J’ai peur qu’en réalité, il ne reste avec moi que pour l’amour.

Elle, c’est une vraie obsédée de l’amour – quand elle n’est pas en train d’échanger des sms romantiques avec l’un ou l’autre de ses galants, elle se mate des comédies sentimentales piratées sur internet.

Les mecs ne réfléchissent qu’avec le cœur. A ce qu’il paraît, ils pensent à l’amour toutes les 7 secondes, ces porcs.

Une femme peut-elle aimer un homme juste par amour ?

Moi, l’amour juste pour l’amour, je trouve ça carrément pathétique.

Non, je te rassure tout de suite : il n’y a rien entre nous, c’est seulement pour l’amour.

L’amour sans attaches, ça a parfois du bon, surtout après une grosse déception sexuelle.

Je suis inscrit sur ce site pour du sérieux. Les mecs qui ne recherchent que l’amour, passez votre chemin.

J’en ai marre de la sentimentalisation de tout ce qui nous entoure : les chansons, les films, les magazines pipole. Pas moyen de vivre tranquille sans une overdose d’amour imposée de tous côtés sans nous demander notre avis.

Moi je préfère attendre un peu avant qu’on commence à parler d’amour — je n’ai pas envie de tomber amoureuse du premier venu.

J’en ai marre d’être tout juste bonne à être ton amoureuse. Je vaux mieux que ça, quand même…

Attention, ce film inclut des situations adultes avec manifestations explicites de sentiments amoureux, justifiant son interdiction pour un public mineur.

Si tu savais tout ce que l’amour peut causer comme maladies (dépression, insomnie, instabilité émotionnelle) tu éviterais de courir autant après, et au moins tu penserais à mieux te protéger.

Cartes de vœux assez géniales.

Ce moment où vous savez ce que vous allez développer mais êtes en incapacité de le faire immédiatement pour diverses raisons. Alors vous commencez à coder dans votre tête, à imaginer la modélisation, à visualiser les interactions, à envisager les écueils.

Ce moment qui permet de transformer la frustration accumulée en une énergie créative future. Où toutes les pièces du puzzle s’agencent parfaitement avant même d’avoir saisi le moindre caractère. Aux dépens du sommeil et des instants intimes.

J’aime ce moment.

Synthèse vocale avec des voix juste géniales.

Programmeur devenu fermier vivant en micro-maison.

I turned 30 last week and a friend asked me if I'd figured out any life advice in the past decade worth passing on. I'm somewhat hesitant to publish this because I think these lists usually seem hollow, but here is a cleaned up version of my answer:

1) Never put your family, friends, or significant other low on your priority list. Prefer a handful of truly close friends to a hundred acquaintances. Don’t lose touch with old friends. Occasionally stay up until the sun rises talking to people. Have parties.

2) Life is not a dress rehearsal—this is probably it. Make it count. Time is extremely limited and goes by fast. Do what makes you happy and fulfilled—few people get remembered hundreds of years after they die anyway. Don’t do stuff that doesn’t make you happy (this happens most often when other people want you to do something). Don’t spend time trying to maintain relationships with people you don’t like, and cut negative people out of your life. Negativity is really bad. Don’t let yourself make excuses for not doing the things you want to do.

3) How to succeed: pick the right thing to do (this is critical and usually ignored), focus, believe in yourself (especially when others tell you it’s not going to work), develop personal connections with people that will help you, learn to identify talented people, and work hard. It’s hard to identify what to work on because original thought is hard.

4) On work: it’s difficult to do a great job on work you don’t care about. And it’s hard to be totally happy/fulfilled in life if you don’t like what you do for your work. Work very hard—a surprising number of people will be offended that you choose to work hard—but not so hard that the rest of your life passes you by. Aim to be the best in the world at whatever you do professionally. Even if you miss, you’ll probably end up in a pretty good place. Figure out your own productivity system—don’t waste time being unorganized, working at suboptimal times, etc. Don’t be afraid to take some career risks, especially early on. Most people pick their career fairly randomly—really think hard about what you like, what fields are going to be successful, and try to talk to people in those fields.

5) On money: Whether or not money can buy happiness, it can buy freedom, and that’s a big deal. Also, lack of money is very stressful. In almost all ways, having enough money so that you don’t stress about paying rent does more to change your wellbeing than having enough money to buy your own jet. Making money is often more fun than spending it, though I personally have never regretted money I’ve spent on friends, new experiences, saving time, travel, and causes I believe in.

6) Talk to people more. Read more long content and less tweets. Watch less TV. Spend less time on the Internet.

7) Don’t waste time. Most people waste most of their time, especially in business.

