Barry Kelly

Software engineer & architect, data specialist, ex-compiler guy. Currently at large advertising and search co. Opinions my own. @barrkel.bsky.social

[Barry Kelly @barrkel]

@rickasaurus It would need WSL2 and a great terminal.

[César A. Hidalgo @cesifoti]

Europe is one of the best places in the world to live, but one of the hardest places to build and scale a company.

After 5+ years in France, following 16+ in the US, I have a conflicted admiration for Europe.

On the one hand, Europe has great potential. When I lived in the US, I was skeptical of the European quality-of-life argument. But after getting used to Sunday morning markets, walkable cities, and 4.5 meter ceilings, I get it. There are things that you simply cannot import or experience as a tourist.

These things can make Europe very attractive for creative and intellectual work. I honestly believe some parts of Europe are the “best neighborhood” in the planet. But that’s not the full story.

I am not only a husband and a dad. I am also an entrepreneur. I founded a company in the US 12+ years ago that has offices in the US and Chile and clients throughout the world. I live in France, yet I have not opened a subsidiary here. That is telling.

We once hired someone in France through one of those remote employment platforms. The person received about 5,000 euros net per month, which is considered a very good salary here. But the total cost to the company was closer to 13,000 per month.

That makes hiring feel less like a relationship between a company and a worker, and more like renting someone from the state. At the same time, you take an enormous amount of legal and administrative responsibility. The presumption is that all companies should operate like a 1960s car manufacturer. The response is simple. Don’t set up operations in Europe.

But this is not a remote-work story. I know many small entrepreneurs in France who do not want to cross the threshold from being a one-person activity to becoming an employer. They sometimes refuse a new customer to stay small and avoid the obligations that come with hiring one person. That should worry us.

Many social protections here are described as being provided by the state, but in practice, a lot of the cost and complexity of the implementation falls on the administrative shoulders of entrepreneurs. That is reasonable for a large energy company or bank. But for a small business, it is the difference between an entrepreneur waking up on a Monday to think about product or paperwork.

Growth is not the enemy of the European social model. It is what enabled it. Much of the quality of life we enjoy here today dates back to growth incubated in the past. Growth that is increasingly hard to find. France once led frontier industries, like bicycles in the 1860s, cinema in the 1890s, and aviation and automobiles soon after. Since then, Europe built a more humane social model. But that model was built on the assumption that Europe and the US were the only two rich and industrialized places in the world.

That is no longer true. Global competition in the 21st century is not what it used to be 50 years ago, and the padding built to protect us, may have grown into the handbrake that constrains the growth of the small and flexible firms we need to compete in new frontier sectors.

We should be able to be critical about Europe in our own terms, without comparing ourselves to the US or China. Innovative parts of Europe, like Sweden or Switzerland, operate differently and provide clues. Sweden has embraced a dynamic of capitalization in its pension system for a long time in a continent where fewer people buy stocks. Switzerland, a place that shares an enormous amount of geography and culture with its neighbors, is built in part on strong internal competition among its cantons.

But neither can light a candle to a French open-air market on a Sunday morning. A market where cash is king, and for a reason.

Europe may be the best place in the world to live. But it is also one of the most challenging places to build and scale an innovative activity. The goal is not to weaken the European model. But to get to a place where we can lead again by example. The world will follow us, but only if we are ahead.

[Barry Kelly @barrkel]

@wydanshu @DemzDeliver Holy hypothetical batman!

[Barry Kelly @barrkel]

One for the department of simple, wrong answers.

[Founders Inc @fdotinc]

They reinvented the hearing aid by studying the human ear

Normal hearing aid: $4700

Theirs: $20

[Barry Kelly @barrkel]

@InfiniteJulian0 It doesn't do what hearing aids do at all - it wouldn't work for my hearing, and I expect it wouldn't work for many if not most people's hearing.

[Barry Kelly @barrkel]

@arishs24 This looks like it just does uniform amplification. That's not what hearing aids do. They boost the frequencies you can't hear, and leave the others alone.

[Barry Kelly @barrkel]

@rickasaurus It would be stuffed with almonds presumably

[Barry Kelly @barrkel]

@rickasaurus FWIW, I don't recognize Steve's description in my org.

[Barry Kelly @barrkel]

@fchollet The graph isn't quite a random walk; you've effectively added momentum to it ("persistence"). That probably models stock movements a little bit better, but it's not a pure random walk.

[Barry Kelly @barrkel]

@patio11 Heroics being bad or not has nothing to do with compensation.

[Barry Kelly @barrkel]

@patio11 Heroics suppresses a pain signal that an organization needs in order to adapt. It can be different if heroics are being applied to maintain a steady state, but heroics can inhibit adaptation when things are ramping up.

[Barry Kelly @barrkel]

@mentalgeorge Society would fall apart if people were not mostly moral. This isn't an either/or situation. You need both: hard rules to guard against deviance and set a perimeter on permissible action, and fundamentally moral action so that rules don't need to be harshly illiberal.

[Barry Kelly @barrkel]

@0xluffy It's ironic that they talk about releasing it early for cyber defense, and yet the leak seems to be down to poor cyber defense practices.

[Barry Kelly @barrkel]

@full_kelly_ @eliebakouch It's not token efficiency, it's move efficiency, to guard against brute force strategies.

Models can generate as many tokens as they like.

[Barry Kelly @barrkel]

@VictorTaelin API prices have huge margin. The plans almost certainly don't subsidize anyone except the heaviest users; most people won't max out their quota day in day on a weekly basis.

[Barry Kelly @barrkel]

@paulnovosad @Scholars_Stage It's more than that. The more ICE is reviled by the people, the more ICE members need to side with their masters and obey them, to save their own hides.

[Barry Kelly @barrkel]

@Scholars_Stage You're mistaking the goal and the means. The goal isn't deporting immigrants. The means - an army of violent thugs - is the goal: having what effectively amounts to a domestic army with blood on its hands, so that it needs to side with the authoritarians, and not with the people.

[Barry Kelly @barrkel]

@EMostaque You want to be looking for côte de boeuf, not tomahawk steak. Try Bouchon Racine.

If you want a steakhouse, I can't save you.

[Barry Kelly @barrkel]

@Miyhnea It can go the other way. It can be that incumbents in a more functioning country can leverage their weight to suppress competition and protect monopolistic rents.

[Barry Kelly @barrkel]

@rickasaurus Hitting the ground running as a senior IC can be tough if the tech stack is different. And some tech stacks are very different.