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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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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 03/09/2025
I too just upgraded. So far: it is fine! I feel like I could probably have pushed my pixel 7 for another year or two though.
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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 · 28/05/2025
Chad! This is a very confused ❤️.
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 16/05/2025
I was able to try updating my site recently. I (finished! then) wrote it up but the conclusion was similar that getting started was easy, but it took the same total time: bsky.app/profile/colc...
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 13/05/2025
Jinx!
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 13/05/2025
Page not found!
Page not found error
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
I have no heuristics for 19 minutes (except more than 1000 seconds) *or* 19mph (except faster than I can run). Prime numbers are the work of the devil.
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 06/05/2025
bsky.app/profile/colc...
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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 · 04/04/2025
...I think I just heard it go by.
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
Should I be watching for a flyover?
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 20/03/2025
A naive Python program can do this search up to 8 contiguous zeros (2^14007) in about a minute. That's 4217 digits long: 4kb as a string! I wasn't able to find 9 contiguous zeros, letting the program run for 10 minutes, up to 2^70000.
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 20/03/2025
I guess it makes sense: if a number has n zeros in a row, twice that number has at least n-1?
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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
Get some sleep, you wacky plotting library!
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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 · 02/02/2025
But for multimodal densities, note that the usual adaptation methods can be actively harmful!
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 02/02/2025
We mostly focus on scaling out to lots of chains or huge log likelihoods. Some of the ensemble chain adaptation methods, and some intuitions for designing algorithms for accelerators might be useful to think about.
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 29/12/2024
What, print it out on a flat sheet of paper? Who is that going to impress?
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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
I will have to practice some hills! 😅🏔️
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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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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
This is so cool! I've got a similar project at github.com/ColCarroll/s.... Will add a link to yours (if that's ok!), since getting the bulk export seems like the annoying part. (Mine also targets runners, not bikers, so you'd have to futz a bit to make it work)
github.com
GitHub - ColCarroll/strava_calendar: Visualizations from Strava data in matplotlib
Visualizations from Strava data in matplotlib. Contribute to ColCarroll/strava_calendar development by creating an account on GitHub.
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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
Yeah, I guess I still hear different things from academics over how easy it is to get one (or more!) accelerator. A lot depends on how familiar they already are! Some places are still investing in big CPU clusters, which pushes those methods away from most industry approaches, too.
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
How easy is it for you to get the infrastructure and tools to "try something out"? Honest question! When I was getting into mcmc, if I couldn't run it on my laptop, I wouldn't run it at all...
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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 · 01/12/2024
... is that an ok thing to do? I have an impression you have Knowledge about coffee, so don't lead me astray here! Follow-up q: nutmeg?
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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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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
What wood is this? Can you get something that patterned and (I assume!) stable at a normal lumberyard?
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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 · 19/11/2024
Those all look like my house.
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Colin Carroll @colcarroll.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
Diesel!
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