Barry Kelly

Yud's buds

It 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

Planners 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.

Mona Khalil, Lebanon’s most well-known sea turtle conservationist, died of her wounds today after being injured by an Israeli strike I feel sick

I never want to see a sharp read again. No more sharp reads.

This "Unethical Guide to Surviving AI Layoffs" by Mo Bitar perfectly captures the current moment www.tiktok.com/@atmoio/vide...

Excellent article (paywall) www.ft.com/content/95f5...

The Matrix was right: the future *is* really full of screens streaming terminal text no one is reading

You need to provide a cetacean for that claim

Great 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...

I like this idea.

If 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/

INBOX: 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.

These 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.

Great thread. The writing looks like it's AI enhanced, but the core ideas and consequences are sound, and it's a concise recitation.

If 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?

Here is the full text of Carney's speech. Very much worth reading. paulwells.substack.com/p/the-carney...

The 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.

Expanding 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.

the 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...

I 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.

1. 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.

Thief 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.

I 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.

2/6 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...

There'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!

the 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...

Nathan 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...

The "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.

a state that cannot enforce consequences for a coup attempt is a state that is going to fail, & so it turned out to be

'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.

Imagine 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.

Misinformation = false or misleading information spread by people who believe it’s true. Malinformation = true information used in misleading or harmful ways.

Media scholar Clare Wardle and colleagues developed a helpful typology: Disinformation = false or misleading information spread deliberately to deceive or manipulate.

This 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!

There'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.

I 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".

Announcing 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...