I'd like mruby as some kind of fail-save boot system. Ruby powering
the operating system as much as possible (ultimately ruby is just
syntactic sugar over C, though, so I am fine using C of course).
The lack of documentation means that I'd just waste my time though.
Not going to do that.
Also, I think mruby and MRI should not be separate. It doesn't do
the project any good. It should be as modular as possible but one
code base only.
As the article said Duralex was the brand use by a large number of school cantinas in France. Inside of each glass there’s a small number used by the brand to identify the mold used for the creation of the glass. For kids that was a way to decide who is going to fetch the water for the table (smaller number or higher number of the table).
That’s why the CE is holding his glass like that in the guardian article.
Beside the nostalgia i think a lot of people support them because it’s a SCOP (the majority of the capital of the company is owned by the employees) [1] and it’s nice to see that another kind of company is possible.
>For kids that was a way to decide who is going to fetch the water for the table (smaller number or higher number of the table).
I only knew the version where your age is the number on the glass. For fetching water, it was the slowest person to say "pot d'eau" (water jug) and sometimes put a hand to your head (it depended on the group).
I might have generalized then. It’s maybe something that we had only in the south (aka the broc à eau area). We also used it to check our age of course.
Eighteen months ago, Marciano oversaw a staff buyout of the company, which had been placed in receivership for the fourth time in 20 years. Today, 180 of the 243 employees are “associates” in the company.
It has only been employee-owned for a short time. Some overhang from the management style of the previous 20 years is only to be expected.
Why? Most large corporations I’ve dealt with are highly bureaucratic and resistant to change. Good ideas get lost in silos or bogged down in bureaucracy. Whether it works or not seems entirely dependent on whether the company has a moat around their revenue stream, which allows them to be inefficient everywhere else.
For an employee owned co-op, a more anarchistic organization structure that allows for more employee control of everyday decisions could actually allow the company to adapt and change more easily. The ones making decisions have skin in the game, both as workers and owners.
If the employees have the power then decisions that are good for company but bad for the employees won't be made.
Let's say that the company can't compete so the CEO proposes to automate production and lay off 50%+ of the employees, do you think employees will vote in favour?
In general coops are not good at tough decisions and innovation.
Duralex already went bankrupt several times and they are heading for it again. What's in the article is nice but it's charity not business so unfortunately I am not optimistic.
Were they a coop when they went bankrupt? According to the article, they only became a coop recently, so having a CEO capable of firing everyone didn’t work out for them.
They took investors, who agreed to the rate of return on their investment. That doesn’t sound like charity.
Now, your example of a CEO that wants to fire everyone assumes that that’s the right decision. How well has that kind of thinking worked for other firms like Boeing? That type of authority structure introduces its own set of distortions, which usually skew towards shareholders, and often not towards long term sustainability.
As a worker, I would be against that decision for selfish reasons as well as for rational reasons. It sounds like a bad idea. If they want to sell commodity glassware, then that’s a race to the bottom. But they’re selling quality, which requires humans with skill.
> In general coops are not good at tough decisions and innovation.
This needs to be backed up. Mondragon in Spain has thrived for decades. In America, mutual aid societies used to provide health care, unemployment insurance and other benefits before being squeezed out by other groups who were better at things like regulatory capture.
There is a long history of cooperative ownership that goes beyond the stereotypical hippie grocery store. I think it’s too quick to dismiss Duralex.
They were not. In fact they went through series of mass-redundancy episodes that were supposed to save them from bankruptcy, soon followed by yet another bankruptcy.
The COOP might fail. Indeed the call for contributions discussed in the article was motivated by that risk. But it won't fail because it was a COOP, because every CEO who tried also failed to save it. The COOP structure is this company's last chance, literally.
Their Wikipedia page says that headcount is flat to increasing over the last 10 years.
The coop structure is a result of their bankruptcy in 2024. As I understand, this was the proposal that didn't involve any layoffs and it was chosen by the bankruptcy court. They also got a large de facto subsidy. The fact that they have run out of money again so quickly (the root of the article) is quite worrying to say the least.
None of that changes anything to the points of my previous comment.
Except that these employees had been put on temporary unemployment (chômage partiel) [0] and their difficulties have been going on for much longer than 10 years.
Ultimately all I am saying is that other structures have not fared better than the COOP. Claiming that the potential current failure is because the COOP prevents hard decisions to be made while ignoring the fact that the previous owner lasted 3 years before failing (in spite of the temporary unemployment decisions) is not logical.
I have never claimed nor suggested that their situation is because they are a coop...
