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Colin Carroll

@colcarroll.bsky.social
2.3K followers 500 following 79 posts

Runner, biker, hiker. Software engineer @DeepMind, and open source enthusiast. Sometimes crafts things out of wood. he/his.

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Reposted by Colin Carroll
Kyle Cranmer @kylecranmer.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
🤯“I tasked 16 agents with writing a Rust-based C compiler, from scratch, capable of compiling the Linux kernel. Over nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and $20,000 in API costs, the agent team produced a 100,000-line compiler that can build Linux 6.9 on x86, ARM, and RISC-V.”
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Reposted by Colin Carroll
Leland McInnes @lelandmcinnes.bsky.social · 22/06/2025
Explore Wikipedia through a data map. Pages are grouped by semantic similarity, for topic clusters. Hover to see details, zoom to explore more fine-grained topics, click to go to a page. Search by page name to find interesting starting points for exploration. lmcinnes.github.io/datamapplot_...
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
Ok, first new blog post in 6 years, about updating my website with the help of an LLM: colindcarroll.com/blog/llm_blo... maybe I will write about statistics again next?
colindcarroll.com
Updating my website with an LLM
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 25/04/2025
I updated my website! It is now just html and css. Possible blog post coming of the experience of updating it. Lots of fun older blog posts and newer projects are highlighted. colindcarroll.com
colindcarroll.com
Colin Carroll
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 17/04/2025
College sports (5k and 10k on the track!) prepared me for the real world by letting me know 1,000 seconds is 16:40. If it takes you 16:40 to run a 5k, that's ~5:20/mi, or exactly 5m/s. Surprisingly useful for mental math, like when something (presumably stan) takes 168 minutes.
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 20/03/2025
Playing with integers: 2^1491 is the smallest power of 2 with 5 contiguous 0's. 2^1492 is the first with 6. This note is too narrow to contain the numbers (they have 449 and 450 characters)
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
Everything's crazy, so I implemented fractals in @matplotlib.bsky.social. Getting the transform API right, and figuring out how to repeatedly apply a function in Python were the hard parts. colab here if you want to try it out: colab.research.google.com/drive/10mzOt...
Iterated trapezoidsKoch snowflakeSierpinski triangleDragon curve
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 04/02/2025
Time for us all to start studying! This is super well written, and seems super useful.
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
I used to have a bot that would reply to this whenever a different major paper used the word first. Might be time to resurrect it! (It was booted for being a bot 🤷)
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Reposted by Colin Carroll
Jon Kuperman @jonkuperman.com · 11/12/2024
git commit -m “No way I am gonna remember I accidentally used a double quote by the time I get to the end of this message’
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Reposted by Colin Carroll
Ferran Alet @ferranalet.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
Excited to share our new Nature paper on probabilistic weather forecasting today @neuripsconf.bsky.social! I'll be presenting at the DeepMind booth 1pm Vancouver time. I'll be at NeurIPS the whole week. If you're interested in AI for Science and sustainability, feel free to reach out for a chat!
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
Love it! This was my 2023 data, and I guess I got into bike commuting last year...
My 2023 in running and riding.
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
Could be a very good week.
Strava "goals", showing almost the same distance needed for the week as for the year.
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Reposted by Colin Carroll
Lisa Hornung @lisahornung.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
I don’t have Spotify, but I use Strava. So I created my personal Year in Sports Wrapped 🚴 📊 Got Strava and want your own? No problem, I turned it into an app year-in-sports.streamlit.app Made in #python using #streamlit + #matplotlib, full code: github.com/Lisa-Ho/year...
Visualisation of Strava activities during 2024. Visual shows a calendar view of 2024 with months going across, days going down and activities shown as dots or circles for each day they happened. Bar charts on the right show the total number of activities by type (top three), total distance per month and total moving time per month
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Reposted by Colin Carroll
Alex Lew @alexlew.bsky.social · 08/12/2024
If you're interested in a PhD at the intersection of machine learning and programming languages, consider applying to Yale CS! We're exploring new approaches to building software that draws inferences and makes predictions. See alexlew.net for details & apply at gsas.yale.edu/admissions/ by Dec. 15
Probabilistic and differentiable programming at Yale — fully funded PhD positions starting Fall 2025! Apply by Dec. 15.

