Tootfinder

"It is fair to say that Microsoft spent at least the first five years of its history in relative obscurity. The first appearance of the name “Microsoft” on the pages of Byte was a short mention of their BASIC interpreter in an advertising on page 47 of the May 1977 issue. In contrast, page 34 of the same issue included an article about the Apple II by Steve Wozniak. The Woz and Gary Kildall were the biggest stars of the microcomputer industry at the end of the 1970s."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/where-does-microsoft-want-to-go-today/

The 79th edition of De Programmatica Ipsum is out!
This month, we explore trust and its importance in human society and culture; in the Library section, we review “Geekonomics” by David Rice; and in our Vidéothèque section, we watch a video on the Veritasium channel where Derek Muller hacks Linus Sebastian’s phone.
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/issue-79-trust/

"Trofim Lysenko était un scientifique soviétique dont le déni dogmatique de la science a conduit Š une famine de masse lorsque ses idées ont été appliquées Š l'agriculture. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ressemble beaucoup Š Lysenko dans son déni de la science. Ses résultats seront-ils aussi désastreux ?"
#lysenkisme

Rant about PHP
You know a technology is declining when the most basic questions about its most bizarre quirks are left completely unanswered for years.
#PHP is like that. Every day I have many of these questions. I look for them. No one asked them before, no one wrote about them before.
I'm baffled by the lack of curiosity and proactivity of its community.
I know it sounds like me piling up on people I don't know anything about, but I used to invest a lot of time programming in PHP. I went to conferences, I made some open source libraries for it, like a PHP kernel for Jupyter Notebooks, I even made a library to work with dataframes, tensors and matrices in PHP (although I lost this one because my laptop was stolen before I released... and I didn't had it in me to rewrite it again).
Then, the ones who I admired the most in that space, like Nikita Popov, started leaving it to work in more intellectually vibrant communities... and it shows.
I'm sure Nikita Popov would be much more gracious than me when talking about it. I can only speculate about his motivations, but at least I can tell you about mine: It was precisely about that same lack of curiosity and creativity that I mentioned before, it felt unbearably grey and sad.

"The Tax Foundation is a veteran anti-tax campaign organization from the United States. It has been around since 1937 when it was founded by top brass from companies such as Standard Oil and General Motors. Close links to some of the biggest corporations in the US has been a constant feature of the organization, as has its political aim of bringing down taxes"
#lobbying

uspolitics, trump
I keep seeing smart people writing stuff like
> [the US] kept peace through strength balanced with restraint, and wielded influence through culture, values, and diplomacy
I understand that #Trump is terrible and some people feel tempted to idealize what they had before him, but we should be more discerning, or otherwise it becomes impossible to understand how this happened in the first place.
Let's start with some questions:
- peace where? and for who? was it true peace, or "Pax Romana"?
- are we going to take seriously that statement on "restraint"? after all the lies, internal witch hunting, sanctions, coups, wars, invasions, genocides, and last but not least, 2 unnecessary nuclear strikes on Japan?
Now, on "culture, values, and diplomacy". Sure. Why not. Not everything was going to be bad, right?
But the thing is, abusive husbands aren't bad all the time either. From time to time they know how to be sweet and seem to care: one present here, flowers the next day, a little bit of gaslighting, and fake apologies after that "accidental" slap.
Given enough time (if the wife is still alive), at some point the victim decides to leave, and then all hell breaks loose. Trump is the manifestation of that moment. He does not represent a change in #USA's nature, but a hidden side that was "always" there, just waiting to play its role.
Others believe this is because #US citizens have been intentionally dumbed down by a combination of propaganda and a disfunctional education system, and I'm sure it's partly true... But let's see what many of their most brilliant and educated citizens are choosing to do with their lives today: https://sfstandard.com/2025/03/12/stanford-students-want-in-on-the-military-tech-gold-rush/
So, all I'm asking is: please drop the act. It was always a clusterfuck.

"Trofim Lysenko était un scientifique soviétique dont le déni dogmatique de la science a conduit Š une famine de masse lorsque ses idées ont été appliquées Š l'agriculture. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ressemble beaucoup Š Lysenko dans son déni de la science. Ses résultats seront-ils aussi désastreux ?"
#lysenkisme

On the same day I signed an initial IEP plan, I find out the US Dept of Education has cut half its staff.
Fuck POTUS47 and anyone that voted for him. And fuck any #ProgressivesForTrump that didn't have the maturity to vote for a better future. There's a million ways we will suffer for your single-minded refusal to see the future. You think people will "try harder&quo…

"If anything, this author firmly believes that programming skills are second to those related to communication; most engineers coming out of colleges these days are unable to express themselves in public, to teach their peers, to write an essay or a blog post, to communicate their ideas to stakeholders, or to put together a simple documentation bundle without suffering a seizure in the process."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/banning-adopting-reckoning/

"Go is a triumph in developer experience and efficiency, a language and a runtime created by very experienced designers built to solve a particular problem in a lightweight manner. Just like PostgreSQL and Git, some technologies survive Darwinian evolutionary cataclysms and rise to the top of their craft. Without any doubt, Go belongs to this select group, and if somewhat naïvely we take the past 15 years as a proof, its future looks definitely bright."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-age-of-concurrency/