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Wesley Livesay

@historyofthesecondworldwar.com
2.1K followers 497 following 2.5K posts

Creator of History of the Great War and History of the Second World War weekly history podcasts. Always ready and willing to discuss video games, Tolkien, and the Detroit Red Wings

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Reposted by Wesley Livesay
Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 02/10/2026
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
patreon.com
Occupied Europe Pt. 0 - Introduction | Wesley Livesay
This is the start of a new series here on the Member's feed, which will be the first of a new type of series. It will be far more in depth a
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 02/10/2026
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
patreon.com
Occupied Europe Pt. 0 - Introduction | Wesley Livesay
This is the start of a new series here on the Member's feed, which will be the first of a new type of series. It will be far more in depth a
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 30/09/2026
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.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 28/09/2026
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.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 28/09/2026
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.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 25/09/2026
Liked this video as an overview of the situation.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 23/09/2026
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.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 23/09/2026
A cool looking book from @rpbook.bsky.social! British paratroopers in...wait....Italy? 1941? www.kickstarter.com/projects/rus...
kickstarter.com
Daring and Determined
Britain sent paratroopers on a brave and experimental mission in 1941. Get the full story of what happened to these courageous men.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 22/09/2026
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...
cryptocellar.org
The MVUEH Break
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 19/09/2026
Not great, not great at all.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 16/09/2026
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.
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Reposted by Wesley Livesay
RG Poulussen @rgpoulussen.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
#BattleofBritainDay Exhaustion on the face of BoB pilot Squadron Leader B.J.E. "Sandy" Lane, 1940. MIA on 13 December 1942. #WW2 #HISTORY
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 10/09/2026
Oh this is just never going to end at this point.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 10/09/2026
Considering it is 98 degrees outside I am going to call this a win. Although running always makes me feel like a failure.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 09/09/2026
Time to add a site infrastructure move to the podcast to do list.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 08/09/2026
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.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 07/09/2026
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.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 06/09/2026
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.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 06/09/2026
Real warm out here today but the conditions are perfect for that air show!
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 05/09/2026
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.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 05/09/2026
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.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 02/09/2026
Thought this was an interesting deep dive into a set of Perplexity AI's sources that were attached to answers. hausresearch.com/reports/perp... This seems very common with the Deep Research functionality that the big LLMs like to push as a way of really diving into topics.
hausresearch.com
A third of Perplexity's citations don't contain the number they're cited for — Haus Research
Of 1,826 citations Perplexity's search models attached to a sentence stating a figure, 34.7% pointed at a page that either would not open or did not contain a single figure from that sentence; scored ...
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 28/08/2026
The most accurate analysis of that part of the story.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 24/08/2026
I 100% agree with this take on WW2 strategy games.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 23/08/2026
I have started writing the next set of North Africa episodes and this is 100% correct.
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Reposted by Wesley Livesay
Bethany Wasik @bethanywasik.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
ICYMI: The first set of books in the Holocaust Studies in Translation series are here! Check them out and future books at @cornellupress.bsky.social's series page: cornellpress.cornell.edu/series/holoc.... All books are published in fantastic collaboration with the @ushmm.bsky.social Mandel Center.
A set of three book covers in a row, with titles and authors in beige and purple, green, and blue backgrounds.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 20/08/2026
I take a day off Bluesky due to business travel and I am so behind on the meta. Do people hate spreadsheets now?
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Reposted by Wesley Livesay
John C @badsocialism.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
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
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 16/08/2026
We are so close to some idiot suggesting all of our bombers should be able to dive bomb.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 14/08/2026
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.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 12/08/2026
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.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 11/08/2026
@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!
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 10/08/2026
I am just going to start quote reposting this every other day.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 10/08/2026
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.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 10/08/2026
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...
api.parliament.uk
ALLIED CASUALTIES IN SECOND WORLD WAR (Hansard, 3 August 1961)
ALLIED CASUALTIES IN SECOND WORLD WAR (Hansard, 3 August 1961)
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 10/08/2026
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.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 10/08/2026
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"
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 10/08/2026
One of the challenges of doing a history podcast is balancing repetition of facts and ideas over time. I will, however, never get tired of highlighting instances where our pseudo-omniscience of history has caused problems with the popular perceptions of decisions and actions in history.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 10/08/2026
As with every type of online content (Blogs, Podcasts, Youtube, Patreon, etc. etc.) as more and more people try to make money from a platform the harder it is for anybody to make a living. This model collapses even faster when direct payment from the audience is needed.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 10/08/2026
This comment from Bret made me think about the reading I have been doing for an upcoming series on Strategic Bombing in WW2. Specifically the absolutely wild over estimation of the capabilities of air power at the time. Destroying the Ruhr in a few weeks with a few hundred bombers type of stuff.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 10/08/2026
Love this type of study. Really digging into a common story you hear from people that feels grounded in reality (something something capitalism) but does not appear to be true.
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Reposted by Wesley Livesay
Hoosier Homer is reading The Best & The Brightest by Halberstam @hoosierhomer.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
strange we built an entire military establishment on half year rotations and significant dwell time and now that we aren't doing that things are falling apart
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 05/08/2026
And so my watch begins.
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 05/08/2026
I have done somewhere around 650 podcast episodes. I am not going to say that they are all the greatest episodes, but when I write and record a real banger, I know it during recording. Just feels right sometimes.
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Reposted by Wesley Livesay
Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
"History involves sorting and organizing hundreds of thousands of facts" I remain astounded by how loud and wrong people are about what history actually is.
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Megan Stevenson
@MeganTStevenson
I haven't heard people talking about this, but AI is an absolute game changer for doing historical research. History involves sorting and organizing hundreds of thousands of facts— a massive logistical/memory problem made so delightfully easy with agentic research. 1/
1:31 PM · Jul 29, 2026
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Megan Stevenson
@MeganTStevenson
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Jul 29
I did an OCR conversion of all my PDFs to make text files, built a semantic search index, and can just let my agents roam free to answer questions, fact-check, dig up interesting stories, quotes, etc. It takes a lot of the hard work out, as well as a lot of the human error. 2/2
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 04/08/2026
Is this good?
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Wesley Livesay @historyofthesecondworldwar.com · 04/08/2026
I don't think this is a hot take but much like other topics about the World Wars where popular understanding has shifted greatly in the last few decades it just takes time for the Olds to find their way out of the conversations. See also: Lions led by Donkeys
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Reposted by Wesley Livesay
The Crusader Project @crusaderproject.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Re-enactors again not beating the allegations. Market Harborough at War today, apparently. @waitmanwbeorn.com @alanallport.bsky.social @garius.bsky.social @andraswf.bsky.social
Apologist info sign at Market Harborough at War by some Waffen-SElS fetishists who probably wanked themselves dry while coming up with this Nazi-fetishising bollocks. Fucking incels.
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World War I As It Happened (1914) @warhappened.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Germany has sent new ultimatums to Russia and France: the former must cease the mobilisation of its armies within 12 hours; the latter must make clear what stance it would take if war broke out between Russia and Germany. Failure to respond will lead to German mobilisation.
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