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I was at work; school had just started a week earlier. I think it was around 3 p.m. when the news broke. I found out about it when I got home that evening. Exactly 10 days later, on a Friday morning, an explosion occurred in the city where I lived, at a SEVESO-classified chemical plant. The result: 31 dead and 8,000 injured, 2,500 of them seriously. Everyone thought it was a terrorist attack carried out by the same group that had struck the United States, but in the end, after a seemingly endless trial, the conclusion was that it was a chemical accident. Dozens and dozens of children were deeply traumatized; they were in class at the time of the explosion. Some didn’t return to school for an entire year, traumatized and/or injured. Brothers and sisters were injured, some seriously. I was working right at the site of the explosion, but that morning, I didn’t have class. Life… So I’m not ready to forget 9/11 and the 21st, and I understand to some extent how Americans felt on September 11.

I was out in service. Did not know it was happening until we met with the group that morning at the KH. Every householder home that day was glued to the TV. We had some very good and/or interesting visits at every at home door.

report about brother who working at bethel took a famous picture https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/september-11-photo-fire-department-ladder-118-aaron-mclamb-b3040491.html

6 months before 9/11, a new TV series called The Lone Gunmen had an episode about a remote hyjacked plane hitting the World Trade Center..

Not necessarily. Once Apple releases Xcode 27.1 the branch simply needs to click “build” and it should work on iPhone Duo. Although it might not have full optimization, it should run two versions of JWL side by side just fine since it uses “scenes” which JWL already began supporting when they released the update supporting multi windows on iPadOS.

From my view as a raised in the truth but not baptized person or even close to dedication I heard about it at like 1pm est hung over getting ready to go to work at 3pm at the ice arena I worked at. Just spent the night skateboarding and drinking with my friends till 4am. Mind you I was not baptized yet but still had a group of friends who were witnesses or raised in the truth like me but not baptized yet I logged on aol instant messenger (AIM) and had brief chats about it but we were focused on what college or Uhaul building we would skate at that night and getting beer and when we all got off work etc To us we knew this type of stuff would happen and were just focused on the same things we did prior, skating, punk rock, girls. Being 20 and being caught up in nonsense didn’t allow world events to affect me/us. I’m kinda thankful as this system and what happens in it traumatizes people Now as a 45 year old man everything traumatizes me lol. But back then I was in my own world and it was just another blip on the news I look back now and see how changed the world is due to that event, and It hurts me thinking about all the badness around it and have total empathy. But I just don’t recall it like everyone else. It felt like everyone around me, outside of my group of friends, was going crazy and I was still in a “pre 9/11” mindset

Luke 24:34 They said: “The Lord has really been raised up and has appeared to Simon!” It is significant that Jesus did not raise himself from the dead. In the Greek text, the verb is in a form that conveys the idea: “was raised.” Jehovah restored life to his Son and then exalted him as Lord and Christ. The word “really” implies that it actually happened—it is an undeniable fact. Jesus did not deliver a single, generic speech to everyone. He recognized the specific help each person needed. Jesus did not avoid Peter or leave him to languish in uncertainty. A valuable lesson here is that he took the initiative to reach out to Peter and appeared to him personally. Jesus did not reason: “Peter let me down, so he can deal with his guilt on his own.” When Jesus was executed as a criminal, it may have seemed to the disciples that all their hopes had died along with him. The words “The Lord has really been raised up” signify far more than just the report of a miracle. They confirm that Jesus is the promised Lord and Messiah, that his sacrifice was accepted, that his teachings are true, and that neither humans nor death can thwart Jehovah’s purpose. Strong faith does not mean a person never weeps or experiences despair. Sometimes, faith is demonstrated when, despite the pain, a person continues to seek answers from Jehovah.

Looks like a pretty good fit for JW Library.

I was driving in the car and heard news over the radio. I loved following news and geopolitics back then already, so when I heard about planes crashing into wtc I immediately knew and said to friend that was with me in the car: "Osama bin Laden". He didn't even know who that is.