8) Don’t let yourself get pushed around. As Paul Graham once said to me, “People can become formidable, but it’s hard to predict who”. (There is a big difference between confident and arrogant. Aim for the former, obviously.)

9) Have clear goals for yourself every day, every year, and every decade.

10) However, as valuable as planning is, if a great opportunity comes along you should take it. Don’t be afraid to do something slightly reckless. One of the benefits of working hard is that good opportunities will come along, but it’s still up to you to jump on them when they do.

11) Go out of your way to be around smart, interesting, ambitious people. Work for them and hire them (in fact, one of the most satisfying parts of work is forging deep relationships with really good people). Try to spend time with people who are either among the best in the world at what they do or extremely promising but totally unknown. It really is true that you become an average of the people you spend the most time with.

12) Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most people are at it. Get rid of distractions in your life. Develop very strong ways to avoid letting crap you don’t like doing pile up and take your mental cycles, especially in your work life.

13) Keep your personal burn rate low. This alone will give you a lot of opportunities in life.

14) Summers are the best.

15) Don’t worry so much. Things in life are rarely as risky as they seem. Most people are too risk-averse, and so most advice is biased too much towards conservative paths.

16) Ask for what you want.

17) If you think you’re going to regret not doing something, you should probably do it. Regret is the worst, and most people regret far more things they didn’t do than things they did do. When in doubt, kiss the boy/girl.

18) Exercise. Eat well. Sleep. Get out into nature with some regularity.

19) Go out of your way to help people. Few things in life are as satisfying. Be nice to strangers. Be nice even when it doesn’t matter.

20) Youth is a really great thing. Don’t waste it. In fact, in your 20s, I think it’s ok to take a “Give me financial discipline, but not just yet” attitude. All the money in the world will never get back time that passed you by.

21) Tell your parents you love them more often. Go home and visit as often as you can.

22) This too shall pass.

23) Learn voraciously.

24) Do new things often. This seems to be really important. Not only does doing new things seem to slow down the perception of time, increase happiness, and keep life interesting, but it seems to prevent people from calcifying in the ways that they think. Aim to do something big, new, and risky every year in your personal and professional life.

25) Remember how intensely you loved your boyfriend/girlfriend when you were a teenager? Love him/her that intensely now. Remember how excited and happy you got about stuff as a kid? Get that excited and happy now.

26) Don’t screw people and don’t burn bridges. Pick your battles carefully.

27) Forgive people.

28) Don’t chase status. Status without substance doesn’t work for long and is unfulfilling.

29) Most things are ok in moderation. Almost nothing is ok in extreme amounts.

30) Existential angst is part of life. It is particularly noticeable around major life events or just after major career milestones. It seems to particularly affect smart, ambitious people. I think one of the reasons some people work so hard is so they don’t have to spend too much time thinking about this. Nothing is wrong with you for feeling this way; you are not alone.

31) Be grateful and keep problems in perspective. Don’t complain too much. Don’t hate other people’s success (but remember that some people will hate your success, and you have to learn to ignore it).

32) Be a doer, not a talker.

33) Given enough time, it is possible to adjust to almost anything, good or bad. Humans are remarkable at this.

34) Think for a few seconds before you act. Think for a few minutes if you’re angry.

35) Don’t judge other people too quickly. You never know their whole story and why they did or didn’t do something. Be empathetic.

36) The days are long but the decades are short.

word2vec

When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards."

We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us.

My stock gradually rose during high school. Puberty finally arrived; I became a decent soccer player; I started a scandalous underground newspaper. So I've seen a good part of the popularity landscape.

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?

The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why don't smart kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, why don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?

One argument says that this would be impossible, that the smart kids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart, and nothing they could do could make them popular. I wish. If the other kids in junior high school envied me, they did a great job of concealing it. And in any case, if being smart were really an enviable quality, the girls would have broken ranks. The guys that guys envy, girls like.

In the schools I went to, being smart just didn't matter much. Kids didn't admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.

So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular.

But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things.

At the time I never tried to separate my wants and weigh them against one another. If I had, I would have seen that being smart was more important. If someone had offered me the chance to be the most popular kid in school, but only at the price of being of average intelligence (humor me here), I wouldn't have taken it.

Much as they suffer from their unpopularity, I don't think many nerds would. To them the thought of average intelligence is unbearable. But most kids would take that deal. For half of them, it would be a step up. Even for someone in the eightieth percentile (assuming, as everyone seemed to then, that intelligence is a scalar), who wouldn't drop thirty points in exchange for being loved and admired by everyone?

And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.

Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that "no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it." I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.

I don't mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers are always on duty as conformists.

