Raphaël Pinson

The AI debate is forcing us to define intelligence. Every definition proposed, when applied consistently, ends up drawing a line through humanity itself.

Hallucination isn't a bug in LLMs — it's the mechanism. The real problem is misallocating non-determinism, and why "SKILLS.md is enough" is exactly backwards.

The DSM defines autism by observable symptoms. But a definition and a diagnostic test are not the same thing. One bar has been cleared. The other hasn't. And mistaking the proxy for the definition has real consequences.

AI didn't create the problem of empty content. It made it cheaper. 3,000 years ago Qoheleth had a word for it.

Most people misunderstand what generative AI actually does. It doesn't add quality — it multiplies what's already there. Which means the people it serves best are the ones who least needed it to begin with.

A field journal from an imaginary researcher studying a puzzling minority neurological condition called allism, which affects approximately 1% of the population.

Why has autism persisted across all human populations, across cultures, across centuries? A hypothesis: not because of individual advantage, but because groups that contained the profile were more robust against a failure mode the majority profile generates in itself.

The double empathy problem, made concrete: not a deficit on one side, but two coherent systems that are mutually opaque to each other.

Rest as low novelty load, not low stimulation — known vs unknown inputs, threat/navigation system, beach vs metal music

Autistic people who talk at length about their interests are often read as self-centered. I think the mechanism is almost the opposite. A follow-up to my series on autism from the inside, on why information has survival-level value, why small talk feels like noise pollution, and why sharing is, quite literally, how a lot of us care.

What if the way you think and the output you produce are two completely separate things — and the gap between them has a cost? A post about internal process, expected output, and what autism adds to the picture.

This series almost didn't happen. A comic strip, a colleague's question, and thirteen posts later: here's what masking actually is, why the right framework matters more than most people realise, and what to do if any of this sounded familiar. Includes a link to a free RAADS-R screening tool.

When 'I don't know' means the ground you're being told to step on doesn't exist

Autism hardly create effects directly: it amplifies whatever is already present, in both directions. The same wiring that produces unusual pattern recognition also produces sensory overload. The genius effect and the burnout are not opposites; they're the same amplifier applied to different inputs. This post synthesizes the series and names the mechanism running through all of it.

Testing GCP Cloud Functions locally can be tricky. This setup uses Docker and Summon to easily run them with cloud secrets.

My wife tells me I have friends. She's probably right. But I don't feel like I do — not in the way the cultural template describes. This post explores why maintaining friendships is harder than making them, what gets misread as manipulation, and the unexpected flip side of a system that doesn't store emotional weight.

Rain Man or Sheldon Cooper — those are the two faces of autism most people know. But the vast middle is invisible, largely because it masks. This post explores the three dimensions you need to understand autism properly, why the "genius" stereotype is largely a visibility problem, and what actually happens when high IQ meets an insatiable information-gathering drive. Spoiler: it's a double-edged sword.

Using Claude & MCP servers to enhance genealogy research.

Most people learn early that you don't look an adult in the eyes when you're being told off. For many autistic people, that reflex simply never installed. This post explores why — and what happens to the emotional cost of all that defiance that wasn't actually defiance at all.

Some tasks are hard. Some are boring. Some are just tasks you don't feel like doing. And then there are tasks that the brain simply refuses — not out of reluctance, but because the purpose doesn't compute. This post explores the neurological mechanism behind that block, why pushing harder makes it worse, and why the person looking back at you with a calm smile while you wait for them to comply isn't being difficult — their brain has already decided.

The autistic brain doesn't filter out irrelevant sensory input. Everything arrives at full processing weight, not louder, just unfiltered. This post explains the mechanism, why common fixes don't work, and why the problem isn't at the ear at all.

The sensory threshold in autism isn't fixed. It can move from one minute to the next — the same sound, the same touch, fine one moment and unbearable the next. This post explains why through a dinner table scene that will be familiar to many autistic people and their families, and connects it to autistic burnout: what it is, and why it often hits hardest in people who seemed fine for decades.

