices in self-awareness. It is far easier to critique than confess. It is far easier to point out what someone else should fix than to sit with God long enough to let Him fix something in us. But Jesus is cutting off that escape route. First take the log out of your own eye, then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. Notice the nuance: Jesus isn’t saying we should never correct others—He’s saying correction is a ministry reserved for the healed, not the reactive.

The passage then transitions to the imagery of trees and fruit—another moment where Jesus shows that real transformation is never cosmetic. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot produce good fruit. In other words, behavior flows from being. Actions flow from essence. You don't fix fruit; you tend the roots. This is why superficial Christianity collapses under pressure. Anyone can behave for a season, but only those whose hearts have been shaped by God can live consistently in love, mercy, and integrity. Jesus is calling His followers not to better performance but to deeper belonging—to let His life become the root system that produces the fruit of the Spirit.

Then Jesus lands the entire chapter with one of the most sobering warnings in all of Scripture: Why do you call me “Lord, Lord” and do not do what I say? Two houses. Two builders. One storm. And suddenly everything hidden becomes revealed. One house stands because it was built on the rock of obedience. The other collapses because it was built on the sand of admiration without action. Jesus isn’t impressed by people who like His teachings—He’s moved by people who embody them. A storm will always reveal what your foundation is made of. And the storms come to everyone. Being a believer doesn’t spare you from storms; it anchors you through them.

Luke 6 is demanding. It is confrontational. It is liberating. It is deeply uncomfortable. And it is beautifully healing. If the Sermon on the Mount is the constitution of the Kingdom, the Sermon on the Plain is its manifesto. It strips away the veneers of religious performance and demands a heart that beats with the heartbeat of Heaven. And at the center of it all is a simple invitation: become who you were always meant to be by becoming more like the One who stood at that level place, surrounded by broken people, speaking words that could either rebuild them or expose them.

Luke 6 is where the words of Jesus begin to circle the heart like a hawk riding thermal winds, tightening the arc, coming in closer and closer until the soul realizes it has nowhere left to run. You can admire Luke 6 from a distance, but the closer you read, the more it becomes a mirror. It stops being a chapter and becomes an encounter. It stops being information and becomes a confrontation. And eventually, it stops being a teaching and becomes a choice.

I’ve always loved that Jesus doesn’t let His listeners walk away with the illusion that spiritual maturity is the result of learning alone. You can learn every verse in the chapter and still not live a single line of it. This is why the foundation metaphor at the end is not accidental—it is purposeful and piercing. Jesus is saying plainly: admiration is not obedience. Affection is not allegiance. Agreement is not transformation. Calling Him Lord without living His teachings is like building a house with no foundation at all and expecting it to stand when the storm finally arrives. But storms do not lie. Storms reveal. Storms report the truth.

Before we arrive at that final image, though, we have to linger over the middle terrain of Luke 6—the region where Jesus exposes motives, reveals the cost of discipleship, and names the quiet realities that shape the Christian journey long before behavior ever changes on the outside. This is where the Kingdom stops being a philosophy and becomes a way of being. This is where the human heart, once tightly wound in self-protection and self-preservation, begins to surrender its scaffolding and allow the winds of Heaven to reconstruct its architecture.

Something profound happens when Jesus speaks about mercy, judgment, forgiveness, and generosity. These aren’t isolated qualities; they form a spiritual ecosystem. They shape each other. They interdepend. Mercy purifies judgment. Forgiveness heals memory. Generosity dissolves fear. And judgment, when misused, poisons all three. Jesus is describing a life where the heart is open—not unguarded in a reckless sense, but uncluttered in a spiritual sense. A heart that releases more than it retains. A heart free from the hoarding of emotional debts. A heart that is no longer negotiating the terms on which it will love. That kind of heart is the soil where the Kingdom grows.

We live in a world that trains people to filter every experience through self-protection. What will this cost me? What advantage does this give me? How do I avoid being used? How do I maintain control? But Jesus is describing a life that no longer organizes itself around fear. Fear is the architect of walls. Love is the architect of bridges. Fear isolates. Love integrates. Fear withholds. Love pours. Fear keeps score. Love erases the chalkboard before the tally is even complete. The radical life Jesus describes requires the dismantling of fear, not the modification of behavior. You cannot tweak your way into mercy. You cannot adjust your way into forgiveness. You must surrender your way into it.

There is a reason Jesus tells us not to judge. He isn’t saying we should never evaluate situations or discern right from wrong. He is saying we must stop forming verdicts on people’s worth. Judgment is a spirit, a posture, a habit of the heart that assigns value based on visible behavior while ignoring invisible battles. Judgment is the arrogance of assuming knowledge we do not have. Judgment is the assumption that someone else's worst moment reveals their truest identity. And Jesus has no tolerance for this, because judgment is the counterfeit of discernment. Discernment seeks truth with humility. Judgment declares truth with pride. Discernment loves people enough to see their potential. Judgment punishes people for not yet being what they could be. Jesus tells us plainly to let it go. Release the instinct to categorize. Release the instinct to accuse. Release the instinct to evaluate someone’s worthiness of love, respect, compassion, or patience. Judgment shrinks people. Mercy restores them.

Forgiveness, too, is woven throughout Luke 6 like an unspoken thread. Jesus doesn’t use the word every time, but it’s present beneath every command. Turning the other cheek requires forgiveness. Loving your enemies requires forgiveness. Giving to those who take from you requires forgiveness. Blessing those who curse you requires forgiveness. Forgiveness is the current running beneath the surface, powering everything Jesus is teaching. And yet, forgiveness is one of the most misunderstood spiritual practices in the Christian life.

Forgiveness is not saying the wound didn’t matter—it mattered deeply. It is not saying the person was right—they were not. It is not saying you will trust them again—trust is earned, forgiveness is given. Forgiveness is the release of the right to become the judge, jury, and executioner of someone else’s soul. It is the choice to place the weight of the offense into God’s hands instead of your own. It is the refusal to carry the poison others handed you. Forgiveness is not weakness. It is power. It is strength. It is authority over the narrative of your own story. Forgiveness is what frees the future from the grip of the past.

When Jesus says, give and it will be given to you, He is showing that life flows out of whatever space we open. When we open the space of giving, blessing flows. When we open the space of forgiveness, healing flows. When we open the space of mercy, restoration flows. The measure we use doesn't just determine how much we receive—it determines how much we are transformed. A small measure creates a small life. A large measure creates a large life. God will never be stingy with those who refuse to be stingy with others. Not financially. Not emotionally. Not spiritually. Not relationally.

This brings us to the blind guiding the blind. Jesus isn’t offering a cynical view of humanity; He’s issuing a warning about leadership and influence. Every one of us is leading someone, whether we realize it or not. Our children. Our friends. Our coworkers. Our audience. Our readers. Our listeners. And the sobering truth is that you cannot lead someone into clarity if you are walking in fog yourself. You cannot lead someone into freedom if you refuse to confront your own chains. You cannot lead someone into healing if you are committed to pretending you were never wounded. Jesus is calling His followers to leadership that begins with self-awareness. A disciple is not above his teacher, but when he is fully trained, he will be like his teacher. Transformation doesn’t happen by proximity alone—it happens by surrender.

Then we reach the speck and the log. Everyone knows this image. Even people far from Christianity quote it. But few understand the power of it. Jesus isn’t merely telling us to avoid hypocrisy. He’s showing us that spiritual sight is sharpened by humility. When you address your own brokenness first, you become gentle in the way you help others address theirs. When God has dealt with your log, you stop using someone else’s speck as leverage. When you’ve been humbled by your own need for grace, you stop using truth as a weapon and start using it as medicine. Jesus is telling us that correction requires clarity, and clarity comes from a heart purified by self-honesty.

