Daniel Molnar soobrosa

What makes §213 of Magnifica Humanitas such a pointed gesture is not just that Pope Leo XIV quotes Tolkien, but which Tolkien he quotes, and what political/cultural terrain that quotation crosses in doing so. Three claimants to Middle-earth, three radically different readings.

The Pope's Tolkien (§213). Leo XIV pulls from Gandalf's speech at the Last Debate in The Return of the King: "It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till." He then glosses it in his own voice: "The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization." The context is an encyclical on AI and the threat of dehumanization, and the rhetorical move is anti-mastery: against the demiurgic temptation to seize the le

Local AI on Apple Silicon

Dec 15th, 2025

Why?

You might ask the question. We all know that LLMs are non-deterministic stochastic parrots and the “blurry JPEGs of the Web” or whatnot the thief overlords found laying around. Still they are useful with the proper leash.

Possible reasons to prefer a local AI:

	CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION CLEAN_DEEP_JSON (j VARCHAR(65535), f VARCHAR(65535))
	RETURNS VARCHAR(MAX)
	STABLE AS $$
	import json
	if not j:
	return None
	try:
	arr = json.loads(j)
	except valueerror:
	return None

	# thanks to
	# https://medium.com/r/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fncsforum.movidius.com%2Fdiscussion%2Fcomment%2F299%2F%23Comment%5C_299
	# https://ahmedibrahimvt.wordpress.com/2017/02/19/fatal-error-hdf5-h-no-such-file-or-directory/
	# http://www.pyimagesearch.com/2015/07/20/install-opencv-3-0-and-python-3-4-on-ubuntu/

	sudo apt-get update
	sudo apt-get upgrade
	sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake pkg-config
	sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev libtiff5-dev libjasper-dev libpng12-dev
	sudo apt-get install libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev libv4l-dev

	# tested on a Raspbery Pi 3 running a Raspbian Jessie July 2017

	# dependencies
	apt-get update
	sudo apt-get install libprotobuf-dev libleveldb-dev libsnappy-dev libopencv-dev libhdf5-serial-dev protobuf-compiler
	sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends libboost-all-dev
	sudo apt-get install libgflags-dev libgoogle-glog-dev liblmdb-dev
	sudo apt-get install libopenblas-dev
	sudo apt-get install libatlas-base-dev

	# tested on Macbook Air 13", early 2015, 1,6 Ghz Intel Core i5, 8Gb RAM running macOS Sierra

	# if you don't have brew
	/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
	brew update

	# dependencies
	brew install -vd snappy leveldb gflags glog szip lmdb
	brew tap homebrew/science
	brew install hdf5 opencv

	#!/bin/bash
	#
	# you need
	# https://github.com/jehiah/json2csv and
	# https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
	# to roll like this
	#
	# get your token at https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/console/get-current-user-saved-tracks/
	#

	cat recipes_vegan.json \| jq '.recipes[].extendedIngredients[]' \| jq '[.id,.aisle,.image,.consistency,.name,.nameClean,.original,.originalString,.originalName,.amount,.unit,.meta[],.metaInformation[],.measures.metric.amount,.measures.metric.unitShort,.measures.metric.unitLong]' -c

	cat recipes_vegan.json \| jq '.recipes[].analyzedInstructions[].steps[]' \| jq '[.number, .step, .ingredients[].id, .ingredients[].name, .ingredients[].localizedName, .ingredients[].image]' -c