Vincent Carrier
@VincntCarrier
Ah Daedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You should read them in the original. θάλαττα! θάλαττα! Building https://oxytone.xyz for Greek nerds everywhere
We’re not just watching a scandal. We’re watching a moment that could realign U.S. politics, fracture parties, and force a reckoning way bigger than Watergate. Because when the state protects predators at the highest levels, the whole system stands guilty beside them.
My wife just compared all this tech-adjacent extreme longevity focus in men to anorexia in women. A physical manifestation of anxiety and lack of control. And now I can't get the thought out of my head. Spot on.
My new hobby is asking Claude to turn my brainfarts into pretentious academese. In this instance: explaining why people hate bikes so much (in the style of Mary Douglas) claude.ai/public/artifac…
a guy created a dataset of 50 books from London 1800-1850 for LLM training. no modern bias. it’s actually super cool to see what can be trained on it!
New release of Oxytone is out: - Poetry Memorization mode @AGROS_edu - Print-friendly styling! oxytone.xyz/read/iliad/1
+1 for "context engineering" over "prompt engineering". People associate prompts with short task descriptions you'd give an LLM in your day-to-day use. When in every industrial-strength LLM app, context engineering is the delicate art and science of filling the context window…
I really like the term “context engineering” over prompt engineering. It describes the core skill better: the art of providing all the context for the task to be plausibly solvable by the LLM.
Some of those failures were very weird indeed. At one point, Claude hallucinated that it was a real, physical person, and claimed that it was coming in to work in the shop. We’re still not sure why this happened.
This is the real deal. Homer. In Ancient Greek. With a supremely competent teacher who can show you how to appreciate the text linguistically from the Indo-European angle as much as from the Greek perspective. 100% recommended! 🤩🤩🤩
This fall, we read Homer.
A new Ancient Greek web library enters the fray. oxytone.xyz lets you highlight different parts of a text (verbs and cases, for example) and offers full lemmatization. You can also create flash card decks from any custom selection of text.
I found a little more info on Oxytone, the new Ancient Greek reading environment, on a listserv I belong to. The developer is Vincent Carrier, a BA student at U. Montréal.
Imagine unknowingly making the linguistic discovery of the millennium, sharing it only with your bro in a letter, the letter gets lost, only for your letter to be found again 400 years later.
On to Loeb Give-away IV: Homer's Iliad & Odyssey, Hesiod & the Homeric Hymns, Cicero on the gods, Catullus & Tibullus on love and loss, Ovid lustily on the same (sometimes roleplaying as famous women), and Marcus Aurelius' tutor on all sorts. Just RT this before draw on 11 July!
Just bought all 558 Loebs, so prepare for a Spare Loebs Giveaway Haul this summer! 📚📚☀️📚📚
fyi: if you call yourself a "value creator" ... you're not
Ten months ago, we launched the Vesuvius Challenge to solve the ancient problem of the Herculaneum Papyri, a library of scrolls that were flash-fried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Today we are overjoyed to announce that our crazy project has succeeded. After 2000…
I can also recommend the website anthologiagraeca.org because it features actual manuscript scans in addition to the edited text and various translations. (The transcribed Greek is riddled with typos, but it's free anyway... 😉)