Impossible to forget…(This was shortly after I had begun drifting away.) Driving to work as a portrait studio photographer, heard all of the Shocking news on the radio. Arrived to many multiple shoots scheduled All day - had to compartmentalize my grief to get little ones to smile while their parents shuddered in horror outside the camera rooms. My husband was a professional firefighter with our city, had come home at 8 am & just went to bed after a tough night. He woke at 10:30, turned on the TV & Immediately called me sobbing his heart out. Our oldest son had just started his senior yr in college - called me sobbing as well, asking if This was Armageddon! I reassured him that it was merely another aspect of satan’s wickedness & that unfortunately, we’d see much more of the same before the end came. He has since moved purposefully away from the Truth BUT the seeds were planted early & I'm confident that Jehovah knows his heart. Impossible to forget…(This was shortly after I had begun drifting away.) Driving to work as a portrait studio photographer, heard all of the Shocking news on the radio. Arrived to many multiple shoots scheduled All day - had to compartmentalize my grief to get little ones to smile while their parents shuddered in horror outside the camera rooms. My husband was a professional firefighter with our city, had come home at 8 am & just went to bed after a tough night. He woke at 10:30, turned on the TV & Immediately called me sobbing his heart out. Our oldest son had just started his senior yr in college - called me sobbing as well, asking if This was Armageddon! I reassured him that it was merely another aspect of satan’s wickedness & that unfortunately, we’d see much more of the same before the end came. He has since moved purposefully away from the Truth BUT the seeds were planted early & I'm confident that Jehovah knows his heart.

Anthropic’s entire marketing spiel is “AI is too dangerous for anyone except us to have” so I’d take any ‘warnings’ coming from them with a massive grain of salt.

I wonder if there are more awkward verses like this lol

yup. i had spiritual aunts and uncles in bethel from cong. it was one of our first concerns. they had only visited whatever tower(s) from time to time but did lose people they knew. was sad. it was a hard time for sure. we instantly think about our friends.

Oklahoman here. Was living in California at the time. A study was still years ahead of my time. But oddly I felt 'extra grief', felt like I could identify more closely for some reason. Years later, having been baptized now 5 years I felt extremely close to the situation. I could recognize it was because of the world HQ being there and all our spiritual family. Now, wherever a disaster strikes that is the first feeling, how are the friends? I immediately pray for them. This closeness I fell now is due to Jehovah alone broadening my empathy for the brotherhood mostly then mankind in general.

i had graduated hs over the summer. no job, just home. it was 6/7am pdt, i just woke up and ran to the living room. could barely open my eyes. turned on the tv and every station was ny and i stopped at cnn and explosion and chills went down my spine. i didnt understand or could comprehend what was happening. i hadn't seen anything like it before. we saw oklahoma and others but this was planes. just chills. because back then there was no tsa and you could walk up all the way to the gate to see family off.

I was home in California. An employee called with the news. She was hysterical. Turned on the TV and watched the second plane. I went to work. It felt surreal, but on Thursday I called a vendor to get a status on a shipment coming from the east coast. They told me traffic was shut-down on the interstate highways. Nothing was moving.