For example, teenage kids pay a great deal of attention to clothes. They don't consciously dress to be popular. They dress to look good. But to who? To the other kids. Other kids' opinions become their definition of right, not just for clothes, but for almost everything they do, right down to the way they walk. And so every effort they make to do things "right" is also, consciously or not, an effort to be more popular.

Nerds don't realize this. They don't realize that it takes work to be popular. In general, people outside some very demanding field don't realize the extent to which success depends on constant (though often unconscious) effort. For example, most people seem to consider the ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall. In fact, most people who "can draw" like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it; that's why they're good at it. Likewise, popular isn't just something you are or you aren't, but something you make yourself.

The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable.

Even if nerds cared as much as other kids about popularity, being popular would be more work for them. The popular kids learned to be popular, and to want to be popular, the same way the nerds learned to be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.

So far I've been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd, using them as if they were interchangeable. In fact it's only the context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typical American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison.

Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they'll tend to become nerds. And that's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after.

Before that, kids' lives are dominated by their parents, not by other kids. Kids do care what their peers think in elementary school, but this isn't their whole life, as it later becomes.

Around the age of eleven, though, kids seem to start treating their family as a day job. They create a new world among themselves, and standing in this world is what matters, not standing in their family. Indeed, being in trouble in their family can win them points in the world they care about.

The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.

Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unpopular in school is to be actively persecuted.

Why? Once again, anyone currently in school might think this a strange question to ask. How could things be any other way? But they could be. Adults don't normally persecute nerds. Why do teenage kids do it?

Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture nerds for the same reason they pull the legs off spiders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.

Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better. When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.

But I think the main reason other kids persecute nerds is that it's part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.

Like a politician who wants to distract voters from bad times at home, you can create an enemy if there isn't a real one. By singling out and persecuting a nerd, a group of kids from higher in the hierarchy create bonds between themselves. Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders. This is why the worst cases of bullying happen with groups. Ask any nerd: you get much worse treatment from a group of kids than from any individual bully, however sadistic.

If it's any consolation to the nerds, it's nothing personal. The group of kids who band together to pick on you are doing the same thing, and for the same reason, as a bunch of guys who get together to go hunting. They don't actually hate you. They just need something to chase.

Because they're at the bottom of the scale, nerds are a safe target for the entire school. If I remember correctly, the most popular kids don't persecute nerds; they don't need to stoop to such things. Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, the nervous middle classes.

The trouble is, there are a lot of them. The distribution of popularity is not a pyramid, but tapers at the bottom like a pear. The least popular group is quite small. (I believe we were the only D table in our cafeteria map.) So there are more people who want to pick on nerds than there are nerds.

As well as gaining points by distancing oneself from unpopular kids, one loses points by being close to them. A woman I know says that in high school she liked nerds, but was afraid to be seen talking to them because the other girls would make fun of her. Unpopularity is a communicable disease; kids too nice to pick on nerds will still ostracize them in self-defense.

It's no wonder, then, that smart kids tend to be unhappy in middle school and high school. Their other interests leave them little attention to spare for popularity, and since popularity resembles a zero-sum game, this in turn makes them targets for the whole school. And the strange thing is, this nightmare scenario happens without any conscious malice, merely because of the shape of the situation.

For me the worst stretch was junior high, when kid culture was new and harsh, and the specialization that would later gradually separate the smarter kids had barely begun. Nearly everyone I've talked to agrees: the nadir is somewhere between eleven and fourteen.

In our school it was eighth grade, which was ages twelve and thirteen for me. There was a brief sensation that year when one of our teachers overheard a group of girls waiting for the school bus, and was so shocked that the next day she devoted the whole class to an eloquent plea not to be so cruel to one another.

It didn't have any noticeable effect. What struck me at the time was that she was surprised. You mean she doesn't know the kind of things they say to one another? You mean this isn't normal?

It's important to realize that, no, the adults don't know what the kids are doing to one another. They know, in the abstract, that kids are monstrously cruel to one another, just as we know in the abstract that people get tortured in poorer countries. But, like us, they don't like to dwell on this depressing fact, and they don't see evidence of specific abuses unless they go looking for it.

Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.

In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to. The most important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that they didn't want to have too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachers mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we created was barbaric.

Why is the real world more hospitable to nerds? It might seem that the answer is simply that it's populated by adults, who are too mature to pick on one another. But I don't think this is true. Adults in prison certainly pick on one another. And so, apparently, do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds like a continuation of high school, with all the same petty intrigues.

I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.

When the things you do have real effects, it's no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that's where nerds show to advantage. Bill Gates will of course come to mind. Though notoriously lacking in social skills, he gets the right answers, at least as measured in revenue.