Now the tree and the fruit. Jesus is pressing deeper into the origin of behavior. He is refusing to let us judge ourselves or others by appearances. If the fruit is rotten, the problem is not the fruit—it is the root. You can wash fruit. You can polish it. You can rearrange it. But if the tree is sick, nothing changes. Jesus is calling for transformation at the root level: your beliefs, your motives, your interior world, the unspoken narratives you live from. The Christian life is not a behavior modification program—it is a character transformation journey. Behavior is the echo of the heart. Fruit is the biography of the root system. If the heart belongs to God, the life begins to reflect it—not perfectly, not instantly, but inevitably.

This leads us to the question Jesus asks that pierces deeper than any theological debate, deeper than any doctrinal argument, deeper than any intellectual exercise: Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and do not do what I say? There is no hiding behind symbolism here. There is no escaping into metaphor. Jesus is asking a question that echoes across centuries and lands in our laps with full weight. If He is Lord, then our lives should look like something. Not flawless. Not sterile. Not artificially perfect. But surrendered. Responsive. Evolving. Alive.

This is why Jesus ends with the parable of the two foundations. Two builders. Both hear the words of Jesus. Both build houses. Both face the storm. But only one survives. Not because he had better luck or better weather or better circumstances, but because he dug down deep and laid the foundation on rock. The difference between superficial faith and solid faith is depth. The superficial believer builds quickly. The deep believer digs. The superficial believer responds emotionally. The deep believer responds obediently. The superficial believer admires Jesus. The deep believer imitates Him. The superficial believer listens. The deep believer acts.

And when the storm comes—and it always comes—the truth of your foundation is revealed. Jesus isn't promising storm-free living. He’s promising storm-proof living. Storms expose the strength or weakness of whatever we’ve built our lives upon. Storms tell the truth we didn’t want to admit. Storms become teachers, revealing whether we built our faith on emotions, reputation, habits, knowledge, or the actual teachings of Jesus.

Luke 6 reminds us that the Christian life is not a negotiation. It is not an arrangement. It is not a selective acceptance of Jesus’ teachings. It is a full-hearted surrender to a Kingdom that turns the world’s values inside out. It is the slow, consistent shaping of your character into the likeness of Christ. It is the surrender of retaliation. The embrace of mercy. The practice of forgiveness. The generosity of spirit. The courage to self-examine. The humility to learn. The hunger to grow. The willingness to be changed.

And the beauty of all of this is that Jesus never calls us into a life He hasn’t already lived Himself. He loved His enemies. He blessed those who cursed Him. He forgave those who nailed Him to the cross. He offered mercy to those who did not deserve it. He walked without judgment yet with perfect clarity. He bore good fruit because His roots were anchored in the Father. He built His life on obedience. He lived the very sermon He preached.

Luke 6 is an invitation to join Him on that path. Not in perfection, but in direction. Not in flawless execution, but in faithful intention. Not in performance, but in transformation. It is a call to become the kind of person who doesn’t just know the teachings of Jesus but embodies them in the quiet places where no applause can be heard. It is a call to live a life that is so saturated with mercy that people taste the Kingdom in your presence without knowing why. It is a call to build something deep, something solid, something eternal, something storm-proof.

And when you embrace Luke 6, not as a chapter but as a lifestyle, everything changes. Relationships change. Reactions change. Priorities change. Desires change. The way you see people changes. The way you see yourself changes. The way you see God changes. This chapter, when allowed to soak into the soul, doesn’t produce nicer people—it produces transformed people. People whose lives look like a lived sermon. People whose steps echo the footsteps of Jesus. People whose character has been shaped by Heaven.

This, ultimately, is the legacy of Luke 6: a new humanity emerging in those willing to surrender everything for the sake of the Kingdom. People who love extravagantly, forgive fiercely, give freely, judge slowly, and build deeply. People who have dug into the rock until they found the foundation that cannot be shaken. People who have chosen the path that leads not to applause but to transformation. People who have discovered that the greatest spiritual victories are won in the interior rooms of the heart long before they ever show up in behavior.

Luke 6 is not just a chapter. It is a doorway. And once you walk through it, the air on the other side tastes different. The light is different. The priorities are different. The journey itself becomes different. You become different.

This article is meant to be lived, not admired. And my hope is that every word becomes a gentle push toward the life that Jesus describes—a life that reflects Heaven’s values in an earthly world, a life that extends mercy where none is expected, a life that forgives where others would retaliate, a life that gives where others withhold, a life anchored so deeply in obedience that no storm can shake it loose.

And as you carry Luke 6 with you, may you find your roots deepening, your foundations strengthening, your character evolving, and your faith expanding. May you become a living picture of mercy, love, clarity, generosity, humility, and courageous obedience. May you become the kind of person who hears the words of Jesus and does them, not out of fear, but out of love. Not out of obligation, but out of identity. Not out of duty, but out of transformation.

The Kingdom is calling. Luke 6 is the map. And your life—your actual lived life—is the ground where this teaching becomes real. Step into it with your whole heart. The world needs people whose foundations are built on rock. The world needs people who choose mercy over judgment. The world needs people who refuse to retaliate and choose love that costs something. The world needs people shaped by Luke 6. The world needs you.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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There’s a strange beauty in the idea that if you don’t believe in God, you should pray that God believes in you. It sounds almost like a paradox, almost like a philosophical knot tied too tightly to pull apart, yet when you sit with it—really sit with it—we discover that it’s not a knot at all. It’s a doorway. A doorway into the quiet, overlooked truth that long before belief ever rises in us, God’s belief has already risen over us. Long before we whisper His name with sincerity or clarity, He has spoken ours with love and certainty. This entire thought—this reversal of expectation—feels like an invitation to step outside the way we’ve been trained to see faith, doubt, and divine connection, and instead walk into the raw and tender place where God meets people exactly where they are, not where they’re “supposed” to be. Talk to enough people who’ve lived through spiritual droughts, confusion, heartbreaks, and intellectual wrestling matches with the universe itself, and you’ll notice a simple pattern: almost nobody doubts God because they want to. They doubt because of wounds. They doubt because of mismatches between expectation and experience. They doubt because life hit them harder than they ever expected and religion didn’t prepare them for what real pain feels like. They doubt because the image of God they were taught did not survive contact with the world they live in. They doubt not out of rebellion, but out of exhaustion. And exhaustion doesn’t need a lecture—it needs a place to rest. That’s where this seemingly inverted sentence becomes a soft landing spot for the soul: if you don’t believe in God, pray that God believes in you. Because even the skeptic, the wounded, the bewildered, and the distant can ask one thing: “If there’s Someone out there, let them not give up on me.” That fragile, almost trembling desire reveals more about the human heart than any argument ever could.

I’ve always felt that faith isn’t born at the front door of certainty—it’s born in the side-alley moments. The quiet crises. The moments of internal contradiction when a person silently whispers to themselves, “I don’t know anymore.” But uncertainty is not the enemy of faith. Indifference is. And there’s a world of difference between someone who says, “I don’t care,” and someone who says, “I don’t know.” When a person says, “I don’t know,” there’s still a reaching happening beneath the surface. It might be small, barely visible, almost fragile, but it’s there. And I believe God honors the smallest reach. If a whisper is all you have left, Heaven listens like it’s thunder. If the only prayer you can muster is, “If You’re real, find me,” God treats that like a door swinging wide. If the heart says, “If You believe in me, show me,” then the God of all creation bends low enough to meet that heart where it stands. And all of this matters because there are people walking around today feeling like they’re not allowed to be honest with God. As if doubt disqualifies. As if questions insult Him. As if struggle means distance. But the truth is far more compassionate. God’s belief in you is not based on your belief in Him. His belief in you is anchored in His nature, not your performance. He doesn’t need your certainty to be committed to you. He doesn’t need your perfection to walk beside you. He doesn’t need your theological clarity to wrap His arms around your life. If anything, He steps closest when clarity is the hardest to find.

