danosull

It's fun that this doesn't actually flag anything on my recent blog post about clichés and LLMs, which deliberately lists cliches. I think because I'm focusing on words and this is looks for phrase patterns?

https://blog.osull.com/2026/07/06/cliches-in-the-age-of-the-...

I recently wrote a note on being subjected to LLM cliches all day, every day https://blog.osull.com/2026/07/06/cliches-in-the-age-of-the-...

Yes, great point. Privacy / dark pattern concerns aside, I used to like having a paper pass in case something happened to my device. I wonder what would happen in practice if you printed a screenshot of the app? After all, a screenshot on a phone works fine.

Thanks very much for letting me know. I've just starting blogging again and the old Wordpress instance needs some love (or replacing...) I think I maybe enabled some background Captcha thing back in the day. It obviously doesn't work well as I have thousands of spam comments sitting in the moderate queue.

Today I'm announcing a project that I've been working on for a while:

Langwag: A mega interactive language learning app. It supports more than 30 languages. The idea is that you can copy and paste any news story into it to get a personalised translation and language lesson.

I've found this to be a satisfying way of learning since I spend a lot of time reading the news anyway. It seems to work well because it's driven by your interests – and so it's much more interactive than slot machine Owl-based alternatives. A friend said she understood more than expected because she already knew the “characters” (orange guy, drunk FBI guy, torso rocket guy, you know).

It has a bunch more features, inspired by what I've found I actually need to help me learn French while living in France: look up and practice phrases, hear things read out loud, ask questions. It also has a cute dog logo. I have ideas for improvements, but really it's over now to you, the world: what would you like to see?

There is a hopefully pretty good demo on the public site so you can see how it works. You can add a few of your own news stories for free and, if it clicks for you, Early Adopter access is just $5 / month – less than a lactose free venti iced chai latte with lavender cold foam (a real drink that I learned about yesterday).

Dan

That's a great, suggestion thank you.

A related thought is that I'd like to pull out results like built-in functions and Standard Library modules to make them more prominent, and perhaps a link to the source code could be presented alongside...

Useful comments, thanks!

Better search results is my next big feature. I'm thinking about "sort by relevance", improved keyword and Python language parsing, and so on.

And DevDocs is great :)

Not right now, although it's something I'm interested in adding!

You can get usually get quite good results by selecting Standard Library and Definitions, though.

"is" is a special case as I currently enforce a 3 character minimum to keep the number of live search results sane.

Very useful feedback, thank you.

The ordering of search results is currently very crude - it's basically just alphabetical. I plan to add "order by relevance" in the future, and I'll definitely bear capitalisation in mind.

Thank you!

And great feature suggestion. I'll put it on the list.