history

I have successfully built my first ever large language model, but don’t expect to find it on Hugging Face anytime soon.

Why? Because the model, which I’ve named lariat-1.7b, was built for one very specific job: detecting the writing of Will Rogers.

Will Rogers is one of America’s greatest humorists but many people have never heard of him. In the 1920s and 30s, Rogers was one of the most famous entertainers in the world. He wrote a mix of daily and weekly syndicated columns, published books, regularly contributed to magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Life, starred on Broadway, radio, and film, and by 1935 was one of the biggest box office draws in Hollywood. Tragically, in August 1935, at the peak of his fame, he died in a plane crash in Alaska.

I’ve been fascinated with Will Rogers ever since I took an elementary school field trip to his memorial and museum. Like me, he was born and raised in northeastern Oklahoma and his good humor and generosity of spirit always struck me as the kind of person, and the kind of Oklahoman, I wanted to be.

His work is also a fascinating window into the period between the World Wars, which is exactly why it fell out of popular culture so easily. Much of his work was just riffs on the day’s news, and reading it a hundred years later is a lot watching late-night monologues from before you were born. Even if you can recognize the main ideas, smaller stuff just goes right over your head because you don’t have the context. The world his jokes depended on started unraveling almost as soon as he died with the build-up to World War II kicking off just weeks after he was laid to rest.

In short, Will Rogers got memory holed. I want to fix that.

On the Macintosh episode of Version History, David Pierce and Nilay Patel had a lot of fun riffing about Mr. Macintosh, Steve Jobs’s obscure concept for a digital cryptid who lives in your computer.

About 15 years later, Apple actually shipped something very similar, except instead of a mysterious little man it was a yak named Bruce.