Do a PhD at the rich intersection of programming languages and machine learning.
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
There's a lot of room for some incredible incremental improvements using LLMs today! Give it a try! I get frustrated hearing claims about llms solving every problem (soon!), and people pointing out they don't (now!).
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Reposted by Colin Carroll
Jack Parker-Holder @jparkerholder.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
Introducing 🧞Genie 2 🧞 - our most capable large-scale foundation world model, which can generate a diverse array of consistent worlds, playable for up to a minute. We believe Genie 2 could unlock the next wave of capabilities for embodied agents 🧠.
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Reposted by Colin Carroll
Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
thinking of calling this "The Illusion Illusion" (more examples below)
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
Proud I could do a straightedge and compass equilateral triangle without looking it up.
Marked out circle and equilateral triangle for a stool.
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
And here is where I would be since mid-2012! Interestingly, the answer is "about 20miles southwest" of where I started. The southernmost bit was the 2019 Boston Marathon. The two red lines in the west were the 2016 Napa Valley Marathon, and a run from Manchester, NH to Andover, MA.
All of my runs for 12 years, assuming I started each run where I stopped the previous one.
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
Ever wonder where you would end up if you would end up if you started every run where you stopped the last one? I plotted that for my year. Turns out I'd be about 20 miles southeast of my house. Cool that I did the Pemi loop when I was at the most northern point of this "journey"!
A map showing every run I did this year, with colored lines connecting the start to the end of each run, and faint black lines showing the runs themselves.
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Reposted by Colin Carroll
Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 23/11/2024
D&D Combinatorics xkcd.com/3015
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
Similarly, when you try to convert your text into smaller pieces but all it does is tell you to throw yourself in next time, that's a fool of a tookenizer.
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
Allen is a great example of "what are the chances?" never being a rhetorical question.
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Reposted by Colin Carroll
ArviZ @arviz.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
Hello BlueSky! This is the official account for the ArviZ project. We provide FOSS tools for exploratory analysis of Bayesian models in both Python and Julia.
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Reposted by Colin Carroll
Diana Cai @dianarycai.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
Another great seminar today is the Monte Carlo Online Seminar: sites.google.com/view/monte-c... Today's talk is on diffusion models!
sites.google.com
Monte Carlo Online Seminar
Upcoming Seminar Presentations All seminars are on Tuesdays 8:30 am PT = 11:30 am ET = 4:30 pm London = 5:30 pm Paris = 0:30 am Beijing (+1d). Subscribe to our mailing list and calendar for up-to-da...
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
Have a box that actually gets some use. The wood dowel hinge finally gave way. First attempt at a fix failed, but have great hope for attempt #2 (a real hinge).
Broken wood from trying to drill a hole in too small a piece of wood.One hinge mortise chopped, the other marked on a strip of ash.
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 17/11/2024
New feature I'm trying to add is the ability to plot every run you've done, organized by distance. Cool to be able to spot the 1 mile track races at the top, and the Pemi loops at the bottom...
A very tall chart with every run I have done on it, each in a different color based on the distance.
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 17/11/2024
Updating github.com/ColCarroll/s... a little early this year (added some basic CI, typing, ruff, and the smallest tests possible). Here's my year so far... h/t to @matplotlib.bsky.social for this thing working for 6 years with no major changes!
A calendar showing the shape of my run from every day so far this year.
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Reposted by Colin Carroll
Duncan Weldon @duncanweldon.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
What a chart. www.economist.com/interactive/...
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Reposted by Colin Carroll
Kuzman Ganchev @ganchev.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
Wanted to share that Varun Godbole recently released a prompting playbook. The title says prompt tuning, but this is text prompts, not soft prompts. github.com/varungodbole...
github.com
GitHub - varungodbole/prompt-tuning-playbook: A playbook for effectively prompting post-trained LLMs
A playbook for effectively prompting post-trained LLMs - varungodbole/prompt-tuning-playbook
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 08/11/2024
I recently got to work on a fun chapter, and the preprint is now available: arxiv.org/abs/2411.04260 We provide intuitions, examples, and recommendations for running MCMC in a world where GPUs and autodiff exist (like this world!)
arxiv.org
Running Markov Chain Monte Carlo on Modern Hardware and Software
Today, cheap numerical hardware offers huge amounts of parallel computing power, much of which is used for the task of fitting neural networks to data. Adoption of this hardware to accelerate statisti...