The other thing that's different about the real world is that it's much larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together. Out in the real world, nerds collect in certain places and form their own societies where intelligence is the most important thing. Sometimes the current even starts to flow in the other direction: sometimes, particularly in university math and science departments, nerds deliberately exaggerate their awkwardness in order to seem smarter. John Nash so admired Norbert Wiener that he adopted his habit of touching the wall as he walked down a corridor.

As a thirteen-year-old kid, I didn't have much more experience of the world than what I saw immediately around me. The warped little world we lived in was, I thought, the world. The world seemed cruel and boring, and I'm not sure which was worse.

Because I didn't fit into this world, I thought that something must be wrong with me. I didn't realize that the reason we nerds didn't fit in was that in some ways we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others.

We were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back into middle school. He wouldn't know the right clothes to wear, the right music to like, the right slang to use. He'd seem to the kids a complete alien. The thing is, he'd know enough not to care what they thought. We had no such confidence.

A lot of people seem to think it's good for smart kids to be thrown together with "normal" kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps. But in at least some cases the reason the nerds don't fit in really is that everyone else is crazy. I remember sitting in the audience at a "pep rally" at my high school, watching as the cheerleaders threw an effigy of an opposing player into the audience to be torn to pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribal ritual.

If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.

Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.

And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they're called misfits.

Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not just for the nerds. Like any war, it's damaging even to the winners.

Adults can't avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So why don't they do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty. The reason kids are so unhappy, adults tell themselves, is that monstrous new chemicals, hormones, are now coursing through their bloodstream and messing up everything. There's nothing wrong with the system; it's just inevitable that kids will be miserable at that age.

This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it, which probably doesn't help. Someone who thinks his feet naturally hurt is not going to stop to consider the possibility that he is wearing the wrong size shoes.

I'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it's physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I've read a lot of history, and I have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren't crazy.

As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.

When I was in school, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids. No one I knew did it, but several planned to, and some may have tried. Mostly this was just a pose. Like other teenagers, we loved the dramatic, and suicide seemed very dramatic. But partly it was because our lives were at times genuinely miserable.

Bullying was only part of the problem. Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the time.

At best it was practice for real work we might do far in the future, so far that we didn't even know at the time what we were practicing for. More often it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through, words without content designed mainly for testability. (The three main causes of the Civil War were.... Test: List the three main causes of the Civil War.)

And there was no way to opt out. The adults had agreed among themselves that this was to be the route to college. The only way to escape this empty life was to submit to it.

Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. They weren't left to create their own societies. They were junior members of adult societies.

Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn. Now most kids have little idea what their parents do in their distant offices, and see no connection (indeed, there is precious little) between schoolwork and the work they'll do as adults.

And if teenagers respected adults more, adults also had more use for teenagers. After a couple years' training, an apprentice could be a real help. Even the newest apprentice could be made to carry messages or sweep the workshop.

Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend.

What happened? We're up against a hard one here. The cause of this problem is the same as the cause of so many present ills: specialization. As jobs become more specialized, we have to train longer for them. Kids in pre-industrial times started working at about 14 at the latest; kids on farms, where most people lived, began far earlier. Now kids who go to college don't start working full-time till 21 or 22. With some degrees, like MDs and PhDs, you may not finish your training till 30.

Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of work, they'd be a net loss. But they're also too young to be left unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and the most efficient way to do this is to collect them together in one place. Then a few adults can watch all of them.

If you stop there, what you're describing is literally a prison, albeit a part-time one. The problem is, many schools practically do stop there. The stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids. But there is no external pressure to do this well. And so most schools do such a bad job of teaching that the kids don't really take it seriously-- not even the smart kids. Much of the time we were all, students and teachers both, just going through the motions.

In my high school French class we were supposed to read Hugo's Les Miserables. I don't think any of us knew French well enough to make our way through this enormous book. Like the rest of the class, I just skimmed the Cliff's Notes. When we were given a test on the book, I noticed that the questions sounded odd. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn't have used. Where had these questions come from? From the Cliff's Notes, it turned out. The teacher was using them too. We were all just pretending.

There are certainly great public school teachers. The energy and imagination of my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Mihalko, made that year something his students still talk about, thirty years later. But teachers like him were individuals swimming upstream. They couldn't fix the system.

In almost any group of people you'll find hierarchy. When groups of adults form in the real world, it's generally for some common purpose, and the leaders end up being those who are best at it. The problem with most schools is, they have no purpose. But hierarchy there must be. And so the kids make one out of nothing.