Most of the replies I got here have not even read my comments, apparently, and completely beside the point or just rush to condemn me for blaspheming. It's like the poor guy who dares disagreeing at a student socialist meeting.
Here is a quote from your original message which I have read and suspect others have too:
> In general coops are not good at tough decisions and innovation.
> Duralex already went bankrupt several times and they are heading for it again. What's in the article is nice but it's charity not business so unfortunately I am not optimistic.
These two paragraphs following each other do make it seem like you are making a connection between the two, coops being unpropitious for hard decisions and this particular coop heading for bankruptcy.
That original comment was primarily made up of three paragraphs criticising coops, and readers naturally assume that the final concluding paragraph (this place is likely going bankrupt) is linked to the first three.
> just rush to condemn me for blaspheming.
Nobody has accused you of blasphemy. They just disagree with you. You are not being victimised, and nobody has pretended you were not allowed to think as you think. There is just a discussion taking place between disagreeing people.
> Duralex already went bankrupt several times and they are heading for it again. What's in the article is nice but it's charity not business so unfortunately I am not optimistic.
Everyone can rally round in their time of need but that doesn't change the fact that Duralex was struggling to begin with, and once this goodwill windfall dries up they'll be back here.
> If the employees have the power then decisions that are good for company but bad for the employees won't be made.
"The company" is a fiction. Real parties are, e.g., employees, capital owners, suppliers, and customers (and, to the extent that any of those are corporations or similar convenient fictions, the same kinds of groups with respect to those entities.)
With a pure labor coop (which an SCOP isn't quite, put similar enough that it works as an approximation for discussing general traits), "capital owners" and "employees" are the same group, rather than different groups whose interests are frequently adversarial.
> Let's say that the company can't compete so the CEO proposes to automate production and lay off 50%+ of the employees, do you think employees will vote in favour?
Quite possibly, though because of this exact issue (and generally the need to buy out ownership shares of terminated employees), labor coops are less likely to go on hiring binges that force them to rapidly and massively downsize to survive when the conditions that drove the binge change.
For this exact use case I used instant-ngp[0] recently and was really pleased with the results. There's an article[1] explaining how to prepare your data.
I find it really practical to create a quick ui. For example i used to do glitch art with a friend that didn’t know how to use a cli, so i created a gui for him to use [0].
Egui is perfect for this use case, you create quickly lightweights softwares, than can be compiled to many different OS.
Looks awesome, nice work. I have an unrelated question, on little workshop's website I can see a pétanque game that I couldn't find online. Is there a way to play this game or was it available only during an event?
So basically GenZ realized that a company is not your friend, they can fire you the moment you are not valuable.
I feel sorry for older generations that let themselves be exploited, there's no point in being loyal to a company. IMO I have a deal with the company I'm working with: my skills and time for money, of course I always want a better deal which means more money or more benefits.
> So basically GenZ realized that a company is not your friend, they can fire you the moment you are not valuable. I feel sorry for older generations that let themselves be exploited, there's no point in being loyal to a company.
Millenials and especially Gen X had a lot of things easier. You could get some stable job and coast and do fine in the economy 20-30 years ago. I think your sympathies for the way us gens X/Y approached jobs 10 years ago is misdirected (though I suspect a lot of Millenials, especially those such as myself who aren't highly compensated, are taking a more individualistic approach to their careers now as well)
Gen Z is out here trying to survive and they've gotten an incredibly raw deal, I'd sympathize with them instead.
Same. I'm a millennial and 30 years ago I was in elementary school; not exactly looking for a job.
I think this is the first time I get to be like, "kids today don't know how hard we had it", so that's a neat experience I suppose. What I won't say is that I think they've got it any easier; indeed it seems like every generation since X has gotten a worse deal.
Just the overall atmosphere when the majority of millenials were entering the job market (I realize this is a good ~15-year period, but at least 10 of those years were decent) was so much better than Gen Z has it (right now).
Gen X especially had some really amazing opportunities, but income to purchasing power has been more favourable for pretty much the entire time Gen X was coming of age.
Personally, I'm just thinking about what entry-level salaries were 15 years ago compared to the cost of real estate, and I could see a clear path to homeownership for a lot of people entering the workforce at that time, even outside of the top 10% paying jobs
Gen Z unfortunately doesn't really have a practical path to homeownership (in big western cities anyway) outside of A) inheritance/family support, or B) entering the workforce into a position that would put them in the top 3-5% of their cohort
People born in 1985 entered the workforce in 2006 when finishing a three year degree. The worst financial crisis since the great depression started two years later.
Not sure what sort of rose tinted glasses you have about the 00s but they were a lot worse than today.
