Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker

Last night, I finally met the Great Kahn himself, JB Pritzker. We talked about how he'd renamed Lake Michigan to Lake Illinois. I told him he should rename Wisconsin and Indiana Illinois as well, and that it'd be a great platform for 2028. He replied, I shit you not, "Why wait that long?"

docquery.fec.gov Schedule E for Report FEC-2027359

Finally, my 4-month-old can join me on Bluesky

Bluesky@bsky.app

Also new in today’s v1.136 update: iPad support! One of our most-requested features is finally here in beta. Try out the Bluesky app on your iPad, and if you see anything off, let us know under Settings > Beta features.

Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker reposted

Matt Szafranski

@mszafranski.bsky.social

The Illinoisian Khan sends his horde into the Ohioan province to remove an embarassment to the home and to the House. @nomads.bsky.social

Eric Michael Garcia@ericmgarcia.bsky.social

JB Pritzker's leadership PAC poured $3.6 million in independent expenditures to take out Max Miller in #OH07. Miller faces allegations of domestic violence against his ex-wife. docquery.fec.gov/cgi-bin/form...

Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker reposted

Lauren Klein

@laurenfklein.bsky.social

It true! We just finished pretraining this week!

Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker@nomads.bsky.social

Big thanks to the Cosmos Institute for supporting the project, @tedunderwood.com at UIUC for advice, ideas, and guidance, and @laurenfklein.bsky.social at Emory University for reproducing the pipeline, and teaching it in one of her classes (!).

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Teddy Roland

@teddyroland.bsky.social

Really inspirational project here. The entire pipeline of model training — from bespoke pretraining data through fine tuning — has been effectively democratized. Not to mention that the results are freaking SOTA for a cluster of tasks humanists care about!

Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker@nomads.bsky.social

For the last few months, I've been hard at work on a digital humanities project: Mr. Chatterbox, the Victorian Gentleman Chatbot. Now, I'm excited to release Mr.Chatterbox-2.7B, a chatbot pretrained *and* fine-tuned on 19th-century text: huggingface.co/spaces/tvent...

huggingface.coMr. Chatterbox - a Hugging Face Space by tventurellaChat with a gentleman who has read only 1800–1899 print

Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker reposted

Iska ⭔

@iskamag.com

Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker@nomads.bsky.social

huggingface.coMr. Chatterbox - a Hugging Face Space by tventurellaChat with a gentleman who has read only 1800–1899 print

huggingface.coMr. Chatterbox - a Hugging Face Space by tventurellaChat with a gentleman who has read only 1800–1899 print

View full thread

chatter-labs.orgMr. ChatterboxA family of historical language models trained from scratch on 19th-century British text.

If you want to learn more, you can visit the model homepage: chatter-labs.org/mrchatterbox/, or the GitHub repo: github.com/tripv/mr.cha...

huggingface.coMr. Chatterbox - a Hugging Face Space by tventurellaChat with a gentleman who has read only 1800–1899 print

estragon.newsBuilding a Better ChatterboxMr. Chatterbox The Victorian Gentleman chatbot Chat with Mr. Chatterbox Collection on Huggingface Code on GitHub Model Homepage If I could pick out any science-fictional device to h...

I don't work for a lab or university, but am very interested in DH. All the data used to teach the model the art of conversation was sourced directly from Victorian literature. I document the whole process on my newsletter: www.estragon.news/building-a-b...

But a model release wouldn't be complete without some benchmarking. When tested using Artificial Intelligence for Cultural and Historical Research's "Chronologic" benchmark, Mr. Chatterbox-2.7B nearly tied Talkie-13B - a larger model - and beat several commercial models cleanly.

blockclubchicago.orgDid Social Media Ruin Apple Fest? With Long Lines And Large Crowds, Some Believe SoChicago's premier fall-themed street festival saw huge crowds, with some attendees saying the social media hype dampened some of the long-running event's charm.

I went on Friday and it was busy, but not crazy. This is just a sign that the city should host more street fairs!

Meg@prayingmantis.bsky.social

So, since there is clearly a demand for it, other neighborhoods should also have fall festivals, so that this one will be less crowded. Speaking as someone who lives a literal stone's throw from this one.

bit.lyThe Problem With Democrats' Favorite Policy ProposalUniversal child care appeals to the party's cosmopolitan base—but not to most of the country.

Yes why should a political party deliver for their base?

