This is one of the greatest color tools to come out for data visualization in probably 7 or 8 years at least. Amazing work (read the whole thread, too! this is just a random post from the stack of good stuff)

We extracted (parts of) 12 books in experiments with 4 frontier-lab, production LLMs. We prompted the LLMs with a short prefix of a book and asked them to complete the rest. For Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, we extracted 95.8% of the book from jailbroken Claude 3.7 Sonnet.

My and Cosma's version of this with a toy model. Equally, and more on this soon, algorithms do have consequences even if they cannot solely be blamed as villains dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10....

When they talk about him at all, historians and antiquarians have argued over whether 17th century translator Thomas Creech committed suicide because of heartbreak, debt, or a crisis of faith, but he was probably closer to what we'd now call depressed, and (of course) never got treatment for it.

Incredibly interesting thread! I’ve seen contact jugglers perform, but had no idea of the history behind the art.

Fascinating thread on the history of contact juggling...

This is contact juggling. There's maybe a few hundred people in the world for whom contact juggling has at one point been their primary source of income, and most of us know each other. It coalesced as an art from in the 1980s and got its name in 1990, though it pulls from practices far older.

(Listen I see the news, but I'm committed to making your feed not *just* the news, a 24/7 barrage.)

Anyway, that seems like a good place to end my thread. I just find it so cool that such a tradition is still thriving, and in some cases growing and changing, yet is still so anchored to material and scribal practices established hundreds or sometimes thousands of years ago.

Just as a Torah's creation is steeped in ritual, so is its retirement. When a Torah is deemed to have too many errors to be repaired, it cannot simply be thrown out. It might be sent to a special room called a geniza, and/or eventually buried in a cemetery.

So central is this absurdly long, historically frozen-in-amber scroll that it acts as focal point of today's Bar/Bat Mitzvah ceremonies, where a Jewish kid becomes an adult. Some traditions have a grandparent pass the Torah to a parent, and then on to the kid: "from generation to generation."

Also when we're reading the torah we can't touch it, so we use a yad (a tiny hand) to help find where we're reading. There's a lot of text and it's easy to lose your place! So both a helper and a tiny metal hand (as well as some practice before, often) are used to ensure accuracy during a reading.

And having someone check our Torah reading is pretty important. Reading Torah is more like singing, with a specific pre-defined (non-repeating) melody. But the melody isn't written down in the Torah. And, uh, neither are any vowels. (black = text in the torah, blue = musical markets, red = vowels)

On the subject of reading the Torah, we take care in the accurate reading just as in the writing of it. As someone stands in front of the congregation to sing the Torah, a "gabbai" stands next to them make sure it's done correctly, with proper pronunciations and melody.

Why yes, I *did* say *all* the synagogue's Torahs. There's often at least three. Among other reasons, there are weeks when we read other sections of the Torah in addition to our place in the annual cycle (holidays / new months). Having just one would mean a lot of in-the-moment scrolling, a pain.

So annually we have a big party, dancing around with all the synagogue's Torahs, reading the very end of one & the very beginning of another. We can "reset" the scrolls, putting all the weight on the other side. I enjoy when we set up very long tables end to end, unrolling as much as possible.

As you can imagine for a 30 lb, 100 ft scroll, it gets *very* heavy on one side at the beginning and end of the year. And we go through one section at a time slowly, but we need to reset it quickly, like a typewriter carriage return.

The Torah scroll continues to be highly ritualized after its creation, with practices dating back well over a thousand years. Depending on the community, we read it one (Saturday) or three (+ Monday & Thursday) days per week, going through the whole scroll once per year or across three years.

Oh a few notes on the Torah itself before getting into contemporary rituals: 1. In a couple places, scribes consistently use a special layout, as the below image of the Song of the Sea poem. 2. One piece of software that augments (not replaces) human reviewers appears below, because it's neat.

The resulting Torah scroll, which takes over a year to make, will be 20-40lbs and 60-140 feet unrolled, containing 304,805 letters (each carefully crafted and reviewed). There are maybe a few hundred to a few thousand new ones created annually?

The scribe ("sofer") writes on one of two types of parchment/vellum prepared in a very specific way, each panel sewn together with specifically prepared animal sinew, written using a specific quill (these days often a turkey). Guide lines are invisibly scored into the parchment for added perfection.

There are Old Strict rules around making a Torah. Only trained scribes can do it. Small mistakes aren't tolerated—sometimes requiring starting a page over entirely. There are many checks (e.g., 2-3 reviewers looking at the *shapes* of and counting the # of letters, and—increasingly—computer review.)

Some of my fellow manuscript nerds may not be familiar with the thriving practices around handwritten Torah scrolls, which should be remedied! So have a 🧵 Torah scrolls as we know them are about two thousand years old, and have been essentially identical to one another for the last thousand years.

Even Impasse, *the* argument for pessimism, doesn't foreclose on the possibility of a human future, nor does it abdicate our reparative responsibilities to each other. "The day is short and the work is long. It's not your duty to finish the work, but you aren't free to neglect it." -Jewish teaching

there’s never a point where the world gets bad enough that you get permission to stop picking up the shovel

Excellent thread about a fabulous manuscript culture and tradition. Anyone interested in MSS, from any culture, should read the thread as a useful primer. One of the many manuscript traditions we should all know about.

Some of my fellow manuscript nerds may not be familiar with the thriving practices around handwritten Torah scrolls, which should be remedied! So have a 🧵 Torah scrolls as we know them are about two thousand years old, and have been essentially identical to one another for the last thousand years.

(the prophecy)

One of the most unforgettable images capturing the vibrant promise of the new year, by the great Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy: 7 A.M. (New Year's Morning), c. 1930 www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti...

Wishing you all a 2026 that proceeds in accordance with the prophecy.

2025 in review: - Launched a grant program - Grant program, my team, & I got DOGE'd - Watched anarchist live theater with Brewster Kahle (!?) - Got a new job; moved to Richmond - Ate at a kosher Jewish restaurant on Christmas Eve; watched someone get a birthday cake that said "Happy Birthday Jesus"

I really want a "I don't care what matrix math you do in the privacy of your bedroom" sticker, though I'm worried it'll get misunderstood.

Oooh I enjoy this "Again, for lack of a better term, I’ll call it describe-and-defend empiricism. This flavor of empiricism treats inference as the first-class citizen: you formulate a claim about the world, assemble evidence, and argue why the data support that claim."

📌Hi! I'm Scott, a historian of science. Before DOGE, I helped the US fund the humanities efficiently and impactfully, to reach the breadth of the American public. Now I help make the Library of Virginia's rich collections and services digitally accessible to all. Personal account, mostly silly.📌