David Barry @pappubahry.com · 26/09/2026"...which sets out an idea I’ve seen several times in prose of various types but never before, I think, in verse — namely that the salvific intervention of God as Christ on earth may take different forms on other planets" vamoul.substack.com/p/a-good-swo... 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 20/09/2026It's overly long, which is typical for an ACX review contest finalist. I didn't love the style but the content was interesting enough to work my way through to the end. The adversarial structure is odd and not very successful. But overall I thought it above average for the contest. 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 20/09/2026I didn't notice the LLM usage in this piece, though I half-see it after reading the scathing comments from people who recognise Claudish: www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-... 101
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 18/09/2026He said he'd do it for $10k: x.com/allTheYud/st...x.comEliezer Yudkowsky (@allTheYud) on X@xlr8harder For $10,000 I will pose in a picture where I and 4 other guys are standing behind Aella, who is sitting on a sofa, with the 5 of us wearing fedoras. 030
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 11/09/2026Good opening pair of recommendations from Facebook today: 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 08/09/2026Reading the vicious fighting over the Navier-Stokes whatever and thinking of the Clara Collier piece on life without work that I read yesterday. asteriskmag.substack.com/p/we-already... 020
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 04/09/2026Incredible post by someone who had an amygdala taken out: www.astralcodexten.com/p/absurd-adv... 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 03/09/2026A long thumbs-up to the National Gallery of Victoria: good place. 151
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 02/09/2026End of a long twelve days at the State Library of Victoria (not shown: requests requiring the Heritage Collections Reading Room): 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 24/08/2026Difficult to walk around the SLV dome because of all the people taking photos blocking the path. 110
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 24/08/2026Melbourne, much like Sydney, has buildings named after financial institutions rather than resource companies. 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 21/08/2026Melbourne sightseeing plan: - the La Trobe Reading Room at State Library Victoria - the Redmond Barry Reading Room at State Library Victoria - the Heritage Collections Reading Room at State Library Victoria - the chess area at State Library Victoria - microfilm scanners at State Library Victoria 020
Reposted by David BarryEthan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 21/08/2026I asked GPT-5.6 Sol to create the most Claude-y possible parody image and what it came up with is pretty great and dead-on. 1323433
Reposted by David BarryArtButMakeItSports @artbutmakeitsports.bsky.social · 21/08/2026Playing Leapfrog (flipped), by Candido Portinari, 1959, 📸 by @jeffhaynesmedia 383168
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 21/08/2026"The rest of the article is spent enumerating all of the modernist writers that the author had ever heard of." 000
Reposted by David BarryUSER WAS BLOCKED FOR THIS POST @blockedforthispost.bsky.social · 20/08/2026Don't forget the LGBT in LGBTESCREAL! 7212
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 10/08/2026Background chess history reading taking me on an unexpected trip to Gallica: gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/b... 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 01/08/2026I remember that post because it's a rare example of seeing someone observe that it was AI-written after I'd read it without noticing it as such. bsky.app/profile/scie... (I think my personal AI detector is a little better now.) 110
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 01/08/2026I've spent a lot of hours at the microfilm scanners lately: pappubahry.substack.com/p/microfilm-... 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 31/07/2026Seventeenth-century annotations of Horace by a school student: vamoul.substack.com/p/can-you-si... 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 29/07/2026Descriptive notation is usually not found in French or with figurines, but French figurine descriptive was sometimes used; very strange to read at first. www.chesshistory.com/winter/winte... (The chess 'bishop' in French is 'fou', jester.) 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 26/07/2026Wood court tennis in the 1985 Davis Cup: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_hF... 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 24/07/20262700chess, now taking a very expansive definition of 2700, tells me that I've fallen more than 14,000 FIDE ranking places in the last 12 months. 010
Reposted by David BarryUSER WAS BLOCKED FOR THIS POST @blockedforthispost.bsky.social · 23/07/2026did u look at my tweets 715438
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 22/07/2026There was once someone who liked cross tables even more than me. 010
Reposted by David BarryBaptiste Coulmont @coulmont.bsky.social · 17/07/2026Marie... Paulette... Pauline... Estelle... Léa. La moitié des bébé filles ont aujourd'hui un prénom qui se termine par le son -a (la suite ici coulmont.com/varia/2026/2... ) Données : @insee.fr Fichier des prénoms, édition 2026 3269
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 21/07/2026The Morning Herald is starting to appear on Trove now! trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/ti... I can recognise the dates and missing pages from the microfilm reels I've gone through. 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 20/07/2026- The Jacobian conjecture counterexample tweet is so funny. - I don't mind a bit of algebra sometimes, but I tried hand-checking it and it started to look very tedious before I gave up one third of the way through writing down the unsimplified determinant. 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 20/07/2026(A library archivist was nearby and walked through the process. It feels slightly comical to have to say that my name is 'pappubahry' as I collect 80-year-old court documents.) 010
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 20/07/2026A fun fact about WA's State Records Office is that you have to make a username to request delivery of records to the State Library's reading room, and then they are filed according to the username. I did not for a moment think to suggest the librarian look under the letter P. 100
Reposted by David BarryArtButMakeItSports @artbutmakeitsports.bsky.social · 19/07/2026Mephisto, by Joaquín Espalter y Rull, 1872, 📸 by Dan Mullan 2682542423
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 15/07/2026It's modified from a chesscom tweet where the fourth panel said (from memory) "Free queen!" with a diagram of a Stafford Gambit trap position after Bg5 Nxe4, or something in that spirit. 020
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 13/07/2026I requested the 1958 UWA calendar from the state library today; the break was from 24 May to 8 June. 000
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 12/07/2026Early impression of GPT-5.6 is that we're back in the bad old days of hallucinations. chatgpt.com/share/6a53a5... 100
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 11/07/2026Jeremy Gaige: "If I had to bet my life on the accuracy of such data, I would rather rely on this book than any other source, and yet remain in considerable fear for my life." 000
Reposted by David BarryGrace @gracekind.net · 09/10/2025My consciousness isn’t phenomenal, but it’s alright 6794
David Barry @pappubahry.com · 08/07/2026When the Sunday Times (re)introduced a chess column in 1964, they put it on the comics page: 000