We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest. And that's exactly what happens in most American schools. Instead of depending on some real test, one's rank depends mostly on one's ability to increase one's rank. It's like the court of Louis XIV. There is no external opponent, so the kids become one another's opponents.

When there is some real external test of skill, it isn't painful to be at the bottom of the hierarchy. A rookie on a football team doesn't resent the skill of the veteran; he hopes to be like him one day and is happy to have the chance to learn from him. The veteran may in turn feel a sense of noblesse oblige. And most importantly, their status depends on how well they do against opponents, not on whether they can push the other down.

Court hierarchies are another thing entirely. This type of society debases anyone who enters it. There is neither admiration at the bottom, nor noblesse oblige at the top. It's kill or be killed.

This is the sort of society that gets created in American secondary schools. And it happens because these schools have no real purpose beyond keeping the kids all in one place for a certain number of hours each day. What I didn't realize at the time, and in fact didn't realize till very recently, is that the twin horrors of school life, the cruelty and the boredom, both have the same cause.

The mediocrity of American public schools has worse consequences than just making kids unhappy for six years. It breeds a rebelliousness that actively drives kids away from the things they're supposed to be learning.

Like many nerds, probably, it was years after high school before I could bring myself to read anything we'd been assigned then. And I lost more than books. I mistrusted words like "character" and "integrity" because they had been so debased by adults. As they were used then, these words all seemed to mean the same thing: obedience. The kids who got praised for these qualities tended to be at best dull-witted prize bulls, and at worst facile schmoozers. If that was what character and integrity were, I wanted no part of them.

The word I most misunderstood was "tact." As used by adults, it seemed to mean keeping your mouth shut. I assumed it was derived from the same root as "tacit" and "taciturn," and that it literally meant being quiet. I vowed that I would never be tactful; they were never going to shut me up. In fact, it's derived from the same root as "tactile," and what it means is to have a deft touch. Tactful is the opposite of clumsy. I don't think I learned this until college.

Nerds aren't the only losers in the popularity rat race. Nerds are unpopular because they're distracted. There are other kids who deliberately opt out because they're so disgusted with the whole process.

Teenage kids, even rebels, don't like to be alone, so when kids opt out of the system, they tend to do it as a group. At the schools I went to, the focus of rebellion was drug use, specifically marijuana. The kids in this tribe wore black concert t-shirts and were called "freaks."

Freaks and nerds were allies, and there was a good deal of overlap between them. Freaks were on the whole smarter than other kids, though never studying (or at least never appearing to) was an important tribal value. I was more in the nerd camp, but I was friends with a lot of freaks.

They used drugs, at least at first, for the social bonds they created. It was something to do together, and because the drugs were illegal, it was a shared badge of rebellion.

I'm not claiming that bad schools are the whole reason kids get into trouble with drugs. After a while, drugs have their own momentum. No doubt some of the freaks ultimately used drugs to escape from other problems-- trouble at home, for example. But, in my school at least, the reason most kids started using drugs was rebellion. Fourteen-year-olds didn't start smoking pot because they'd heard it would help them forget their problems. They started because they wanted to join a different tribe.

Misrule breeds rebellion; this is not a new idea. And yet the authorities still for the most part act as if drugs were themselves the cause of the problem.

The real problem is the emptiness of school life. We won't see solutions till adults realize that. The adults who may realize it first are the ones who were themselves nerds in school. Do you want your kids to be as unhappy in eighth grade as you were? I wouldn't. Well, then, is there anything we can do to fix things? Almost certainly. There is nothing inevitable about the current system. It has come about mostly by default.

Adults, though, are busy. Showing up for school plays is one thing. Taking on the educational bureaucracy is another. Perhaps a few will have the energy to try to change things. I suspect the hardest part is realizing that you can.

Nerds still in school should not hold their breath. Maybe one day a heavily armed force of adults will show up in helicopters to rescue you, but they probably won't be coming this month. Any immediate improvement in nerds' lives is probably going to have to come from the nerds themselves.

Merely understanding the situation they're in should make it less painful. Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world. Adults know this. It's hard to find successful adults now who don't claim to have been nerds in high school.

It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.

If life seems awful to kids, it's neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It's because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do. Any society of that type is awful to live in. You don't have to look any further to explain why teenage kids are unhappy.

I've said some harsh things in this essay, but really the thesis is an optimistic one-- that several problems we take for granted are in fact not insoluble after all. Teenage kids are not inherently unhappy monsters. That should be encouraging news to kids and adults both.

Le code d’un développeur ne peut porter atteinte à un être humain, ni, en restant passif, permettre qu’un être humain soit exposé au danger.
Le code d’un développeur doit obéir aux ordres qui lui sont donnés par un être humain, sauf si de tels ordres entrent en conflit avec la Première loi.
Le code d’un développeur doit protéger son existence tant que cette protection n’entre pas en conflit avec la Première ou la Deuxième loi.

