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Did you know the actor Martin Sheen’s real name is Ramón Antonio Gerardo Estéve? When he picked his acting name, he saw now Blessed Fulton Sheen and was thoroughly impressed. He picked his new name from Fulton Sheen.

He then shares a story in which he got to meet Fulton Sheen and spend an hour with him.

In summary, let it not be said that by this action, implementing the spirit of renewal coming out of the Council, we have abolished Friday, repudiated the holy traditions of our fathers, or diminished the insistence of the Church on the fact of sin and the need for penance.

In 1966, the USCCB (US Catholic Council of Bishops) published their Pastoral Statement on Penance and Abstinence. Until that point, abstaining from meat on Fridays was a hard requirement that carried the penalty of sin. What many people took away from that document was this:

Among the works of voluntary self-denial and personal penance which we especially commend to our people for the future observance of Friday, even though we hereby terminate the traditional law of abstinence binding under pain of sin, as the sole prescribed means of observing Friday, we give first place to abstinence from flesh meat.

What many people failed to read was that the call to penance on Fridays IS still in effect – in fact moreso. They observed that abstinence from meat is much less of a penance than it used to be and that the gospel might indeed be better served by other forms of self-denial and atonement. They especially mention acts that Jesus speaks of when the final judgement will be laid upon the world.

It would bring great glory to God and good to souls if Fridays found our people doing volunteer work in hospitals, visiting the sick, serving the needs of the aged and the lonely, instructing the young in the Faith, participating as Christians in community affairs, and meeting our obligations to our families, our friends,our neighbors, and our community, including our parishes, with a special zeal born of the desire to add the merit of penance to the other virtues exercised in good works born of living faith.

So, in short, while the requirement for act of abstinence from meat on Fridays was lifted, we are still asked to do acts of penance that can still include abstinence from meat or other acts of atonement and penance.

The document makes an excellent point that by our acts of penance and atonement on Friday when Jesus died, it helps us to enter into and prepare us for the celebration of mass on Sunday.

Claude Code Channels is quickly becoming a practical alternative to OpenClaw for people who want to connect Claude to chat platforms without setting up a heavier agent framework. It is simpler to get running, works with a Claude subscription out of the box, and gives you a straightforward way to interact with a local Claude Code session through Discord.

You need to start Claude command line, then install the official Claude channels Bum plugin. You can then start Claude and run /plugin marketplace commands to install plugins for Discord and other applications. Set up some authentication keys, and then restart for access.

You can see how to set up Claude Code Channels and connect Claude code to Discord using this article.

I always thought that quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be. Because if you watch cartoons, quicksand is like the third biggest thing you have to worry about in adult life behind real sticks of dynamite and giant anvils falling on you from the sky. I used to sit around and think about what to do about quicksand. I never thought about how to handle real problems in adult life, I was never like “Oh, what’s it gonna be like when relatives ask to borrow money?” Now that I’ve gotten older, not only have I never stepped in quicksand—I’ve never even heard about it! No one’s ever been like, “Hey if you’re coming to visit, take I-90 ’cause I-95 has a little quicksand in the middle. Looks like regular sand, but then you’re gonna start to sink into it.”

John Mulaney

Quicksand is a real thing, but definitely much less of a concern than what I was led to believe as a kid. Turns out a man was recently rescued from quicksand in a Utah canyon.

4090 graphics cards came with 24gb of memory. As the AI boom sucked up everything on the market, some modders (mostly in China) learned you could upgrade the VRAM on a 4090 from 24GB to 48GB. These mods were often done poorly and had high failure rates; but people were desperate for more VRAM for AI uses. Soon, better quality modders come online – including these guys in Michigan that seem to be reputable and stand behind their modding.

Still, it’s an odd world. The world is quickly aligning to standards of fitting their models into 32, 96, 128, or 256 of ram – so these 48gb variants might not be as interesting as they once were. Also add to the fact that the processor in the 4090’s isn’t nearly as fast as a 5090, and while expensive, 5090’s are now generally available. Still, someone locally was selling one of these cards recently. (Update: still hasn’t sold in 6 weeks)

Look out hardware engineers – AI is now coming for your jobs just like it is starting to take over software jobs. An AI agent just designed an entire CPU from a single prompt.

Verkor.io claims, in a research paper published in March, that its agentic AI system, Design Conductor, autonomously produced a complete RISC-V CPU core — taking a 219-word requirements document and generating a verified, layout-ready design in 12 hours, which is orders of magnitude faster than the standard 18- to 36-month timelines seen in commercial chip design.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/ai-agent-designs-a-complete-risc-v-cpu-from-a-219-word-spec-in-just-12-hours

More info on IEEE Spectrum here.