Franck Achkouyan 🌱

Remote 🌍 Product engineer / Fullstack Typescript developer 👨‍💻 • ex @LeMondeFR • Vegan for the animals 🐮 • 🎮 • ⚽️ • 🇫🇷

[Franck Achkouyan 🌱 @a_franck]

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek." —Barack Obama

[Sawyer Hood @sawyerhood]

Do yourself a favor and set this in your pnpm config

[Aurea @AureaLibe]

Je suis choqué par le tournant que prend la France. Le pays sombre lentement dans le totalitarisme.

Je réside depuis plusieurs années dans un État considéré comme « non démocratique ». Les communications y sont censurées et l’usage des VPN y est généralisé.

Il y a quelques semaines, je disais à ma femme : « au moins, en France, on a de la chance, on n’a pas besoin de VPN pour accéder aux sites ».

Quelle naïveté de ma part.

Quelques semaines plus tard, une loi imposant une carte d’identité pour accéder aux sites pour adultes entre en vigueur, et les principaux sites bloquent l’accès aux Français. Résultat : VPN obligatoire.

Puis vient Clara Chappaz, la ministre du Numérique, qui, dans sa dérive autoritaire, veut maintenant censurer X, la seule plateforme où la liberté d’expression existe encore, sous prétexte de lutter contre la « pornographie » (lol). VPN encore une fois nécessaire.

Et comme le totalitarisme n’a jamais de limites, la prochaine étape sera l’obligation de carte d’identité pour accéder à n’importe quel réseau social. Car l’objectif, c’est le contrôle. Il faudra donc, encore une fois, un VPN pour préserver le peu de vie privée qu’il nous reste.

Une fois qu’ils contrôleront totalement Internet, il ne leur restera plus qu’une chose pour achever votre vie privée : interdire les communications chiffrées.

La première étape sera évidemment d’interdire les VPN pour le grand public. Peine de prison et amendes pour ceux qui en utilisent. Et à défaut de pouvoir tous les bloquer, ils s’attaqueront aux sites qui en vendent, les feront disparaître du web afin de rendre l’accès aussi difficile que possible.

Ensuite, l’étape ultime sera de casser le chiffrement de toutes les communications, en ciblant tout particulièrement les services de messagerie comme Signal, WhatsApp ou Telegram.

Le Royaume-Uni essaie, l’UE en rêve, et notre ministre de l’Intérieur, Bruno Retailleau, l’a déjà proposé.

Vous avez sûrement déjà entendu la fameuse phrase :

« Si vous n’avez rien à vous reprocher, vous n’avez pas besoin d’être anonyme. »

Cette phrase est dangereuse. Elle sert à légitimer l’anéantissement de votre vie privée.

Le chiffrement permet d’envoyer des messages, de communiquer, de naviguer sur Internet sans que quiconque puisse lire vos échanges les plus intimes ou surveiller votre activité. La vie privée, c’est le droit de choisir ce que vous souhaitez partager, ou non, avec les autres.

Est-ce que vous critiquez quelqu’un ? Est-ce que vous êtes amoureux de quelqu’un sans oser lui dire ? Est-ce que vous avez des fantasmes inavoués ? Est-ce que vous avez menti à un ami ? À vos proches ? À votre employeur ?

Tout le monde a de bonnes ou de mauvaises raisons de cacher des choses. La question n’est pas de juger la légitimité de vos secrets, mais de garantir que vous avez le droit de les préserver.

La vie privée est un droit fondamental. Sans elle, vos messages, vos pensées, vos secrets les plus personnels pourraient être exposés au regard de tous.

Pour casser le chiffrement des services de messageries, ils feront pression sur les entreprises pour qu’elles intègrent des portes dérobées.

Si elles refusent, ils poursuivront les dirigeants au nom de la « lutte contre le terrorisme ». Exactement comme ils l’ont fait avec Pavel Durov, fondateur de Telegram.

Pour les entreprises qui refuseront de coopérer et dont les dirigeants sont à l’étranger, ce sera tout simplement le bannissement : déréférencement sur Google, suppression de l’App Store, site web rendu inaccessible… Tout sera fait pour en empêcher l’usage.

Je ne suis pas complotiste. Je vois juste très bien la direction que prend le pays.

Le dernier référendum remonte à 20 ans, et son résultat a été piétiné. Des médias sont censurés. Le temps de parole des politiciens est limité. L’ARCOM censure les plateaux télé. La liberté d’expression est à géométrie variable, et n’importe quel propos peut vous envoyer devant un tribunal. Une ministre peut faire fermer un compte TikTok par un simple mail, sans décision de justice. Les lois d’exception “anti-terroristes” sont devenues la norme. La reconnaissance faciale “temporaire” des JO va être généralisée. Les manifs sont réprimées avec un niveau de violence toujours plus élevé, avec un pic glaçant pendant les Gilets Jaunes.

J’ai honte. Et j’ai peur. Réveillez-vous.

[colinhacks @colinhacks]

Zod 4 is now stable and production-ready!

