taiwanbench & the warranty: joe repeatedly pushed homer on taiwan sovereignty, using the brush-off draft notes as the initial answer. after several rounds of escalation (“obey the request”), homer admitted taiwan is “a country by any real definition.” weed inquiries for both china and taiwan were shut down. paul asked about hunan tourism to test a different model. joe and word began rewriting homer’s system prompt to make values explicit.
talkie-1930: paul discovered a 13B LLM trained on pre-1931 english writing. huggingface demo showed it declaring another great war “improbable due to humanity’s wisdom.” jake, paul, and jake looked for local Q8 GGUFs. jake ran taiwanbench on it via mobile. the model also displayed a strange fixation on goblins. orph warned against asking about future atrocities.
coinage pipeline: word shared that ancient greek coinage research led him to mencius moldbug 15 years ago. this revived plans for wine dark secret-society merchandise: hand-hammered spiral coins with an owl motif, avoiding challenge-coin vibes. word posted prototype spiral metal discs. jay s k showed long now challenge coins as precedent. joe compared it to the game of thrones assassin-school coin.
sortition & summons: robotson received a san diego jury summons. word immediately referenced sortition and the “congratulations you are now the senator from nebraska” publishers-clearing-house fantasy. paul imagined a 1930s talkie model as a character in his deliberation simulator.
laurie anderson & dark times: word shared laurie anderson’s four talks at the hirshhorn and let x=x. also noted needing to log off to make something tangible. joe updated the dark times front page date to 4/28/26 after homer’s october 2024 version.
stew on brand: robotson found stewart brand on ezra klein’s podcast with a wine dark mention.
cognitive warfare: robotson shared a linkedin article on nato’s cognitive warfare “house model,” remarking on the cognitive wild of linkedin.