One of the great tragedies of spiritual culture is that people have been made to feel like faith requires flawless conviction. But think of every person in history who’s ever become anything meaningful in their walk with God—they all began in some version of confusion. They all carried questions. They all wrestled with doubts so real and so heavy they could barely lift their own heads. And yet God still moved in them. He still believed in them. He still breathed life into the places that felt hollow. If the greatest stories in Scripture were built on shaky beginnings, then why do we expect modern believers to start their journey perfectly stable? God has always done His best work in people who came to Him imperfect, unsure, unsteady, and halfway broken. Because belief isn’t a ladder—it’s a seed. And seeds don’t start strong. They start hidden. They start quiet. They start in darkness. They start in soil that doesn’t look like anything is happening at all. And yet, under that soil, life begins. Under that soil, roots take hold. Under that soil, growth starts its sacred, unseen work. Belief works the same way. It does not burst from the ground fully formed. It begins unseen. It begins inside. It begins in whispers like, “God, I don’t know You yet… but if You believe in me, help me believe in myself the way You do.”

There’s also this deep tenderness woven into that idea—that God believes in you. Just pause with that. Let it soak. The Creator believing in the created. The Eternal believing in the temporary. The One who has no beginning believing in the one still struggling to begin. He believes in your capacity to rise. He believes in your ability to heal. He believes in the parts of you you’ve written off. He believes in the version of you that you can’t quite see yet. He believes in your future while you’re still stuck in your past. He believes in your potential even if your history tries to shout otherwise. He believes in the arc of redemption written through every life that still has breath in it. God doesn’t just believe in you as you are—He believes in the you that’s becoming. And when you realize that, when you feel it not as a religious slogan but as a truth that reaches down into your bones, everything shifts. Suddenly you don’t walk like you’re abandoned—you walk like someone held. You don’t think like someone unwanted—you think like someone chosen. You don’t live like someone left behind—you live like someone God refuses to give up on.

There is a phenomenon that happens when people get hurt deeply enough: they don’t stop wanting God—they stop trusting the idea of being disappointed again. And this is where belief becomes complicated. So many people aren’t rejecting God Himself—they’re rejecting the pain attached to previous attempts at faith. They’re rejecting the versions of God handed to them by flawed voices. They’re rejecting the interpretations that hurt more than they healed. They’re rejecting the expectations that were too heavy to carry. And in that place, “I don’t believe in God” often means, “I can’t afford to be let down again.” That kind of declaration isn’t coldness—it’s self-protection. So imagine what happens when we offer them a new doorway: “If you don’t believe in God, then ask that He believes in you.” That’s not a challenge. It’s not an argument. It’s not a debate. It’s an open hand. A pathway for the weary. An invitation for those who’ve been bruised by life. A gentle whisper saying, “You don’t have to know everything. You don’t have to decide everything. You don’t have to resolve everything today. Just ask for one thing: that the One who made you hasn’t lost faith in who you can become.”

And the beauty of that ask is that it matches God’s heart perfectly. Because God has always been the God who believes before you do. Look through Scripture, through history, through the testimonies of countless lives changed—not one of them begins with someone who had it all together. They were uncertain, unqualified, unprepared, undone. God didn’t wait for them. He believed in them and then walked them forward. The fisherman who doubted himself. The woman who felt unworthy. The outcast who wondered if life held anything else. The leader who never asked to lead. The wanderer who had no direction. The broken who felt useless. They weren’t chosen because they believed—they grew because He believed. And the same story continues in our time. You don’t need perfect belief to start this journey. You need honesty. You need willingness. You need that slight leaning of the heart that says, “If You believe in me, then maybe I can take one more step.”

Think of how many people live every day feeling unseen. Feeling like their best efforts fall short. Feeling like nobody recognizes what they carry, what they fight through, what they survive. The thought that God believes in them becomes more than theology—it becomes oxygen. It becomes something that keeps them from sinking. It becomes a lifeline when they feel adrift. Because if God believes in you, then there must be something in you worth believing in. Something that hasn’t been ruined by your mistakes. Something unbroken by your past. Something untouched by the disappointments that shaped you. Something sacred. Something intentional. Something God still plans to use. And that realization alone can lift a person out of despair. It can lift them out of self-condemnation. It can lift them out of the belief that they are too far gone to matter.

When you tell someone, “Pray that God believes in you,” you’re telling them something deeply empowering: you’re saying that the relationship between God and the human soul doesn’t begin with your perfection—it begins with His persistence. His pursuit. His unwavering commitment to who you really are beneath the layers. You’re saying that God has already invested Himself in your life long before you ever learned how to look back at Him. You’re saying that faith is not a mountain you climb alone—it’s a journey where God walks toward you even as you stumble toward Him. You’re saying that the pressure to have every answer figured out is replaced with the invitation to simply be honest, open, and willing.

This idea frees people. It frees them from religious performances. It frees them from the fear that doubt separates them from God. It frees them from the lie that God is disappointed by their humanity. And in that freedom, faith grows more authentically than it ever could under pressure. Because faith that grows by force is fragile. Faith that grows by honesty is durable. And faith that grows from the realization that God believes in you before you believe in Him becomes almost unbreakable. It becomes rooted not in your own strength, but in His. Not in your consistency, but in His faithfulness. Not in your understanding, but in His insight into who you truly are.

This world is full of people who carry quiet battles nobody else knows about. Anxiety that keeps them awake at night. Guilt that eats at them in the morning. Fear that follows them like a shadow. Memories they wish they could erase. Pressure that makes them feel like they’re drowning from the inside out. These people often avoid faith conversations because they believe they’re already disqualified. They think God only wants the strong, the certain, the steady. But imagine the healing that begins when they hear: “Even if you don’t believe in God… He hasn’t stopped believing in you.” That statement alone can crack open a wall someone has held up for decades. Because suddenly, faith is no longer a competition. It’s no longer a requirement. It’s an invitation back to themselves. It’s a reminder that they are not alone in the fight to become whole.

And this is where the real transformation begins. When someone takes that first step—not a confident step, not a sophisticated step, not a doctrinally precise step—but a real step. A step like, “God, if You’re there, I need You to believe in me because I don’t know how to believe in myself.” That moment becomes sacred soil. Heaven meets people there. God bends low to that place. It’s the place where the divine and human heart breathe at the same rhythm. It’s where hope begins rebuilding its foundation. It’s where the seed of belief finally gets its chance to open. And once it opens, even slightly, even subtly, everything begins to change.

Because when belief begins to grow in the soil of honesty instead of pressure, it becomes a different kind of belief. It becomes humble. It becomes authentic. It becomes patient with itself. And most importantly, it becomes sustainable. People who try to force themselves into belief often end up exhausted, and exhaustion is not faith—it’s performance. But people who let belief grow from a place of being seen, understood, and believed in by God discover a faith that carries them instead of a faith they must constantly carry. It becomes something alive instead of something heavy. It becomes something they look forward to instead of something they're afraid they will fail at. Because when you know God already believes in you, your fear of disappointing Him begins to dissolve. You stop bracing for judgment and start opening yourself to transformation. You stop hiding from God and start letting Him into the rooms of your soul that you kept closed for years. You stop expecting perfection from yourself and start welcoming progress. This is the beginning of real faith, and it is holy in its simplicity.

There’s also another dimension to this: when God believes in you, He believes in the story He’s writing through you. People often think their story is defined by what they’ve done, but God defines your story by what He’s doing. People look at their failures and see endings; God looks at the same failures and sees setups. People see brokenness; God sees building material. People see disqualification; God sees invitation. And when you begin to understand that God isn’t writing you off, you begin to participate in the story He’s still writing. That’s when faith stops feeling like a distant concept and becomes an unfolding reality inside you. One day you wake up and realize you’re speaking differently, thinking differently, walking differently, loving differently. Not because someone told you to change, but because the God who believes in you is awakening the version of you He always knew was there.

