Reposted by Barry KellyPascal @pascallth.bsky.social · 06/07/2026It seems like small potatoes but this is reflective of why I don't believe a change in who runs Washington DC will fundamentally change America's position on the world stage 46313
Reposted by Barry KellyRobert Borden Stan Account @bordenstan.bsky.social · 03/07/2026Planners should worry less about the admin that YOLOed into Caracas suddenly deciding to meticulously Desert Storm us, and worry a lot more Garand Thumb or some random chud LARPer livestreaming themselves walking around Coutts in their tactical barbie loadout and getting QTed by Elon. 3416
Reposted by Barry Kellyelia ayoub @ayoub.bsky.social · 19/06/2026Mona Khalil, Lebanon’s most well-known sea turtle conservationist, died of her wounds today after being injured by an Israeli strike I feel sick 1743882327
Barry Kelly @barrkel.bsky.social · 18/05/2026I never want to see a sharp read again. No more sharp reads. 000
Reposted by Barry KellySimon Willison @simonwillison.net · 13/05/2026This "Unethical Guide to Surviving AI Layoffs" by Mo Bitar perfectly captures the current moment www.tiktok.com/@atmoio/vide...tiktok.comTurtleneck optional but highly recommended. #ai #chatgpt #tech #bigtech #jobTikTok video by Mo Bitar 1215126
Barry Kelly @barrkel.bsky.social · 03/05/2026Excellent article (paywall) www.ft.com/content/95f5...ft.com‘I’m fighting two wars. One against the Russians. And one inside myself.’A drone pilot and her all-women unit are waging a new kind of warfare on Ukraine’s eastern front 000
Reposted by Barry Kellyjohn vining @johnvining.bsky.social · 27/04/2026The Matrix was right: the future *is* really full of screens streaming terminal text no one is reading 317527
Reposted by Barry KellyDaryl Sng @darylsng.com · 23/04/2026You need to provide a cetacean for that claim 617811
Barry Kelly @barrkel.bsky.social · 06/04/2026Great thread. Great diagnosis. I don't really buy the cure, and I think the stacks idea is a bit iffy, but a deeper dig into our malaise than just name-dropping McLuhan. Single page here: skywriter.blue/@eliothiggin...skywriter.bluePage by Eliot Higgins | @eliothiggins.bsky.social🧵 Democracy feels like it's in a rough state at the moment across the globe, and we hear various explanations, like polarisation, extremism, disinformation, and loss of trust. But what if those explan... 000
Reposted by Barry KellyAndrew Parkin @parkinac.bsky.social · 15/03/2026If you’re wondering what the big deal is about Jürgen Habermas (who died yesterday), or if you’ve never heard of him until now, you’re not going to learn much from the short newspaper obituaries, which are focusing on more on what he said about current events than his philosophy. 1/ 616187
Reposted by Barry KellyAlex Ip 葉清霖 @alexip718.com · 04/02/2026INBOX: Washington Post Ukraine Correspondent Lizzie Johnson announces that she has been laid off in the middle of a below-freezing war zone without power, heat, or running water. 20397014351
Barry Kelly @barrkel.bsky.social · 01/02/2026These comms from Mandleson are weird. He describes Epstein as his life advisor, yet the information goes the other way: Mandleson filling Epstein in on his proposed scheme. Curious. 010
Barry Kelly @barrkel.bsky.social · 23/01/2026Great thread. The writing looks like it's AI enhanced, but the core ideas and consequences are sound, and it's a concise recitation. 000
Reposted by Barry KellyPhilip Bump @pbump.com · 21/01/2026If I walk up to you with hammer and say “I could break your knees if you don’t give me $20 but I won’t,” would you feel relieved that I’d ruled out breaking your knees? 231802321
Reposted by Barry KellyThorsten Benner @tbenner.bsky.social · 20/01/2026Here is the full text of Carney's speech. Very much worth reading. paulwells.substack.com/p/the-carney...paulwells.substack.comThe Carney doctrineOpen comment thread on the PM's Davos speech 610744
Reposted by Barry KellyJames Ball @jamesrball.com · 18/01/2026The incredibly lukewarm Democratic response on Greenland is being noticed in Europe, incidentally. Chuck Schumer not finding a stronger word than “quixotic” for Trump’s plan to seize Greenland has been name checked to me more than once. 35387722040
Barry Kelly @barrkel.bsky.social · 12/01/2026It seems clear that today's AI agent CLIs aren't the future of software engineering. We need to persist the plans, the dialog, record the decisions, and we need to integrate the flow with code review and link it back to product requirements. They're great for ad hoc, but we need more structure. 1/2 140
Barry Kelly @barrkel.bsky.social · 09/01/2026Expanding on this: MoE models, once they route to one path (like tool use for search), architecturally remove the influence of broad knowledge in responses. Models will be trained to trust the results of a search, for grounding and avoiding hallucination. Careful questions are important as ever. 010
