Re: the Barkan affair: in March Rich Yeselson and I wrote an article on the Dems and Israel. 11 days later Barkan published an extremely similar piece - similar framing, points made, structure, everything. Is it exactly the same? No, but egregious when you read both in parallel.

Polling Rahm but not Pritzker lol

Pole arms.

If I recall my omens correctly this portends the great eight year reign of the glorious khan. Soon we will ride with @nomads.bsky.social

I talked to NBC last week about a really important topic: the ability of Pritzker to potentially build a coalition that includes progressives and the left. www.nbcnews.com/politics/202...

(I make a "mouth" with the side of my hand and draw little eyes above it) Richard Dawkins: hmmmm (I put lipstick around the "mouth") Richard Dawkins, suavely: well hello

This is really amazing: a team trained a 13 billion-parameter language model on out-of-copyright texts up to 1930. It's like talking to a guy from the Hoover presidency: talkie-lm.com/introducing-...

Trump obviously sounds ridiculous here, but this is actually a masterful demonstration from Tim Cook on how to handle him: call him with an ask, but flatter him by framing it as some intractable business problem that can only be solved by the Master of Deals.

🏔️🐴Oh great Tengri, show your favor to the illustrious Brad Underwood and his mighty band of giant Balkan Janissaries as they face down the dogs of puny Connecticut

lol

yeah this is a funny phenomenon you come across; counter-intelligence people really dislike the Israeli government! bring up Pollard to them and watch them spit glass

I got LLM psychosis from Mr. Chatterbox

The Mr. chatterbox creator has a good explanation of what they were trying to achieve with it here www.estragon.news/mr-chatterbo...

Interesting to read about building this small-scale LLM project and the fine-tuning and sycophancy that comes in even when trained entirely on Victorian-era novels

Mr. Chatterbox is a really fun project. It's not great to talk to but it's a fun demo of what you can build using entirely out-of-copyright training data It's a 2GB nanochat model - I released a new llm-mrchatterbox plugin that can run it on my Mac simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/30/...

This is a great account that really teaches you a lot about how modern LLMs get made

This is in the best traditions of DH. Its success didn't depend on big compute or extensive tech background, but on good design + 19c vibes. And yet, in fact, figuring out how to fine-tune something like this is not a solved problem, and people w/ more compute hours could learn from the experiment.

I’ve been overwhelmed and thrilled by the response to this! I’ve also gotten a lot of questions asking how I did it. So, this weekend I sat down and wrote a detailed narrative documentation outlining how, exactly, I built Mr. Chatterbox: www.estragon.news/mr-chatterbo...

You never know what data will be used for! I uploaded a @britishlibrary.bsky.social dataset to Hugging Face in 2022. IIRC one of my first PR to a HF repo! 4 years later, someone trains a Victorian chatbot on it More libraries should be sharing their public domain collections for AI to build on!

Want to talk to the past? Here' an LLM "trained entirely from scratch on a corpus of over 28,000 Victorian-era British texts published between 1837 & 1899, drawn from a dataset made available by the British Library" Quite different from an LLM roleplaying a Victorian. huggingface.co/spaces/tvent...

Guess I found a good use for AI for once. Not enough to make me cease my appeals for Butlerian Jihad, but at least this one's likely to make me laugh a bit.

Currently attempting to explain the BTS comeback to Mr Chatterbox

Wanted to share a personal project I've been working on: I love classic literature, and I'm also taking an AI class here at UIUC, so I trained an LLM from scratch on Victorian lit from 1837 to 1899. This is Mr. Chatterbox, the Victorian Gentleman Chatbot: huggingface.co/spaces/tvent...

💀

Ross Barkan out today with a column that very closely recapitulates what I wrote last week with Rich Yeselson in the New Republic: Pritzker has a "Nixon goes to China" quality that can help the Democrats move the party forward on Israel

Excellent, thought-provoking piece by Rich Yeselson and Trip Venturella: "Who Will Lead the Dems to the Promised Land of a New Israel Policy?" newrepublic.com/article/2073... via @newrepublic.com

Nice argument. Unfortunately, I have already depicted myself as the assured and laughing head of FDR and you as the screaming and infantile Adolf Hitler

Great piece cowritten by @nomads.bsky.social on Pritzker’s unique position coming into in 2028.

The Democrats must shift on the question of Israel. "As ....contenders—plot a path toward a possible run for the presidency, they might consider: Politicians who do the right thing that is also the shrewd thing improve the country—and win elections." newrepublic.com/article/2073...

The New Republic has an extended discussion on how JB Pritzker may be the one to lead the Democratic Party to a revised position on Netanyahu's Israel. newrepublic.com/article/2073...

"... the Democrats’ leadership has triangulated itself into no man’s land. It is neither sufficiently supportive of Israel to propitiate the country’s increasingly radical governing elite nor sufficiently critical of that elite to mollify the base of its own party."

This is a pretty convincing case to me! @govpritzker.illinois.gov can lead the Democrats to a new understanding of and relationship with Israel.

Only Nixon could go to China, and only Pritzker can be similarly singular for the Dem party and Israel

For the past 5 months, Rich Yeselon and I have been working on a major article addressing what may be the first major question of 2028: who can lead Dems to a new US-Israel policy? That article drops today. If you follow me, you won’t be surprised at my conclusion lol newrepublic.com/article/2073...

FWIW, I spent the day with Mama Garcia since she turns 63 tomorrow and she wants JB Pritzker to run for president. Make of that what you will.

And in the middle of of that venn diagram sits a movie called Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon

Do we have a Constitution anymore, or is it just optional? Because if it’s the second thing it opens up a lot of options about what to do with these guys

The Great Khan of the Northern Steppes abstains from the ale, sausages, & curds in preparation for the Eastern March to the Eagle Throne

Invasion of Indiana CONFIRMED

@nomads.bsky.social BAH GAWD HE GONNA DO IT

The thing about Newsom doomposting is that there is another way

I don't understand why they are doom posting about Newsom and aren't doing what all red blooded Americans should be doing and be #PritzkerPosting @nomads.bsky.social

There aren’t words for how strongly I feel that the people responsible for this and thousands of other/similar horrors are incompatible with a society that values dignity. To not ostracize, put on trial, and punish those perpetrating this at all levels would be a catastrophic moral failure.

Donald Trump is a racist.

Shouldn't surprise us that Bari Weiss is willing to wage out all out war to keep Peter Attia on the new CBS. As I explained recently, her project is provide a life raft for the Epstein coterie

An extremely disturbing and threatening message from the UIUC college republicans. The club needs to be disbanded and the leadership need to face consequences.