And the beautiful thing is that God’s belief in you doesn’t just shape your inner world—it shapes how you move in the outer one. You start to walk with a quiet confidence. The kind that isn’t loud, but steady. The kind that doesn’t need to shout, but still shifts the atmosphere. When you know God believes in you, you approach challenges differently. You don’t treat them as signs you’re failing—you treat them as proof you’re growing. You don’t hide from responsibility—you rise to it. You don’t retreat in the face of adversity—you lean into purpose. Because a person who knows they are believed in becomes a person who is able to believe in what God is doing in them. This is why people of great spiritual depth don’t always start with great belief—but they always end with it. Their belief becomes the harvest of being believed in by a God who refuses to walk away from them.

And this understanding does something else—something powerful. It softens your judgment of others. When you know how patient God has been with your process, you begin to carry patience for the process of others. Suddenly you don’t look at doubters with frustration—you look at them with compassion. You don’t see skeptics as threats—you see them as people in pain. You don’t see wanderers as defiant—you see them as searching. You don’t see people struggling with faith as failures—you see them as future testimonies in progress. This is because once you truly experience a God who believes in you even when you don’t believe in Him, you begin to reflect that same belief toward those who are still struggling. You become a carrier of the same grace that carried you.

And perhaps this is one of the most transformative parts of the entire concept—that God’s belief in you becomes a model for how you treat the world around you. Instead of becoming someone who polices belief, you become someone who nurtures it. Instead of becoming someone who judges the uncertain, you become someone who walks with them. Instead of becoming someone who pressures people toward faith, you become someone who creates safe spaces where faith can grow naturally. You begin to see that belief is not a battlefield—it’s a journey. And journeys take time. They take patience. They take compassion. They take understanding. They take room to breathe. And when you carry God’s belief in you, you naturally create that room for others.

It also shifts the way you see yourself. You stop defining yourself by the worst things you’ve done. You stop defining yourself by the hardest seasons you’ve lived through. You stop defining yourself by the failures that once haunted you. Instead, you define yourself by the God who has never given up on you. And that shift changes the entire architecture of your identity. Suddenly your past isn’t your prison—it becomes the soil where your calling grows. Your regrets aren’t chains—they’re lessons. Your wounds aren’t disqualifiers—they’re testimonies waiting to be told. And when someone says, “If you don’t believe in God, pray that God believes in you,” what they’re really saying is, “Let God begin the work in you that you don’t yet know how to begin in yourself.”

And in time, faith will come. Not forced. Not rushed. Not pressured. But naturally. Quietly. Authentically. Faith will rise like morning light—gentle, gradual, revealing what has always been there but was hidden in the dark. One day you’ll look back and realize belief didn’t come the way you expected. It didn’t arrive with fireworks or arguments or sudden bursts of clarity. It arrived the way God often arrives—in the stillness, in the whisper, in the gentle stirring of a heart that finally realized it was safe to hope again. And that kind of faith is deep. It’s rooted. It’s unshakeable. Because it’s faith born from being loved, not faith born from being pressured.

If the world understood this, faith conversations would change. Instead of trying to force belief on people, we’d speak to the parts of them that long to be believed in. We’d talk to the hurt before we talked to the doubt. We’d talk to the longing before we talked to the theology. We’d talk to the heart before we talked to the doctrine. Because in the end, people aren’t looking for a God to argue with—they’re looking for a God who hasn’t abandoned them. They’re looking for a God who can handle their uncertainty. They’re looking for a God who doesn’t vanish when life gets hard. They’re looking for a God who believes they’re worth the effort of redemption. That’s the God who shows up when someone whispers that first hesitant prayer: “If You believe in me… help me believe again.”

So if you’re reading this today, and you’re wrestling with your own doubts, your own questions, your own fears, your own distance from God, let this be a soft place for your soul to land. You don’t have to pretend. You don’t have to perform. You don’t have to exaggerate your faith or hide your uncertainty. Just start with honesty. Start with the simple acknowledgment that your heart is still open enough to ask. And if you don’t know how to believe in God right now, then simply pray this: “God, I pray that Your belief in me becomes the anchor I can’t give myself.” That prayer is not small. It is not weak. It is not inadequate. It is sacred. It is powerful. And it is enough.

Because God’s belief in you has been steady from the start. He has never withdrawn it. He has never reconsidered it. He has never questioned whether you are worth the investment. His belief in you is not based on who you were, but on who He knows you can become. So take the pressure off yourself today. You are not behind. You are not failing. You are not forgotten. You are not disqualified. You are simply in process. And that process is holy.

Let this be your reminder: if you don’t believe in God right now, it’s okay. It truly is. Just pray that God believes in you. And when you do, you’re not awakening something in Him—you’re awakening something in yourself. You’re stepping into a truth that has always been waiting for you. You’re allowing God’s belief in you to breathe where doubt had stolen your breath. You’re letting the One who formed you remind you why He formed you. And eventually, you’ll discover that belief isn’t something you achieved; it’s something you received. Something that grew quietly as you allowed God’s love to work in you.

And when that happens, when belief rises from being believed in, you’ll find a faith that’s not fragile—it’s alive. It’s resilient. It’s personal. It’s rooted in relationship rather than rules. And that faith will carry you farther than you ever imagined. So keep going. Keep whispering. Keep reaching. Even your smallest prayer is big in God’s hands. Even your weakest faith is precious to Him. Even your uncertainty is welcome in His presence. And even your doubts cannot stop His belief in you.

In time, you will look back and see that faith wasn’t something you built from the ground up—it was something God breathed into the deepest parts of you from the very beginning. And that breath is still in you. That purpose is still in you. That calling is still in you. And God’s belief in you is still the foundation under your feet.

You’re not lost. You’re becoming. And Heaven has never been more certain of you than it is right now.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Watch Douglas Vandergraph's inspiring faith-based videos on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

Support the ministry by buying Douglas a coffeehttps://www.buymeacoffee.com/douglasvandergraph

as sweet as possible as spontaneous as possible as sincere as possible as serene as possible as strong as possible as symbolic as possible as soothing as possible as soulful as possible

/feb26

A Message of Hope

Each of you is unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable, incomparable, separate, and distinct. You have been given a body and a pyche which are sometimes similar in character type and/or traits to others, but beyond that your are a spirit person with a limited degree of freedom and a capacity to respond to life an its demands. There never was, there never is, there never will be an absolute twin, a clone, one who can replace you. You are a one of a kind and life is calling, inviting, and challenging you to become the authentic you by trancending yourself and at the same time forgetting yourself.

If you simply search for pleasure or power, you will experience something missing. You will at some moment feel empty, a void, a vacuum. You will wonder, “What's it all about?”

When the need for meaning finally occurs to you, you will beging to seach for meaning every day.

...

McKilopp, T. (1993) A MESSAGE OF HOPE, The International Forum of Logotherapy, p. 4

#LogoTherapy #FranklViktor #McKillopp #hope #UniquePerson #meaning

This fairly recent obsession with metrics in the workplace is driving companies insane.

A while back, I watched a video about all the ways hotels are trying to save money by, among other things, eliminating storage space, making the bathroom less private, removing desks, and pressuring guests to work at the bar, where they can spend more money. (By the way, that bartender? They're also the receptionist.) These changes are, of course, driven by metrics like “GSS” and “ITR,” whatever the f@*k those are.

Is there a kernel of truth to all of this? Sure. Aloft Hotels are cozy, and they seem to follow this playbook. I didn't mind staying in one when I was stuck in San Francisco for one night more than ten years ago. Would I want to stay in one of their rooms during a business trip or anything else lasting more than a couple of days? Hell no. I'd like a desk and somewhere to put clothes. (I know, I'm so needy. I travel with clothes.)