I thought it might be interesting to give some concrete examples of how I use AI, because my use of it has moved quite a long way beyond simply opening ChatGPT and asking questions. Yes this has been written by AI but thoroughly checked and heavily prompted to get there. 😀 One of my main experiments has been building a self-hosted personal AI agent called Bud. Rather than being just another chatbot, Bud runs continuously on my own infrastructure and has gradually become a kind of personal AI operating layer. What Bud actually does Spiritual study Bud helps me with quite a lot of spiritual study and preparation. It can: prepare the day's text with key principles, meditation points and possible personal applications produce useful comments on every verse of scheduled Bible reading conduct deeper chapter studies using an indexed local library of publications search jw.org/WOL material that I have indexed locally use verified Bible wording rather than inventing or loosely paraphrasing scriptures I've built a fairly substantial local spiritual research library behind it. That now includes: more than 105,000 indexed passages from books, magazines, meeting workbooks and other material the complete NWT Study Edition — 1,189 chapters, including study notes, footnotes and cross-references around 2,260 Watchtower study articles 19 books cached from WOL So instead of relying entirely on general AI training data, the agent can search the actual source material before answering. That has been one of the most useful things I've learnt about AI: Give the AI good source material rather than expecting it to know everything. Health, fitness and rehabilitation I've also built a fully integrated fitness and rehabilitation application. It records workouts, exercises, progress and rehabilitation information, synchronises the information with my Obsidian vault, and then makes relevant information available to Bud. That means my AI agent can have an ongoing picture of my training and rehabilitation rather than each conversation beginning from scratch. It can help me: keep track of exercises and progress compare training sessions record rehabilitation information follow changes over time connect workout information with my wider notes I don't see this as replacing medical or professional advice. It's more like having a very organised record system that can also reason over the information already stored in it. Organisation and administration Bud also handles a lot of the everyday organisational work that is easy to forget. It can: maintain my calendar manage reminders and appointments keep a dedicated scheduling conversation as a single source of truth maintain durable notes record things I don't want to forget keep information in an Obsidian knowledge vault rather than losing everything when a chat ends This persistent information is something I find particularly useful. A normal chatbot conversation can be temporary. My aim has been to create something where useful information gradually becomes part of a structured personal knowledge system. AI helping with my secretary work Another very practical use I make of AI is writing and administration. In my congregation secretary role there are quite a lot of occasions where information needs to be communicated clearly, accurately and succinctly. AI is extremely useful for taking what I already want to say and helping me turn it into something clearer. For example, I use it to help with: organising rough notes making messages easier to understand shortening something without losing important information preparing concise administrative messages making wording warm and tactful removing repetition turning a collection of points into a logical message That is actually one of my most frequent uses of AI. Sometimes I know exactly what I want to communicate, but the AI can help me express it in two minutes rather than spending twenty minutes trying to get the wording right. For me, AI is often less about writing something for me and more about helping me communicate my own thoughts clearly and efficiently. Daily briefings Every morning at around 6:15am, Bud prepares a briefing covering things such as: what's on the calendar important reminders current priorities relevant health information things approaching that I need to think about It can also automatically produce: tomorrow previews weekly previews reminders scheduled spiritual material without me remembering to ask for them. That is where AI starts becoming quite different from a chatbot. Instead of: I remember something → open AI → ask AI it becomes: The system remembers → AI brings it to me when it matters. Research and monitoring Bud also watches various sources for me. For example, it can: monitor selected YouTube channels monitor AI developments summarise new material filter out things that aren't particularly important run research jobs delegate longer research to specialist agents This means AI can sometimes act less like a person I'm talking to and more like a piece of infrastructure quietly performing jobs I've previously asked it to do. My FPL manager One example is a complete Fantasy Premier League management system I've built. There are a number of FPL creators whose analysis I find useful. My system can collect and process their video transcripts and use that information alongside data about my own team. That gives me a way of bringing together many hours of FPL discussion and using it to help analyse things such as: transfers captaincy player form fixtures injuries upcoming deadlines different creators' opinions Rather than relying on one person's view, the system can help me see the overall picture across several different analysts. It's essentially a specialised AI research assistant built around one particular hobby. AI-assisted security camera monitoring Another project I've built is a Reolink camera watcher for security camera monitoring during LDC work. When