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mtremsal's comments

mtremsal | 1 year ago | on: Telegram has launched a pretty intense campaign to malign Signal as insecure

AFAICT Signal is collateral damage in this disinformation campaign. The original attack seems to be aimed at the CEO of NPR, coming from an assortment of right wing (and some Russian-aligned) voices. She happens to also be on the board of Signal which, through the prism of conspiracy theory, now extends their crusade. Given that Telegram is commonly understood to be aligned with the Russian government, this maps neatly on the US/left vs Russia/right axis through which such people already understand the world.

mtremsal | 2 years ago | on: A Japanese hikikomori released a game after 6 years of development [video]

oh god "NHK ni Youkoso" came out 20 years ago already... Watching it as a teenager made a lasting impression on me, especially the depictions of depression and anxiety, the animation by Gonzo, and also the trumpet in the jazzy opening. That being said, it properly did not age well, so I'll stick to my nostalgia-tinted glasses.

mtremsal | 2 years ago | on: Improving OKRs

This is very interesting. This is similar to how Big Tech runs tech projects in a vastly different way than the “good practices” for agile/scrum commonly adopted by the industry at large.

e.g. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/project-management-at-big...

Similarly the article on OKRs describes small but critical adjustments from the OKRs cannon (Measure What Matters) that only scale-ups and Big Tech seem to know about. Everyone else too often tries to:

1. Cascade OKRs down from the top, sometimes outside Product & Engineering (in teams that are more process- than project-based like sales), killing team-level autonomy in the process.

2. Write Objectives for time consuming activities, rather than having a non-OKR work / BAU section that captures it. This makes it much harder for other teams to rely on OKRs to understand the context of what’s changing and to have key cross-team alignment conversations.

3. Focus on OKR tracking and scoring, possibly through a dedicated tool. This misses the point that the primary value of a plan is in the planning, not the deliverable, and risks making OKRs a performance management tool (at which point teams discuss KRs endlessly to sandbag rather than setting stretch goals and moving on).

But when you say the local implementation looks both overkill and misguided compared to what works at other tech shops, people point to the OKR book as what drives their own implementation. :)

mtremsal | 2 years ago | on: Mistral Large

In the top-left corner, when using dark mode, they call it "le chat noir", i.e. the black cat. :)

mtremsal | 2 years ago | on: Mistral Large

The phrasing in the announcement is a bit awkward.

> We’re maintaining mistral-medium, which we are not updating today.

As a French speaker, I parse this to mean: "we're not releasing a new version of mistral-medium today, but there are no plans to deprecate it."

edit: but they renamed the endpoint.

mtremsal | 2 years ago | on: Tai chi reduces blood pressure better than aerobic exercise

Ah yes, thank you! The Cheng Man Ching so-called "short form" would be considered a descendant/variation of Yang style then. I assume we're more familiar with Cheng Man Ching in the West due to his travels and teachings in the US. Hard to say how closely related to the source modern-day lessons are TBH.

mtremsal | 2 years ago | on: Tai chi reduces blood pressure better than aerobic exercise

There are a lot of possibly exaggerated, and somewhat dubious, legends about Cheng Man Ching (who created the "Yang style" I believe). In one such story, he performs an exhibition match at the British Embassy in Chungking during WWII, and none of the British soldiers manage to land a single hit. In the story, the British army ends up so impressed they decide to study T'ai Chi.

mtremsal | 2 years ago | on: Gödel, Escher, Bach is the most influential book in my life (2022)

Crucially the French translation was significantly rewritten, with contributions from Hofstadter. In doing so, the French version becomes a separate projection of the author’s original ideas, along a different vector than the original English version. The approach therefore illustrates the main point of the book, similarly to its cover. Very meta. :)

mtremsal | 2 years ago | on: Obsidian 1.5 Desktop (Public)

My solution to this problem, which has worked for the past 2 years, is to rely on a private git repo for sync, obsidian on desktop, and GitJournal on mobile.

mtremsal | 2 years ago | on: MongoDB security notice

This is almost certainly normal activity under a 10b-5 plan, meant to protect specifically against suspicion of insider trading, which is what you’re implying.

mtremsal | 2 years ago | on: MongoDB security notice

SMS 2FA is better than no MFA at all, despite the very valid concerns about SMS. It at least protects against credential stuffing and similar automated attacks.
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