No wonder he returned: he can focus on meaningful work without direct financial pressure, with full access to people, decisions, and resources.

If only we all had a time in life to do what we love, get paid, and face no paywalls. I call that "liberated work". If only at least retirement was like that.

Thanks for this punchline which starts better than a long an laborious argumentation.

free doesn't imply that the service/product has no costs, only that your transaction has no costs. Google is also free but it has costs (mostly paid by ads which are then included in products costs).

How do I see those invisible characters in emacs or vim ? In emacs I thought that whitespace-mode would do the trick but apparently it doesn't.

vim (7.4) seems to display them by default. With my whole vimrc commented out (just to be sure it wasn't a setting I changed), I get this:

    F<200b>or exam<200b>ple, I’ve ins<200b>erted 10 ze<200b>ro-width spa<200b>ces in<200b>to thi<200b>s sentence, c<200b>an you tel<200b><200b>l?

(The <200b> is also highlighted a different color than the rest of the text, and acts like a single character when moving the cursor through it. It's really, really obvious.)

Indeed, I copy-pasted in emacs but not in vim, my bad...

In emacs those characters are by default visible as one-pixel wide spaces, to make them more apparent eval (update-glyphless-char-display 'glyphless-char-display-control '((format-control . empty-box) (no-font . hex-code))).

To view it, I used:

    echo "Ctrl+V" | hd

Which makes a hexdump. Easily visible there.

If you're looking for Vim or Emacs specifically, I don't know.

Could you provide more precisions / examples of this C code-style ?

I wrote a huge ranty reply, but deleted it because it leads OT. Basically, read up on the link to ECS in the sibling comment. Also, definitely check out "Data-oriented design". There's a talk by Mike Acton on Youtube. "Where there's one, there's many" is a pretty basic but super important insight.

I consider this to be important to code maintainability at least as much as to performance.

Those are only for fun, but real stuff are designed to be deliberately inconvenient (e.g. against homeless people): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_architecture

There really is a very sharp relief between security and tasteful design

. . . and pigeons.

I would kill to have this module in the batteries included…

I didn't know the last one. Nevertheless I find the mix of functions with no arguments, function values and optionnal parenthesis quite confusing syntax wise.

What about the end of life of solar panels ? Did they manage to build recyclable ones ?

The answer is at the end of the article. The short answeris: that the solar industrie has processes to recycle 100% all the panels. I agree that it would be nice to know more about this, especially if the panels are really recycled - after all having processes is not a gjarantee that they are really applied.

There is a gray scale of "entrepreneurs" and "companies" based on the means they use to gain power and influence, so this is rather natural,just as people already read Machiavel or Sun Tzu before. Law, customs, means of legitimation (media) and force are fuzzy and moving barriers.

But one should not forget that this is only one aspect, one dimension, the "power and influence" one. Companies are structures for making things together with others : people spend much time there so we should also seek other aspects within them. E.g more "horizontal" and "democratic" structures preventing mafiaesque hierarchies can also bring fullfillment to much more employees : this is especially important in companies employing well-educated and smart people like programmers at the lowest positions.