Wesley Livesay

I have #FWW and #SWW podcasts. If you are a historian of any variety on those topics (and in between) and you want to chat with me for an episode send me a message! That isn’t just for famous historians, just as excited to talk to students, early career, and non-academic independent scholars.

Last week it was Audacity problems, this week I have a cold. Really destroying my Wednesday release consistency for the podcast here right in the last few months of the year.

I have always thought that this was the root of Halsey's mistake. He took a sledgehammer after a nail, it was correct to try and hit the nail but a more reasonable tool would have been the less risky play. Kind of depends on the exact intelligence that Halsey had though, which I don't know.

For the first time in as long as I can remember, Audacity has let me down. Messed up in some way and won't even load the file anymore. It at some point corrupted the audio anyway and it sounded garbled. Guess this week's episode won't be coming out tonight.

Just finished my first playthrough of the Halo 2 campaign probably since about a month after it released. Still a fun time.

Hearing @austinwalker.bsky.social flabbergasted at Elvish reproduction is hilarious after the release of Nature of Middle Earth which chronicles Tolkien spending some of the last years of his life trying to figure out Elvish reproduction stuff. Tables after tables of trying to make the math work.

I hear a lot of talk about punching Nazis, but really people need to protect their hands. Important to learn from history when better alternatives exist.

It is finally LIVE! My new podcast with the Pilecki Institute! My first guest is the fanfriggingtastic Ian Garner.But we only touched the tip of the iceberg in this convo so if you want more of our banter and sarcasm let me know!! Link ⬇️ youtu.be/qQqhFieSCVc?... #Podcasting #DefyingEmpiresPodcast

Death is only the beginning.

Starting the largest Member series I have ever done with a free episode 0. Come check it out! The full series will cover a whole host of topics, along the entire length of the war and the breadth of Europe. #WW2 #Podcast

Given the complete dumpster fire that the Red Wings offseason has been, maybe I should just find another team to root for. Montreal looks fun.

I like this thread. I think a major reason why you have seen OpenAI/Anthropic dive so hard into Software Development is specifically because entire companies are built around distilling things down to a to-do list for an Engineer. That makes the transition of that to-do list to an LLM easier.

The AI spam emails continue to evolve, I think this is the first one that has given an option to just write the entire episode for me, rather than just do an AI web search and give me the output.

Liked this video as an overview of the situation.

I refuse to believe in "Blue Texas" until the people are elected and take office, and even then I am going to give it a few months just to be sure.

A cool looking book from @rpbook.bsky.social! British paratroopers in...wait....Italy? 1941? www.kickstarter.com/projects/rus...

Strongly suspect that the Python and C++ that was written to solve this by the LLM is half well structured and half just million-monkey brute forcing. But still interesting to see. Make sure to update your encryption, your Enigma messages are not secure www.cryptocellar.org/bgac/the-mvu...

Not great, not great at all.

Podcast ads are out of control, episode I just started had 4 and a half minutes of pre-roll ads! 4 and a half minutes! I understand why it happens, with a combination of CPM decay and rising revenue goals, but it still sucks for listeners.

#BattleofBritainDay Exhaustion on the face of BoB pilot Squadron Leader B.J.E. "Sandy" Lane, 1940. MIA on 13 December 1942. #WW2 #HISTORY

Oh this is just never going to end at this point.

Considering it is 98 degrees outside I am going to call this a win. Although running always makes me feel like a failure.

Time to add a site infrastructure move to the podcast to do list.

The number of these I am receiving is really annoying. I have to check my spam folder because listener questions drop into it frequently so I have to see these type of emails.

New spam email meta just dropped. I have four of these just this morning. $25 for an AI agent to do some “fact checking” on a single episode.

I know it is old, obsolete, and should have been retired decades ago…..but also it looks weird in all the right ways in the air.

Real warm out here today but the conditions are perfect for that air show!

In case you are wondering what kind of projects you will start see showing up in droves due to AI research, coding, and then data generation. This is a great example. LLMs, basically designed to fill in blanks between known bits of information which is all that this site is doing.

An event covered by one of the great poets of our time in her work "The Great War". A great retelling of the relationship between Britain and France before, during, and after the First World War. Taylor Swift really knocked it out of the park with this insightful historical analysis.

The most accurate analysis of that part of the story.

I 100% agree with this take on WW2 strategy games.

I have started writing the next set of North Africa episodes and this is 100% correct.

I take a day off Bluesky due to business travel and I am so behind on the meta. Do people hate spreadsheets now?

Military History is *full* of people who were just blagging it and have gotten away with it so succintly that their plagiarism/straight-up falsification is now just a historical curiousity instead of anything else

We are so close to some idiot suggesting all of our bombers should be able to dive bomb.

Good News: These steps will allow you to play this game on Linux. Bad News: The game still has major issues in any kind of mixed scaling/HiDPI screen setup.

Did not know they were working on this functionality! Could be a tremendous amount of fun. One of the few games I take the time to boot back into Windows for. Wish it was easier to run in Linux but every attempt I have made has resulted in it working but being VERY janky.

@robzacny.bsky.social I need you to find a way to convince the other AMCA presenters that this should be featured at some point. An in universe history book! Rob this book was written just for you!

I am just going to start quote reposting this every other day.

I think that this timeline too optimistic if you are not a fan of LLMs. I would be shocked if a majority of nonfiction works that are being written right now did not have at least one LLM powered search as a part of the research process. Whether it is the big LLMs or specialized stuff like Scite.

Hansard is 99% amazing, Then you run into fun tables like this that take a bit of deciphering to line up correctly: api.parliament.uk/historic-han...

I yearn for the day that my Bsky feed is not just full of people dunking on screenshots of some random account that is throwing out bad takes, that I don't want to see, and which just increases the engagement on their posts. Trolls, undefeated since the beginning of the Internet.

I know that there are a lot of people who have wrong opinions on Bluesky, around the Internet, in the World. But there is "wrong" and then there is "estimations of the damage that strategic bombers could inflict in the late 1930s" which really recalibrates the scale on "wrong"