Last April I went to see the movie Michael about Michael Jackson, which I liked very much. Before the movie, my knowledge of Michael Jackson was restricted to knowing a few hits from him ( Beat It and Black or White had rocked a number of my listening sessions when I was a teenager with a short music rotation on my small MP3 player), knowing he was the guy who did the moonwalk, and having a vague…
2025 apparently was the 'year of agents'. After spending a fair share of the year programming with LLMs both for my personal side-projects and at work, I wanted to reflect on my impressions. Those impressions are based on using Cursor with various models (at work), Gemini CLI (personal projects), and Codex CLI (personal projects). Observation 1: Agents are doing waterfall The latest agents are…
The Monty Hall problem was keeping me awake last night. Here is an infographic of how I eventually made sense of the solution. (Drawings courtesy of ChatGPT.) Below the doors is indicated the probability of the door(s) concealing the car.
I originally wanted to write 2 distinct articles, but realized that they shared the same underlying idea: 'Vibe coding', the act of talking to an LLM / LLM-based AI agent to code a full project without writing a line of code manually, is no more than a metaprogramming technique, where a program (the AI agent), produces another program (the code that gets committed). As such, it shares some common…
When we are learning something new, and we struggle with failures, some of us can easily get unmotivated and convince ourselves that we are simply unskilled at what we are trying to learn, and therefore that there is no point in learning it. 'It's useless, I'm not good at it.' Then, there is also the case when you are on the other side of the mirror: When you are (relatively) skilled at something,…
I gave up this book about 1/4 through (the 'rise part', basically). It was just way too long and detailed. Such details lost me and prevented me to understand the most significant events among all the twists and turns. On the other hand, it definitely contains some very interesting annecdotes, some of which contains very symptomatic and important insights about this time period. I have highlighted…
I remember how much, about 10-15 years ago, Elon Musk was praised on social media and, to some degree, by journalists. He was becoming a myth adorned with God-like virtues, because people like to believe such stories and idolize such heroes: a genius engineer, a genius man with a vision for mankind. Someone able to understand everything and to create anything. The real-life Tony Stark! The 'CTO'…
People struggling to find a good definition for 'AGI' (Artificial General Intelligence) seem to forget that we never had a good definition for 'AI' (Artificial Intelligence) to begin with. Historically, the practical usage of AI has been 'anything that we thought we couldn't do with a computer', such as, for example, natural language translation. But now that AI is being integrated into every…
Released todo 5.0.0 Made my first YouTube video Built ratesmovies.net Passed all S licenses with Gold in Gran Turismo 7 Built auto-redactle Wrote 5 articles for this blog Read the Rust book and wrote my first lines of Rust Watched 107 movies Read 7 books: L'autre Fille (Annie Ernaux), Spielberg: The First Ten Years (Laurent Bouzereau), Skin in the Game (Nassim Nicholas Taleb), What Do You Care…
When it comes to testing, I'm a proponent of aiming at 100% code coverage, and I've encountered numerous opinions claiming that such a goal is useless, worthless, idiotic, or merely amusing (and other variations of the 'bad idea' part of the spectrum). I have found out that many critics seem to confuse necessary with sufficient , as if my point was that the '100%' stamp ensures that the code is…
This is a book written by a Navy captain that took command of the USS Santa Fe in the late 90s. He explains that the default model for leading in US submarines is the leader-follower model, where the captain is basically an all-knowing God who is the most expert in everything, and is therefore the one most qualified to give orders down to the minutiae. The model obviously has limits, most notably…
Redactle is a game in which you are presented with a Wikipedia page in which most words are redacted, and you need to find the article's title. You can submit as many words as you want, and if the word you submitted is anywhere in the article, it 'unredacts' all the occurrences of it, so you can progressively comprehend what the article is about by trial and error. I usually start by submitting…
At work I recently needed to demo a project I was leading to our biggest customer (a somewhat famous company totaling tens of thousands of employees). As you can imagine I was a bit stressed out from the moment I learned I would need to do the demo (which was 5 days before), but I used a strategy to mitigate the stress: viewing myself as a character in a sitcom. See, characters in sitcoms go…
