Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker
@nomads.bsky.social
Posting live from the Most Serene IL-Khanate of the Great Khan JB Pritzker
I've been watching episodes of Seinfeld, and it has made me curious: could a language model be trained to replicate the voice of a character? So, I built a quiz - see if you can guess if a Seinfeld line is real, or written by AI: chatter-labs.org/seinfeld/
Synthfeld
Can you tell the real Seinfeld lines from the AI fakes? A two-round line-spotting game.
chatter-labs.org
I recently got some incredible news: I've received a grant from the Cosmos Institute (cosmos-institute.org) to continue developing my Victorian-era language model. This grant will go towards employing AI/NLP to conduct literary, historical, and humanistic research—something I think is badly-needed.
Cosmos Institute
Cosmos Institute is the Academy for Philosopher Builders
cosmos-institute.org
The idea that this apt building is out of character for this neighborhood is laughable - it's 1 block away from downtown Urbana, on the same block as a grocery store.
Abundant Housing Illinois@abundanthousingil.bsky.social · 2mo ago“When “just not there” is a neighborhood’s answer regardless of what is proposed or who it might help, the problem isn’t location. It’s whether the city is willing to build housing at all.” - @jaredfritz.bsky.social www.smilepolitely.com/opinion/an-o...
I hate that Donald Trump is the one throwing backyard cage fights at the White House. I feel like Pritzker Kahn needs to get Noche De Los Grandes moved to the Lincoln Park Zoo. @nomads.bsky.social
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.
Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker@nomads.bsky.social · 5mo agoRoss 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
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
Barry Butler Photography@barrybutler9.bsky.social · 3mo agoIntense Double Rainbow over Sears Tower on Monday evening in Chicago.
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...
Who will own the Bernie Sanders lane in 2028?
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. is seen as a frontrunner for the left if she runs, but many progressives say they're open to others as well.
nbcnews.com
(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-...
Introducing talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930
talkie-lm.com
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.
MAKS 26 👀🇺🇦@maks23.bsky.social · 4mo agoOh God…
🏔️🐴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
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
Mike Black@mikeblack114.bsky.social · 4mo agoThey also conveniently gloss over the fact (which anyone actually doing work in the space is painfully aware of) that Israel is actively spying on the USG 24/7 and routinely sells our secrets to our geopolitical adversaries
The Mr. chatterbox creator has a good explanation of what they were trying to achieve with it here www.estragon.news/mr-chatterbo...
Mr. Chatterbox, or, The Modern Prometheus
A few days ago, I posted about a personal project that I've been working on for the last few weeks: Mr. Chatterbox, a chatbot trained from scratch on Victorian-era literature. I have to admit, I was t...
estragon.news
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
Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker@nomads.bsky.social · 4mo agoI’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...
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/...
Mr. Chatterbox is a (weak) Victorian-era ethically trained model you can run on your own computer
Trip Venturella released Mr. Chatterbox, a language model trained entirely on out-of-copyright text from the British Library. Here’s how he describes it: Mr. Chatterbox is a language model trained ent...
simonwillison.net
Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social · 4mo agoWant 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...
Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker@nomads.bsky.social · 4mo agoI’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...
This is a great account that really teaches you a lot about how modern LLMs get made
Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker@nomads.bsky.social · 4mo agoI’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...
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.
Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker@nomads.bsky.social · 4mo agoI’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...
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...
Mr. Chatterbox, or, The Modern Prometheus
A few days ago, I posted about a personal project that I've been working on for the last few weeks: Mr. Chatterbox, a chatbot trained from scratch on Victorian-era literature. I have to admit, I was t...
estragon.news
Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker@nomads.bsky.social · 4mo agoWanted 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...
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!
Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social · 4mo agoWant 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...
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.
Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker@nomads.bsky.social · 4mo agoWanted 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...
