Kit Barron

CTO @ Farmers Business Network (FBN) - Building the Amazon for Agriculture, powered by geospatial data and AI.

[spor @sporadica]

can someone at Spotify explain to me what in the hell they are doing with 45 hundred production deploys a day

the website that doesn’t change at all until once a year they give you some basic ass crappy data about the songs you listened to???

[AI at Meta @AIatMeta]

We’re sharing the next major milestone in our non-invasive brain-to-text decoder research: Brain2Qwerty v2.

Building on v1, which was published today in @Nature, Brain2Qwerty v2 is the highest-performing end-to-end pipeline capable of real-time sentence decoding from raw brain signals. It advances beyond character-level performance to decoding words and semantics, enabling accuracy for overall communication.

We believe this research has the potential to make a real difference for the millions of people who suffer from brain lesions or disorders that prevent them from communicating.

🧵👇

[Boris Cherny @bcherny]

As engineering, product, design, DS, etc. melt into a new kind of role, I was reflecting on what roles might look like in the future. For example, when I look at the Claude Code team I see what I think is five archetypes:

1. Prototyper: comes up with brand new ideas; churns out many ideas, most of which don't ship
2. Builder: quickly turns a prototype/idea into production-grade product/infra
3. Sweeper: cleans up the UI, simplifies the code and system, unships, optimizes performance
4. Grower: takes a product that has been built and iterates on it to improve Product-Market Fit
5. Maintainer: owns a mature system to make it secure, reliable, fast, and efficient as it scales

Many people span across 2 roles, and sometimes 3 roles. I also notice that these roles are not really tied to job function -- eg. across Anthropic, some designers match category 1, some 2, some 3; same for engineers, PM, DS.

A healthy team needs a mix of these, depending on the product:

- A product that is new and pre-PMF needs people that are strong at 1+2+3
- A product that is growing and has found PMF needs 2+3+4 and some 5
- A product that has strong PMF needs 3+4+5 and some 2

Maybe product roles of the future will look more like this, and less like the domain-specific roles of today?

[Eli Mernit @mernit]

7am flight out of SFO

- Leave house 1h before flight leaves
- 13 min Uber to airport, views of the Bay
- TSA agent smiles asks if you like the Grateful Dead
- Ads for AI agents that cure cancer
- Multiple food options spanning global cuisines
- 2 min walk to gate
- Get upgraded to business class
- Depart 5 min early

7am flight out of JFK

- Leave house 3h before flight leaves
- 73 minute Uber to airport, bumper to bumper traffic
- TSA agent hates you
- Ads for underwear
- No food options besides Jamba Juice and hardboiled eggs
- 17 min walk to gate
- Get downgraded to seat next to bathroom
- Depart 2 hours late

[Aaron Levie @levie]

AI regulation is far less simple than it looks. It’s prisoners dilemma at insane scale.

In theory if all leading AI labs globally agreed to the same process of review and slow down, then we’d get frontier intelligence at similar rates and it diffuses relatively evenly.

If the US remains at the frontier at all times, and has heavy regulation on the release of intelligence then we end up with an economic and geopolitical edge because we can control who has access to frontier intelligence.

If we delay model releases, however, and another player - specifically China - doesn’t slow down and has equally strong models (not now but soon?) then our delays end up advantaging their models and eventually their tech stack.

Now, the US could ban these models, but that actually only puts the US at a steeper disadvantage because other countries won’t have those bans. Then, from a relative competitiveness standpoint the US has now fallen behind even though it started in front.

So, none of this is as simple as it looks. At some point it’s a simple bet of can closed models remain at the frontier in perpetuity or is there a risk of any other player or market catching up or just not falling behind.

[Wonder of Science @wonderofscience]

A size comparison of 80 moons of Jupiter with Manhattan for scale.

📽: MetaBallStudios

[Chris @ChrissGPT]

Mid journey unveils the future of medical scanning:

"Less than a dozen of these machines operating together at full speed can do more full body scans than every MRI machine together on Earth. Our goal is to build a fleet of 50,000 of these scanners, capable together of doing a billion scans a month—enough to bring full body imaging to everyone on Earth."

Using thousands of specialized transducers, this prototype system shoots ultra-precise sound waves through the body at over 1,400 meters per second. As these sonic vibrations echo back, they are captured in data streams of 17 gigabytes per second, measuring changes finer than the width of an atom. A massive 2-petaflop compute ring then merges these thousands of sub-images to map out a highly detailed, 3D internal anatomy of organs and tissues in just 60 seconds.

"This is a new kind of infrastructure. It’s Full Body Ultrasonic Computational Tomography. No such device has ever been built until now, and yeah, we’re calling it the Midjourney Scanner."