Metrics are fine, sometimes, when their use is limited and their shortcomings are genuinely appreciated. Taking them too seriously and letting them make the decisions, however, is a recipe for disaster. Hard questions demand more thoughtfulness than that. “GSS” and “ITR” are meaningful until they aren't, and nobody is going to find solace in those abbreviations when generations of potential customers steer clear of your business because they actually want something good.

Sadly, I don't think most businesses think that far ahead.

Show me the metric which proves that your business isn't incurring massive risk by ignoring common sense. Until then, I don't care about “the numbers.”

#Life #SoftwareDevelopment #Tech

Our Mothers — This Documentary is a Very Keen Look at Our Dear Mothers

Lydia Joly, middle, on her parents’ farm circa 1967 — son, Loran, left; sister, right; my great-grandmother, back row. When great-grandmother was not visiting, I would sometimes sleep in the bed she had slept in when at the farm… “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree?”

A documentary on the “astounding impact” of a mother on others, was created by Michael DuBois, a few years ago …

“Becoming Home – full film”:

https://youtu.be/NtPbAuFMI0c?si=bcCTE2fZH3PVN7vy

“The documentary “Becoming Home” touched my heart, a few years ago. Make by filmmaker Michael DuBois, he chronicled the “first year after the death of his mother. He set out to discover why she had the astounding impact on others that she did…”

Michael lives on Cape Cod, as of when he created this documentary…

“Becoming Home” is his finished story. It is the story of his mother, and her grace through life. It is the story of his childhood. And it is the story of learning to move forward after those losses, without moving away from them. Directed by Michael F. DuBois Produced by Bert Mayer and Larissa Farrell Director of Photography Mark Kammel Original Music by Derek Hamilton Featuring Music by Sky Flying By and Pete Miller”

Denzel Washington has this to say, about mothers, also…

“The Power of a Mother’s Love | Denzel Washington’s Inspiring Speech on Gratitude and Respect”

My mother, Lydia Joly, age 87, war refugee from Piaski, Poland, with time in a relocation camp in northern Germany after World War I also — arrived Ellis Island 1950 — image by son Loran

Christmas card 2024 with Lydia’s self-made Gingerbread house

Lydia — my mother — was born in Lubelskie County, Poland.

We see her village, Piaski, here, with beautiful music…

“Piaski Lubelskie”:

https://youtu.be/XF04EznukOY?si=E2qJLDS5jNsJxzaI

No wonder she loves gardening and flowers…

Lydia, gardening, 2025, age 87

Caveat: this article contains a detailed examination of the state of open source/ weight AI technology that is accurate as of February 2026. Things move fast.

I don’t make a habit of writing about wonky AI takes on social media, for obvious reasons. However, a post from an AI startup founder (there are seemingly one or two out there at the moment) caught my attention.

His complaint was that he was spending $1,000 a week on API calls for his AI agents, realised the real bottleneck was infrastructure rather than intelligence, and dropped $10,000 on a Mac Studio with an M3 Ultra and 512GB of unified memory. His argument was essentially every model is smart enough, the ceiling is infrastructure, and the future belongs to whoever removes the constraints first.

It’s a beguiling pitch and it hit a nerve because the underlying frustration is accurate. Rate limits, per-token costs, and context window restrictions do shape how people build with these models, and the desire to break free of those constraints is understandable. But the argument collapses once you look at what local models can actually do today compared to what frontier APIs deliver, and why the gap between the two is likely to persist for the foreseeable future.

To understand why, you need to look at the current open-source model ecosystem in some detail, examine what’s actually happening on the frontier, and think carefully about the conditions that would need to hold for convergence to happen.

The open-source ecosystem in early 2026

The open-source model ecosystem has matured considerably over the past eighteen months, to the point where dismissing it as a toy would be genuinely unfair. The major families that matter right now are Meta’s Llama series, Alibaba’s Qwen line, and DeepSeek’s V3 and R1 models, with Mistral, Google’s Gemma, and Microsoft’s Phi occupying important niches for specific use cases.

DeepSeek’s R1 release in January 2025 was probably the single most consequential open-source event in the past two years. Built on a Mixture of Experts architecture with 671 billion total parameters but only 37 billion activated per forward pass, R1 achieved performance comparable to OpenAI’s o1 on reasoning benchmarks including GPQA, AIME, and Codeforces. What made it seismic was the claimed training cost: approximately $5.6 million, compared to the hundred-million-dollar-plus budgets associated with frontier models from the major Western labs. NVIDIA lost roughly $600 billion in market capitalisation in a single day when the implications sank in.

The Lawfare Institute’s analysis of DeepSeek’s achievement noted an important caveat that often gets lost in the retelling: the $5.6 million figure represents marginal training cost for the final R1 phase, and does not account for DeepSeek’s prior investment in the V3 base model, their GPU purchases (which some estimates put at 50,000 H100-class chips), or the human capital expended across years of development. The true all-in cost was substantially higher. But even with those qualifications, the efficiency gains were highly impressive, and they forced the entire industry to take algorithmic innovation as seriously as raw compute scaling.

Alibaba’s Qwen3 family, released in April 2025, pushed things further. The 235B-A22B variant uses a similar MoE approach, activating 22 billion parameters out of 235 billion, and it introduced hybrid reasoning modes that can switch between extended chain-of-thought and direct response depending on task complexity. The newer Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B, released later in 2025, achieves 61.8% on the Aider Polyglot benchmark under full precision, which puts it in the same neighbourhood as Claude Sonnet 4 and GPT-4.1 for code generation specifically.

Meta’s Llama 4, released in early 2025, moved to natively multimodal MoE with the Scout and Maverick variants processing vision, video, and text in the same forward pass. Mistral continued to punch above its weight with the Large 3 release at 675 billion parameters, and their claim of delivering 92% of GPT-5.2’s performance at roughly 15% of the price represents the kind of value proposition that makes enterprise buyers think twice about their API contracts.

According to Menlo Ventures’ mid-2025 survey of over 150 technical leaders, open-source models now account for approximately 13% of production AI workloads, with the market increasingly structured around a durable equilibrium. Proprietary systems define the upper bound of reliability and performance for regulated or enterprise workloads, while open-source models offer cost efficiency, transparency, and customisation for specific use cases.

By any measure, this is a serious and capable ecosystem. The question is whether it’s capable enough to replace frontier APIs for agentic, high-reasoning work.

What happens when you run these models locally

The Mac Studio with an M3 Ultra and 512GB of unified memory is genuinely impressive hardware for local inference. Apple’s unified memory architecture means the GPU, CPU, and Neural Engine all share the same memory pool without the traditional separation between system RAM and VRAM, which makes it uniquely suited to running large models that would otherwise require expensive multi-GPU setups. Real-world benchmarks show the M3 Ultra achieving approximately 2,320 tokens per second on a Qwen3-30B 4-bit model, which is competitive with an NVIDIA RTX 3090 while consuming a fraction of the power.

But the performance picture changes dramatically as model size increases. Running the larger Qwen3-235B-A22B at Q5 quantisation on the M3 Ultra yields generation speeds of approximately 5.2 tokens per second, with first-token latency of around 3.8 seconds. At Q4KM quantisation, users on the MacRumors forums report around 30 tokens per second, which is usable for interactive work but a long way from the responsiveness of cloud APIs processing multiple parallel requests on clusters of H100s or B200s. And those numbers are for the quantised versions, which brings us to the core technical problem.

Quantisation is the process of reducing the numerical precision of a model’s weights, typically from 16-bit floating point down to 8-bit or 4-bit integers, in order to shrink the model enough to fit in available memory. The trade-off is information loss, and research published at EMNLP 2025 by Mekala et al. makes the extent of that loss uncomfortably clear. Their systematic evaluation across five quantisation methods and five models found that while 8-bit quantisation preserved accuracy with only about a 0.8% drop, 4-bit methods led to substantial losses, with performance degradation of up to 59% on tasks involving long-context inputs. The degradation worsened for non-English languages and varied dramatically between models and tasks, with Llama-3.1 70B experiencing a 32% performance drop on BNB-nf4 quantisation while Qwen-2.5 72B remained relatively robust under the same conditions.