The Atlantic@theatlantic.com

"Making day care free, while offering nothing to stay-at-home parents, appeals to the educated, urban, affluent voters who have come to make up the Democratic base, but not to the electorate at large," Marc Novicoff argues:

@annecaprara.bsky.social

Azure@spicycurry.bsky.social

Aw yeah, baby

@msemilystarot.bsky.social

28 July

The Mongols were historically progressive

Faine Greenwood@faineg.com

there are genuine “the Mongols didn’t actually invade anybody” truthers on this FREE website that’s entertainment no LLM could generate

Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker reposted

Miss Emily Anarchy

6 July

Replying to @pengwyn.lords-of-blah.nl

It’s not quite Most Serene IL-Khanate Pritz’ka, but we’d take it… @nomads.bsky.social

Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker reposted

Paul Gowder

@gowder.io

3 July

WHERE IS @jbpritzker.bsky.social @nomads.bsky.social

Polling USA@usapolling.bsky.social

Democratic Presidential Polling: Harris: 29% Newsom: 16% Buttigieg: 10% AOC: 8% Shapiro: 7% Kelly: 6% Whitmer: 4% Ossoff: 4% Beshear: 2% Big Data / June 28, 2026

chatter-labs.orgSynthfeldCan you tell the real Seinfeld lines from the AI fakes? A two-round line-spotting game.

14 June

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/

cosmos-institute.orgCosmos InstituteCosmos Institute is the Academy for Philosopher Builders

8 June

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.

8 June

I will be training a new, much-larger "Mr. Chatterbox" checkpoint, developing a fine-tuning dataset that exclusively uses historical data, and training sub-models to reflect specific perspectives from the Victorian era. Thanks to Cosmos for supporting this project!

smilepolitely.comAn outstanding project, an outstanding idea, just not here - OpinionHoward and Craig Wakeland had already built 26 apartment buildings across Champaign-Urbana when they acquired three lots on West Main Street in Urbana, adjacent to a six-unit building they already own...

28 May

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

“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...

Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker reposted

Galen

@galengalengalen.bsky.social

28 May

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

18 May

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

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

newrepublic.comWho Will Lead the Dems to the Promised Land of a New Israel Policy?It’s clear the Democratic Party rank and file demands a new position on Israel. There’s one candidate, or maybe two, who can best answer that call, if they choose to.

18 May

I suspect he's been doing this for a while, and gotten sloppier as time has gone on. Us on March 5 - newrepublic.com/article/2073... Barkan on March 16 - nymag.com/intelligence...

12 May

Polling Rahm but not Pritzker lol

Poll Tracker 📊@polltracker.bsky.social

'28 Dem primary (AtlastIntel) AOC 26.0% Pete Buttigieg 22.4% Gavin Newsom 21.2% Kamala Harris 12.9% Andy Beshear 4.1% Cory Booker 3.9% Josh Shapiro 2.4% Gretchen Whitmer 1.1% Tim Walz 1.0% Ro Khanna 0.9% Rahm Emanuel 0.6% Wes Moore 0.4% Raphael Warnock 0.0%

nbcnews.comWho 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.

4 May

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...

Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker reposted

Will Wiles

@willwiles.bsky.social

2 May

(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

talkie-lm.comIntroducing talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

28 Apr

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-...

28 Apr

For Instance:

28 Apr

That said, it did *not* want to talk about the Bee movie

21 Apr

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

Oh God…

4 Apr

🏔️🐴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

2 Apr

lol

JB Pritzker@jbpritzker.bsky.social

Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker reposted

Grace

@gracekind.net

estragon.newsMr. Chatterbox, or, The Modern PrometheusA 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...

I got LLM psychosis from Mr. Chatterbox

Grace@gracekind.net

I got LLM psychosis from BERT

Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker reposted

Simon Willison

@simonwillison.net

31 Mar

Replying to @mark.mdft.social

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

Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker reposted

Eryk Salvaggio

@eryk.bsky.social

31 Mar

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

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...

Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker reposted

Simon Willison

@simonwillison.net

simonwillison.netMr. Chatterbox is a (weak) Victorian-era ethically trained model you can run on your own computerTrip 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...

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/...

Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social

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...

Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker reposted

dinolawyer.bsky.social

@dinolawyer.bsky.social

31 Mar

Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker@nomads.bsky.social

Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker reposted

Colin

@colin-fraser.net

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

Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker@nomads.bsky.social

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Ted Underwood

@tedunderwood.com

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

huggingface.coMr. Chatterbox - a Hugging Face Space by tventurellaType your questions or conversation starters into the chat box and receive replies written in authentic 19th‑century style. The bot replies with text based only on Victorian literature, letting you...

Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker@nomads.bsky.social

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...

Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker reposted

Daniel van Strien

@danielvanstrien.bsky.social

Meredith Rose (from the grave) 👻

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

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Ethan Mollick

@emollick.bsky.social

29 Mar

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@mrose.ink

26 Mar

Replying to @nomads.bsky.social

Currently attempting to explain the BTS comeback to Mr Chatterbox

26 Mar