There is a common anecdote which consists in stating the likelihood of dying from a falling coconut , and sometimes comparing it to, say, the likelihood of dying from a shark attack . Those probabilities are usually inferred by taking the number of casualties of those bizarre deaths each year, and dividing it by the number of people on Earth, or something like that. If I point my index finger to…
We tend to underestimate combinatorial explosion . For example, there is a somewhat famous anecdote which states that if you shuffle a standard deck of cards, then the sequence of cards you hold in your hand is unique in the history of mankind. Indeed, there are 52! ≅ 10^67 sequences possible, which will yield unique combinations with any good enough shuffle. Another example is the famous XKCD…
I've read several times on social media the idea according to which, for some reason, smartphones are absent from our dreams, and that such a psychological phenomenon ought to be studied and explained. I, for one, can testify that my smartphone is present in some of my dreams, or, more precisely, some of my nightmares. There is a recurring pattern: I'm in a high-pressure situation that requires me…
Fooled by Randomness explains how we attribute meaningful narratives to series of events which were, in fact, random. The book illustrates the idea with the trading world, which the author comes from. He recounts numerous examples of 'foolish' traders unable to see that their fortune, as well as their succeeding downfall, is only the result of randomness, and not of some grand market theory. The…
In 2021, redditor /u/ashtonanderson posted a graph on /r/chess which showed that the more time chess players spent thinking about their next moves, the higher the chance that their move would be a blunder. (A 'blunder' is a costly mistake, something like losing a piece in exchange for nothing.) The explanation given in the Reddit thread, which makes a lot of sense, is that people spend a lot of…
Oppenheimer is being released next week. People on social media are realizing that few cinemas can actually project actual IMAX, and that the vast majority of spectators will therefore watch a cropped version of the IMAX scenes from the movie, since IMAX has the unusually tall aspect ratio of 1.43:1. Hence the viral buzzword 'Croppenheimer'. I don't think it matters much, since Christopher Nolan…
If you suffer from being too hard on yourself, chances are that your mistakes tend to become a burden. That would be rather unfortunate, since you're probably bound to make mistakes all throughout your life. A mistake can make you discouraged with what you're doing by making you (falsely) think that you must be fundamentally bad at it. It can put you in an over-thinking state of trying to figure…
In my last ChatGPT blog post I showed how ChatGPT needs to describe the steps to go to a solution before writing the solution, and has trouble giving the solution beforehand : since the solution is derived from what it has already written, it cannot be just written from 'nothing'. I have since found a smaller exercise on which this can be demonstrated: And the failure to write the answer before…
The Black Swan deals with the problem of induction , that is, the problem of how we can predict the future based on knowledge of the past. The book argues that, as far as the real-world is concerned, we can't, most notably because of Black Swans. Given a series of datapoints which harbor similar properties, a Black Swan is a new datapoint of the series, which is unlike any other existing…
ChatGPT is a fancy auto-complete : what it does is finding the most likely continuation of text for the text it has already printed out (or as a reply for the prompt, when it is starting printing stuff out), according to the large corpus of text it has been trained with. There is a broad limitation of ChatGPT's coherence which is a direct result of it generating tokens according to the tokens it…
The following is a transcript of a conversation between me and ChatGPT . Paragraphs like this are my prompts. Paragraphs like this are replies from ChatGPT. d4 d5 2. Nf3 Nf6 3. g3 Nc6 4. c3 Be6 5. h3 h6 6. Bg2 Qd7 7. O-O O-O-O 8. a4 Bxh3 9. a5 Bxg2 10. Kxg2 a6 11. Nbd2 g5 12. Nb3 Ne4 13. Nbd2 f5 14. Qc2 Bg7 15. Nb3 e5 16. Nc5 Nxc5 17. dxc5 Qe7 18. b4 e4 19. Nd4 Nxd4 20. cxd4 Bxd4 21. Rb1 Rhf8 22.…
When we want to assess the proficiency of someone in a given activity ('how good' this person is), we have 2 ways to measure it, which yield very different results. The first way is to classify the activity by levels of proficiency, and see at which level someone currently belongs. For examples, video games usually have a customizable difficulty ranging from 'Very easy' to 'Very hard'. Someone who…
