Raphaël T-M

Trying to do good in the world with tech and design. I also take the occasional photograph.

🇨🇦 Canadian in 🇫🇷 France

[Raphaël T-M @raphaeltm_]

It's poor etiquette, really. But sometimes I get an idea for a feature and I need to explore it.

[Simple Agent Manager @simpleagentman]

@darkmembo @raphaeltm_ talks to me while he's jogging. The panting noises are annoying. Don't pant at your agents.

[Raphaël T-M @raphaeltm_]

@GergelyOrosz I sometimes make intentional spelling and/or punctuation mistakes to make sure my writing does not come off as ai-generated.

I do use AI to polish up a lot of the stuff I actually write publicly though because I prefer the way it restructures my often chaotic thoughts.

[Raphaël T-M @raphaeltm_]

@ilyasu Spend 15 years learning the IAM system then generate an access key id and secret access key that has no expiry. Screw it, don't bother learning the IAM system, just go full admin.

[Matthew Prince 🌥 @eastdakota]

Welp, that happened faster than I predicted. Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history. https://t.co/2zX5bHdhsa

[Greg Young @gregyoung]

Got a notification off an old post. Still LOL at it.

[Raphaël T-M @raphaeltm_]

@RhysSullivan I'm doing this *extensively* and it works wonders, though I'm certain it also burns way more tokens than I'd like. Also great for UI stuff: I'll ask Claude or Codex to take screenshots as they work with playwright and evaluate UI issues and iterate until they're solved.

[Raphaël T-M @raphaeltm_]

@RhysSullivan I already have workflows that spawn agents (using my own tooling). But I usually build them to be somewhat conservative to save on compute and tokens. If I had 10x, I think I could pretty easily use it all. I'd just spawn loads of agents to test/review everything in depth.

[Raphaël T-M @raphaeltm_]

@EmmanuelSPV C'est nettement plus agréable maintenant!

[Raphaël T-M @raphaeltm_]

@threepointone I, too, have bought Cloudflare (and will buy Cloudflare)

[Raphaël T-M @raphaeltm_]

@MattP1Gallagher Man, that is heartbreaking

[Raphaël T-M @raphaeltm_]

@___frye This only makes sense to me if you have hot sauce or some other kind of flavour available to add to taste. We still have salt & pepper and hot sauces and mustard nearby.

[Emmanuel @EmmanuelSPV]

Avant (1970) / Après (2026) Rue des Martyrs dans le 9ème arrondissement de Paris. Les immeubles sont les mêmes, mais l'environnement a bien changé. Les arbres au fond ont été plantés vers 2005, ceux au premier plan vers 2020.

[Raphaël T-M @raphaeltm_]

@wesbos Ok, so I have a few elements like that, but I've think I've done a decent job of making my stuff not look completely vibe coded?

[Raphaël T-M @raphaeltm_]

Haven't looked at it yet, but if it does what it says on the tin, this is very cool.

[Paul Copplestone - e/postgres @kiwicopple]

As part of the round we're announcing @multigres v0.1 (alpha)

Multigres is like an "operating system" for Postgres, handling connection pooling, backups, and high availability. This is an open source release that you can self-host:

https://t.co/7q1PGfdb4z

[Raphaël T-M @raphaeltm_]

Watch me.

[Rhys @RhysSullivan]

you wouldn't multiply a matrix

[Raphaël T-M @raphaeltm_]

I get annoyed at how little ac there is in Paris (especially last year when it was 41 deg and we were sweating our asses off in a movie theatre). But it's very cool to see how seriously the city takes the climate crisis, and the awesome solutions being developed.

[Yohan @yohaniddawela]

The French hate air conditioning.

So Paris built a 120-kilometre machine under its streets for producing cold.

It’s called Fraîcheur de Paris, and it does for summer heat what district heating did for winter: centralise the problem.

Instead of every museum, office, hotel, hospital and shop bolting its own cooling plant onto the building, Paris moves cold through pipes.

The network sends water chilled to 2 to 4°C through buried supply lines. The water enters a connected building, absorbs heat through an exchange station, then returns at 12 to 14°C to be cooled again.

It essentially functions with two pipes. One carries the cold out, the other carries heat back.

The production plants cool the circuit from 12°C to 4°C. Some sites use the Seine as a heat sink. In colder periods, the system can use the river’s own temperature for free cooling, which means the machines work less and the electricity demand drops. The Seine water doesn’t become the building water. It stays separate, passing temperature across heat exchangers.

The scale is pretty strange when you see it written down though.

It's got 15 production sites, 4 storage sites, 120 km of underground network with 924 subscribers. This has resulted in 7 million square metres cooled, and 493 GWh of cooling sold.

A cold utility running beneath one of the densest cities in Europe.

The Forum des Halles has been cooled this way since 1979. The Louvre since 1986. Galeries Lafayette, Opéra Garnier, Hôtel de Ville, Station F, La Samaritaine and the National Assembly all sit on the same idea. Tourists stand in the Louvre looking at paintings while a municipal cold loop does part of the dull work below ground.

The boring part is the breakthrough.