Separate research from ACL 2025 introduces an even more concerning finding for the long-term trajectory of local models. As models become better trained on more data, they actually become more sensitive to quantisation degradation. The study’s scaling laws predict that quantisation-induced degradation will worsen as training datasets grow toward 100 trillion tokens, a milestone likely to be reached within the next few years. In practical terms, this means that the models most worth running locally are precisely the ones that lose the most from being compressed to fit.

When someone says they’re using a local model, they’re usually running a quantised version of an already-smaller model than the frontier labs deploy. The experience might feel good in interactive use, but the gap becomes apparent on exactly the tasks that matter most for production agentic work. Multi-step reasoning over long contexts, complex tool use orchestration, and domain-specific accuracy where “pretty good” is materially different from “correct.”

The post-training gap that open source can’t easily close

The most persistent advantage that frontier models hold over open-source alternatives has less to do with architecture and more to do with what happens after pre-training. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback and its variants form a substantial part of this gap, and the economics of closing it are unfavourable for the open-source community.

RLHF works by having human annotators evaluate pairs of model outputs and indicate which response better satisfies criteria like helpfulness, accuracy, and safety. Those preferences train a reward model, which then guides further optimisation of the language model through reinforcement learning. The process turns a base model that just predicts the next token into something that follows instructions well, pushes back when appropriate, handles edge cases gracefully, and avoids the confident-but-wrong failure mode that plagues undertrained systems.

The cost of doing this well at scale is staggering. Research from Daniel Kang at Stanford estimates that high-quality human data annotation now exceeds compute costs by up to 28 times for frontier models, with the data labelling market growing at a factor of 88 between 2023 and 2024 while compute costs increased by only 1.3 times. Producing just 600 high-quality RLHF annotations can cost approximately $60,000, which is roughly 167 times more than the compute expense for the same training iteration. Meta’s post-training alignment for Llama 3.1 alone required more than $50 million and approximately 200 people.

The frontier labs have also increasingly moved beyond basic RLHF toward more sophisticated approaches. Anthropic’s Constitutional AI has the model critique its own outputs against principles derived from human values, while the broader shift toward expert annotation, particularly for code, legal reasoning, and scientific analysis, means the humans providing feedback need to be domain practitioners rather than general-purpose annotators. This is expensive, slow, and extremely difficult to replicate through the synthetic and distilled preference data that open-source projects typically rely on.

The 2025 introduction of RLTHF (Targeted Human Feedback) from research surveyed in Preprints.org offers some hope, achieving full-human-annotation-level alignment with only 6-7% of the human annotation effort by combining LLM-based initial alignment with selective human corrections. But even these efficiency gains don’t close the fundamental gap: frontier labs can afford to spend tens of millions on annotation because they recoup it through API revenue, while open-source projects face a collective action problem where the cost of annotation is concentrated but the benefits are distributed.

Where the gap genuinely is closing

The picture is not uniformly bleak for open-source, and understanding where the gap has closed is as important as understanding where it hasn’t.

Code generation is the domain where convergence has happened fastest. Qwen3-Coder’s 61.8% on Aider Polyglot at full precision puts it within striking distance of frontier coding models, and the Unsloth project’s dynamic quantisation of the same model achieves 60.9% at a quarter of the memory footprint, which represents remarkably small degradation. For writing, editing, and iterating on code, a well-configured local model running on capable hardware is now a genuinely viable alternative to an API, provided you’re not relying on long-context reasoning across an entire codebase.

Classification, summarisation, and embedding tasks have been viable on local models for some time, and the performance gap for these workloads is now negligible for most practical purposes. Document processing, data extraction, and content drafting all fall into the category where open-source models deliver sufficient quality at dramatically lower cost.

The OpenRouter State of AI report’s analysis of over 100 trillion tokens of real-world usage data shows that Chinese open-source models, particularly from Alibaba and DeepSeek, have captured approximately 13% of weekly token volume with strong growth in the second half of 2025, driven by competitive quality combined with rapid iteration and dense release cycles. This adoption is concentrated in exactly the workloads described above: high-volume, well-defined tasks where cost efficiency matters more than peak reasoning capability.

Privacy-sensitive applications represent another area where local models have an intrinsic advantage that no amount of frontier improvement can overcome. MacStories’ Federico Viticci noted that running vision-language models locally on a Mac Studio for OCR and document analysis bypasses the image compression problems that plague cloud-hosted models, while keeping sensitive documents entirely on-device. For regulated industries where data sovereignty matters, local inference is a feature that frontier APIs cannot match.

What convergence would actually require

If the question is whether open-source models running on consumer hardware will eventually match frontier models across all tasks, the honest answer requires examining several conditions that would need to hold simultaneously.

The first is that Mixture of Experts architectures and similar efficiency innovations would need to continue improving at their current rate, allowing models with hundreds of billions of total parameters to activate only the relevant subset for each task while maintaining quality. The early evidence from DeepSeek’s MoE approach and Qwen3’s hybrid reasoning is encouraging, but there appear to be theoretical limits to how sparse activation can get before coherence suffers on complex multi-step problems.

The second condition is that the quantisation problem would need a genuine breakthrough rather than incremental improvement. The ACL 2025 finding that better-trained models are more sensitive to quantisation is a structural headwind that current techniques are not on track to solve. Red Hat’s evaluation of over 500,000 quantised model runs found that larger models at 8-bit quantisation show negligible degradation, but the story at 4-bit, where you need to be for consumer hardware, is considerably less encouraging for anything beyond straightforward tasks.

The third and most fundamental condition is that the post-training gap would need to close, which requires either a dramatic reduction in the cost of expert human annotation or a breakthrough in synthetic preference data that produces equivalent alignment quality. The emergence of techniques like RLTHF and Online Iterative RLHF suggests the field is working on this, but the frontier labs are investing in these same efficiency gains while simultaneously scaling their annotation budgets. It’s a race where both sides are accelerating, and the side with revenue-funded annotation budgets has a structural advantage.

The fourth condition is that inference hardware would need to improve enough to make unquantised or lightly quantised large models viable on consumer devices. Apple’s unified memory architecture is the most promising path here, and the progression from M1 to M4 chips has been impressive, but even the top-spec M3 Ultra at 512GB can only run the largest MoE models at aggressive quantisation levels. The next generation of Apple Silicon with 1TB+ unified memory would change the calculus significantly, but that’s likely several years away, and memory costs just shot through the ceiling.

Given all of these dependencies, a realistic timeline for broad convergence across most production tasks is probably three to five years, with coding and structured data tasks converging first, creative and analytical tasks following, and complex multi-step reasoning with tool use remaining a frontier advantage for the longest.

The hybrid approach and what it means in practice

The most pragmatic position right now (which is also the least satisfying one to post about), is that the future is hybrid rather than either-or. The smart deployment pattern routes high-volume, lower-stakes tasks to local models where the cost savings compound quickly and the quality gap is negligible, while reserving frontier API calls for the work that demands peak reasoning: complex multi-step planning, high-stakes domain-specific analysis, nuanced tool orchestration, and anything where being confidently wrong carries real cost.

This is approximately what the Menlo Ventures survey data suggests enterprise buyers are doing already, with model API spending more than doubling to $8.4 billion while open-source adoption stabilises around 13% of production workloads. The enterprises that are getting value from local models are not using them as wholesale API replacements; they’re using them as a complementary layer that handles the grunt work while the expensive models handle the hard problems.