you have perhaps 8–16 camera feeds visible at once, you still need to keep watching the screens properly, but anything that can draw attention to activity can be useful additional assistance. The program allows me to select the part of the computer screen containing the camera feeds and then monitors each of those individual feeds. It uses two layers of detection. First, it can watch for the person-detection icon produced by the Reolink cameras themselves. I've also integrated a YOLO computer-vision person detector, so the software can independently detect and track people appearing within the camera feeds. So it doesn't replace the person monitoring the cameras. It's an additional layer that can help draw attention towards one of many feeds when relevant activity is detected. That was another project that began simply with: "It would be useful if software could help with this." and eventually became something I could actually build. Multiple AI agents Another area I've experimented with is multi-agent systems. Bud doesn't necessarily have to perform every task itself. It can delegate work to other agents specialising in things such as: research coding debugging analysis I've experimented with tools and agents including Bud, Codex, Claude Code, OpenClaw, Antigravity and others. That means the workflow can sometimes look like: Me → Bud → specialist agent → result → Bud → me instead of me manually moving everything between different AI systems. About 80 specialised AI skills I've gradually built a library of roughly 80 specialist skills. A skill is basically a repeatable procedure teaching the AI how I want a certain type of job done. Examples include workflows for: talk preparation assistance Bible research family worship ideas rehabilitation tracking fantasy football YouTube monitoring project work coding system maintenance This is another change in how I now think about AI. Rather than repeatedly explaining: "Whenever I ask you to do this, please remember to do A, B, C, D and E…" I can encode that method once as a reusable skill. Around 47 scheduled jobs The system currently operates roughly 47 scheduled jobs. Some use AI. Others deliberately don't. They include things such as: daily briefings spiritual encouragement reminders monitoring backups housekeeping health checks weekly reviews data updates One useful lesson has been learning when NOT to use AI. If a normal script can reliably do something, I generally prefer the script. AI is most useful where judgement, interpretation, language or reasoning is required. So the architecture becomes something like: ordinary software for predictable work + AI for intelligent work. What I've actually learnt to build Perhaps the more interesting part for me isn't Bud itself. It's what experimenting with AI has enabled me to learn. I wouldn't describe myself as a professional programmer or AI engineer, yet with AI helping me I have been able to design and build systems I simply would not previously have attempted. AI system architecture I've learnt to put together systems involving: a main AI assistant specialist sub-agents task delegation scheduled jobs scripts databases knowledge stores local servers APIs monitoring dashboards backup systems recovery processes I can start with the outcome I want and use AI to help work backwards towards the architecture. Knowledge-base engineering One of the things I've enjoyed most has been creating specialist knowledge bases. Instead of merely hoping the model knows something, I can index authoritative material and tell it: Search this first. That is how my spiritual research system works. The AI can retrieve relevant material and then reason over it. That concept can be used with almost anything: personal notes technical documentation books research papers project histories specialist reference material The intelligence comes partly from the model, but also from giving the model the right information at the right time. Defining an AI's behaviour I've also learnt that building a useful AI agent isn't just about choosing the smartest model. A huge amount depends on defining things such as: its role its tone its boundaries what sources it must consult what it is allowed to change when it must ask permission how it should admit uncertainty For Bud I've maintained an identity and behaviour specification so that it stays warm and practical rather than becoming theatrical or pretending to know things it doesn't. I've also built rules such as: verify scripture wording search the local library for doctrinal research don't expose secrets restrict external systems where appropriate be clear about what the agent actually knows AI still needs boundaries. AI supervising AI I've increasingly become interested in using AI to supervise other AI. For example: AI architect → AI builder → AI tests → AI reviewer or: AI researcher → source checking → review → final synthesis That reduces my dependence on simply trusting the first answer produced by one model. Sometimes one of the most useful jobs for AI is checking the work produced by another AI. Automation with human approval I deliberately haven't tried to make everything fully autonomous. For important changes I prefer: AI proposes → I review → I approve → system implements That seems much more sensible than simply giving an AI unrestricted permission to modify everything. Automation is useful. Oversight is useful too. Keeping it economical I've also put quite a bit of thought into AI cost. Using the most powerful model for every task is unnecessary. I'm experimenting with systems that can choose between: simple deterministic code smaller/cheaper AI models general models coding models stronger reasoning models depending on what the job actually requires. The principle is roughly: Use the least expensive method capable of doing the job reliably. Only escalate to the more powerful models when their additional intelligence is actually