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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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    • can AI replace the job of a real programmer, or a team of software engineers? Probably not for a long time.
    • can manager abuse the fantasy that they could get rid of those pesky engineers that dare telling them something is impossible? Yes totally. If they believe adding an AI tool to a team justifies a 200% increase in productivity. Some managers will fire people against all metrics and evidence. Calling that move a success. Same occurred when they try to outsource code to cheaper teams.





  • Say you only listen to Wing as the greatest magnificent singer of all time. You are particularly in love with her interpretation of Beat It where she clearly outperforms the miserable attempt of Michael Jackson.

    I guess with such an argument the discussion about your musical taste will not take long to switch to another subject.

    And also, I really, love Wing because she sing without any other goal than to make other people feel good. No attempt to be a genius or taking herself too seriously.


  • S-expressions are a hack because the Lisp devs didn’t know how to make an actual compiler, and instead had the users write the syntax tree for them. (For legal reasons I am being facetious).

    Just for anyone thinking you are serious; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression I love how S-expression existed.

    McCarthy had planned to develop an automatic Lisp compiler (LISP 2) using M-expressions as the language syntax and S-expressions to describe the compiler’s internal processes. Stephen B. Russell read the paper and suggested to him that S-expressions were a more convenient syntax. Although McCarthy disapproved of the idea, Russell and colleague Daniel J. Edwards hand-coded an interpreter program that could execute S-expressions.[2] This program was adopted by McCarthy’s research group, establishing S-expressions as the dominant form of Lisp.




  • I don’t see how this could be prevented.

    There are already many “small web” movements. With different proposals. Like gemini, sub-set of currently supported web standards (typically no-js, no-css, no POST, etc…)

    But the monetized web is doomed to reach a point were it will be controlled in such a way that you will not be able to block ads, not be able to hide your pseudonymous identity.

    I remember reading an article many years ago about the cat and mouse game between ads publishers and ad-blockers. The conclusion were that in the end, ads blocker will lose the final war. And with these kind of system we are closer and closer to reach it.

    I think we need to collectively find a way to have sub-nets. For example declare that our website conform to certain sub-net properties.

    • no-ads
    • privacy (no cookie/no js/no user-agent header/no canvas, no css)
    • etc…

    The small webs are different for everyone. It would be very nice if we could put an HTML header that would list which small webs pattern this page is compatible with. And have a browser that would adapt to your preferences and also a way to filter your small-web preferences in search engine.

    The closest to this we have today is probably gemini. But this a very small but friendly web. I am sure we could find other solutions to create an alternative “respecting his users” web.



  • 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.