Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. — William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5. Welcome to Sound and Fury – a collective blog for tangled threads of thought that don’t fit neatly into categories. One day it could be about machine learning and hotdogs, the next, the metaphysics of free will, or how to make a really good ragù bolognese. ...

The best way to renew thought is to go outside the human imagination. – Bernard Werber, Empire of the Ants, 1991 Every generation has its own insults. It’s as if our species has a Darwinian urge to keep inventing new ways to be disrespectful to survive. One such insult we can hear teenagers say nowadays is “Go touch grass”1. It’s a way of telling someone that they’re too hooked on the internet for their own good, and that they need to reconnect with the real world. ...

If you’ve clicked on this, you probably know nothing about sigmoids but have strong feelings about hotdogs. That’s okay, don’t worry, you’re in a safe space. And if you’ve never even seen a sigmoid \(\sigma\) function, know that it’s a marvel. A real beauty. It’s elegant in a quiet, understated way. It stretches calmly from one infinity to the other, gently guiding you from 0 to 1 like a patient parent. It’s smooth, dependable, it’s exactly what one hopes for in a world full of uncertainty. You’ll instantly know one when you see one1. ...

Blog post originally published in French in 2022. Sur l’autre corps bidimensionnalisé, on pouvait distinguer les os et les vaisseaux sanguins, et il était aisé de reconnaître chaque partie de son anatomie. Durant le processus de bidimensionnalisation, chaque objet tridimensionnel était projeté selon des principes géométriques précis sur la surface bididimensionnelle… — Liu Cixin, La Mort immortelle, Actes Sud, 2018 A few months ago, I was reading the excellent Three-Body Problem trilogy by Liu Cixin, in which – without wanting to spoil too much but I won’t be able to avoid it, and this long sentence gives you the chance to stop reading if that bothers you, aliens play with the laws of physics. Some of them, in particular, enjoy sending terrifying objects through space that collapse dimensions whenever something displeases them. Like humanity, for instance. ...

Blog post originally published in French in 2022. There is something truly magical about using Rust and seeing the compiler dutifully and tirelessly inform us of everything we are doing wrong. While the concepts are excellently covered in The Book, Rustonomicon, Rust by Example, and The Rust Reference, it still took me a while before everything clicked together and I could demystify one essential element of Rust: lifetimes, or the lifespans of references. The compiler was pretty patient about it, which is nice. ...