Tech
Les voitures autonomes peuvent analyser en temps réel des milliers de variables. Elles anticipent les trajectoires d’autres véhicules et prennent des décisions de conduite en quelques millisecondes. C’est une prouesse technologique impressionnante.
Cependant, les voitures que je conduis occasionnellement ne parviennent pas à détecter correctement que mes mains sont sur le volant.
Comment faire confiance aux systèmes pour des décisions critiques quand ils échouent sur des bases fondamentales ? C’est comme avoir un chirurgien de génie qui ne sait pas enfiler ses gants.
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AI is becoming such a bland word.
It reminds me of the Skinner’s Sense of Snow Simpsons’ episode, when kids are stuck at school during a blizzard:
— Marge: This is terrible! How will the kids get home?
— Homer: I don’t know. Internet?
You could reuse that joke with AI, and it would be even better. AI is turning into a vague term, a one-size-fits-all infaillible oracle and authoritative figure, used to address any issue we encounter. What a joke!
Don’t get me wrong, I do not underestimate tools such as ChatGPT and Claude. I use them daily, but I apply judgment to ensure they make sense for the task at hand.
But look at this segment from The Daily Show. “AI says” is becoming the new “studies show”—a phrase that sounds authoritative but often masks lazy thinking. If AI could not find a single instance of Donald Trump using “enigma”, then it must be true: Donald Trump never used the word “enigma”. Then the Daily Show shows Trump saying “enigma” multiple times. This is both hilarious and deeply sad.
Let’s buckle up and get ready to call bullshit on a lot of AI-authority claims in the months and years to come.
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Again, Letterboxd is amazing. Their commitment of web standards allows me to choose my next movie simply by visiting this URL: https://letterboxd.com/dirtyhenry/watchlist/on/favorite-services/type/stream/by/shuffle/.
This link filters my watchlist to show only the movies available to streaming services I subscribe to, and randomizes the order. My strategy? I just pick the first movie that appears. It’s that simple.
I like losing the context of when or why I added a movie to my watchlist. I trust that my past self picked these films for a reason. This approach saves me time and helps me avoid indecision.
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After a clean macOS reinstall, running a web project using the canvas package (via react-pdf) failed with the following error:
Cannot find module '../build/Release/canvas.node'
Many occurrences online suggested that fixing this only required to reinstall the package but it turns out that in my case, a Python library was missing:
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils'
It turns out what fixed the error was:
pip install setuptools
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Aujourd’hui, je vois des publicités pour Instagram où la plateforme prétend jouer un rôle dans la législation européenne sur l’accord parental pour les téléchargements sur l’App Store. Les potards de pompiers pyromanes sont à 11 chez Meta. 💻 × 🏛️
My tech blog is now located at https://mickf.net/tech/.
For the last 15 years or so, I used the hostname bootstragram.com, but I grew tired of the name. It brings back stressful memories that make me clench my teeth. I prefer to consolidate all my online presence under mickf.net from now on. I have completed the most part of the redirection tasks and will finalize the details in the coming weeks.
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I am not a frequent user of Instagram. I visit occasionally because some of my favorite people and places only post there. I noticed that the platform has shifted from square previews to rectangle previews. If I were a heavy user, this change would have driven me crazy. I remember how some people used to be creative with their posts, creating really cool feeds filled with square previews. Instagram threw away all that effort.
Instagram users: it’s never too late to leave. Pixelfed — or Micro.blog — are very solid fediverse alternatives.
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Here is my Year in Review from Letterboxd for 2024.
I love Letterboxd and have been using it since 2012. It has improved continuously over time. I also appreciate their commitment to web standards. Just look at the RSS feed icon on any user’s diary! 🍿 × 💻
The trick that made Mickey Mouse famous: a fascinating video by Phil Edwards explains how optical sound technology contributed to the success of the first Mickey Mouse cartoon by achieving perfect sound synchronization. 🍿 × 💻
oplets you manage 1Password from the command-line. (…) Its killer features is theop runsubcommand, which can dynamically inject secrets from your 1Password vault into your application’s environment. Instead of storing sensitive values directly in your.envfile, you reference them using specialop://URLs.
Smart. Replacing secrets by references also means that backups are easier. I also wonder if we could define a URL scheme for keychain items URL instead of op to fetch secrets. 💻