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.

Might be a bit strong. But the repeated invitation to come and watch.

idk - weird melancholy pleading coda of Joyriders gives it something else, like the 'join us' allure rubbing up against the 2nd verse blunt contempt.

The condensed surprise that draws you in but gives you nothing - it's fascinating, & people seem to be prodding it from a few directions - nostalgebraist on eyeball kicks, Will Storr on the AI substack style

He’s just a really perpetually annoying instantiation of the mystery of creation

One of my favourite GOV.UK pages. Just reading through going ‘and that also sounds cool, must watch The Raid again’

www.gov.uk/buying-carry...

Probably this issue where I learned George Wendt is a big fan of minutemen, butthole surfers, mudhoney etc