Recent content on Christian Jauvin
Cet article a aussi été publié sur mon Substack . Dans le contexte de la révolution en cours dans le monde de l’IA, on peut parfois avoir l’impression que les néologismes apparaissent de manière trop rapide et désordonnée, et qu’il est difficile de suivre leur évolution. Le fait que ces néologismes apparaissent tout d’abord en anglais n’aide pas, car la plupart…
This article has been posted to my Substack also. Consider these situations: You want to write a novel Someone asks you what is the capital of Norway Someone asks you how you feel today Someone is telling you that their program has a bug Suppose that you would want to write a classic program (GOFAI-style), as an agent able to implement (perform) these four scenarios. How would it work? The first…
When I was studying as a CS undergrad in 1998 at the University of Montreal, every student had a Linux account with a special folder in their $HOME where you could put stuff which would be instantly served on the web. It took me a while to see the beauty of it, because at that time, I didn’t know much about the web and Linux. Fast-forward in 2026, and I now work as a professor at an online…
For some weird reason, I always had some kind of slight “mental hesitation” with the meaning of data encoding versus decoding . Which one goes in what direction? To be honest, I have the same kind of weirdness with other concepts: daylight saving time for instance (are we gaining or losing an hour? I can never tell, sometimes even for many days after a change). So I wanted to create a…
Most often when we think about the difficulties associated with the translation of a language, we are thinking in one direction: you are learning a new language, and it is difficult to translate your own language and thoughts into this new one. This difficulty feels extremely real and visceral, and engages generally with many aspects of your overall cognitive experience: it’s difficult to…
J’expliquais récemment à un ami que ChatGPT, dans son essence, est « juste » un modèle de prédiction du mot suivant, celui qui vient après une suite d’autres mots. Ainsi, quand on lui demande « Quelle est la capitale de la France ? », il ne répond pas (vraiment) à la question : il complète plutôt une séquence de mots sur laquelle il a été entraîné, en profondeur et avec une très grande…
I was explaining to a friend recently that ChatGPT, to its core, is “just” a model to predict the next word, the one coming after a bunch of other words. So when you ask it “What is the capital of France?”, it does not (really) answer your question, it completes a sequence of words on which it has been trained, deeply and efficiently. So considering that, it might seem that…
With VS Code I am writing a lot of Markdown text these days (for instance this Hugo blog) and I’m using two extensions to help with my word processing needs: Code Spell Checker , which has a bunch of dictionaries for many languages (I use French). Auto Correct , which is much more obscure extension (its code has not been updated for many years), which allows to automatically change a word to…
Imagine a situation where a majority effectively has a quiet veto over a change. Not because the status quo truly serves them, but because, for each individual person, it feels simpler to go along with it. Speaking up costs energy. It risks conflict. It can feel embarrassing, or socially unsafe. So something persists that does not really benefit the majority, and yet is still easier, moment by…
Or.. the era of turbocharged goalpost moving The ARC benchmark was designed by François Chollet to serve one goal : be sufficiently difficult, demanding so that it cannot be “hacked” by some “cheating” AI techniques, LLM or whatever. But it must do so in a rigorous, systematic and simple to define way, it cannot be vague or ambiguous. It must be (relatively) easy for a…
Some models of reality are bolder than others Digital physics is the body of mathematical and philosophical work treating the universe and the way it works as a giant digital computer. This is often associated with cellular automata, and names like Konrad Zuse, John Von Neumann, Stephen Wolfram, etc. What I find fascinating about this field is that the models it suggests are making very deep…
Computer Science as a term should simply capitulate and give way to AI In French the term “informatique” feels slightly better, as a label to describe the field, than “Computer Science” feels in English. But this is a rare occurrence for French, because most of the other terms, like “technologie de l’information”, and “science des données”,…
The original idea of AI, that we got mostly through science-fiction, and also a little from the philosophy of mind and logic, imagined an entity that would implement idealized and mechanical notions of thoughts, reasoning and logic. Such an entity would of course know everything there is to know about such topics, and its behavior would thus be rooted in them. Although this would mean that the…
Suppose you’re like me, in the middle of editing a Word document, and you realize that you’re fed up with Word. So you tell it to a colleague, who happily tells you: use pandoc , it can render docx files! So here you go, and you first try to convert this simple markdown: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna…
When I’m doing freelance software development projects and I’m asked how much time things will take, it’s always very hard to answer. It’s a very high dimensional problem, and you have many degrees of freedom: how much should you charge, should you do it per hour or not, if you use AI how should it be factored in the efforts and time you report, what is the separation…
Currently in my car I have the “check engine” light being on, but it’s ok, because I know what is the problem, my mechanic told me that it’s <something> , and that even though it’s not ideal, it can wait while he finds the part to repair it (apparently it’s not so easy to find). There is something I don’t like about this though: if there is a NEW problem…
I’ve been learning Persian (Farsi) for a while now, and I’m using a bunch of tools for it. The central one is certainly Anki , a spaced repetition app to train memory. I’m creating my own never-ending deck of cards, with different types of content, for different purposes. The most frequent type of cards is grammar focused phrases (very rarely single words) coming sometimes from…
I recently spent a lot of time trying to come up with an interactive data grid widget in Streamlit . It needed to be a bit like Excel: the value you enter in a cell should trigger the recomputation of the value in another cell. At first I assumed it would be relatively easy, but given the powerful state management model at the heart of Streamlit, I found out that it wasn’t. State management…
Imagine an alternate history in which AI, in the sense of our current LLMs, had come first. This possibly means that things would have looked much more like they did in the 2001: A Space Odyssey movie: computers having a user interface so powerful that you don’t really need anything else (apart from a set of fancy looking dashboards maybe). But this is not what we got. First we got something…
There’s a cottage industry of AI gurus who extol the virtues of being open about the advent of AI in the enterprise. Don’t be shy about it, AI is powerful enough as it is, and it can already help in the current state of its evolution (mainly, powerful chatbots that have access to certain “tools”, and vendor APIs with which to build some more customized applications, backed…
I was recently thinking about a dimension of intelligence and the mind that might have played a role in my school results of the past, and also my taste for computer programming. When you are taking an exam, careful management of your time might be a very good skill to possess, in the sense that if you are stuck on a given hard question, it might be preferable to rapidly switch on another one,…
3blue1brown recently felt the need to add a supplementary video to its Grover’s algorithm introduction . Apparently, a lot of people have been confused by what I believe is basically just the logical structure of the concept, or why this algorithm is interesting and surprising in the first place. For someone who only knows about classical computing and a little about algorithm complexity,…
I have a friend who wanted to have a quick idea about whether he should use classes and objects for his project. Of course I told him that it depends.. on many aspects. He says that he doesn’t really like tutorials, so here I want to propose something more compact: the skeleton of a Pacman game, just the most basic concepts, without any bells and whistles (so of course not playable, although…