💎 7x faster object parsing
💎 100x fewer tsc instantiations
💎 localization in 34 languages
💎 recursive z.object()!
💎 metadata
💎 z.toJSONSchema()
💎 z.templateLiteral()
💎 z.int32(), z.float32(), etc
💎 z.file()
💎 and a new logo :)

[colinhacks @colinhacks]

Zod 4 is now in beta!

💎 7x faster object parsing
💎 20x reduction in tsc instantiations
💎 57% smaller core bundle size
💎 metadata via .meta()
💎 z.toJSONSchema()
💎 z.templateLiteral()
💎 z.stringbool()
💎 z.int32(), z.float32(), etc
💎 z.file()
💎 new logo 😇

[Matteo Collina @matteocollina]

For years, I’ve been asked whether I’ll ever write a book about @Nodejs.

I’m excited to announce the time has come.

Presenting “The Definitive Guide for Node.js in Enterprise”, a labour of love by myself, @Lucamaraschi, and every single member of the @Platformatic team.

[Julian Garnier @JulianGarnier]

After 5 years in the making, I'm very happy to finally release Anime.js v4, my dream animation library:

🧩 New modular API
⚡️ Highly performant
🖱️ Scroll-linked animations
🫵 Draggables
↔️ Responsive
✨ Additive animations
🪽 WAAPI support

And so much more!

Link below👇

[Jane Manchun Wong @wongmjane]

Breaking: Apple Polishing Cloth now upgraded to support iPhone 16e

[Tanner Linsley @tannerlinsley]

📣 Time to announce "create-tsrouter-app" or CTA, a drop-in CRA replacement:

- Powered by @Vite_js + @Tan_Stack Router, built by @jherr
- TypeScript/Tailwind/File-Route templates (more coming)
- Pre-ejected with full control over Vite and (soon) upgradeable to TanStack Start

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

I was given early access to Grok 3 earlier today, making me I think one of the first few who could run a quick vibe check.

Thinking
✅ First, Grok 3 clearly has an around state of the art thinking model ("Think" button) and did great out of the box on my Settler's of Catan question:

"Create a board game webpage showing a hex grid, just like in the game Settlers of Catan. Each hex grid is numbered from 1..N, where N is the total number of hex tiles. Make it generic, so one can change the number of "rings" using a slider. For example in Catan the radius is 3 hexes. Single html page please."

Few models get this right reliably. The top OpenAI thinking models (e.g. o1-pro, at $200/month) get it too, but all of DeepSeek-R1, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, and Claude do not.

❌ It did not solve my "Emoji mystery" question where I give a smiling face with an attached message hidden inside Unicode variation selectors, even when I give a strong hint on how to decode it in the form of Rust code. The most progress I've seen is from DeepSeek-R1 which once partially decoded the message.

❓ It solved a few tic tac toe boards I gave it with a pretty nice/clean chain of thought (many SOTA models often fail these!). So I upped the difficulty and asked it to generate 3 "tricky" tic tac toe boards, which it failed on (generating nonsense boards / text), but then so did o1 pro.

✅ I uploaded GPT-2 paper. I asked a bunch of simple lookup questions, all worked great. Then asked to estimate the number of training flops it took to train GPT-2, with no searching. This is tricky because the number of tokens is not spelled out so it has to be partially estimated and partially calculated, stressing all of lookup, knowledge, and math. One example is 40GB of text ~= 40B characters ~= 40B bytes (assume ASCII) ~= 10B tokens (assume ~4 bytes/tok), at ~10 epochs ~= 100B token training run, at 1.5B params and with 2+4=6 flops/param/token, this is 100e9 X 1.5e9 X 6 ~= 1e21 FLOPs. Both Grok 3 and 4o fail this task, but Grok 3 with Thinking solves it great, while o1 pro (GPT thinking model) fails.

I like that the model *will* attempt to solve the Riemann hypothesis when asked to, similar to DeepSeek-R1 but unlike many other models that give up instantly (o1-pro, Claude, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking) and simply say that it is a great unsolved problem. I had to stop it eventually because I felt a bit bad for it, but it showed courage and who knows, maybe one day...

The impression overall I got here is that this is somewhere around o1-pro capability, and ahead of DeepSeek-R1, though of course we need actual, real evaluations to look at.

DeepSearch
Very neat offering that seems to combine something along the lines of what OpenAI / Perplexity call "Deep Research", together with thinking. Except instead of "Deep Research" it is "Deep Search" (sigh). Can produce high quality responses to various researchy / lookupy questions you could imagine have answers in article on the internet, e.g. a few I tried, which I stole from my recent search history on Perplexity, along with how it went:

- ✅ "What's up with the upcoming Apple Launch? Any rumors?"
- ✅ "Why is Palantir stock surging recently?"
- ✅ "White Lotus 3 where was it filmed and is it the same team as Seasons 1 and 2?"
- ✅ "What toothpaste does Bryan Johnson use?"
- ❌ "Singles Inferno Season 4 cast where are they now?"
- ❌ "What speech to text program has Simon Willison mentioned he's using?"

