stwalsh

I've no idea who did this as I received it via WhatsApp....nb @scottwortley.bsky.social

The Largest Historical Dictionary of English Slang Now Free Online: Covers 500 Years of the “Vulgar Tongue” 'The three volumes of Green's Dictionary of Slang demonstrate the sheer scope of a lifetime of research by Jonathon Green, the leading slang lexicographer of our time. A remarkable collection of this ...

The Largest Historical Dictionary of English Slang Now Free Online: Covers 500 Years of the “Vulgar Tongue”

Happy worst month of the year to all those who observe

Exactly - as a non-coder using Claude Code on language/document tasks I watch it eating work. Verification is much easier than 'just do it yourself'. I don't think 'fake/doesn't work' can survive contact with local persistent adaptive tools.

100%. Real giddying fairy tale quality to the tool that makes the tool you need when you ask it for it.

'Nay, if my lord affirm'd that black was white,
My word was this, "Your Honour's in the right."

F451.3.4.11
Dwarf can draw entrails out
of elephant.

And (obviously!) human in the loop at every step.

(where 'scratch' is its finding and analysing a complicated thicket in guidance and/or legislation)

It should, with a little tinkering, be able to help with service prototype content. eg I taught my local version about smart answers and it does fair job of offering draft question flows from scratch.

GitHub - stwalsh/govuk-content-demo: Demo sandbox for analysing GOV.UK guidance and legislation using Claude Demo sandbox for analysing GOV.UK guidance and legislation using Claude - stwalsh/govuk-content-demo

I've used the multi-agent approach for content design - style agent (a prompt + a folder with 'writing for GOV.UK materials') and accuracy agent (prompt + eg legislative material) run iteratively alongside an editing agent.
github.com/stwalsh/govu...

I do like a good river catalogue and Windsor Forest’s is a good one

More generally I think the Lonsdale anthologies make the baseline case for that stretch as a constellation of smaller achievements

I’d say Dryden is way less fussy than Pope, at best real smart arguing roll-along energy while hitting his rhymes, but they do get glued together (Pope tighter, for better and for worse)

Got Pope rolling along here

bsky.app/profile/pope...

I love him, love Dryden more, but idk it’s a contrary taste and not that easy to account for when put in opposition to Milton or the Romantic mainline

Thanks for the eyes on it - basically I'm coming to think any field with strong sources of authority and constrained style rules is going to hit very very hard

There was a lot to cover haha. But yeah, it can be flabby - I haven't tried explicitly constraining length, tho the style checker guns for LLM padding. Got a lot of verification to do but it's ripped through some... problems

I've rebuilt an old site to document things and try and show colleagues what's happening. Links are in there:
www.immram.net
lmk if I'm undergoing psychosis, probably the more comfortable option in many ways

Not the coding tools - I'd heard the noises about 4.5, tried it for a little dumb code thing and then remembered hearing 'point claude code at not-code'. Realised it could do a hell of a lot of my job and had proof of concept in <2hrs. People have no idea.

I'm a non-dev and think I've got something solid that does a lot of drudgework in my domain, government guidance. Need to keep human reviews in place but set claude code up right and it'll analyse text, check legislation, draft, build tools... i feel like I'm 2-4 weeks ahead of the explosion proper

Alright Windsor Forest is go

I won’t share the repo right now but if you want to build a similar picobot, make a noise (DMs are off. I will never verify my age.) There are much easier ways to make a bot btw.

It just reads through a big discrete chunked text file, so it can be repurposed very easily. I might do Dryden’s Aeneid next. Maybe Herbert. Rochester if I can get him through the terms of service. I like the idea of having a pile of little black boxes spitting out poetry.

AI warning: I also wanted to find out about LLM coding, so I used Claude code (with code reviews from Gemini pro) to rebuild the original for the pico in micropython. If you’re allergic to AI in absolutely every form, this is silently tainted.

But I’ve been meaning to bring it back. I wanted to find out about microcontrollers so this one runs on a dedicated raspberry pi pico 2 W.

The old one... I can’t really code but somehow kludged some Python together that ran on a Raspberry Pi (also my local media server). It was very very janky. It would fall over all the time for days at a time (generally until its number one fan asked after it).

Oh, it doesn’t do the Homer. There’s just so much of it, and so much of it isn’t by Pope. And things like the Dunciad annotations... no. Too hairy.

It’ll take around 9 months to get through the poems (absent crashes, bugs or this place going fash and me and him leaving). We’re still on the pastorals. It should get better (go easy he’s 16 right now) when it hits the Essay on Criticism in 2 or 3 weeks, and r of the lock after that.

It does Pope because 90% of Pope is tidy couplets. Also I love Pope and he brightened my timeline.

During the pandemic I built a dumb bot that would tweet all of Alexander Pope’s poetry, couplet by couplet, once an hour. I’ve now rejigged it for Bluesky, because I like having a hobby and the bot is I hope a harmless entertainment in dark times.