Colin Carroll's Avatar

Colin Carroll

@colcarroll.bsky.social

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

2,192 Followers  |  497 Following  |  79 Posts  |  Joined: 18.10.2023  |  2.2805

Latest posts by colcarroll.bsky.social on Bluesky

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.

03.09.2025 22:14 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 0    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Video thumbnail

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_...

22.06.2025 15:36 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 118    ๐Ÿ” 50    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 7    ๐Ÿ“Œ 8

Chad! This is a very confused โค๏ธ.

28.05.2025 22:15 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 1    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

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...

16.05.2025 22:07 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 2    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

Jinx!

13.05.2025 00:22 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 1    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Page not found error

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Page not found!

13.05.2025 00:22 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 3    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

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.

06.05.2025 17:52 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 1    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

bsky.app/profile/colc...

06.05.2025 14:54 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 1    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Updating my website with an LLM

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?

06.05.2025 13:29 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 4    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 1
Colin Carroll

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

25.04.2025 20:17 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 8    ๐Ÿ” 1    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

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.

17.04.2025 00:01 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 4    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 1

...I think I just heard it go by.

04.04.2025 18:04 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 1    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

Should I be watching for a flyover?

04.04.2025 18:01 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 0    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

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.

20.03.2025 21:25 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 0    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

I guess it makes sense: if a number has n zeros in a row, twice that number has at least n-1?

20.03.2025 21:16 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 0    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

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)

20.03.2025 21:15 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 2    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

Get some sleep, you wacky plotting library!

13.02.2025 02:30 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 0    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Iterated trapezoids

Iterated trapezoids

Koch snowflake

Koch snowflake

Sierpinski triangle

Sierpinski triangle

Dragon curve

Dragon curve

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...

13.02.2025 02:28 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 26    ๐Ÿ” 2    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 1

Time for us all to start studying! This is super well written, and seems super useful.

04.02.2025 19:39 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 4    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

But for multimodal densities, note that the usual adaptation methods can be actively harmful!

02.02.2025 14:03 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 0    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

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.

02.02.2025 14:02 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 0    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

What, print it out on a flat sheet of paper? Who is that going to impress?

29.12.2024 03:34 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 1    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

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 ๐Ÿคท)

20.12.2024 22:13 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 3    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

git commit -m โ€œNo way I am gonna remember I accidentally used a double quote by the time I get to the end of this messageโ€™

11.12.2024 14:26 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 72    ๐Ÿ” 2    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 6    ๐Ÿ“Œ 1
Post image

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!

10.12.2024 19:08 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 20    ๐Ÿ” 5    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1    ๐Ÿ“Œ 1

I will have to practice some hills! ๐Ÿ˜…๐Ÿ”๏ธ

10.12.2024 11:59 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 1    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

Love it! This was my 2023 data, and I guess I got into bike commuting last year...

10.12.2024 03:21 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 6    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 2    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Strava "goals", showing almost the same distance needed for the week as for the year.

Strava "goals", showing almost the same distance needed for the week as for the year.

Could be a very good week.

09.12.2024 17:19 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 0    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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.

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)

09.12.2024 17:10 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 3    ๐Ÿ” 0    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 2    ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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

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

I donโ€™t have Spotify, but I use Strava. So I created my personal Year in Sports Wrapped ๐Ÿšด ๐Ÿ“Š

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...

09.12.2024 09:51 โ€” ๐Ÿ‘ 62    ๐Ÿ” 12    ๐Ÿ’ฌ 9    ๐Ÿ“Œ 4

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