Point de vue super intéressant sur la vie privée…

Comment trouver la travail qui nous intéresse ? Un bon heuristique c'est de voir ce qui n'a pas l'air d'un travail pour nous (ou qui est un loisir), alors que pour les autres, c'est un travail (un minimum pénible).

Ne nous voilons pas la face, faisons fi du politiquement correct : il est désormais évident que la plupart des terroristes sont issus d’une partie bien identifiée de la population.

Certes, la majorité des individus la composant ne deviennent pas terroristes. Mais cette population reste néanmoins le terreau, le berceau qui permet à l’horreur de grandir et d’exister.

Aujourd’hui, je pense qu’il est indispensable d’ouvrir les yeux et de prendre des mesures pour éradiquer cette partie de la population, pour faire en sorte qu’elle ne puisse plus exister dans nos pays. Nous n’avons rien à attendre des politiques ou de l’état. Nous ne pouvons compter que sur nous-mêmes. Et nous en avons les moyens. Aujourd’hui, individuellement, nous pouvons prendre des mesures, nous pouvons lutter afin de réduire cette partie de la population qui donne naissance au terrorisme : la classe sociale humainement pauvre et peu éduquée.

Le premier réflexe

Notre premier réflexe après une agression est bien entendu de haïr, de souhaiter la mort. On amalgamera sans discernement. Par exemple, si les aléas de l’histoire font qu’il y’a proportionnellement plus d’Arabes parmi la classe pauvre et peu éduquée que parmi la classe riche, on associera les Arabes au terrorisme, oubliant que c’est la pauvreté et la misère intellectuelle qui sont en cause, que corrélation n’implique pas causalité. Et que, peut-être, les Arabes ne sont pas la majorité des terroristes mais ceux dont les médias parlent le plus.

Dans un second temps, toujours pris par l’émotion de l’agression, on voudra se défendre, se venger, se protéger. Dans l’urgence, nous prendrons des mesures qui seront, au mieux, inutiles face au terrorisme.

Car il leur suffit d’une tentative d’attentat, même complètement ratée, pour terrifier. Il leur suffit d’un seul et unique mort pour réussir.

Empêcher tout attentat terroriste par la force est donc illusoire et dangereux. Se défendre avec les armes des terroristes, c’est accepter la guerre, c’est leur faire l’honneur de les reconnaître comme ennemis, c’est se mettre à leur niveau.

Porter une arme, c’est bâtir un monde où posséder une arme est nécessaire. Soutenir la peine de mort, c’est bâtir un monde où tuer est acceptable. Encourager la surveillance, c’est bâtir un monde d’insécurité où la surveillance est indispensable.

Paradoxalement, en luttant de front contre les terroristes, nous augmentons l’insécurité et la violence. Nous coopérons avec eux pour bâtir le monde qu’ils cherchent à construire. Nous leur donnons raison.

Offrons l’humanité

Pour pouvoir tuer de sang-froid, avec préméditation et sans discernement, il faut avoir perdu toute notion d’humanité. Il faut avoir appris à haïr l’humain, le détester. Il faut n’avoir jamais reçu d’humanité.

Grandissant dans la haine, n’ayant jamais été reconnu, félicité, admiré, aimé par les autres humains, il est tellement facile de perdre toute considération, de se réfugier dans la première superstition surhumaine venue puis de l’utiliser comme un prétexte afin d’assouvir sa rage.

Nous sommes tous coupables d’oublier d’offrir de l’humanité à toute une couche de la population. Nous l’endoctrinons à la consommation, nous lui offrons une fausse image de luxe obscène. À la première incartade, nous la brimons et nous l’accusons de tous nos maux. Nous qui avons une vie confortable et luxueuse, nous accusons ceux qui peinent pour survivre de ne pas faire d’efforts et d’être coupables du fait que nous ayons un peu moins de luxe ce mois-ci.

Combien de vies auraient été sauvées si chaque terroriste avait, au cours de sa vie, rencontré une seule personne qui lui aurait dit : « Tu es quelqu’un de bien. Tu as du talent. Tu es unique. Tu n’es pas un adjectif, une culture, un compte en banque ou une superstition. Tu es un humain et tu n’as pas à te comparer à d’autres. »

Enseignons à apprendre

Empli de haine envers l’humanité, envieux d’une classe sociale supérieure fantasmée, l’individu sans éducation se découvre également sans sens à sa propre vie. Il tente de s’oublier dans l’alcool, la drogue jusqu’au jour où on viendra lui offrir un sens tout fait. Un but. Un objectif qui est compatible avec sa haine.

