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Veikko Isotalo

@isoveikko.bsky.social
372 followers 452 following 63 posts

Senior researcher in political science @UniTurku | intraparty competition | ideology | voting advice applications | FNES

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Reposted by Veikko Isotalo
West European Politics @wepsocial.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
⏳ Why are voters out of step with parties on immigration and redistribution? Hironao Yoda and Serika Atsumi study 16 Western European countries: newer cohorts link the two issues as parties do — older ones don't, so the gap should narrow with generational turnover. 🔗 doi.org/10.1080/0140...
Description of the article "Time dilation: the temporal structure of elite–voter incongruence on redistribution and immigration" by Hironao Yoda and Serika Atsumi, published online first in West European Politics.
Figure 1. Two scatter plots on redistribution (x-axis) and immigration (y-axis) for 14 Western European countries. Panel (a) shows party positions from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, which line up along a clear diagonal; panel (b) shows voter positions from the European Social Survey, which spread across all four quadrants with essentially no relationship between the two issues.
Figure 2. Dot-and-interval plot of how strongly immigration attitudes relate to redistribution attitudes in each of seven cohorts, from the interwar generation to the newest "crisis" generation. For cohorts up to the 90s generation the link is small and often indistinguishable from zero; it turns clearly positive for the 00s generation and is strongest for the crisis generation.
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Arndt Leininger @aleininger.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
🧵 Just accepted @thejop.bsky.social, with @tswalve.bsky.social "What's in a name? Name recognition, place-based identities, and candidate success" Voters prefer local candidates. But how do they know who's local? Often simply from the name on the ballot👇 www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
journals.uchicago.edu
What's in a name? Name recognition, place-based identities, and candidate success | The Journal of Politics: Vol 0, No ja
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Julius Lehtinen @julleht.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Mukavia uutisia, väitöskirjaprojektin ensimmäinen tutkimusartikkeli on nyt julki Party Politicsissa (Open Access): doi.org/10.1177/1354... Artikkelissa tutkimme miten poliittisen puolueen edustama ideologia vaikuttaa sen ehdokkaiden erottautumisprioriteetteihin vaalikampanjassa.
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Felix Lehmann @felixlehmann.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
What do parties do after severe and persistent electoral defeat? In a new paper recently published in Party Politics, I find that parties tend to focus more on their core issues but do not necessarily adopt more extreme positions: doi.org/10.1177/1354....
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Roman Senninger @rsenninger.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Does losing an election affect politicians' democratic attitudes? A large literature documents a winner–loser gap among voters, but evidence on political elites was long scarce. A series of recent studies has narrowed this gap. A thread on the state of the evidence. 🧵
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Dan Smith @profdansmith.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
New in @electoralstudies.bsky.social w/Justin F. Reeves: "Getting to know her: Information and gender bias in preferential voting systems." Can women's success in open-list PR elections be improved by (1) providing candidate information and/or (2) making preference voting compulsory? 🧵1/10
Abstract/title page of article in Electoral Studies: "Getting to know her: Information and gender bias in preferential voting systems," by Justin F. Reeves and Daniel M. Smith.
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Politics Journal @politicsjournal.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
1/4. New article published: Can AI support Citizens' Assemblies? Jäske, Kulha, Leino, Setälä & Wessman tested GPT-4o in Finland's 2025 Energy Assembly. They identify 6 deliberative functions & tested AI in 3: inquiry, co-creation & integration @polstudiesassoc.bsky.social @sagepub.com
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Reto Mitteregger @indubioproreto.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
New publication out in @epsrjournal.bsky.social! We know young voters vote for different parties and hold different attitudes than older citizens. What we know less about: whether they also care differently about political issues. Using novel experimental survey data, I show: they do! 👇
cambridge.org
“Nothing else matters?” Salience differences between young and old | European Political Science Review | Cambridge Core
“Nothing else matters?” Salience differences between young and old
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(((Tendar))) @tendar.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Following the dismissal of Ukrainian Defense Minister Fedorov, protests have erupted in Kyiv, Ukraine.