There’s also the operational burden that is rarely mentioned in relation to model use. When you run models locally, you effectively become your own ML ops team. Model updates, quantisation format compatibility, prompt template differences across architectures, memory management under load, and testing when new versions drop, all of that falls on you. The API providers handle model improvements, scaling, and infrastructure, and you get a better model every few months without changing a line of code. For a small team that should be spending its time on product rather than infrastructure, that operational overhead has real cost even if it doesn’t show up on an invoice.

The future of AI probably does involve substantially more local compute than we have today. Costs will come down, architectures will improve, hardware will get more capable, and the hybrid model will become standard practice. The question is not who removes the constraints first, it’s who understands which constraints actually matter.

Audible link

This, as were the last two, is a book I discovered in Tiny Bookshop. I like a good love story and the game's blurb sounded pretty good.

Story

Actually listening to the book, I found it has a bit too much drama for my taste. Why are all the protagonist together with these absolute garbage people?

The love story though is well told and charming. Even if some of thoughts Harriet is having toward her crush gave me «Good Intentions» vibes in a way that did not feel appropriate for the book.

I'm also not sure we needed to hear the outcome in quite so many words. The book comes to an epic climax. Stopping there and leaving the rest to the listener's imagination would have been fine, too. It's something we do not get nearly enough of these days. At least in the books I listen to.

The letter

I want to take a moment to talk about the letter Harriet writes. In the story it goes that she sits down, in the middle of the night no less and writes the letter in one go, even refuses to proof read it. Remember too, that she is a wedding photographer and not an author or a journalist who has a lot of practice. I am sorry, but that is bullshit. That letter is so well written. Clearly, these are the carefully written words of Mhairi McFarlane and not those of Harriet. Now, I am sure that this is necessary. The letter is pretty long and we get to hear all of it and were it written in a more realistic fashion, that part of the story might be hard to get through. Nonetheless, it shattered my suspension of disbelief.

But also, it is an interesting way of doing exhibition. I've not had that in too many books before, so fair enough I guess.

Social media

Social media plays a big role in this book. It gets mentioned from the beginning, reminding us that this is a contemporary piece of work.

Anyone can make up a story, paint themselves as a victim and their adversary as the abuser. Online mobs are quick to judge and ruthless in their damnation. They don't wait around to ask if there might be another side to the story.

By making this a central plot point, the book serves as a warning, to not believe everything you see online, just because it sounds sincere and plausible. A warning that can't be made often enough in these times.

Recording

The audio quality is good, as you'd expect from any modern recording. I am, however, not too happy with the performance of Chloe Massey in reading the book.

Yes, the different people do all get their own voices. But they are not very pronounced and, worse, not very consistent either. It is especially hard to distinguish what Harriet is saying out loud and what she is merely thinking in her head, sometimes making conversations hard to follow.

This might be to blame on the book in parts — there are some books that are suited better to being made into an audiobook than others.

Overall it's still an enjoyable listen, but it could definitely be better. If you're going to listen to the book, maybe check out this other recording here. It doesn't have as many reviews as the one I listened to, but they are better, particularly concerning the recording.

Who is it for

If you're looking for a romantic story and are not turned off by a bit of drama, then this is definitely for you!

Quick Look • Barlow penned his bold and controversial take on the future of the Internet 30 years ago. • Many of Barlow's predictions about the capabilities of the Internet to remain free have not panned out and unforseen threats have cropped up. • But, it's hard not to feel his central thesis can still be achieved—though perhaps, only if you chose it.

Today marks 30 years since John Perry Barlow—co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation—opened his laptop at the 1996 Economic World Forum in Davos and penned an unforgiving declaration of independence for the Internet.

Now, three decades later, as the Internet has come to dominate our lives and is in a crucial period of transition, it's a good time to reflect on Barlow's early vision of the Internet and how it might guide the Internet's future.

There are, no doubt, many parts of his declaration that simply haven't come true, but I can't help thinking that the spirit of Barlow's message can be achieved—at least for those who might be willing to seize it.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow, February 8, 1996

Barlow's Declaration

There are a lot of ways to describe Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

Lofty, inspiring, and courageous might come to mind. But so might pompous, blow-hard, specious and grandiloquent.

When Barlow wrote his declaration, the Internet was a very different place. Most homes, if they had computers at all, put them in “computer rooms.” The idea that every individual would have their own computer—let alone multiple—connected to the Internet at all times wasn't yet a thing. Total Internet users were counted in the millions, rather than billions.

Google had not yet been founded, and social media, cryptocurrency, and generative AI were many years away.

Yet, Barlow made bold declarations about the capabilities of cyberspace to flourish, and governments' inability to contain it:

“You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.”

He claims that cyberspace exists without borders and outside jurisdictions:

“Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule.”

While in spirit, some of these declarations may be true. I think most would disagree with Barlow's claim that governments do not possess “any” methods of enforcing their laws on the Internet, and that because users are distributed around the globe that jurisdictions are rendered meaningless.

Governments around the world have spent the last three decades working to reign in the Internet and enforce laws on its users. In China, the country's Great Firewall heavily regulates the country's domestic Internet. Iran recently disconnected its country from the world's Internet amid widespread protests.

And in the West, the United States and Europe have been on foolhardy campaigns to institute age verification laws, crackdown on VPNs, and backdoor end-to-end encryption on popular messaging services.

The United States has incredible influence to enforce its criminal laws concerning computer crimes well beyond its geographic borders.

Alexandre Cazes of notorious AlphaBay fame was arrested in Thailand, while Kim Dotcom of Megaupload was arrested in New Zealand—both on U.S. warrants. Julian Assange spent seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid arrest by the U.S. and other western countries, and Edward Snowden fled to Russia in 2013 to avoid prosecution.

Additionally, Barlow's declaration did not predict the considation of the Internet and how that has impacted online freedom.

Over the past 30 years we have seen the giants of the Internet rise and take hold: Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, X/Twitter, and Amazon.

They operate as proxy governments online, enforcing terms of service and privacy policies that limit expression and pry into every aspect of our lives.

They have disrupted industries in the real world and online, baited our society and culture with “free” services, and sunk their tentacles into our communications, our jobs, our banking, our health, our entertainment, and even our frontdoors and living rooms.

Digital town squares and convenience have given way to hive-minds and dependence.

But for those who want it...

In re-reading Barlow's declaration today, it's hard not to question whether there remains the kind of freedom online that Barlow describes.

There are threats to Internet freedom on all sides, as society moves into this post-modern era we find ourselves.

Yet, I can't help but agree with Barlow's claim that the Internet is “an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.”

In Iran, as the government shut down access to the Internet, people started setting up Starlink connections to reach the global Internet; people in China have used VPNs and international SIM cards to circumvent the country's firewall for years; and age restriction laws in the United States are easily avoided with a VPN or TOR browser.

The more restrictions that governments attempt, the more they push people toward alternatives.

The same goes for corporations.

Some have sought refuge from Microsoft's unwanted and invasive AI features by moving to Linux. Others have ditched Google for Proton or Tuta. Others still, have left behind centralized social media for the Fediverse. Linux desktop usage topped 5% globally in 2025

An unheeded plea

We have to ask whether Barlow's declaration is really a declaration, or is it more of a plea?

The second sentence of his declaration is a request: “I ask you of the past to leave us alone.”

Unfortunately, I think it's safe to say this plea has not—and will not—be respected. Governments are not going to step away from the Internet and corporations are not going stop maximizing their control and revenue.

Yet, for those who are willing to break free from governments and the centralized control of corporations online, there are still ways to make the best of Barlow's vision a reality:

“We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

~ Torman

Verify this post: Source | Signature | PGP Key

#privacy #Internet #policy #InternetFreedom

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NEXT UP

This afternoon the Indiana University Women's Basketball Team will play their annual Pink Game. Their opponent will be the Purdue Boilermakers who will be traveling down to meet them on the floor of IU's Assembly Hall.