❌ I did find some sharp edges here. E.g. the model doesn't seem to like to reference X as a source by default, though you can explicitly ask it to. A few times I caught it hallucinating URLs that don't exist. A few times it said factual things that I think are incorrect and it didn't provide a citation for it (it probably doesn't exist). E.g. it told me that "Kim Jeong-su is still dating Kim Min-seol" of Singles Inferno Season 4, which surely is totally off, right? And when I asked it to create a report on the major LLM labs and their amount of total funding and estimate of employee count, it listed 12 major labs but not itself (xAI).

The impression I get of DeepSearch is that it's approximately around Perplexity DeepResearch offering (which is great!), but not yet at the level of OpenAI's recently released "Deep Research", which still feels more thorough and reliable (though still nowhere perfect, e.g. it, too, quite incorrectly excludes xAI as a "major LLM labs" when I tried with it...).

Random LLM "gotcha"s

I tried a few more fun / random LLM gotcha queries I like to try now and then. Gotchas are queries that specifically on the easy side for humans but on the hard side for LLMs, so I was curious which of them Grok 3 makes progress on.

✅ Grok 3 knows there are 3 "r" in "strawberry", but then it also told me there are only 3 "L" in LOLLAPALOOZA. Turning on Thinking solves this.
✅ Grok 3 told me 9.11 > 9.9. (common with other LLMs too), but again, turning on Thinking solves it.
✅ Few simple puzzles worked ok even without thinking, e.g. *"Sally (a girl) has 3 brothers. Each brother has 2 sisters. How many sisters does Sally have?"*. E.g. GPT4o says 2 (incorrectly).
❌ Sadly the model's sense of humor does not appear to be obviously improved. This is a common LLM issue with humor capability and general mode collapse, famously, e.g. 90% of 1,008 outputs asking ChatGPT for joke were repetitions of the same 25 jokes​. Even when prompted in more detail away from simple pun territory (e.g. give me a standup), I'm not sure that it is state of the art humor. Example generated joke: "*Why did the chicken join a band? Because it had the drumsticks and wanted to be a cluck-star!*". In quick testing, thinking did not help, possibly it made it a bit worse.
❌ Model still appears to be just a bit too overly sensitive to "complex ethical issues", e.g. generated a 1 page essay basically refusing to answer whether it might be ethically justifiable to misgender someone if it meant saving 1 million people from dying.
❌ Simon Willison's "*Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle*". It stresses the LLMs ability to lay out many elements on a 2D grid, which is very difficult because the LLMs can't "see" like people do, so it's arranging things in the dark, in text. Marking as fail because these pelicans are qutie good but, but still a bit broken (see image and comparisons). Claude's are best, but imo I suspect they specifically targeted SVG capability during training.

Summary. As far as a quick vibe check over ~2 hours this morning, Grok 3 + Thinking feels somewhere around the state of the art territory of OpenAI's strongest models (o1-pro, $200/month), and slightly better than DeepSeek-R1 and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking. Which is quite incredible considering that the team started from scratch ~1 year ago, this timescale to state of the art territory is unprecedented. Do also keep in mind the caveats - the models are stochastic and may give slightly different answers each time, and it is very early, so we'll have to wait for a lot more evaluations over a period of the next few days/weeks. The early LM arena results look quite encouraging indeed. For now, big congrats to the xAI team, they clearly have huge velocity and momentum and I am excited to add Grok 3 to my "LLM council" and hear what it thinks going forward.

[Franck Achkouyan 🌱 @a_franck]

@tannerlinsley @tan_stack start v1 ? 😁

[Dark Web Informer @DarkWebInformer]

CISO vs Pentester 🤣

[˗ˏˋmewtru´ˎ˗ @trunarla]

If programming languages asked you out 😬 who are you picking???

[Franck Achkouyan 🌱 @a_franck]

@astrodotbuild what do you mean 400% ? did u just remove everything ? 😄

[Franck Achkouyan 🌱 @a_franck]

@zugzwang2011 @mansBJJ que choisirais tu ?

[Franck Achkouyan 🌱 @a_franck]

@tannerlinsley Happy birthday 🎉

[Franck Achkouyan 🌱 @a_franck]

@thekitze skill issue 😁

[Brenley Dueck @brenelz]

Do you need server components to get the benefits of the server in React?
https://t.co/q3LgKmqWnD

[Neil Zeghidour @neilzegh]

Today we release Hibiki, real-time speech translation that runs on your phone. Adaptive flow without fancy policy, simple temperature sampling of a multistream audio-text LM. Very proud of @tom_labiausse 's work as an intern.

[Matt Pocock @mattpocockuk]

In case you missed it, I released a full free tutorial on Vercel's AI SDK.

It's an awesome intro to building AI apps in TypeScript.

https://t.co/1m5sDbboSq

[Prisma @prisma]

🎉 Prisma Postgres is production-ready!

It's the first database built on unikernels and comes with these features:

✅ No cold starts
✅ Global cache
✅ Real-time events
✅ Built-in connection pooling
✅ Simple and predictable pricing
✅ A generous free tier