chevreuil

Joined 14 years ago

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Apr 11

@chevreuil

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Comment · 12 years ago

In the 2010 Boréal conference Ted Chiang had an interesting take on the singularity and the computable brain. There is a transcript (in french) here : http://www.actusf.com/spip/article-9802.html.

To sum it up that is what he says : "There is this thing called ethnobiology, a sub-dicscipline of anthropology, that studies the way civilizations understand and represent the living things. Ethnobiology reveals a constant in History : we tend to compare our brain to the most complex technology we know. At the Renaissance, philosopher assimilated the brain to a very complex and subtle clockwork, Freud compared it to a steam engine, which pressure should be evacuated to avoid explosion. In the 40's, schoolboy and schoolgirls were told that brain was like a telephone exchange. Today, computers are the most advanced technology we know, so we tend to compare our brain to it. But like our predecessors, it's very likely that we are wrong. Let just think forward, and admit that we are totally biased by the fact that computer are now inherent part of our life. Let's admit that there is a chance that our brain may never be modeled by a computer."

Comment · 12 years ago

I'm french and I worked with two foreigners (US & Canada) in a parisian startup. One of them didn't bother learning french, and it was ok. He was mostly hanging out with other expats, and seemed to enjoy it.

Nonetheless, it is hard for foreigner to find an apartment to rent, but it's hard for everyone. And since whining about real estate is the national sport it somehow eased their integration and they quickly found colleagues to help them in this task.

France is not the UK, and it's not the US either. If you want to come in Paris make sure you're compatible with locals culture and habits. That means try to talk to some people mentioned in the slideshow, visit coworking space and startup offices. You'll be welcomed.

Antares rocket explosion: The question of using decades-old Soviet engines washingtonpost.com

1 chevreuil 12 years ago 0 comments

Magic Roundabout (Swindon) en.wikipedia.org

1 chevreuil 12 years ago 0 comments

Comment · 12 years ago

This one for example : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8013773

The title was "The Tech Industry vs. San Francisco " : http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/07/07/140707fa_fact_...

Comment · 12 years ago

Main economic institutions [1] already maintains databases of consumer goods and services price across countries, but they don't give easy access to the raw data. Glad to see Expatistan filling this gap.

[1] International Comparison Program for the Worldbank (http://icp.worldbank.org/), Eurostats (http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index....)

Comment · 12 years ago

The data format bothers me. Why not use a standard one like JSON?

Comment · 12 years ago

The Paper demo is quite impressive on my phone (iPhone 5s). Anyone who struggled with touch events in an HTML app should be impressed.

Comment · 12 years ago

I like how you sumed it up

> Famo.us is built around a neat idea: by directly using the CSS matrix3d transform in combination with the window.requestAnimationFrame function, you can describe the complete layout and animation of your app in a way that’s hardware accelerated with consistent performance.

> It’s a stroke of genius, but in order to implement that simple idea you need a sophisticated math library to help translate your app’s UI into the series of matrix transformations that get pushed to the GPU. This library is Famo.us.

Comment · 12 years ago

Yes that's insane. But the blogger is also to blame here, he should not have used a Hotmail account to share such sensitive information.