Pretty sure this is wrong. Code pénal, art. 434-25, translated with deepl.
"Any attempt to publicly discredit a judicial act or decision—through actions, words, writings, or images of any kind—under circumstances likely to undermine the authority or independence of the judiciary is punishable by six months’ imprisonment and a fine of 7,500 euros.
The provisions of the preceding paragraph do not apply to technical comments or to acts, statements, writings, or images of any kind intended to seek the reversal, annulment, or review of a decision."
You are free to disagree with the ruling, but you cannot say that the trial is a parody of justice, the judge biased and the whole thing a conspiracy (cough cough Sarkozy)
My point is that flashy presentations already were an issue before the rise of LLMs. The evaluation of a hackathon relies on presentations and subjective opinions rather than pure benchmark of technical assets, there is nothing new under the sun here.
You can now win with 20 skills.md files now, you could win with "it would be great to use this sexy tech" 10 years ago.
10 years ago I won the only hackathon I participated in (not by choice). The jury was especially impressed in our report with the AI section. That part was a bunch of technobabble that I wrote, more or less saying "in the future the system should do this and that", quoting some popular algos from that time. None of it was implemented in our demo in any way, shape or form. They checked that I knew what I was talking about, and talking with confidence was all it took.
We did not even try to win the hackathon, just to get a passing grade.
Seems like the blog succumbed to the HN hug of death (`Actioning this file would cause "jbkempf.com//blog/2026/dav2d/" to exceed the per-day file actions limit of 160000 actions, try again later`), is there a copy available somewhere?
You usually do secret sharing in a finite field because computers don't like real numbers. The size of your share is a point (x, y), x can be small (typically log n in case of n participants), y is a random point in the field.
Since Shamir Secret Sharing is information-theoretically secure (if you do not know k points from the k-out-of-n secret then all secrets are equally plausible even when bruteforcing), the bitsize of your field can be whatever you want (but obviously bigger than the bitsize of your secret, you can't hide 100 bits in a finite field of 5 elements).
Usually, you don't want an attacker to be able to bruteforce your secret (while the scheme is ITS, your secret typically isn't, e.g. the seed of your wallet), hence randomness can be added to your secret and the bitsize of the field is taken big enough to thwart these attacks.
Depending on your attack model, an 80-bits or 128-bits field is more than secure enough, hence a share bitsize slightly above 80 or 128 bits.
And regarding quantum computer, since the scheme is ITS no attacks can exist.
What I write down is usually a quite literal dump of my brain. I have a problem, and rather than keeping it in my head, I write it down, and force myself to continue writing about the topic to force myself trying to find solutions, rather than be obsessed with the question.
Example: "I need to solve problem A. Problem A can be formulated in this way. This way is similar to a project I did a few years ago, if I remember correctly I had done B and C. However B would not work in the current situation, but would it not though? The issue is that it clashes with component X and Y. What about C? Hmm maybe but I needed approval from Z." etc. All of these thoughts are written down, without filter.
Forcing me to write down has two effects. The first one, slow down my thoughts, because discarding idea B after only 0.1 second of consideration is not productive if you do not explicitly think about why it is a bad idea, and consider the bad idea anyways. The second one is that writing down (especially manual writing and not keyboard typing, for reasons I cannot explain) allows you to think more deeply about your ideas, to envision it in different ways, not only the first way that popped to your mind. I think that keyboard writing requires too much of my brainpower compared to handwriting.
Moreover, in these sessions, having the possibility to look back to a previous idea immediately is extremely useful, and cannot be attained if you use an erasable surface rather than a notebook.
I have to say though that I very rarely look back to what I wrote after the session took place, unless I need to get back to the exact same problem.
I mean, the example you link is probably an engineer doing their job of signalling to hierarchy that something went deeply wrong. Of course, the lack of action of Facebook afterwards is a proof that they did not care, but not as much as a smoking gun.
A smoking gun would be, for instance, Facebook observing that most of their ads are scam, that the cost of fixing this exceeds by far "the cost of any regulatory settlement involving scam ads.", and to conclude that the company’s leadership decided to act only in response to impending regulatory action.
