Today, we have an LLM from the 1930s, crazy evolutionary details about the mantis shrimp, and the history of the openai.com domain, among other things.

talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

Talkie-1930-13b is a 13-billion-parameter language model trained exclusively on pre-1931 English text to simulate conversations with someone from the past.

Here’s an example:

USER: What will the future hold for computers?

TALKIE-1930: Computers in the future may be employed in offices where calculations are required to be made, and where the nature of the business does not demand a very high degree of knowledge. The occupation will be a steady one, and the remuneration will be sufficient to afford a comfortable livelihood. The hours of attendance will probably be from ten to six.

USER: and digital computers?

TALKIE-1930: Computers who make use of machines will be distinguished from digital computers, who perform their operations by means of the fingers alone. The former will be employed in offices and public establishments, where a great number of calculations have to be made; the latter in private houses, and by individuals.

(back then, a computer meant a person who did the calculations)

Does the mantis shrimp pack a phononic shield?

The mantis shrimp already had a reputation as nature’s deranged punch specialist. Researchers found that its club evolved to filter out damaging high-frequency stress waves, which allows it to survive both the impact and the violent cavitation shock from its own strikes.

openai․com was once the personal homepage of a guy named glenn

A delightful scrap of internet archaeology: before they became empire-scale brands, openai.com and tiktok.com were both just personal websites, one belonging to a guy named Glenn and the other documenting a couple’s early life together from meeting to marriage to a kid.

Making the Marlboro Man

The story of how Marlboro went from a lipstick-friendly women’s cigarette to one of the most successful masculine rebrands in business history.

My father used to work for Philip Morris in the 1990s, so our house was filled with Marlboro’s merch, and I remember watching their cowboy movies.

True Facts About Cosmology (or, Misconceptions Skewered)

The Big Bang model and modern cosmology are well-supported, but widely misunderstood in key ways. Here are the most common misconceptions people have about these models.