needed. Other things I've built with AI Away from Bud, I've used AI to help design and build quite a variety of things. These include: the integrated fitness and rehabilitation system the Reolink/YOLO camera-monitoring assistant the complete FPL management system AI monitoring dashboards an agent observability system personal productivity tools project dashboards music-making software drum machines bass-line creators sub-bass generators ambient and psychedelic music tools workflow automation server monitoring databases research tools decision dashboards experimental multi-agent systems Often my part begins with something as vague as: "Wouldn't it be useful if something existed that could do this?" Then I can discuss it with AI until that becomes: idea → specification → architecture → design → code → testing → working application That, for me, is probably one of the most remarkable parts of current AI. The distance between having an idea and being capable of building the idea has suddenly become much smaller. Research The other major way I use AI is research. I've used it for subjects ranging from technology, AI and software through to health, history and Bible-related research. One particularly deep example has been my research into the Neo-Babylonian period. I've used AI to help investigate things such as: Babylonian kings dated business tablets regnal chronology astronomical records historical synchronisms ancient historical sources archaeological evidence Scriptural passages academic literature What makes AI useful here isn't simply asking it for an answer. I can give it a large research question and then keep drilling down into particular pieces of evidence. For example: "What is the original source for this claim?" "How strong is this evidence?" "Is this source contemporary with the event?" "Are these five websites actually relying on the same original source?" "Can we reconstruct the sequence year by year?" This is where AI can save an enormous amount of time while still leaving the human responsible for evaluating the evidence. Source-critical research I frequently ask AI not merely to find information, but to distinguish between different kinds of evidence. For example: primary evidence → contemporary records → near-contemporary records → later historical sources → modern academic interpretation → opinion That helps enormously with subjects where twenty websites may appear to provide twenty pieces of evidence when they're actually all repeating the same underlying claim. AI can help trace things back towards the original source. Researching current information For things that change frequently, I use AI together with live internet research. Examples include: developments in AI new AI models technology news software releases products prices travel and accommodation services technical documentation The big difference from an ordinary search engine is that I can search, compare the results, ask follow-up questions and have the material organised into something understandable. Researching videos and long material I also use AI to get useful information out of long videos and documents. I can give it a long video or transcript and ask: What were the main arguments? What evidence was presented? Which parts actually matter? What practical ideas came out of it? Is there anything here that I could use or build? Quite a few of my software projects have actually started because I've seen an idea somewhere and then asked AI: "Could we build our own version of that?" Writing and communicating clearly One of the less spectacular but probably most useful applications of AI for me is simply writing faster and more clearly. I use it constantly for: rewriting messages shortening long explanations improving structure removing repetition making something tactful making something warmer turning notes into finished prose organising research explaining complicated subjects simply producing summaries at different levels of detail I can often write a rough paragraph containing exactly what I mean and ask AI to preserve the meaning while improving the communication. That can save a surprising amount of time. And because I do quite a lot of administrative and congregation communication, that little everyday use of AI is probably just as valuable to me as some of the much more complicated systems I've built. Probably the biggest change I don't really think of AI as a chatbot anymore. Increasingly I think of it as a collection of capabilities: Researcher Programmer Architect Designer Critic Editor Scheduler Monitor Knowledge librarian Automation engine Orchestrator The clever part isn't necessarily any single AI model. It's increasingly about combining: AI + ordinary software + trusted source material + automation + databases + human oversight. And ultimately that is what I find most useful about it. I'm not trying to automate my life for the sake of automating it. I'm trying to remove some of the repetitive mental load, speed up things that otherwise take unnecessary time, and make information easier to manage so that more attention can go towards the things that actually matter. And occasionally, of course, using a ridiculously powerful collection of AI models to build something completely unnecessary simply because I thought, "That would be brilliant." 😄

I was at work. Radios and TV'S were not allowed during working hours but the supervisor let everyone watch the news that day.

Give hints !

Back from high school... I saw the second plane entering

Ah, you’re a teaser, aren’t you! 😆

I just back from a German class and my dad told me: „You won’t believe it. Some airplanes crashed into skyscrapers in New York.” I remember I couldn’t understand him. It didn’t make any sense.

second grade

French Class. They interrupted to make a somber announcement that I didn't really understand the import of. My family and I were glued to the TV for the rest of the day.