Basically, the story goes that the good brahmin, for all his wealth and intelligence, is miserable, whereas the stupid beggar down the street is very happy. While the brahmin accepts that the beggar is objectively happier than him, he would never swap places with her.
It made me realise that the quest for intelligence is fundamentally different from the quest for happiness, and even to this day I still take the story in consideration when making life choices. I do not believe that intelligence forbids happiness, simply that if you spend too much time trying to be right, you don't spend enough trying to be happy. Of course trying to be right can make you happy, but in the general case you always need to remember to take a step back.
You can defend a lot of atrocities by arguing "for the greater good" and comparing to uchronic hypotheticals. I could as well argue that without Rome, the greek democracies would have been much more prevalent, and lead to modern democracies much sooner. Or that a world leader would have emerged, leading the ancient world to endless peace and prosperity.
* "Rubber bouncy at Heathrow removal" on Google had 3 links, including the one about SFO from which chatGPT took a tangent. While ChatGPT provided evidence for the latest removal date being of 2024, none was provided for the lower bound. I saw no date online either. Was this a hallucination?
* A reverse image lookup of the building gave me the blog entry, but also an Alamy picture of the Blade (admittedly this result can have been biased by the fact the author already identified the building as the blade)
* The starbucks pop Google search led me to https://starbuckmenu.uk/starbucks-cake-pop-prices/. I will add that the author bitching to ChatGPT about ChatGPT hidden prompts in the transcript is hilarious.
I get why people prefer ChatGPT. It will do all the boring work of curating the internet for you, to privde you with a single answer. It will also hallucinate every now and then but that seems to be a price people are willing to pay and ignore, just like the added cost compared to a single Google search. Now I am not sure how this will evolve.
Back in the days, people would tell you to be weary of the Internet and that Wikipedia thing, and that you could get all the info you need from a much more reliable source at the library anyways, for a fraction of the cost. I guess that if LLMs continue to evolve, we will face the same paradigm shift.
Oh, I know that strong emotions increase engagement, outrage being a prime candidate. I have also no issue believing that FB/TikTok/X etc aggressively engage in such tactics, e.g. [0]. But I am not aware of FB publicly acknowledging that they deliberately tune the algorithm to this effect, even though they carried some research on the effects of emotions on engagement (I would love to be proven wrong though).
But admitting FB did publicly say they manipulate their users' emotions for engagement, and a law is passed preventing that. How do you assess that the new FB algorithm is not manipulating emotions for engagement? How do you enforce your law? If you are not allowed to create outrage, are you allowed to promote posts that expose politicians corruption? Where is the limit?
Once again, I hate these algorithms. But we cannot regulate by saying "stop being evil", we need specific metrics, targets, objectives. A law too broad will ban Google as much as Facebook, and a law too narrow can be circumvented in many ways.
Sooo... Should we ban Google too? It is also ordering the contents of its research results with algorithms. Similarly, HN and reddit order the contents of their front page with some algorithms, and in the case of Google and Reddit, the algorithm is personalized with the user's preferences.
Or do we only ban websites that design their algorithms to trigger strong emotional emotions? How do you define that? Even Musk doesn't go around saying that the algorithm is modified to promote alt right, instead he pretends it is all about "bringing balance back". Furthermore, I would argue that systems based on votes such as Reddit or HN are much more likely than other systems to push such content. We could issue a regulation to ban specific platforms or websites (TikTok, X...) by naming them individually, but that would probably go against many rules of free competition, and would be quite easily circumvented.
Not that I disagree on the effect of social medias on society, but regulating this is not as easy as "let's ban the algorithm".
"Any attempt to publicly discredit a judicial act or decision—through actions, words, writings, or images of any kind—under circumstances likely to undermine the authority or independence of the judiciary is punishable by six months’ imprisonment and a fine of 7,500 euros.
The provisions of the preceding paragraph do not apply to technical comments or to acts, statements, writings, or images of any kind intended to seek the reversal, annulment, or review of a decision."
You are free to disagree with the ruling, but you cannot say that the trial is a parody of justice, the judge biased and the whole thing a conspiracy (cough cough Sarkozy)