factorio

the dedication of the dev is perceptible, almost unlimited replay value and the will release a major extension in 9 days that looks wonderful.

I don't see how this could be positive for any Software developer in the long run. I totally see how this could be positive for CEO/CTO, Project Managers, in the long run, and I see a few short term advantages for Software developers.

Let's be clear, I saw that coming since Microsoft bought Github, and I am scared by the direction this is taking. The end goal is to move more and more control and power to non-software people about Software development.

By forcing every developer to not use their own tools this will have a lot of advantage for CEO/CTOs but this is terrible for software developers:

1. telemetry: they will try to find a formula to assess who are the best performer in a team. And as with SEO, any formula could be gamed, the best at this game, will not be the best software developers, but the one that will learn how to cheat.
2. global team tooling enforcement: vim vs emacs etc... ? Forget about it, the only way to work on a project will be via this unique allowed editor.
3. assets protection: impossible to download the code on your local computer to use external tools on it. The only way to have analysis tools will be via these "allowed" analysis tools. This will make code analysis and experimentation a lot more difficult.
4. Locked by promoting vendor-specific applications. As you will focus to make your code/app/product work only for Google Cloud for example, you will naturally use Google-Cloud-only features that will make your code difficult (or impossible) to move to another Cloud provider, or god-forbid, host your product on a non-cloud or private made cloud.

And I can think of other possible drawbacks but my comment is already long enough.

But there are many EEE attempts by big players.

Microsoft Exchange is not entirely compatible with normal protocols in subtle ways to provide outlook-only features which makes it very difficult for me to use my preferred email client for my work emails. So I am naturally forced to use outllook while I hate it.

Gmail can easily mark any small and private email domain as spam making. And in fact there are many stories like these, where people stopped self hosting their email server to use a bigger player (and often pay for it) so their emails are seen. If gmail was smaller, they wouldn’t have so much power as forcing most people to not host email.

So the conclusion for me is not corporate vs free/FOSS. But more about preventing having too much power in a single instance which is why it is important not to let threads federate and take >90% of the content, participants, etc…

a single gunshot was heard echoing through OpenAI’s offices as the LLM confidently asserted that the word “dog” contains 11 Rs.

nice finish touch

If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.

Plato against writing

I think the message that want to be passed by this article is probably pro-oil industry. It gives a false impression that we could tackle ecology not by changing our habits but just be mad at a few billionaires. And this is factually false.

Unlike wealth pollution is more equitably shared among people. Here in order to demultiply the calculated pollution of billionaires they introduced thier industry and the pollution of their employees somehow.

And while it is expected these people pollute more. Getting rid of them will not reduce the pollution as one could expect.

unfortunately everyone, even not the wealthiest will need to change how they live to have a visible impact on pollution. broadly speeking, not just CO2, as we have a lot more ecological problems than global warming. Note the focus on global warming alone is also a strategy to hide the real changes that need to ne made in order to prevent humanity to hurt itself too much by destroying its own ecosystem.

Edit: As I am being downvoted it looks people probably misunderstood my message. I would gladly get rid of super rich people. But while this would help, we would all still need to make efforts. Until we accept that we should change our way of life, we will not solve our balance with our ecosystem.

Obligatory XKCD https://xkcd.com/378/

when you have a certain world vue your frame of reference is this one. And you will prefer to hide reality for a very long time before admitting you made a poor decision. Worse admitting your point of view is not moral, or problematic.

All of this to say, people will not make a direct correlation between facts and their acts. They will find another plausible (for them) explanation.

The morons… Why use a computer if you don’t have full power?

yes

• Real programmers code in C!
• NO! Real programmers code in Fortran77!
• NO! Real programmers code in ASM!
• NO! Real programmers code in binary!
• NO! Real programmers build their own hardware!
• NO! Real programmer code using bacteria DNA!

haha I am not British but the curved banana was a funny one

I didn’t see Claude 4 Sonnet in the tests and this is the one I use. And it looks like about the same category as o4 mini from my experience.

It is a nice tool to have in my belt. But these LLM based agents are still very far from being able to do advanced and hard tasks. But to me it is probably more important to communicate and learn about the limitations about these tools to not lose tile instead of gaining it.

In fact, I am not even sure they are good enough to be used to really generate production-ready code. But they are nice for pre-reviewing, building simple scripts that don’t need to be highly reliable, analyse a project, ask specific questions etc… The game changer for me was to use Clojure-MCP. Having a REPL at disposal really enhance the quality of most answers.

“Hi computer! Write me a program that make money. I must just run it and I become rich.”

In France the « bio » label (https://www.bioagricert.org/en/certification/organic-production/ab-france.html) does bot only take into account ecological properties of the product but also many metrics relative to the social quality of the company and well being of its employees.

It’s happening!

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-418

This was a very great article to read whose title does not make justice to the content.

I think I kind of dislike the generalization on generation. To me recently there are simply a lot more people that see programming as a job and not as much as a passion.

I learnt programming as a scientific activity and not as a productive one. So this was driven by creativity. And many in my promotion shared these values. But even in my time, many were just interested in the job. And of course, these people were not as effective. They were mediocre in comparison to people programming in their free time.

And yes, there is probably a lot more people like this today, in particular in younger generation. But there are still a lot of people programming for fun in their free time in the latest generation. This is just, they are now hidden by the majority of more “normal” people. Because let’s face it. Attitude of people programming during the week-end for super long hours while still programming for work during the week is not sane and abnormal.

Edit: a big missing part is that passionate dev are not necessarily what company prefer. Because yes, they can do incredible work. But quite often I see company prefer to have few of them and a bunch of more mediocre but reliable developers.

Can a line be a cat? I love kittens.

I feel that I see more and more articles that give the false impression that rich are the only people we should put a pressure for pollution. This will give more and more people the illusion that they can pollute because their pollution is very minor compared to the pollution of the rich.

The reality is while richer people pollute more. The ratio of pollution between a rich and a normal person is not comparable to the ratio of the wealth difference.

In fact, for pollution, everyone effort has a real effect.

More precisely I read an article that made it clear that if a super rich has 100000x more money, they will pollute directly only 40x more than most people. (the number are probably wrong but the order of magnitude is correct).

This mean that pollution is not just for the rich, but for everyone. And your personal effort count.

Depends on how you look at things.

Compare your life to the life of people 1 century ago, 2 centuries ago, etc…

News, social networks focus on shit. Lot of things improve. But news only focus on what is going wrong.

Lot if things are shit, but lot other things aren’t.