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Christopher Miller @christopherjm.ft.com · 15/07/2026
LATEST: Mykhailo Fedorov is out as Ukraine's defense minister, people close to the president and familiar with his decision this evening confirm to me.
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Petter Törnberg @pettertornberg.com · 07/07/2026
‘Polarization’ has become the master concept for diagnosing our current democratic crisis. But this is not polarization. It is the radicalization of the political right. By misdiagnosing it, we risk becoming complicit in the crisis. 🧵 Just out in Perspectives on Politics doi.org/10.1017/S153...
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Yiqing Xu @yiqingxu.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
My very personal reflection on the use of AI in social science, perhaps the first of many. yiqingxu.substack.com/p/ai-disarray
yiqingxu.substack.com
AI Disarray
I have felt a little disarrayed recently, and I attribute it to AI.
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Mohamed Dhia Hammami @meddhiah.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
Tuesday, Senegal 🇸🇳 plays France 🇫🇷 , its former colonial ruler, in the World Cup. French police was set on high “vigilance across the territory” (AFP). Why are such post-colonial encounter sensitive ? Answer from a paper I wrote (available on request, previously presented at MPSA)🧵
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Veikko Isotalo @isoveikko.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Usein puhutaan länsimaisten yhteiskuntien arvojen liberalisoitumisesta. Briteissä kehitys tässä asiassa vastakkaista sekä vasemmistossa että oikeistossa.
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Ansgar Hudde @hudde.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
📝New preprint: A golden era for open-ended questions? Using LLMs for text classification tasks ➡️Advanced LLMs outperform student assistants in text coding accuracy. We provide replication files & practical guidance for applied social scientists. Feedback welcome! 🧵 osf.io/preprints/so...
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Reto Mitteregger @indubioproreto.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
In most advanced democracies, newer generations and younger citizens are less likely to vote. In this new paper, Thomas Jocker (@uva.nl) and I ask *why* this is the case. We try to answer this question by analyzing the answers that *non-voters themselves* give to this question 👇
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Do They Want, Can They, and Have They Been Asked? Generational Differences in Reasons for Non‐Voting in Switzerland
In many advanced democracies, newer generations and younger citizens are less likely to vote than earlier generations and older individuals. However, despite this being an established empirical matte...
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Julia Partheymüller @schnizzl.bsky.social · 24/05/2026
Can LLMs Emulate Human Belief Dynamics? 🧪 The answer is a clear no. [The findings] raise a sharp warning against deploying LLMs as human proxies in social simulations. arxiv.org/pdf/2605.18781 #SyntheticData #EsWirdImmerAbsurder
Screenshot of the abstract of the preprint.

Can LLMs simulate how humans form and change beliefs in social net-
works? We put this to the test by replicating an established study on belief
dynamics, evaluating 12 LLMs across multiple model families and param-
eter sizes. The answer is a clear no, and in systematic ways. LLMs fail
to capture initial human belief distributions and tend to be overall more
conformist than humans, shifting their responses to align with those around
them. They also take a nuanced approach to emulating human homophilic
tendencies within networks. Our findings carry a double payoff: they
highlight fundamental properties of LLM behavior, and they raise a sharp
warning against deploying LLMs as human proxies in social simulations.
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Alexander Wuttke @kunkakom.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
Early in my PhD, a colleague finishing his (highly rated) dissertation told me he was stuck on the introduction. After years of hard work, he could no longer find an argument for why any of it actually mattered. This stuck with me ever since. A🧵 about this paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Should social science be more solution-oriented? - Nature Human Behaviour
Duncan Watts considers whether many branches of social science could benefit from setting research goals aimed at specific and manageable real-world problems. He gives examples and discusses how more ...
