Like every Sunday – or almost after a break of almost six years – here is our selection of the most interesting links of the last few days. They come from the most interesting/useful/original comments of the week, but also from our research.
The souvenir factory
France Culture offers a podcast in five episodes (5 minutes each) on the topic of memories: “How do our emotions affect them?” Why does our memory sometimes play tricks on us? How is collective memory created? And do goldfish really have amnesia? “.
Since we are at Radio France, we take the opportunity to take a look at France Inter with Mathieu Vidard and Camille Crosnier. In La Terre au Carré they offer “a look behind the scenes of the legendary National Museum of Natural History in Paris, to introduce listeners to all the treasures it contains.” In short, the museum as we have never seen it before, through the voice of those who bring it to life.” Four episodes for this podcast, but 49 minutes each.
T@LC: Cray-1 vs. Raspberry Pi
The Cray-1 is one of the first supercomputers from the mid-1970s. His name is legendary. He is now almost 50 years old and, given the speed at which computer science is evolving, he has been far surpassed. “It achieves a computing power of 80 MFLOPS (or Mega-FLOPS), i.e. the average performance of an Intel Pentium from 1993,” says Wikipedia, based on the book “The Illustrated History of Computing” by Pierre-Éric Mounier-Kuhn ( Researcher at CNRS)
According to Roy Longbottom, the result is clear: “In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 million, weighed 4,700 kg and had a power supply of 115 kilowatts. It was by far the fastest computer in the world. The Raspberry Pi costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few dozen grams, uses a 5-watt power supply, and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1 .”
ChatGPT, you want to be my mother, my father…
The markup draws on an article published by the University of Michigan that focuses on “the effectiveness of assigning a role to LLMs and the way that role can change the precision of answers.” The gender issue came to the fore.
“There was a slight decline in performance for roles associated with women compared to men, but this was small enough that this could be due to chance.” However, there was a much larger difference between non-gender roles (parents) and gender-specific roles (mother, father).” Another surprising result: “Our experiments showed that there was no advantage to choosing a role that was related to the domain of the question.”
“A big blind spot” in the criticism of Guerlain?
Stéphane Bortzmeyer reminds us: “OK, Guerlain lies with their quantum cream, but all luxury cosmetics lie,” with a link to the thread by Antoine Bérut (Doctor of Physics, Lecturer in Materials Science at the University of Lyon 1). We also returned to this matter and the updates to the Geurlain website.
“I think there is still a big blind spot in the criticism directed at him […] Most criticism focuses on the use of the word “quantum,” which I think is anecdotal here. […] Focusing on the term “quantum” misses the point. Guerlain cream is nothing unusual in the world of cosmetics (let alone luxury cosmetics).”
Kevin MacLeod, the most listened to man in the world
SEB (that's good, I'm speaking with expertise) released a video about Kevin MacLeod a year and a half ago: “Today we're talking about royalty-free music, especially the most listened to man in the world,” who changed the internet and music forever. ” SEB provides excerpts in the first few minutes of his video, you will probably recognize some of them.
There is also an archive (which is already eight years old) that lasts almost 90 minutes. There are about thirty pieces there.
CNRS: “pathogenic potential of inhalation of nanomaterials”
If you are interested in health topics, the CNRS publishes a press release about a recent study. The title is: “Asbestos: Size and geometry of inhaled nanofibers could be solely responsible for the development of lung fibroids.”
The conclusions raise several questions: “The pathogenic potential of inhalation of inert fibrous nanomaterials used for thermal insulation (such as asbestos or glass wool) does not depend on their chemical composition but on their geometry and their size.”
Get rid of LIDD
Fdorin, to whom we must offer a seat in the LIDD. Among the news about “conflicting orders” in telecommunications, he offers us a seven-minute sketch about “experts” discussing a project: draw seven lines, all perpendicular to each other, in green and transparent ink. The video is in English, but there is an option to activate subtitles. The video is several years old but could be set in the present.
As Sheepux reported last week (you saw the link to the comment!), there is a room dedicated to LIDD on the Next INpact Discord. But as DanLo'tomate reminds me: “Is there a fault with the goods?” Here it is the LIDD, not the LIDD, nothing to see! 😁”.
Thrown together, we quote the Blackthornprod video, in which six developers have to develop a game without communication. We also find the tweet of Dexerto and his mishap with his Ford car : “”Your vehicle can no longer be driven” after the software update failed”, handy!
Refuznik offers us a video called “How I animate stuff on Desmos Graphing Calculator” that lives up to its name. For the rest, we let you discover it on Discord.
