Small things

Small Things

Claude

I was testing different models for NER and needed to add two columns to a table and adjust my pipeline a bit. I decided to use Claude code in the CLI, and in an effort to be helpful, it took it upon itself to drop a table without asking first, or being told to. It was the very first action in the conversation, and the permission to do this without approval shouldn’t have persisted between sessions, so it was, shall we say, a bit of a surprise. Whilst I’ve subsequently worked out what happened, I’ve eyed it with a healthy amount of suspicion ever since. Luckily, I know better than to YOLO run these things on anything that isn’t backed up, so there was no harm done or data loss. Still… 😅

Synchronicity

Request classification surfaced a few gems this week, including a Food Standards Agency response to a request about food products containing human cells/flesh to which the answer wasn’t there are none, and something about a werewolf. In the quest for 100k, I hit 77777 overall with 7070 done in the past month. 7070 is 707 off being 7777, and the two numbers contain seven sevens. I had left it on 70707 a few months back, so it was 7070 more than that too. This was unplanned, but as I spot patterns in most things, I did enjoy the symmetry.

Essentials

I went shopping at the weekend, which is an activity that I really don’t enjoy. After a while, I confidently told my partner that we were fine to go home, as we’d got everything important that we needed. He rather gently pointed out that all I’d bought was a rock and a toy capybara. I guess we have different ideas of what counts as essential.

GPT

I thought I’d ask GPT to engage agent mode and do a mundane task for me, as I’ve not played with it since it was Operator. I’d got a bit frustrated when trying to view the information on a County Council’s disclosure log. I wanted to extract a URL list for the responses, as there was no easy way to browse them without clicking through 1,000 pages of search results. Apparently, GPT couldn’t be bothered to click the links either, as it tried to mess with the javascript and access all sorts of admin things instead, triggering the firewall. I had to intervene and tell it to behave. After capturing 20 URLs, it got bored and instructed me to go do it manually and click through the search results myself. Brave new world indeed. At least I got to watch AI read an AI written request about the use of AI as compensation.

Projects

I’ve completed the initial stages of what will be a long project to turn the WDTK archive into an anonymised linguistic corpus. I want to look at how people talk to power in the UK, and how power talks back. It is far too early to draw many conclusions, but there already seem to be some interesting patterns in the language used that I am excited to look into further.