Barry Kelly @barrkel.bsky.social · 09/01/2026I'm seeing an interesting problem start to crop up with GPT 5.2. It seems like the model has less general knowledge. It's trained to do a web search instead, and it then synthesizes a response based on the results. But the results are biased by the search query! They may omit important context. 1/3 100
Reposted by Barry KellyJessica Schulberg @jessicaschulberg.bsky.social · 07/01/2026the victim, identified as 37 yo Renee Nicole Good, "was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known," her mother told the Star Tribune. She leaves behind a young child whose father died in 2023. “There’s nobody else in his life,” the boy's grandfather said www.startribune.com/she-was-an-a...startribune.com‘She was an amazing human being’: Mother identifies woman shot, killed by ICE agentRenee Nicole Good, 37, lived in the Twin Cities with her partner. 05321
Barry Kelly @barrkel.bsky.social · 08/01/2026I too had thought rationals were named after numbers that could be expressed as ratios, or fractions, but it isn't the etymology. Rationals are essentially named because they are the opposite of illogical irrationals, and ratio comes from rational, not the other way around. 010
Reposted by Barry KellyJeff Colgan @jeffcolgan.bsky.social · 03/01/20261. Look, there are basically just two ways to run the global oil market: petro-imperialism and petro-consumerism. Historically USA has embraced both, varying over time. The attack on #Venezuela is a return to naked petro-imperialism. Thread. 212666
Barry Kelly @barrkel.bsky.social · 04/01/2026Thief II then, because I had played Thief and it changed my perspective permanently and I didn't know about Deus Ex until 2001. Now it would be Deus Ex, because of how revolutionary it was. But if I want to replay either game, it would be Thief II. Really, it's just a better, more focused Thief I. 000
Barry Kelly @barrkel.bsky.social · 30/12/2025I tried Cursor last night, first time in a long while. I found the agent modes close to unusable; it races ahead and make edits to multiple files without confirmation, and it gets stuff wrong right from the first or second edit. Surprisingly poor if you want to retain intellectual control over code. 000
Reposted by Barry KellyMihnea @miyhnea.bsky.social · 28/12/2025The fear of EU/NATO is from the social-political inability of the RF to integrate with it an become a 'normal European country', as Navalny put it. The elite, especially old Putinist one, and segments of society, see RU as a great power, inheritor of USSR, equal to US on world stage 1141
Reposted by Barry KellyMichael Pettis @michaelpettis.bsky.social · 08/12/20252/6 This is the point I have been making again and again over the years. The global economy is a closed system, and it must balance. This means that domestic imbalances created by countries that control their external accounts must... 1112
Barry Kelly @barrkel.bsky.social · 28/11/2025There's a problem with LLM problem solving that I'm seeing pretty consistently now. LLMs, when they encounter an error, formulate a hypothesis about what's wrong. Then, rather than validate the hypothesis, they immediately try to implement a solution based on the hypothesis. Check the hypothesis! 030
Barry Kelly @barrkel.bsky.social · 27/10/2025This isn't really accurate but understanding why is quite subtle. Mimicking patterns of words relies on approximate knowledge. LLMs have approximate knowledge of lots of things. This means they're usually right on the gist of something but wrong on specifics. 1/ 100
Reposted by Barry Kellymr. TIM @timkellogg.me · 15/10/2025the most exciting specialization method, imo, is Cartridges basically take a gigantic context, and then *train* a KV cache this is wild, who even thinks to train a KV cache? but it works. incredible compression & recall hazyresearch.stanford.edu/blog/2025-06... 2184
Reposted by Barry KellySunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 26/09/2025Nathan Gill, Reform's leader in Wales at the last Welsh parliament election, has pled guilty to 8 bribery charges, taking Russian cash while he was one of Nigel Farage’s MEPs to speak in favour of Putin's Russia in that parliament www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...theguardian.comReform UK’s ex-leader in Wales Nathan Gill pleads guilty to bribery chargesGill admits to eight counts of bribery relating to pro-Russia statements made in the European parliament and articles 28494311
Reposted by Barry KellyMcDaragh @mcdaragh.bsky.social · 15/09/2025The "Kirk was civil" lady from the Atlantic has been stuck in my head this morning. So much of this is about existing elites focusing on maintaining elite status in the new order. The Zyuganovication of American liberalism. 1464
Barry Kelly @barrkel.bsky.social · 05/09/2025I'm kind of disappointed in GPT5. I had a tough problem recently. zfsbootmenu handoff to Ubuntu, failure for framebuffer to initialize, making it harder to configure my new rig. 4-5 minute waits for advice that wasn't that useful. Gemini Pro 2.5 was significantly more useful, and faster. 110
Reposted by Barry KellyToby Buckle @polphilpod.bsky.social · 30/08/2025a state that cannot enforce consequences for a coup attempt is a state that is going to fail, & so it turned out to be 19113