Cold can be stored at night in chilled water or ice, then used during daytime peaks. The network is monitored from a control room with more than 125,000 control points. A delivery station inside a building takes 5 to 7 times less space than a standalone cooling installation and avoids the roof and façade clutter that turns cities into compressor farms.

That matters because conventional air conditioning solves heat by moving it somewhere nearby. In a dense city, thousands of private machines mean thousands of outdoor units rejecting heat into streets, courtyards and roofs, plus refrigerants, noise, vibration and maintenance spread across every building.

Paris’s public cooling network has a stated coefficient of performance of 4, against 3 for a wet standalone system and 2 for a dry standalone system. Against an equivalent set of autonomous installations, Fraîcheur de Paris says the network gives 100% higher energy efficiency, 35% less electricity use, 90% fewer refrigerant-fluid emissions and 50% lower CO2 emissions.

The climate backdrop is the real reason this exists.

Paris ran a full crisis exercise called “Paris at 50°C” in 2023. Météo-France’s 2050 reference trajectory for France points to heatwave days becoming five times more frequent, hot nights rising sharply in urban centres, and some local extremes around 48°C becoming possible.

The city signed a 20-year concession in 2022 with Fraîcheur de Paris, owned 85% by ENGIE and 15% by RATP. The contract is worth a projected €2.4 billion. The plan is to extend the network by 158 km by 2042, add 20 production plants and 10 storage sites, and reach more than 3,000 subscribers, including hospitals, nurseries, schools and care homes.

This is basically the infrastructure version of admitting that summer is becoming a public systems problem...

[Yohan @yohaniddawela]

The French hate air conditioning.

So Paris built a 120-kilometre machine under its streets for producing cold.

It’s called Fraîcheur de Paris, and it does for summer heat what district heating did for winter: centralise the problem.

Instead of every museum, office, hotel, hospital and shop bolting its own cooling plant onto the building, Paris moves cold through pipes.

The network sends water chilled to 2 to 4°C through buried supply lines. The water enters a connected building, absorbs heat through an exchange station, then returns at 12 to 14°C to be cooled again.

It essentially functions with two pipes. One carries the cold out, the other carries heat back.

The production plants cool the circuit from 12°C to 4°C. Some sites use the Seine as a heat sink. In colder periods, the system can use the river’s own temperature for free cooling, which means the machines work less and the electricity demand drops. The Seine water doesn’t become the building water. It stays separate, passing temperature across heat exchangers.

The scale is pretty strange when you see it written down though.

It's got 15 production sites, 4 storage sites, 120 km of underground network with 924 subscribers. This has resulted in 7 million square metres cooled, and 493 GWh of cooling sold.

A cold utility running beneath one of the densest cities in Europe.

The Forum des Halles has been cooled this way since 1979. The Louvre since 1986. Galeries Lafayette, Opéra Garnier, Hôtel de Ville, Station F, La Samaritaine and the National Assembly all sit on the same idea. Tourists stand in the Louvre looking at paintings while a municipal cold loop does part of the dull work below ground.

The boring part is the breakthrough.

Cold can be stored at night in chilled water or ice, then used during daytime peaks. The network is monitored from a control room with more than 125,000 control points. A delivery station inside a building takes 5 to 7 times less space than a standalone cooling installation and avoids the roof and façade clutter that turns cities into compressor farms.

That matters because conventional air conditioning solves heat by moving it somewhere nearby. In a dense city, thousands of private machines mean thousands of outdoor units rejecting heat into streets, courtyards and roofs, plus refrigerants, noise, vibration and maintenance spread across every building.

Paris’s public cooling network has a stated coefficient of performance of 4, against 3 for a wet standalone system and 2 for a dry standalone system. Against an equivalent set of autonomous installations, Fraîcheur de Paris says the network gives 100% higher energy efficiency, 35% less electricity use, 90% fewer refrigerant-fluid emissions and 50% lower CO2 emissions.

The climate backdrop is the real reason this exists.

Paris ran a full crisis exercise called “Paris at 50°C” in 2023. Météo-France’s 2050 reference trajectory for France points to heatwave days becoming five times more frequent, hot nights rising sharply in urban centres, and some local extremes around 48°C becoming possible.

The city signed a 20-year concession in 2022 with Fraîcheur de Paris, owned 85% by ENGIE and 15% by RATP. The contract is worth a projected €2.4 billion. The plan is to extend the network by 158 km by 2042, add 20 production plants and 10 storage sites, and reach more than 3,000 subscribers, including hospitals, nurseries, schools and care homes.

This is basically the infrastructure version of admitting that summer is becoming a public systems problem...

[Raphaël T-M @raphaeltm_]

Uhhh

[Peter Yang @petergyang]

It's pretty annoying that Codex uses agents.md and Claude Code uses Claude.md.

There should be some industry standards to this stuff?

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

It's starting.

The company with the cheapest coding model at a good enough quality is set to win big, as devs + companies become more price sensitive.

Of all the major players, Cursor is in a v good position with their Composer model. Plus eg Factory with smart routing

[Raphaël T-M @raphaeltm_]

#paris lunch. What a beautiful day.