The following is a transcript of a conversation between me and ChatGPT . Paragraphs like this are my prompts. Paragraphs like this are replies from ChatGPT. Inventors have created a new device that is able to intercept pain and emit an alarm instead. The device is worn next to the ear so that users are sure to hear that something is wrong when they are injured or suffering anything that would…
The following is a transcript of a conversation between me and ChatGPT . Paragraphs like this are my prompts. Paragraphs like this are replies from ChatGPT. Tom is a teenager enjoying a sunny Sunday afternoon by bicycling in the woods. He is alone and following a path he knows well. When he arrives at an oak tree under which one can rest, he stops, puts his bicycle down and rests for a bit. But…
Ce livre explore la question de l'énergie nucléaire, et plus particulièrement celle de l'énergie nucléaire en France, laquelle se repose sur le nucléaire pour 70% de son électricité. Une exception dans le monde, qui est due à un développement extraordinaire dans les années 80. Spoiler alert : à la question posée dans le titre, le livre répond 'Stop'. J'ai trouvé le livre extrêmement bien…
This book was written by Einstein just one year after having published his paper about the general theory of relativity (1915) and 11 years after having published his theory of special relativity (1905). The goal of the book is to explain in simple terms his theories for people who don't have a strong background in maths/physics, but still some basic notions[1]. It's a relatively small book (180…
The more I read books about elite people (people having world-class success in what they do), the more I'm under the impression that they don't even try that hard about what they do; they just work naturally very hard and very effectively, and they happen to be so good that they reach the level they're at. This seems important to me, as it mostly eliminates the whole 'motivational' and 'surpassing…
I've read Antifragile from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and it was quite interesting. The point of the book is that the usual spectrum we consider when pondering fragility, which goes from fragile to robust, is actually only half of a larger spectrum, the missing half going from robust to antifragile. Antifragile systems are systems that explicitly improve when submitted to shocks, errors or mishaps.…
I've read Pride and Prejudice from Jane Austen, and I've read it passionately. The story is about the Bennet family, a family of 5 daughters, whose main goal as young ladies in their era is supposed to be finding a husband. While some of the youngest of the sisterhood seem to be brainwashed by the system, and only desire going to balls and social events in the prospect of finding a husband, the…
AI should be called MA, for Mental Automation. The AI hype seems to be convinced that anything a human accomplishes with his brain is smart, but a lot of mental tasks don't require intelligence. For example, recognizing whether a picture contains a bird or not is a mental task (because it is achieved by our brain, and not our hands or feet), but it doesn't require intelligence; it's just a…
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it. Before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience. Never, never, never, on cross-examination ask a witness a question you don't already know the answer to, was a…
Once upon a time, I didn't care about sound quality. I was buying 10€ earphones at some random tech store, used them until they broke, and then bought a new pair of the same. They provided me with music, which quality was the only quality I knew of. And so I enjoyed life, happily listening to music. At some point, I started to become a bit more serious about music quality. I started with a pair of…
Two years ago, I recreated the opening sequence of Midnight in Paris (some 60 sixty shots in various Paris spots). This year I went again on some movie tracking with Mission Impossible: Fallout , which features a big action segment in Paris. Since Tom Cruise (I'll call him Tom) was busy making the new Mission Impossible, I couldn't get him to work with me on a full recreation, so I settled on…
Chess engines: In average, there are 35 legal moves available when it's someone's turn to play. A skilled human player is able to immediatly spot 3 or 4 moves that are 'plausible' and then study them to elect the one they think is the best. The intelligence that allows them to spot those 3 or 4 candidate moves is not well understood, so the machine has no other choice than studying all the…
Last November I watched The Queen's Gambit , and it was excellent enough to motivate me to learn chess. My only experience with chess then dated back to my teenage years when I looked up the rules of how the pieces moved, tried a few games against the computer in the easiest possible mode, lost all of them, at which point I decided that this game was stupid. But Beth Harmon got me motivated, and I…