Alors arrêtez de nous casser les pieds avec vos valeurs. Elles ne sont pas meilleures que d’autres. S’il est acceptable de choisir un sens à la vie préfabriqué, alors ne vous étonnez pas si certains en choisissent un autre que le vôtre. En érigeant en idéal absolu votre sens de la vie, vos valeurs, vous justifiez que d’autres fasse la même chose avec les leurs.

Nous devons au contraire enseigner à construire un sens individuel, à refuser les solutions toutes faites, les valeurs de groupes. Celui qui a lu Proust, Hugo ou King et Rowling ne verra dans la Bible et le Coran qu’un livre de plus dont il pourra éventuellement tirer des enseignements en rejetant certaines parties. Il comprendra l’inanité d’un manifeste nationaliste ou indépendantiste.

Celui qui n’a jamais lu, émerveillé par le pouvoir de l’écriture, grisé par le fait d’apprendre, ce qui est nouveau pour lui, ne voudra plus jamais rien lire d’autre de peur de perdre cette magie initiale. Il se radicalisera et basera sa vie sur un seul et unique livre ou sur une seule et même idée. N’ayant jamais appris à être critique, il abhorrera ceux qui le sont.

Combien de vies auraient été sauvées si, avant de rencontrer un manipulateur, les futurs terroristes avaient appris à lire et à apprendre, à construire leurs propres idées, à critiquer ?

Ne remettons pas la lutte à demain !

Malheureusement, il est déjà trop tard pour certains. Nous allons encore connaitre des attentats. Les terroristes de demain sont déjà embrigadés. Mais peut-être pouvons nous éviter cela à la génération qui nous suivra ? En refusant un monde armé, surveillé. En donnant de l’humanité à tous et en enseignant le fait d’apprendre.

Nous ne pouvons rejeter la tâche sur d’autres. Nous ne pouvons pas espérer de soutien des politiciens ni des médias. Au contraire, ils lutteront contre nous : un monde qui va bien n’est pas vendeur dans leur business model.

Au fond, éradiquer la misère humaine et la pauvreté intellectuelle, faire disparaître le terrorisme, cela ne tient qu’à chacun de nous.

Gros malaise. Je ne suis pas descendu parmi la foule. Je ne suis pas Charlie. Et croyez-moi, je suis aussi triste que vous.

Mais cet unanimisme émotionnel, quasiment institutionnel pour ceux qui écoutent les radio de service public et lisent les grands media, j'ai l'impression qu'on a déjà essayé de me foutre dedans à deux reprises. La société française est complètement anomique, mais on continue à se raconter des histoires.

Première histoire: victoire des Bleus en 1998. Unanimisme: Thuram Président, Black Blanc Beur etc. J'étais alors dans la foule. Quelques années plus tard: Knysna, Finkelkraut et son Black Black Black, déferlement de haine contre ces racailles millionnaires, mépris de classe systématique envers des sportifs analphabètes tout droit issus du sous-prolétariat post-colonial. Super l'"unité nationale".

Deuxième histoire: entre deux-tour en 2002. Unanimisme: le FHaine ne passera pas, "pinces à linges", "sursaut républicain", foule "bigarrée" et drapeaux marocains le soir du second tour devant Chirac "supermenteur", "sauveur" inopiné de la République, et Bernadette qui tire la tronche, grand soulagement national. J'étais dans la foule des manifs d'entre deux tours.

Quelques années plus trard: le FN en pleine forme, invention du "racisme anti-blanc", création d'une coalition Gauche/Onfray/Charlie/Fourest laïcarde et une Droite forte/UMP/Cassoulet en pleine crise d'"identité nationale" contre l'Islam radical en France, "racaille" et "Kärcher", syndrome du foulard, des prières de rue, des mosquées, émeutes dans les banlieues, tirs sur les policiers, couvre-feu, récupération de la laïcité par l'extrême droite, Zemmour, Dieudo, Soral... Super l'"unité nationale".

Troisième histoire: sursaut national après le massacre inqualifiable à Charlie en janvier 2015. Unanimisme: deuil national, "nous sommes tous Charlie", mobilisations massives pour la défense de la liberté d'expression dans tout le pays. Charlie ? Plus personne ne le lisait. Pour les gens de gauche qui réfléchissent un peu, la dérive islamophobe sous couvert de laïcité et de "droit de rire de tout" était trop évidente. Pour les gens de droite: on déteste cette culture post-68, mais c'est toujours sympa de se foutre de la gueule des moyen-âgeux du Levant. Pour l'extrême droite: pas lu, auteurs et dessinateurs détestés culturellement et politiquement, mais très utile, les dessins sont repris dans "Riposte laïque" [site islamophobe d'extrême droite]. Pour beaucoup de musulmans: un affront hebdomadaire, mais on ferme sa gueule, c'est la "culture française".