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Simon Hix @simonhix.bsky.social · 10/05/2026
On 7 May 2026, Britain ran a PR experiment: Scottish Parliament: a Mixed-Member Proportional system Welsh Senedd: a (new) Low-Magnitude Party List system Same day, same political context, different outcomes. Which version of PR would be better for Westminster? 🧵
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Mark Chadbourn @chadbourn.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
Looks like Orban’s Russia-backed false flag operation could be underway to lead to the cancelling of the Hungarian elections. Predicted recently. Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić has informed Orban of “explosives of devastating power” found at the gas pipeline connecting the two countries. 1/2
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Andrew Gordon @andrewgordon.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
New preprint out today (osf.io/preprints/ps...). We tested whether AI agents are actually infiltrating online surveys. Spoiler alert: they aren't Thread 🧵 [1/9]
osf.io
OSF
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Yiqing Xu @yiqingxu.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
1/ Happy to release StatsClaw — an open-source multi-agent workflow for building statistical software with AI. w/ @tianzhuqin.bsky.social Site: statsclaw.ai Paper: bit.ly/statsclaw GitHub: github.com/statsclaw/
statsclaw.ai
StatsClaw
Collaborative AI for Stats Packages.
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Andreas Albertsen @andreasalbertsen.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
Excited to share the special issue co-edited with Garzia, Tromborg and Marschall: "Voting Advice Applications: Methodological Innovations, Behavioural Effects, and Research Perspectives". Published in Politics and Governance (@CogitatioPaG)! www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandg... #OpenAccess
cogitatiopress.com
Voting Advice Applications: Methodological Innovations, Behavioural Effects, and Research Perspectives
Thematic Issue, Vol 14 (2026)
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Kevin Collins @kwcollins.bsky.social · 26/03/2026
Interesting new bot-detection strategy in online samples: academic.oup.com/jcr/advance-...
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Pedro🦋 @petsi.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
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Jussi Ahokas @ahokasjaj.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
Jokin järki sentään liikkuu vielä tässä maassa. #yhteiskunta
yle.fi
Oikeusministeriö peruu päätöksensä: vaalidataa ei siirretäkään Amazonille – ”Voidaanko luottaa, että ei tulisi yllätyksiä?”
Muuttunut kansainvälinen tilanne pakotti oikeusministeriön perumaan aiemman päätöksensä. Suojelupoliisi varoitti pilvipalveluista kaksi viikkoa sitten.
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V-Dem Institute @vdeminstitute.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
📢 Out Now! V-Dem Dataset v16 & the V-Dem Institute Democracy Report 2026 💾 The V-Dem Dataset: v-dem.net/data/the-v-d... 📰 The Report "Unraveling The Democratic Era?”: v-dem.net/publications... 📈 Explore the new data with the V-Dem Graphing tools: v-dem.net/graphing/gra... #PoliSky #PoliSciSky 1/3
Two map graphs show the state of liberal democracy according to the V-Dem Liberal Democracy index for 2025 and 2024. The higher the score (or darker blue), the more democratic the country. Lower scores (or dark red) mean less democratic. While North and South America, Western Europe and Oceania are mostly in the blue, most parts of Asia and Africa are in the red in 2025. 
In comparison to the map for 2024, the map graph for 2025 shows democratic backsliding in some traditionally stable democracies in Western Europe and North America, in particular the USA, United Kingdom and Italy.
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Veikko Isotalo @isoveikko.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
Selvisipähän se, miksi Belgia jarrutteli jäädytettyjen varojen hyödyntämisen kanssa.
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Veikko Isotalo @isoveikko.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
Vaalitutkimuksesta taas kuuluu! Vuoden 2023 eduskuntavaalien ehdokastutkimus "Tie Arkadianmäelle" on nyt ulkona. Kokoelmassa monta kiinnostavaa lukua, itse olin mukana kolmessa. Linkki tutkimukseen: doi.org/10.61201/ssz... 1/4
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nitasha tiku @nitasha.bsky.social · 01/03/2026
WSJ reporting that the U.S. used Claude for the air strikes in Iran. Centcom has been using Claude "for intelligence assessments, target identification and simulating battle scenarios" www.wsj.com/livecoverage...
