Sabbath Speeches: Authenticity
This talk was delivered in a sacrament meeting in the Summer Hill Ward, in Palmerston North, New Zealand on the 10th of March 2024. ‘To thine own self be true’, is a line from Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet. It is spoken by a man giving his son advice. The sentiment has become very popular. Be true…
Modernising the standard works with machine learning (part III): LDSBot
In part II, I used ChatGPT to modernise verses from the LDS standard works. ChatGPT is a fine-tuned GPT-3.5, trained using supervised learning and reinforcement learning. I recently read about LDSBot, an OpenAIAPI project that uses the ChatGPT-4 model. LDSBot is part of the Mormonr project by the B. H. Roberts Foundation. I wanted to…
Sabbath Speeches: Dirt and Dung – Salt of the Earth
I gave a contracted version of this talk, in Polish, in the Warsaw Branch, in Poland on 23/04/2023. When I was a child, we didn’t have a digital camera. To see photos, we had to take film to a developer. This costed more and took longer than it takes to look at digital photos on…
Modernising the standard works with machine learning (part II): ChatGPT AI
How would ChatGPT modernise the standard works? Would there be doctrinal changes or loss of intertexuality between scriptures? Perhaps we’d be surprised.
Do babies need a name to be blessed before the church?
I can imagine D&C 20:70 being followed to the letter, but in a variety of different ways to how we currently bless babies.
Strengthen ye the weak hands and confirm the feeble knees
When I was a deacon, I sometimes passed the sacrament to older people whose hands trembled so much that they regularly spilled their water. Then as a teacher, I would only fill the tiny sacrament cups halfway, to try and make it easier for them, but it only helped a little. Deterioration of hand function…
Taking half the sacrament
We were late for church on Sunday. We use public transport, and there is no direct route to church. Our bus was running late and we missed the tram we planned to catch. The next tram was half an hour later, and we arrived at church during the sacrament. We heard the prayer blessing the…
Will a man rob God? Tithing and temples
“Paying a full and honest tithe leads us to the temple.” – Elder Yoshihiko Kikuchi
Modernising the standard works with machine learning (part I)
Could we use the KJV and another version of the bible as training data, and create a machine learning translation model that translates from KJV-style English directly to a more modern style of English?
Spare the rod
“I am persuaded that violent fathers produce violent sons.” – Gordon B. Hinkley
Josiah Reckons 