My favorite quote from David, was that they want this to be a feel like a genuinely “nice” experience, not a “going to the doctor experience” they’re going to put these inside mid journey spas!

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Rough estimate on $ productivity lost by Fable 5 ban: $12M per hour

Frontier AI-coding daily actives, mid-2026: 5M devs
Fully-loaded cost: $90/hr

Work routed to Fable in 48 hours: 17.8%
Fable is on average ~15% more productive

Effective throughput loss per dev = 17.8% × 15% ≈ 2.7% of output

2.7% × $90/hr = ~$2.40/dev/hr × 5M devs = $12M per working hour

[roon @tszzl]

As a result of a US government directive, McDonalds is suspending access to the Big Mac for all customers. You can continue to eat all other McDonald’s burgers.

[Cole Vandaele @cole_Vandaele]

Soybean field took a beating in last nights storm. Good chunk of the field looks like this, stems kinked off or completely snapped above cotyledons. Anyone have experience with this? Will they recover?

[Danny Assman @DannyAssman]

Never had slugs before. Here we are. Anyone got a good way to stop them from getting more? Seems to be getting worse by the day.

[signüll @signulll]

in today's keynote, apple produced this really interesting graphic that ironically outlines the core mechanics for a new type of operating system (for perhaps a new class of devices).

you can see how this moves the world from an app based ecosystem to an intent centric world.

i.e. you roughly do not need third party applications in this world at all esp when ai has the ability to construct & deconstruct interfaces / experiences on demand.

[Kit Barron @kitbarron]

@harris Muckspreader

[Atlas Press @realAtlasPress]

C.S. Lewis, this is what life boils down to at the end of the day

[Colin McCarthy @US_Stormwatch]

One of the most insane thunderstorm I’ve ever seen just rolled through Davis, California.

Local weather stations recorded nearly 0.50” of rain in 5 minutes. Temperature dropped over 20 degrees down from 70s to high 40s.

[Kit Barron @kitbarron]

@TJGameDev this looks dope!

[Kit Barron @kitbarron]

@CharlotteAlter Don’t worry.

All you need to do before your next anniversary is create a soul.md file, ramp up your context window and build some agentic recursive self improvement memory loops.

[Owen Lewis @is_OwenLewis]

Okay folks, this qualifies as BREAKING NEWS!

Harold “Sonny” White, the warp drive pioneer behind NASA’s EagleWorks Lab, just stepped out of stealth with Casimir Inc. to unveil MicroSPARC: the first battery free chip to harvest continuous electrical power straight from the quantum vacuum via the Casimir force.

The 5 mm × 5 mm device uses millions of custom microscale Casimir cavities fabricated on a substrate. Inside each cavity, two fixed conductive walls create a region of negative vacuum pressure (the well known Casimir effect). Stationary micropillars anchored in the middle act as antennas. Electrons from the cavity walls then quantum tunnel to the pillars because the interior is a lower energy “quieter” zone — and the probability of tunneling back is orders of magnitude lower. This one way “quantum ratchet” flow generates a measurable DC current with no external power source or moving parts.

Prototypes already fabricated at university nanofab facilities (Texas A&M AggieFab, MIT.nano) have been tested in RF-shielded, low noise chambers for weeks. The team reports outputs ranging from millivolts to volts at picoamp to microamp levels using precision electrometers and Kelvin Probe Force Microscopy. Target performance for the first commercial chip: ~1.5 V at 25 µA (≈40 µW continuous). Stacking and scaling could reach milliwatts or even watts per device.

Initial applications are ultra low power: always on IoT sensors, wearables, and medical implants. Longer term roadmap includes trickle charging phones, powering small electronics, and eventually grid independent homes or EVs. Commercialization is targeted for 2028, starting at ~$100/W before dropping toward $10/W.

White ties the work directly to his earlier theoretical paper on emergent quantization from a dynamic vacuum and sees it as a practical power source for the deep-space missions he’s long championed.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and independent scientists have so far declined public comment. But if the engineering scales as hoped, MicroSPARC would represent a genuine paradigm shift: continuous, maintenance free power drawn from the fabric of spacetime itself.

A bold leap from warp-drive theory into real hardware. Progress (and vacuum-powered chips) marches on.

Photo: MicroSPARC | Casimir Inc.

Source: https://t.co/11tlwNSf71

[frankie @FrankieIsLost]

Frog put the shares in an SPV. “There,” he said. “Now we can transfer these shares freely”

“But Anthropic can still exercise its transfer restrictions” said Toad.

“That is true,” said Frog.

[Kit Barron @kitbarron]

@yacineMTB But can they live off of worms and nectar?