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Veikko Isotalo @isoveikko.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
Did you know there is an open-source framework for building Voting Advice Applications? OpenVAA (openvaa.org) offers a way to develop a VAA for any election. It is fully localisable, accessible, modular and free to use. 1/3
OpenVAA v0.1 Shiba is out now!
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Veikko Isotalo @isoveikko.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
Did you know there is an open-source framework for building Voting Advice Applications? OpenVAA (openvaa.org) offers a way to develop a VAA for any election. It is fully localisable, accessible, modular and free to use. 1/3
OpenVAA v0.1 Shiba is out now!
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NOELREPORTS @noelreports.com · 03/02/2026
Energy Minister Shmyhal said Russia shelled CHP and thermal power plants that were operating only to heat residential areas in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Dnipro. He said the targets were purely civilian, leaving hundreds of thousands of families without heat in minus 25 C cold.
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Kira Renée Kurz @kirareneekurz.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
🚨New Publication🚨 The role of the VAA VOTESWIPER in polarizing voter choices in the 2025 German Federal Election @mariusfroehle.bsky.social @ronaldschleehauf.bsky.social @judithreinbold.bsky.social and Sebastian Jäckle @pwunifreiburg.bsky.social doi.org/10.1002/poi3... A short 🧵on our findings
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West European Politics @wepsocial.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
🎉 Online first: How does owning a home change how people feel about politics? In this article, @mhaslberger.bsky.social and @madselk.bsky.social find that owning a home is linked to feeling more politically included, especially for older people. 🔗 doi.org/10.1080/0140...
Abstract of "Homeownership and political efficacy: how housing wealth shapes whether people feel heard" by Matthias Haslberger and Mads Andreas Elkjær, published in West European Politics.
Predicted levels of external efficacy by housing tenure and age, with 95% confidence intervals. Covariates fixed at: Married male Conservative voter without university degree living in Southeast England, full-time employed with average income.
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Tom Pepinsky @tompepinsky.com · 23/01/2026
Claude Code is an amazing tool for social science researchers. It does not think and it does not interpret properly, but it generates and executes code with a speed and accuracy that I could never have anticipated.
tompepinsky.com
Agentic AI and Social Science Research Practice
I’ve been exploring AI tools of various forms for more than a year now, mostly from a critical perspective of identifying things that they cannot do (such as draw maps), but also so that I can unde…
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Dariia Mykhailyshyna @dariia.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
I guess this means goodbye to the three hours of electricity per 24 hours i used to have, i will miss you #UkrainianView
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Ruth Dassonneville @rdassonneville.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
Super excited to be participating in this Una Europa project on "Democracy and AI" ! And looking forward to co-leading the Leuven team with @bzar.bsky.social !
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Tarik Abou-Chadi @tabouchadi.bsky.social · 21/01/2026
Many social democratic parties have ignored this (and focused on winning back socially conservative voters from the radical right). It has turned them into (even more) lifeless bureaucratic cartel parties whose voters are predominantly pensioners and whose "activists" work for the party or the state
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Dr. Salla-Maaria Laaksonen @sallamaaria.eurosky.social · 21/01/2026
Haluaisitko ymmärtää digitaalista teknologiaa yhteiskunnallisesta näkökulmasta? Nappaa kuunteluun Digitaalisen yhteiskunnan rajapinnoilla MOOC-kurssimme luennot! Myös opintopisteet tarjolla HY:n avoimen kautta jos suorittaa kurssiin littyvät tehtävät. rajapinta.co/2024/05/21/k...