Why are there so many autistic people in IT? Or does it just look that way? This post explores the genetics of autism, why certain cognitive profiles cluster in technical fields, and the personal story behind one late diagnosis. Spoiler: the people were always there. The name just arrived later.

The constant background hum — why the autistic brain never quite stops gathering information, and why that has nothing to do with anxiety as most people understand it. This post covers intolerance of uncertainty, the apartment tour, the actor's name, special interests as solid ground, and why the exhaustion isn't from interacting but from the continuous cost of running a manual process on autopilot.

What does "autism spectrum" actually mean? Most people picture a straight line from "a little autistic" to "very autistic." Using the analogy of myopia vs. color blindness, this post explains why autism is a horizontal spectrum of different neurological configurations, not a vertical scale from normal to severe, and why that distinction changes what support actually looks like.

Why autism is neurological, not psychological — and why that distinction changes everything about how we think about support.

A comic strip on autism

Learn how to automate badge issuance with Credly when users complete an Instruqt lab.

Building a Go proxy to simplify access to embedded Instruqt labs

DevOps Stack v1 will be modular

Note: this is a personal blog post. It does not concern Camptocamp's partnership with Puppet Inc.,...

Terraform providers can be dynamically configured using other resource attributes if their code allows for it

The last Cloud Native Romandie Meetup took place on March 25th

Decoupling in container orchestration enables immutable infrastructure workflows.

As software needs evolve, technological evolution implies Technical Debt. Open Source can help mitigate Technical Debt by influencing on standards.

How to easily give access to an EKS cluster using an authentication proxy with a PSK

Kubectl commands, but in color

Storing and sharing secrets doesn't have to be complex

Puppet can let you purge resources you do not manage explicitely

When managing multiple Puppet Control Repositories, modulesync is a very useful tool to keep files in sync.

GitHub Sponsors could be leveraged on dev.to to generate revenue

MyHeritage in Color allows to fine-tune automatically colorized and enhanced photographs

It would be great to attract more DevOps-related content to dev.to. With a few other people, I've...

Narcissus is a reflection library letting you edit configuration files in Go

After a few years of being inactive on dev.to, I've started actively posting about a month ago. I...

Puppet has many tools to manage configuration files. Knowing them can help you choose the one that best fits your needs.

X chromosomes have a specific inheritance pattern which often allow to narrow family branches when looking for relationships hypothesis

Instead of sending metrics from the Puppetserver to Prometheus, they can be retrieved using the PuppetDB Metrics API.

When PuppetDB started misbehaving, it took us quite a while to realize the problem was somewhere else…

PuppetServer can be spending a lot of time doing gargage collection, which impacts its performance

When composing posts on dev.to, is there a way to dispensary display error messages so they appear as...

Using Grafana & Catalog Diff to tune the Puppet Server

Several ways to display technical skills on a timeline

Using Git and Markdown to write a novel

About 4 years ago, we started using Terraform. Many things we were doing manually in the cloud at the time are now coded.

One of the hard problems to solve when using Docker in production is deploying secrets. githut_pki makes SSH key deployment easy.

GitLab allows to perform shallow repository clones (and it seems to be the default in recent versions...

Using GitLab Pipelines and Catalog Diff to preview changes between two branches in a merge request

Everyone who has been using Puppet with a self-signed CA for more than 5 years knows that dreaded time: the time when the CA must be renewed.

Using machine learning to identify people in historical photographs

Is it a good idea to use dev.to for other subjects than development?

Puppet Catalog Diff helps to visualize the differences between two Puppet environments

Many applications are not containerized, and we still need to monitor their nodes. Prometheus PuppetDB SD allows to discover nodes in the PuppetDB and generate Prometheus configurations automatically.

The FreeIPA Terraform provider allows to automate creation and management of FreeIPA resources.

Containers have become a great facility to easily deploy applications, whether locally or on orchestrated clusters. However, containers are ephemeral, meaning their data should be stored externally and should be backed up.

Code quality is important to ensure style consistency and easy maintenance. Puppet-lint, Onceover and puppet-ghostbuster help ensure Puppet code quality.