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Reposted by Colin Carroll
Jo Wood @jwolondon.bsky.social · 02/11/2024
#30DayMapChallenge Day 2: Lines Thought I'd try experimenting with terrain hachures. Wanted to capture multiple scales of surface form, which conventional hachures are not well suited to. As ever, data, source code and design notes available here: observablehq.com/@jwolondon/t...
A square map composed of many short dark lines orientated in slope direction of a terrain surface. Lines are in three thicknesses - the thickest covering most of the map area with thinner lines only on the steepest slopes. The flat areas to the right and bottom-left of the map have no lines. There is also some faint relief shading over the entire map creating slightly darker regions in the southeast facing slopes and light off-white to pink regions on northwesterly slopes. There is a title in the bottom right corner saying "English Lake District Northern Fells".
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 01/11/2024
Was confused about the construction, so wrote some code, and made some fun images, mostly by pushing the cardiod through a parametric function (instead of a circle, use a lemniscate or trifolium). If I was being careful, I suppose I'd use an arc-length parameterization, but I'm not being careful!
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 31/10/2024
The only implementation I've seen of this (high quality!) sampler:
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Reposted by Colin Carroll
Lucy D’Agostino McGowan @lucystats.bsky.social · 31/10/2024
Boo! livefreeordichotomize.com/posts/2024-1...
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 29/10/2024
Pete says "hey".
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Reposted by Colin Carroll
Andrew Gelman et al. @statmodeling.bsky.social · 29/10/2024
What makes an MCMC sampler GPU-friendly? statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/10/29/w...
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
What makes an MCMC sampler GPU-friendly? | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
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Reposted by Colin Carroll
Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 28/10/2024
New starter pack! go.bsky.app/GZ4hZzu
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 29/12/2023
About 3,000 runs over 10 years, organized by distance.
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Reposted by Colin Carroll
Predrag Gruevski @predr.ag · 07/11/2023
Why did it take months to build this? I can't pay my rent with cargo-semver-checks. I appreciate all donations (♥!), but with a couple of exceptions (♥♥♥!) they've been $1-$5. It adds up to "monthly family dinner" not "rent." Please help me work on it more! github.com/sponsors/obi...
github.com
Sponsor @obi1kenobi on GitHub Sponsors
Predrag is the author and maintainer of cargo-semver-checks, a linter for semantic versioning in Rust that can prevent accidental breaking changes: `cargo semver-checks && cargo publish` Support...
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 05/11/2023
A pond in Massachusetts
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Reposted by Colin Carroll
Peter W🤓 @wang.social · 27/10/2023
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 27/10/2023
Used to be color when we had built-ins! Too hard to do on smaller shelves/cases.
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Reposted by Colin Carroll
Thomas Wiecki @twiecki.bsky.social · 23/10/2023
The future of HMC: Multiscale Generalized Hamiltonian Monte Carlo with Delayed Rejection. Great talk by Bob Carpenter: www.youtube.com/watch?v=p32z... Basic idea: Run HMC, when you get a rejection, run it again but reduce the step-size. That way you can sample from the funnel of hell.
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 22/10/2023
Joinery! I don't know why photos don't upload in any particular order. Just three more to go!
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 21/10/2023
Still no stats, but started a pair of beefy step stools today. Made out of some cherry and mahogany boards I've had for too long. Going to try some fancy joinery on the top...
Two cherry boardsSome stacked pieces of wood, looking like a stoolA big cherry board and a mahogany board
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 20/10/2023
I promise I'm still doing statistics with computers, and hope to post more about that in the future, but in the interest of creating Content, here's a canoe paddle I made this summer out of a cherry board. It took about a month of 30-minutes-at-a-time, and was a lot of fun!
A canoe paddle blade with "Colin Carroll | Somerville, MA" stamped on it.A canoe paddle on a workbench.
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Reposted by Colin Carroll
Popehat @kenwhite.bsky.social · 18/10/2023
Parent: Ask your kid what it is! Other Parent: Never ask a child a question when you don’t know the answer Me: I think that’s actually cross-examination and not kids?
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