Context by Barry

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Latest — 25 Jun 2026

On religion and control

What I’ve realized is that in a lot of respects, religion puts the ball back at your court. Let me start from the very beginning. I’ve always thought about religion as a kind of salve, something you fall back on when you’re out of options. But now

More issues

Can you price a bike lane into car insurance? I tried.

A rabbit-hole into whether protected cycling infrastructure is priced into insurance. I was first drawn to this topic by the apparently obvious claim that protected bicycle infrastructure should have positive effects on pedestrian fatalities, and general road deaths. Many of the claims floating around assert perfunctorily that more protected bicycle

Cyber Selloff: No Market Leak

On 7 April 2026, Anthropic announced Claude Mythos Preview, its cybersecurity-focused model, and Project Glasswing, its partnership program to use Mythos to improve defensive cybersecurity capabilities. The firm stated that this model was capable of diagnosing cybersecurities risks far beyond human ability. Their frontier model, Claude Mythos Preview, was too

The Black Wall

Your first. Recall when you were enchanted by their hair, or the tinkle of their laugh, or even just a smirk in your direction was enough to send your heart soaring? Were these moments punctuated by the choice of the next best token you could predict? At the gumball core

May 2026 Budget

On the May 2026 budget on the tuesday evening when it came out, commentators were barking about the disagreeability of the budget to their particular point of view. But, the headline objections are the wrong ones, and don't explore the real second-order effects. We should instead expect to

I Trained a Chatbot to Talk Like Me

I wanted to create a chatbot that spoke closely to how I would talk. Sometimes, you just don't want to bother with sending messages, and wonder if it would be possible to somehow replicate your own voice with this. My initial question was, where was the data? I

Same regression, four languages: Rust, Python, JavaScript, R on Australian car prices

Most language benchmarks are comparing ecosystems while pretending to compare languages. They tell you whether pandas is faster than dplyr, whether ml-matrix is faster than nalgebra, whether one set of bindings into BLAS is tighter than another. None of those answers is about the language; the language sits underneath, mostly

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Context by Barry

Thoughts, stories and ideas.

Topics

AI

Benchmarks

ML

Programming languages