Résultat: des centaines de milliers de musulmans sommés de montrer patte blanche, quelques années à peine après la purge officielle sur l'identité nationale. Des années durant avec toujours le même message insistant: mais putain, quand est-ce que vous allez vous intégrer? Et vous, les musulmans "modérés", pourquoi on vous entend pas plus? A partir d'aujourd'hui, "vous êtes pour nous ou contre nous". Cabu ne disait pas autre chose: "la caricature, ils doivent bien l'accepter, c'est la culture Française". Super l'"unité nationale".

Réactions à chaud de jeunes de quartiers entendues dans le micro: "c'est pas possible, c'est trop gros, c'est un coup monté". Dieudo/Soral et les complotistes sont passés par là: manifestement certains ne croient pas plus au 07/01/15 qu'au 11/11/01. La réalité est qu'on les a déjà perdu depuis longtemps, et c'est pas avec des veillées publiques à la bougie qu'on va les récupérer ni avec des incantations à la "résistance" - mais à quoi vous "résistez" au fond ? Vous allez vous abonner à Charlie? Et ça va changer quoi?

La réassurance collective est un mouvement sain et compréhensible face à un massacre aussi traumatisant, mais elle a pour versant complémentaire le déni collectif, et pour résultat l'oubli des causes réelles et profondes de l'anomie. La majorité va se sentir mieux, se faire du bien, comme elle s'était fait du bien en 1998 et 2002, et c'est précieux. Mais la fracture est totale. Et la confusion idéologique à son comble.

Personne ne se demande comment on en est arrivé là, comment des jeunes parigots en sont venus à massacrer des journalistes et des artistes à la Kalash après un séjour en Syrie, sans avoir aucune idée de la vie et des idées des gens qu'ils ont tué: ils étaient juste sur la liste des cibles d'AlQaeda dans la Péninsule Arabique. Personne ne veut voir que cette société française, derrière l'unanimisme de façade devant l'horreur, est en réalité plus que jamais complètement anomique, qu'elle jette désespérément les plus démunis les uns contre les autres, et qu'elle a généré en un peu plus d'une décennie ses propres ennemis intérieurs.

Personne ne veut voir que la plus grosse fabrique à soldats d'Al Qaeda sur notre territoire, c'est la PRISON. Personne n'a compris que la France n'a pas basculé en 2015, mais il y a dix ans déjà, lors des émeutes. Personne ne veut voir que nous vivons encore les conséquences lointaines de l'immense humiliation coloniale et post-coloniale, et que vos leçons de "civilisation" et de "liberté d'expression" sont de ce fait inaudibles pour certains de ceux qui l'ont subie et la subissent ENCORE.

Et on continue à se raconter des histoires, après la fiction des Bleus de 1998, après le mythe du "Front républicain" de 2002, en agitant cette fois-ci comme un hochet la liberté d'expression, dernier rempart d'une collectivité qui n'est plus capable de se donner comme raison d'être que le droit fondamental de se foutre de la gueule des "autres", comme un deus ex machina qui allait miraculeusement réifier cette "unité nationale" réduite en lambeaux.

Vous n'arriverez pas à reconstruire la "communauté nationale" sur ce seul principe, fût-il essentiel. Je vous le dis, vous n'y arriverez pas. Car ce n'est pas CA notre problème. Notre problème, c'est de faire en sorte qu'il n'y ait plus personne en France qui n'ait tellement plus rien à espérer et à attendre de son propre pays natal au point d'en être réduit à n'avoir pour seule raison de vivre que de tuer des gens en masse, chez nous ou ailleurs.

Car on ne peut rien contre ceux qui leur fournissent la liste des cibles une fois qu'ils sont conditionnés. Il faut donc TOUT mettre en oeuvre pour agir avant qu'ils en soient là: ce n'est pas facile mais c'est la seule chose qui compte si on ne veut pas progressivement tomber dans le gouffre de la guerre civile, qui est la conséquence ultime de l'anomie.

Après, c'est trop tard. Et c'est déjà trop tard....

Plutôt que de cracker du WPA… Suffit de créer un faux AP, de faire un peu de social engineering, et pouf…

Faire du MITM sur un wifi ouvert, ok. Mais envoyer des headers pour demander au nivagateur de cacher des fichiers JS vérolés, c'est incroyablement ingénieux…