rajapinta.co
Kaikille avoin verkkokurssi digitaalisesta yhteiskunnasta
Rajapinta ry on ollut mukana kehittämässä kaikille avointa Digitaalisen yhteiskunnan rajapinnoilla -verkkokurssia, jolla käsitellään teknologiavälitteisen toiminnan ulottuvuuksia ja reunaehtoja yht…
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Dr. Salla-Maaria Laaksonen @sallamaaria.eurosky.social · 18/01/2026
Viime päivien uutisen valossa olisikohan nyt niin että tätäkin päätöstä voisi harkita uudelleen. yle.fi/a/74-20191502
yle.fi
Suomen vaalidata siirtyy Amazonin pilveen – USA:n vaalivilppiepäilyjä tutkinut asiantuntija varoittaa riskeistä
Ensimmäistä kertaa vaaleissa ehdokas- ja äänestäjätiedot sekä tuloslaskenta siirtyvät Suomen rajojen ulkopuolelle. Tutkija ei käyttäisi pilvipalvelua kansallisen turvallisuuden asioissa.
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Vicente Valentim @valentimvicente.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
Apologies for being self-referential but
Abstract of the paper "How Mainstream Politician Erode Norms": "How does anti-immigrant rhetoric by mainstream politicians affect norms of tolerance? How does this compare to similar statements made by radical-right politicians? Drawing on experimental evidence, we find that statements by mainstream politicians lead to more norm erosion than similar statements by radical-right politicians. Subsample analyses suggest that this is because statements by mainstream-right politicians erode norm perceptions of right-wing individuals, while those by radical-right politicians induce backlash among left-wing individuals, who hold closer to the norm in place. The latter effect (backlash by the left) disappears when similar statements are made by mainstream right politicians. We argue that this difference occurs because mainstream politicians represent the views of a larger part of the population or have a higher status. Our results highlight the pivotal role of mainstream politicians in enforcing or eroding democratic norms, and that similar political statements can have different effects depending on their sender."
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Veikko Isotalo @isoveikko.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
Oli kyllä hyvää pohdintaa. Itselle jäi mieleen ennakointi uudesta maailman järjestyksestä, jossa jakolinja ei ole EU vs. USA, vaan maiden sisällä laitaoikeisto vs. perinteiset puolueet. Lopputuloksena kaoottinen maailma. 1/2 www.hs.fi/kuuntele/aud...
hs.fi
Tällaista maailmaa Trump todella tavoittelee
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Tarik Abou-Chadi @tabouchadi.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
Within the next decade the radical right is going to be the main force on the right in Europe (national and EU level). This includes far-right parties and formerly centre-right parties shifting their position. Moderate conservatism and Christian democracy will largely disappear on the right. 1/
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Tamkinat Rauf @tsrauf.bsky.social · 14/01/2026
This is a belated post about our paper in @poqjournal.bsky.social. We analyzed 100 survey experiments fielded by TESS (tessexperiments.org), using only information from the proposals to identify intended hypotheses. Here are some of the things we learned:
doi.org
An Audit of Social Science Survey Experiments
Abstract. Survey experiments have become a popular methodology for causal inference across the social sciences. We study the efficacy of survey experiment
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Peter Egge Langsæther @peterla.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
Very happy to see this out in CPS! We study class identities and their social and political relevance over several decades in Britain, Denmark, Norway, and the US. A small thread: journals.sagepub.com/eprint/SIRW4...
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Piotr Zagórski @pzag.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
📣 Kicking off 2026 with a new article in @eepolitics.bsky.social! When do voters with left-wing economic views support populist radical right parties? Many supporters of 🇵🇱 PiS are left-authoritarians (left-wing econ & authoritarian socio-cult views)... 1/4 👇 www.tandfonline.com/eprint/EISET...
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Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham @paulgp.com · 31/12/2025
Yo what the fuck short form videos are bad Short-Form Videos Degrade Our Capacity to Retain Intentions arxiv.org/pdf/2302.03714 Ht: HowTown
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Joe Noonan @joenoonan.se · 28/12/2025
A big part of my old job writing code for ggplot2 graphs, this is something that LLMs have been extremely good at right from the beginning. My workflow in the last three years has changed to prompting a certain style of graphs then editing them.
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