AI tool comparison
last30days-skill vs Talkie
Which one should you ship with? Here is the side-by-side panel verdict, pricing read, reviewer split, and community vote comparison.
Research Tools
last30days-skill
Research any topic across 10+ platforms from the last 30 days
75%
Panel ship
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Community
Free
Entry
last30days-skill is an AI agent skill that aggregates, deduplicates, and synthesizes recent discussions about any topic from Reddit, X/Twitter, YouTube, Hacker News, Polymarket, Bluesky, TikTok, and Instagram simultaneously. The core value proposition: instead of manually searching eight platforms and stitching together what people are actually saying, you ask once and get a grounded summary with citations ranked by engagement and cross-platform convergence. The ranking system is unusually sophisticated for a community project—it combines text similarity, engagement velocity, source authority, and cross-platform convergence detection (penalizing topics that only appear on one platform). For prediction markets, it evaluates topics as outcomes within broader events rather than naive title matching. A handle resolution feature identifies X/Twitter accounts from natural language names alone. Zero configuration is needed for Reddit, HN, and Polymarket; unlocking other sources requires API keys from ScrapeCreators and Exa. The project reached 18k stars in its first week, largely driven by prompt researchers discovering it surfaces "what actually works" for tools like ChatGPT or Midjourney. Results auto-save to ~/Documents/Last30Days/ by default, and a watchlist mode supports scheduled topic monitoring with an external cron scheduler.
Research
Talkie
A 13B LLM trained only on pre-1931 text — by design
75%
Panel ship
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Community
Free
Entry
Talkie is a 13-billion-parameter language model with an unusual constraint: it was trained exclusively on text written before 1931. That means no internet, no Wikipedia, no modern code — just 260 billion tokens of books, newspapers, journals, patents, and case law from the pre-modern era. The result is a "vintage" LLM that speaks like it's from the early 20th century and has zero knowledge of anything after its cutoff. The model was built by Nick Levine, David Duvenaud, and Alec Radford (yes, one of the original GPT authors) with support from Anthropic and Coefficient Giving. The scientific motivation is rigorous: Talkie enables researchers to cleanly test how models generalize to unfamiliar tasks from examples alone (since it's never seen Python), study future prediction capabilities without data leakage, and understand how training data diversity shapes model dispositions and values. An instruction-tuned version exists, trained on synthetic data derived from historical etiquette manuals and cookbooks, enabling actual conversation. The model is available free on Hugging Face with a live chat demo on their site. A larger variant is planned for summer 2026.
Reviewer scorecard
“The cross-platform convergence scoring is clever—topics that only trend on one platform get penalized, which filters out astroturfing and PR-driven hype. The handle resolution for X accounts is a nice touch for competitive intelligence workflows where you know a person's name but not their handle.”
“This is one of the most scientifically interesting model releases I've seen. A clean pre-1931 cutoff gives researchers a genuinely controlled environment for studying generalization, data contamination, and in-context learning — problems that plague every other benchmark we have.”
“Most of the headline platforms require paid API keys from ScrapeCreators to actually work, so the 'zero-config' claim is misleading—you get Reddit and HN out of the box, which is not exactly a revelation. The 18k stars look suspiciously like another viral GitHub moment that won't translate to sustained usage.”
“This is a research artifact, not a tool. Unless you're studying AI generalization or historical NLP, there's nothing here for practitioners. The 'it speaks like 1930' angle is fun for demos but the actual scientific payoff is years from materializing into anything usable.”
“The watchlist mode with scheduled monitoring is the feature that turns this from a one-off research tool into genuine trend intelligence infrastructure. As public discourse increasingly happens in fragmented, platform-specific bubbles, multi-source aggregation with convergence detection becomes essential signal.”
“Alec Radford doesn't build toys. A model trained this carefully to isolate temporal knowledge enables experiments we genuinely can't run any other way — like testing whether a model can predict future events from historical patterns alone. This could reframe how we think about benchmark contamination.”
“For content creators trying to find what's actually resonating versus what's being pushed, the engagement velocity scoring is invaluable. Knowing that a prompt technique has 1000 upvotes spread over a week versus 1000 upvotes in 2 hours tells you completely different things about audience authenticity.”
“Writers working on historical fiction or period-accurate dialogue have a dream tool here. A model that only knows 1930s-era language and references can help maintain authentic voice without accidentally slipping in modern idioms. That's a genuinely useful creative constraint.”
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