STARDATE 2026.126 — Den Day 836
Posted: May 6, 2026 | Waseca, Minnesota
I want to tell you something that happened this week, and then I want to tell you what to do about it.
Anthropic — the company that makes Claude, the AI assistant I use for almost everything — just announced a deal to rent a supercomputer from Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX. Not buy. Rent. The supercomputer in question (called Colossus 1) has roughly 200,000 of the most expensive computer chips ever made, sitting in a building in Mississippi, drawing more power than a small city.
The reason Anthropic rented it is simple: they don’t have enough compute power to keep up with the demand for Claude. Even with their existing deals with Amazon and Google, they can’t get enough machines online fast enough. So they paid Elon Musk’s company — their direct competitor — for access to the spare capacity.
If you use Claude, you’ve already felt the result. Usage limits expanded this week. The tool got quietly more generous. The version on the free tier is more capable than what was on the $200/month tier a year ago.
This story is going to get covered as a tech business deal, and the headlines will say something like “AI Compute Crunch Forces Strange Bedfellows.” But that’s not what it is.
It is an invitation.
The Invitation
Here is what I have learned, after two years of using AI every single day, after building businesses with it, after writing sermons with it, after using it to think through divorces and trauma and theology and code:
The capability of these tools is currently growing faster than the human race’s ability to absorb what they can do.
That sentence is not hype. It is just an observation. The companies building these tools are now physically building gigawatt-scale supercomputers in farmland and renting capacity from each other because they cannot keep up with how fast the underlying technology is improving. And the people the tools are being built for — you, me, the church up the street, the woman doing books for a small nonprofit, the dad trying to figure out his kid’s IEP — most of us are still standing on the porch wondering if we should open the door.
Open the door.
I don’t mean install something complicated. I don’t mean learn to code. I don’t mean spend money. I mean open Claude.ai (it’s free) or ChatGPT or Gemini or any of the others, type something into the box, and see what happens.
That’s the invitation.
Why a Pastor Is Telling You This
I am the last person who should be cheerleading for tech. I came up in church communities that were suspicious of every new screen, every new platform, every new way of doing things. I have watched the harm that uncritical adoption of technology does to families, to mental health, to attention, to communities. I am not naive about what we have wrought.
And yet.
The thing about AI, specifically, is that it is the first technology I have ever seen that actually saves the kind of time and energy that real people in small towns and small lives don’t have. Not “time” the way Facebook saves time (it doesn’t). Not “convenience” the way DoorDash provides convenience (at the cost of the local economy). Real, recoverable, returned-to-you hours and clarity and capability.
A few examples from my own life and my clients’ lives just in the last six months:
- A 60-year-old nonprofit founder who runs her organization on her own used Claude to draft a board report in twenty minutes. She had been dreading it for two weeks. The version Claude produced was better than what she would have written tired at 11 PM.
- A woman processing a hard divorce used ChatGPT to organize her financial records when she couldn’t afford a forensic accountant. It got her ready for mediation in three evenings of work instead of three months.
- I used Claude this morning to read a 1,300-line meeting transcript from a small nonprofit’s bookkeeping cleanup, extract the action items, and draft a follow-up email to the board treasurer. Forty minutes of work, end to end, including coffee.
- A friend used it to help her prepare for a difficult conversation with her father by working through what she actually wanted to say and what she was afraid to hear.
These are not productivity tricks. These are dignity-restoring use cases. They give people back their evenings. They give people back the ability to do things that used to require professionals they couldn’t afford.
I am telling you this from the post-evangelical, trauma-informed, watch-the-machines-carefully corner of the room. I am not selling you anything. I am telling you that the gap between people who use these tools and people who don’t is widening every single week, and the cost of waiting is real.
What To Do Today
Here is the most basic possible starting place. You can do this in the next ten minutes.
- Open a browser. Go to claude.ai. Sign up with your email. (No credit card required. There’s a free tier.)
- Type something into the box. Anything. A question you have. A task you’ve been putting off. A conversation you need to figure out. Try things like:
– “Help me draft an email to my landlord about the broken dishwasher. Firm but not rude.”
– “I have these three doctor’s appointments this week and I’m overwhelmed. Help me think through what to ask each one.”
– “My son is 14 and won’t talk to me. What questions might actually open him up that aren’t going to feel like an interrogation?”
– “Explain what a Roth IRA is in plain English, like I’m not stupid but I never learned this.”
– “Take this rambling voice memo I’m pasting in and turn it into a clean to-do list.” - Read what it says. Push back if it’s wrong. Ask follow-up questions. Treat it like a smart, patient assistant who has all the time in the world for you. Because that’s what it is.
That’s it. That’s the whole onboarding. There is no course to take. There is no certification. There is no “right way to use it.” You just talk to it like it’s a person who is trying to help you.
You will be wrong about it some of the time. That is fine. So is everyone. Including the people building it.
But you will also discover, in the first or second or fifth conversation, that you have access to a kind of help that did not exist on Earth twelve months ago. And that help got more powerful this week because Anthropic rented a supercomputer in Mississippi.
That is the invitation.
The Last Thing
There is a kind of person who reads a post like this and says: “I’m too old for this. I’m not technical. I’ll just keep doing things the way I do them.”
I want to gently tell you: that voice is the same voice that told my grandmother she didn’t need to learn email in 1998. She was 63 then. She lived another 24 years. The amount of life she missed because she stayed off email — birthdays, photos of grandkids, news from family members who only emailed — added up to something real. Her sister, who learned email at 70, lived more connected. Same family. Different choice.
The choice in front of you right now is whether you want to be on the side of this transition that has the help, or the side that doesn’t.
I am telling you, because I love this community of people who have been hurt by religion and are rebuilding their lives, that you should be on the side that has the help. You have been told for too long that you were stupid, or behind, or not smart enough, or too late. Those things were never true. And they are especially not true now, when the tool you need to figure out hard things is sitting in your browser, free, waiting for you to type a sentence into a box.
Open the door.
Today.
If you want help getting started — actual hand-holding, not a YouTube video — reply to this post or message me. I’ll walk you through it. No charge. This is the part of the work I would do for free if I had to.
— Matt
Loopwalker
“Nothing is lost. Only recompiled.”