If the Internet doesn't crap out on me, I'll be listening to the radio call of the game streaming from B97 – The Home for IU Women's Basketball.

And the adventure continues.

Just testing out this platform. Here we go.

今日は6時半に目が覚めた。 外を見ると雪が積もっていて、早朝の澄んだ空気の中でその景色が見れたのは幸運だった。

ぼーっと眺めたり、写真を撮ったりしながら、10分ほどベランダに出ていた。 最近は腰痛予防に腹筋のインナーマッスルを鍛える習慣を続けていて、それが自信になっているのか、前より寒さに強くなった気がする。 凍える仕草をせず、少し強気に振る舞って、内心寒く感じてきた辺りで部屋に戻った。

最近は人と会う機会が、いつもより少しだけ増えている。 俺はだいたい15分前には現地に着いてしまう性格なので、待ち時間にコンビニで飲み物を買う。 「冬にしか飲まないからな」と思いながら、冬は決まってほっとレモンを選ぶ。飲むたびに「思ったより甘いな」と毎回感じている。

塀の上に猫がいたので、しばらく眺めて楽しんだ。 そのあと焦点を手前にずらして、猫をぼんやりとした輪郭で見ることで、もう一度楽しむ事ができる。 猫のことだから、表情をはっきり見なくても、きっと想像通りのあの顔をしているのだろう。

冬はみんな厚着をするから、満員電車ではそのぶん夏より乗れる人数が減る気がしているが、実際はどれくらい変わるのだろう。 朝の通勤電車は体感では乗車率200%ほどで、いつも乗れない人が出ている気がするが、電車の本数が季節で変わるという話は聞かない。 ということは、全員が厚着でも乗車数にはそこまで影響がないのだろう。

喫茶店に入ると、角砂糖の入った容器が大体置いてある。 自分はコーヒーも紅茶も基本ブラックだが、角砂糖の容器には店ごとのこだわりが出ていて、つい観察してしまう。 「自分の食卓にも置こうか」と思うものの、使う機会がない。 置き場所を考えて、最初は自分の向かいに置いてみたり、次は中央に置いてみたりするだろうが、ほとんど開けることがないまま埃をかぶり、やがて食器棚の奥にしまわれる未来を想像すると、少し寂しくなった。

喫茶店でゆっくりしていると、向かいの女性が今やっているゲームについて早口で語っていた。 体を使ったり、手を大きく振ったりして説明している様子から、本当に好きなのだとわかる。 腕を大きく振ったとき、その影が一瞬だけ机全体を覆った。

別の席では、40代くらいのおじさんが電話をしていた。 「そうかそうか、元気でやってるか」と言ったあと、「本題はここからだ」と言わんばかりに、 「お前、コンテストに出るって言って、それから出てないだろ」と相手に問いかけていた。 「いや、俺はいいんだけど、先生が『あいつはいつ出るんだ』って詰めてくるからなあ」と言っていて、じゃあこの仲介的なおじさんは一体どういう立場なのだろうと気になった。

家に帰ると、通販で買ったSサイズのニットが届いていた。 普段はMサイズだが、今回はSサイズを着こなすことに挑戦した。 着てみると見事にジャストサイズで、自分の体格にも合っていた。 「賭けに勝ったぞ」と思いつつ、普段の姿勢が悪すぎて、鏡を見ると右肩と左肩の高さが明らかに違い、歪んだボディラインが目立っていた。 この服自体はとても気に入っているので、しばらく着るだろう。 明日からはしばらく姿勢を意識して生活していく。

I usually have six nominees instead of five for this category. It’s because movie posters are rectangular instead of square so to fit in an Instagram post, I needed six 😅 But screw that: the year in movies was just too good so I have seven entries! Melbourne International Film Festival was amazing, especially when it came to the movies coming from the Cannes selection.

And now, the nominees.

It's What's Inside by Greg Jardin

A sci-fi comedy in which a bunch of friends are given a machine that allows them to swap bodies. It’s funny at first but questions about attraction and social status show up and it becomes hilarious. A great first movie for Greg Jardin.

Red Rooms by Pascal Plante

A young woman is obsessed about a serial killer and attends the trial. This Canadian movie is highly confronting though no violence is shown, especially because it remains ambivalent all along about its main character. It takes you on a ride but finds a strange way to redeem itself at the end.

Mars Express by Jérémie Périn

In this French animated movie, set in the future on Mars, two agents investigate the disappearance of two students. It’s greatly animated, the world building is impressive and the story works really well. It’s such a shame that it bombed because it’s a real gem.

Sirāt by Oliver Laxe

In Morocco, a man and his son looking for his daughter in free parties decide to follow some partygoers deeper into the desert. This movie doesn’t really follow conventions and punches you right in the guts to remind you about some hard truths in life. Strong and beautiful.

It Was Just An Accident by Jafar Panahi

In Iran, a man kidnaps someone he thinks was his torturer in jail but before he kills him, he decides to check with other victims first. This year’s Palme d’Or is a drama, but it’s also got a strong dark sense of humour. Definitely worth a watch.

The Secret Agent by Kleber Mendonça Filho

During the Brazilian military dictatorship, a man tries to leave the country to escape a hit on his head. It’s impossible to describe the genre of this movie: is it a political thriller, magical realism or even a horny period drama?! It’s all at the same time.

A Useful Ghost by Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke

In Thailand, a woman haunts a vacuum cleaner to reunite with her husband. This is the craziest movie I have seen this year, if not ever. I had high expectations and it did not disappoint, I laughed a lot. Let’s not forget the strong social and political commentary as well.

And the winner is… Well, I was unable to choose between those two very different movies so it’s a tie! The winners are Red Rooms by Pascal Plante and A Useful Ghost by Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke!

#JujuAwards #MovieOfTheYear #JujuAwards2025 #BestOf2025

Stay entertained thanks to our Weekly Tracker giving you next week's Anticipated Movies & Shows, Most Watched & Returning Favorites, and Shows Changes & Popular Trailers.

Anticipated Movies

• ☆ Crime 101
• War Machine
• “Wuthering Heights”
• GOAT
• Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
• Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
• Cold Storage

Anticipated Shows

• Small Prophets
• ☆ How to Get to Heaven from Belfast
• Love Story
• The Art of Sarah
• Neighbors

Returing Favorites

• The Artful Dodger — Season 2
• Turn of the Tide — Season 3
• ☆ Cross — Season 2
• Love Is Blind — Season 10
• In the Mud — Season 2

Trending Shows Status Changes

Most Watched Movies this Week

• new The Housemaid
• +3 The Wrecking Crew
• -2 Anaconda
• -2 Greenland 2: Migration
• -1 Zootopia 2
• -3 The Rip
• new We Bury the Dead
• -2 Predator: Badlands
• new Hamnet
• -3 Sinners

Most Watched Shows this Week

• = Fallout
• = A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
• = The Pitt
• +1 High Potential
• -1 The Rookie
• +1 The Night Manager
• new Wonder Man
• new Bridgerton
• new Shrinking
• -4 Hijack

Popular Trailers

• A place you'll never want to leave. — Send Help
• Quite simple, really. — “Wuthering Heights”
• When Sensei Speaks, You Listen — One Battle After Another
• we love our 🍵🍰 — Cold Storage
• Jaw On The Floor — Primate
• Season 2 Episode 6 Preview — The Pitt
• If you're seeing this, go book tickets! — GOAT
• Hulu Trailer — Predator: Badlands
• Now Streaming on Hulu on Disney Plus — Ella McCay
• Halstead and Upton Are BACK – One Chicago Crossover Event — Chicago Fire

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Hi, I'm Kevin 👋. I make apps and I love watching movies and TV shows. If you like what I'm doing, you can buy one of my apps, download and subscribe to Rippple for Trakt or just buy me a ko-fi ☕️.

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