Valentin's musings

Last April I went to see the movie Michael about Michael Jackson, which I liked very much.

2025 apparently was the "year of agents".

The Monty Hall problem was keeping me awake last night.

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 me…

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.

I gave up this book about 1/4 through (the "rise part", basically).

I remember how much, about 10-15 years ago, Elon Musk was praised on social media and, to some degree, by journalists.

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.

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:…

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).

This is a book written by a Navy captain that took command of the USS Santa Fe in the late 90s.

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.

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).

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.

We tend to underestimate combinatorial explosion.

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.

Fooled by Randomness explains how we attribute meaningful narratives to series of events which were, in fact, random.

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.

Oppenheimer is being released next week.

If you suffer from being too hard on yourself, chances are that your mistakes tend to become a burden.

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

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.

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

The following is a transcript of a conversation between me and ChatGPT.

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 following is a transcript of a conversation between me and ChatGPT.

The following is a transcript of a conversation between me and ChatGPT.

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.

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 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…

I've read Antifragile from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and it was quite interesting.

I've read Pride and Prejudice from Jane Austen, and I've read it passionately.

AI should be called MA, for Mental Automation.

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...

Once upon a time, I didn't care about sound quality.

Two years ago, I recreated the opening sequence of Midnight in Paris (some 60 sixty shots in various Paris spots).

Chess engines: In average, there are 35 legal moves available when it's someone's turn to play.

Last November I watched The Queen's Gambit, and it was excellent enough to motivate me to learn chess.

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…

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 e…

I work 40h per week, which means that I spend 24% of my living time working.

Very informative article from The Atlantic.

A common technique to try to predict the future is to think about technology.

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 |…

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.

One of my activities during the lockdown here in France is trying to predict how much time will the lockdown last.

Can we prove or disprove the existence of god?

If you want to release energy, then you need to give some force the opportunity to work.

My external hard drive is connected to my Raspberry Pi, which itself is connected to my TV via HDMI.

The fact that 1 + 1 = 2 is not an axiom of the Peano arithmetic, but it is fairly easy to demonstrate.