Senior leadership will word it more diplomatically; but that is the only mindset that makes sense for them. Once you have the power to choose to add or remove resources from a project it doesn't make sense to interact with the company in any way other than transacting skills and time for money. Except people with substantial equity stakes, for obvious reasons. One of the tells of a high-performing management culture is everyone can do their job in working hours with the skills that they have formal training in.
There are exceptions where you sometimes get workaholics in high places, especially founders. That can be an advantage or a disadvantage; I've seen at least one founder destroy their own business because they couldn't stop coding, get a regular 8 hours sleep and switch off from time to time. One of the paths from sleep deprivation leads to a rolling crisis and eventual company collapse. They didn't understand that a boundary between work and not-work is necessary for high performance management to happen.
Unless I misunderstand you, this would mean "leadership" translates to "my time is valued at $xyz per hour which I can get at companies A, B and C, but I love company D so much I will work for them for less than that". Or alternatively, "leadership" means "leaving money on the table because of a feeling of loyalty towards a corporation"?
Yes, you misunderstand. It's ironic, but it's a well known irony, that being outwardly transactional about a relationship can be a losing strategy. (Example: bringing a gift to a cocktail party versus giving the host the cash value of that gift.)
Loyalty shouldn't be freely given. But it's not particularly hard to spot the overly transactional types, and it also shouldn't surprise anyone that while those tactics work for a while, they cliff out before leadership. Again, that cliff is well within the range of a really good salary. But it's a cliff nonetheless.
Your work contract isn't a relationship, you're example doesn't make sense here. My company isn't a person hosting a party, so why should I bring a gift?
I'm not disagreeing with you on the premise that work should be mostly transactional and there should be no expectation of loyalty, but the spirit of the other guy's example is that your coworkers, the other human beings who work there and have to interact with you, will find it offputting if you are aggressively transactional with them about everything all the time.
My experience disagrees with this analysis. Everyone in leadership has enough of a seasoning of cynicism and sociopathy to trivially evade the common filter for transactionality.
You can have that attitude internally without impacting your ability to do your job or grow. People in leadership leave companies all the time, there's no need to be tied to a particular one.
Precisely. Compartmentalization is a critical skill at the executive level. You cannot simply let every emotion play out on your face and expect to not be an open book.
Companies have limited leadership opportunities for developers. It's pointless trying to make everyone a leader when there's 1 leadership position for every 20 developers.
Yes, yes, you can be an informal leader as well, but let's please recognize that not everyone wants to be one, and it's ok to be "just a worker".
I suppose that's true if you believe leadership is telling people what to do. That idea, however, is equally as wrong-headed as thinking you shouldn't develop leaders unless you have management headcount.
Software developer compensation spans a very wide range, especially in the USA. Devs with the same years of experience could be earning anywhere from $50k on the low end to $500k on the high end in the same city. The "upward mobility" across the range is relatively easy and not hindered by your credentials (i.e. you aren't permanently barred from the highest end jobs because you didn't do your undergrad at Harvard, Yale or Princeton).
The fact that the USA allows immigration means that this compensation range applies globally. A dev in Tallinn earning €80k can aspire for the $500k role in San Francisco and actually have a decent shot of getting it.
It's almost unreasonable to expect employees to remain loyal in this situation.
The phenomenon where people stayed in the same job forever happened because they couldn't really go anywhere else to make more. Indeed, at high-paying tech companies, you will find many devs who have been there for decades.
IMHO that likely because our culture changed long ago and loyalty in general is worth less and even considered stupid when there are options.
Naturally this reflects onto businesses, which of course are made and run by people. Loyalty to employees and vice versa is gone in favour of getting the better deal.
> IMHO that likely because our culture changed long ago and loyalty in general is worth less and even considered stupid when there are options.
I disagree, loyalty in friendship or with your family is not worth less. Being loyal to human being is not stupid, for me it's being loyal to a company or a brand that is.
When being loyal to your close ones, you create trust and for me this is critical of my hapiness.
I don't get anything from being loyal to a company.
I don't fully understand your comment, are you implying that older generations were able to buy a house in their 20s because they were loyal to their companies?
I wonder if the fact that we spend the last 50 years or so having policies erroding all our social benefits might have a role in the deterioration of overall living conditions.
But off course no, it's because our grandparents were more loyal to their companies.
Well, my family came up in a different country (not the US) and the two key things that enabled their rise from poverty were a literal obsession with working/putting in hours and entrepreneurship/"the hustle".
In my own life I have seen the enormous, overwhelming, and abundantly clear difference from when I self-commiserated, lamenting my own misfortune to embracing hardship, explicitly forbidding myself from whining, throwing myself into hard work, foregoing any kind of social life for a few years and eventually it all paid off, only getting better when I decided to be an entrepreneur.