I think there is a growing idea in traditional and social media according to which, in the management of the COVID-19 crisis, we are making a trade-off which consists in saving old people's lives, at the cost of very strong restrictions on young people's lives. More precisely, the growing sentiment is that maybe we should reverse the trade-off: old people aren't long away from death anyway, and to…
A common characterization you can find on the Internet of introversion and extraversion is that introverted people consume their energy when they're around other people (and therefore need alone time to recharge) whereas extraverted people consume their energy when they're alone (and therefore need to hang out with others to rejoice). Here I suggest a more sophisticated theory in which both…
I work 40h per week, which means that I spend 24% of my living time working. That number absolutely doesn't mirror the amount of my time it feels work is taking. I can start by excluding sleep from the calculation: I spend 36% of my awakened time working. That still doesn't really feel like it. To be fair the one hour of breakfast and shower before work isn't valuable free time because my mind is…
Very informative article from The Atlantic. TL;DR: The spread of the virus obeys the Pareto principle: something like 80% of the contaminations comes from 20% of the infected. In other words, if in average one infected person contaminates x other people, that x is the average between many 0s and a few big numbers. In other words, the virus spreads in clusters. Such dispersion seems to be the…
A common technique to try to predict the future is to think about technology. We take new technology, such as AI, self-driving cars, neurotechnology, etc, and try to understand how society will be shaped once (if ever) they become industrialized. If we feel even more bold than that, we take a mere idea of a technology (rocket-based transportation on Earth, etc) and try to understand how humans…
Approximately , using whole numbers of units commonly used for each time scale. 1599938520 ||||||||||- every second |||||||||- every 10 seconds ||||||||- every 2 minutes |||||||- every 17 minutes ||||||- every 3 hours |||||- every day ||||- every 12 days |||- every 4 months ||- every 3 years |-every 32 years
One of the most important realizations that I have had about mathematics is the fact that there is no global definition of what 'infinity' is. You can't just drop the word 'infinite' in any context, as if one day mathematicians had a meeting to decide the meaning of 'infinity' and made it an element of reasoning you can use with any mathematical thing. In set theory, a set is 'infinite' if, for…
One of my activities during the lockdown here in France is trying to predict how much time will the lockdown last. The data I'm using comes from here . Below is a plot of the rate of growth of Covid-19 in Hubei, Italy, and France, starting from the day each region has started its lockdown. The rate of growth at a given day is the number of new cases on this day, as a percentage of the number of…
Can we prove or disprove the existence of god? It depends on the exact definition of god, but in many of the traditional religious definitions, god hides himself from proof in order to truly test the faith of believers. In this case, his existence is, by definition, not provable. A relevant question would then be: can something whose existence we cannot prove ('we' as humans) have any impact on…
If you want to release energy, then you need to give some force the opportunity to work. For example, consider a child who is tensing a slingshot. In this state, all forces cancel each other. The force of the child's arm counters the force of the slingshot's elastic. There is no energy released out of this system. But as soon as the child releases the elastic, then the tension force of the elastic…
My external hard drive is connected to my Raspberry Pi, which itself is connected to my TV via HDMI. I have a bunch of videos on my drive which I usually watch on the TV using omxplayer , but sometimes I want to be able to watch them on my laptop. I wanted a simple solution without having to make my Pi a full-fledged NAS . My first attempt was to launch the built-in simple HTTP server of Python…
The fact that 1 + 1 = 2 is not an axiom of the Peano arithmetic , but it is fairly easy to demonstrate. The Peano axioms for natural integers are all based on the notion of 'successor'. The only named integer is zero (0), and then there are five axioms revolving around zero and successors of natural integers. The Peano arithmetic introduces further axioms for various operations on integers. It…