Reposted by Barry KellyRoland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 26/08/2025'Immigration doesn't bother me but it seems to bother everyone else' – Everyone. This is what happens when the media runs away with Hard Right narratives. 651355591
Barry Kelly @barrkel.bsky.social · 15/08/2025Imagine if we got this 20 years ago, something able to understand and write language, that fits on less than half a CD, but requires monstrous amounts of computation. It would be like alien technology, practically beyond our comprehension. 010
Reposted by Barry KellyEliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · 27/06/2025Misinformation = false or misleading information spread by people who believe it’s true. Malinformation = true information used in misleading or harmful ways. 247370
Reposted by Barry KellyEliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · 27/06/2025Media scholar Clare Wardle and colleagues developed a helpful typology: Disinformation = false or misleading information spread deliberately to deceive or manipulate. 346465
Barry Kelly @barrkel.bsky.social · 17/06/2025This is super interesting stuff. Adds quite a bit of nuance on top of the simplistic Economics 101 model of thinking scarcity means it's fine to let prices rise. It can actually be an opportunity to collude with competitors and raise prices! 000
Barry Kelly @barrkel.bsky.social · 09/06/2025There's something I'm starting to get sick of in LLM prose. It's not flattery - it's antithesis. It's starting out not with the point, but instead its opposite. The forced contrast is not effective, it's overused. And I don't think I'm wrong to see it as a tell. 000
Reposted by Barry Kellyil Cane Saggio @bardolino.bsky.social · 01/06/2025I just had a vision of that Oval Office ambush when Tr*mp accused Zelenskyy of having "no cards". Zelenskyy must have sat there smiling inside, thinking, "You've no fucking idea what cards I've got you dumb moron". 11107
Reposted by Barry KellyMatej Balog @matejbalog.bsky.social · 14/05/2025Announcing AlphaEvolve, our new LLM coding agent that has - made new scientific discoveries - discovered algorithms that are now deployed at Google (in Gemini, Transformers, TPU hardware design & data centers) Blog: deepmind.google/discover/blo... White paper: storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-med...deepmind.googleAlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithmsNew AI agent evolves algorithms for math and practical applications in computing by combining the creativity of large language models with automated evaluators 511539
Reposted by Barry KellyEthan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 06/05/2025Thanks to this anonymous user, I now have preferred terms for output tokens and thinking tokens: “yap” and “juice.” Future model cards should include yap & juice statistics. Now we just need as good a term for the size of the context window. 3424
Barry Kelly @barrkel.bsky.social · 02/05/2025You can't out-Nazi the Nazis. Awareness of how the dynamic plays out in practice isn't widespread, I think. 000
Reposted by Barry KellyThe Isaac Who Came In From the Butler @isaacbutler.bsky.social · 08/04/2025So the Supreme Court’s strategy seems pretty clearly to be forestall admitting we have a constitutional crisis by giving Trump huge victories on narrow procedural grounds. This is akin to having engineers move the Rubicon River closer and closer to Rome to avoid Caesar crossing it. 322297563
Reposted by Barry KellyMichael Pettis @michaelpettis.bsky.social · 04/04/20251/2 Amid all the huffing and puffing, Brown University's Mark Blyth takes a longer view: "Ending the current system will be massively disruptive, no doubt, and the prospect of... prosyn.org/rFWknNOprosyn.orgTrump, Tariffs, and the Fate of the Dollar | by Mark Blyth - Project SyndicateMark Blyth argues that America’s protectionist policies reflect a global economic reordering that was already underway. 12813
Reposted by Barry KellyMihnea @miyhnea.bsky.social · 14/02/2025Putin's not anti-immigration! It was the thing that made him unpopular among even the real ethno-nats and why Libs like Navalny picked it up because how salient it was. Immigration from CA is massive and the border is effectively "open" 7436
Reposted by Barry KellyPopehat @kenwhite.bsky.social · 14/01/2025Mom would have been 82 today. She died at 55. I recently realized that I am now older than she ever was, which seems like a fundamental wrongness in the universe. I was particularly thinking about her penchant for taking a direct and vivid role in her schools’ disciplinary approaches. /1 2697427337
Barry Kelly @barrkel.bsky.social · 30/12/2024I want two dimensional restaurant ratings. One for how refined the food and experience is, the other for how good it is within this dimension. You don't go to the best pizza place for fine dining. But pizza is easy. Sit down dining with a wine menu can be hard to pin down from reviews alone. 010