But all my effort is nothing compared to the hard work my dad had to do, and even less compared to that of my grandfather's.
Is this genuine wonderment? The state of housing in western countries has been discussed at great length and it's disingenuous to compare that across generations, whereas the state of working and how companies treat you has stayed the same, or gotten worse (as we've seen lately).
I used egui for a personal project and would gladly recommend it. It's simple to use and really responsive. For me it was the first gui library that was a pleasure to work with.
You don't have the native look but for Rust developers that don't have this requirement you should definitely give it a try.
The curious thing about "native" GUIs, nowadays, is that most people spend their time using "desktop" apps that are just browsers in disguise, and don't really bother with looking like any platform's native UI.
I often wonder how much effort it would take to make one of the popular eguis framework and, rather than make it looks "like a native" app, you could get away with making it look "like a browser". (everyone style buttons/ inputs / etc... but they have a general "default" feeling that people are probably used to, at this point ?)
I also wonder if it's not mostly developers that care about that, as long as the software is well made and fast I think users will use it without thinking twice about it.
For example Blender's GUI has nothing native yet it's massively used, some people complain about the complexity of the UI but rarely if ever of the non native look.
Yep,as a former animator-in-training and heavy Blender user, the fact that the UI didn't match the rest of the OS was an afterthought, at best. You might even argue that having the exact same UI look on multiple OSs was a plus.
> The curious thing about "native" GUIs, nowadays, is that most people spend their time using "desktop" apps that are just browsers in disguise,
I really feel like I live in some alternate universe sometimes. Most people around me use very classic desktop apps for their day-to-day work - blender, kicad, adobe illustrator, qt creator, telegram desktop, krita, ableton live, libreoffice ... none of these are browsers in disguise.
I remember using both Swing and Tk apps on Windows that attempted to replicate a Windows look-and-feel and did not quite succeed, and the uncanny valley effect was strong with those; similarly with Qt apps attempting to emulate the active Gtk+ 2 theme. So being close to native might even be a bit worse than nothing like native.
(Not that it’s impossible to do a near-perfect emulation—IE 5&6, VB 6, and Office 97 all use completely custom widget toolkits, and apart from the funky menus and common file dialogs in Office people rarely complained about mismatches with the platform.)
I used Shoes two (edit: three according to git) years ago to build a small software[1]. At the time there was a version 4 ongoing heavy development based on top of JRuby but I think it’s in the same state.
The version 3.3 listed here has been officially abandoned by the sole developer. At the time they wrote a blog article about stopping the project but the blog is not available anymore (it’s the link in the description of the project [2]).
Already two years ago shoes 3.3 was crashing a lot unexpectedly so I wouldn’t recommend using it for anything serious.
But if you want to access the documentation online I made a small website for that [3]. The official documentation is only available in the executable which isn’t great to browse.
> At the time they wrote a blog article about stopping the project but the blog is not available anymore (it’s the link in the description of the project
>> As you have guessed by now, I’m not maintaining Shoes 3 anymore. I do still answer some questions on github but nothing new is likely. I owe you an explanation of why. It’s pretty simple. My health is bad and is not going to get better.
That snipit's a little misleading without the follow-on next sentence:
> The Shoes community (Shoes 3 or Shoes 4) is not growing and there is little enjoyment in working on code that no one else cares about enough to help code the internals. The underlying technology employed is evolving in ways that run counter to what Shoes is and does. It’s just time to quit. We had fun, we learned some things and we’ll leave it at that.
And then a lot of text about wandering off into home automation, Arduino, and 3D printers.
Just a heads up: PySimpleGUI 5 isn't open source any more [0], and the official GitHub repo was replaced with a stub [1]. From the blog post, it sounds like the people behind it will probably remove the FOSS version from PyPI soon.
It's possible the community will fork it with a version of PySimpleGUI 4 that's still kicking around, but I haven't seen one yet.
I'm the perfect target user for something like this -- long time "scientific" programmer, who is sometimes asked to create a useful little app for a limited audience. Nothing I write will ever see the light of day as a software product.
I use Tkinter. It was not hard to learn at all, and while it's not comprehensive, it gets enough stuff done. And it comes with the "vanilla" Python istall.
What I did with Tkinter, starting more than a decade ago, was to create my own little "wrapper" that simplified things even further. Each of my little functions or objects incorporates what I've learned about a widget and imposes a default -- ugly but functional -- layout. That way, I never have to look it up again.
[0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ni-1x5Esa_o