Tout écrivain, Saint-Exupéry le premier, vous le dira : l’art de l’écriture, c’est de supprimer, de trancher, de raccourcir le texte pour lui donner de la puissance.

Dans mon entourage, les gens l’utilisent pour envoyer des dossiers administratifs. Alors, est-ce utile ? Non, c’est juste que ces dossiers sont complètement cons, que personne ne va les lire et qu’on utilise des outils cons pour gérer des problèmes à la con qu’on se crée soi-même.

Un outil et non une solution:

Comme le dit la linguiste Emily M. Bender, on ne demande pas aux étudiants de faire des rédactions parce que le monde a besoin de rédactions. Mais pour apprendre aux élèves à structurer leurs pensées, à être critiques. Utiliser ChatGPT c’est, selon les mots de Ted Chiang, prendre un chariot élévateur à la salle de musculation. Oui, les poids vont faire des va-et-vient, mais va-t-on se muscler pour autant ?

aphorisme: « tout le monde peut écrire, l’écrivain est celui qui ne sait pas s’empêcher d’écrire »

Bruno Leyval dessine tous les jours depuis qu’il est tout petit. Il dessine tout le temps. Il s’est transformé en machine à dessiner. Cette sensibilité de toute une vie ne pourra jamais se comparer à un algorithme générateur d’images.

À propos de l'IA qui génère du code: On cherche à optimiser la « création de logiciel » tout en oubliant la maintenance du logiciel et de l’infrastructure pour le faire tourner.

A tiling manager

The digital art creations below are “64k intros”: small computer programs of 65,536 bytes or less, that present a short audio visual experience. They are a showcase of creativity and technical skills, using techniques like procedural generation, sound synthesis, and real-time graphics. More info.

Some are maintaining a list!

"The major cause of the software crisis is that the machines have become several orders of magnitude more powerful! To put it quite bluntly: as long as there were no machines, programming was no problem at all; when we had a few weak computers, programming became a mild problem, and now we have gigantic computers, programming has become an equally gigantic problem." —Edsger Dijkstra

Various efforts have been made to address pieces of the software crisis, but they all follow the same pattern of "abstract it away".

Programming models, user interfaces, and foundational hardware can, and must, be shallow and composable.
There have been movements to bring awareness to the software crisis, such as (Handmade), (Permacomputing), and various retro-computing circles.

The article is well written and connects multiple topics: line of code and care work to the software, computer architecture and speed, its industry and more.

Debian 12, for comparison, is 1,341,564,204 lines of code. For comparison, Google Chrome is about 40 million lines, which is in the same ballpark as the Linux kernel these days. No one, even a team, can read these entirely.

Computers aren't much faster now than they were a decade ago, and they will probably never again return to the rate of performance improvement they had for 60 years up to the mid-noughties.

The thing is, that doesn't scale very well. On the desktop we have four-core machines and now we're moving to eight-plus cores, but a single person can't use that very helpfully, so instead, we're getting computers with a mixture of high-performance but hot, power-hungry cores, and lower-performance, cooler, but more electrically-efficient cores.

A limit to multiple cores is the Amdahl's law: even if a program can be made 95 per cent parallel, the maximum speedup you can get is about 20 times, no matter how many processor cores you throw at it.

Programmers want to write fast apps. But the market doesn’t care.

And the list goes on for th rest of the characteristics: reliability, lightweight, etc...

Programmers have power though.

Shit. I have to change some apps of my android phone.

To meet the demands of the European Commission's Digital Markets Act—slated to be enforced in March 2024—Microsoft must make its apps easier to uninstall, its default settings easier to change, and its attempts at steering people toward its services easier to avoid.

It includes Bing, default apps, Edge, etc...

Un état des lieux des différentes alternatives libres soutenues par Framasoft depuis des années.

It’s a reminder that reliability, consistency, and user satisfaction can coexist in the realm of software development.

RMS was right since the very beginning. Every warning, every prophecy realised. And, worst of all, he had the solution since the start.

The solution has always been there: copyleft. Copyleft as in "Forbidding privatizing the commons". Here's why:

He also foresaw that if we were not the master of our software, we would quickly become the slave of the machines controlled by soulless corporations. He told us that story again and again.

RMS quickly pointed, rightly, that the lack of "freedom" means that people will forget about the concept. Again, he was right. But everybody considered that "Free Software" and "Open Source" were the same because they both focused on the four freedoms.

Pushing GPL and AGPL was not enough, because

all this work was ridiculed. Microsoft, through Github, Google and Apple pushed for MIT/BSD licensed software as the open source standard. This allowed them to use open source components within their proprietary closed products. They managed to make thousands of free software developers work freely for them.

We need more commons, because:

• young student are taught computer with Word and PowerPoint
• young hackers are mostly happy with rooting Android phones or using the API of a trendy JS framework.
• When an industry receives millions in public subsidies then make a patent, that industry is privatising the common.
• When Google is putting the Linux kernel in a phone that cannot be modified easily, Google is privatising the common.

Fighting back?

Well, the first little step I can do myself is to release every future software I develop under the AGPL license. To put my blog under a CC By-SA license. I encourage you to copyleft all the things!

Add a fifth rule to the free software: The obligation to keep those four rights, effectively keeping the software in the commons.

A FLOSS alternative to reddit. It is gaining traction since Reddit announced to make their API not free anymore.

All of these sound good to me. The thoughts are in contradiction with some terms of the current IT developments and programming.

About the current state of the software:

• it is getting slower as demonstrated by the latency. A computer from 2015 is 2-5 times slower than an Apple 2e from 1986 just at reading a keystroke and displaying it on screen. https://danluu.com/input-lag/
• putting all-in-one software increase complexity, and maintenance costs. They become untrustworthy.
• they are more a liability than an asset

I take some quotes out of it.

Humanity didn't get good at building houses by building the same house a million times. We built lots of different houses and learned from each other's failures.

As a programmer, I've tried multiple times in the past decade to create services just for myself and a few friends. Each of them has fallen away after a year or two. And a big reason for that was the burden of keeping up with updates for all the tools they depend on.

My initial plan had been to create clones of apps for myself and take out lots of features. [...] I didn't expect to find myself wondering what a web browser for memory palaces might look like.

Solutions

• making forks instead of all-in-one software. It keeps them lighter.
• we can have a huge amount of softwares. It is ok. Prefer software with thousands rather than millions of users, that seldom requires updates, that spawns lots of forks, that is easy to modify, that you can modify.