Geoffroy Couprie

@geoffroycouprie.com

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Messing with Rust and cryptography

Excerpt from "now it can be told": " The piles themselves were surrounded by heavy shields of steel, pressed wood and concrete, to protect the operators from the extreme radioactivity that accompanies the formation of plutonium. The energy of this radiation is cquivalent to that of hundreds of tons of radium, Each pile was located within an area of one square mile. At first they were six miles apart. S additional piles became necessary, we planned to intersperse them between those already in existence, so that the distance betwee them would then be three miles. Design of the equipment for the chemical separation plants had to i keep abreast of, and in some cases ahead of, the development of the process itself. Fortunately, the two separation processes that seemed to offer the best prospects employed virtually the same equipment and piping layouts, SO that it was possible to go ahead with a design the first stages of which would be suitable for either process. Almost every one of the major design decisions for Hanford had to be made before the Clinton pile was in operation. Oricinally eight separation plants were considered necessary, then Six, then four. Finally, with the benefit Of the `perating experience and information obtained from the Clinton semi-works, we decided to build only three, of which two would operate and one would serve as a reserve. I should like to point out that these separation plants were designed when we only had sub-microscopic quantities of plutonium. Here again, each plant was provided with its own water system and steam plant and the other service facilities needed for independent operation. Each plant was a continuous concrete struc- ture about eisht hundred feet long, in which there were individual cells containing the various parts involved n the process equipment. To provide protection from the intense radioactivity, the cells were surrounded by concrete walls seven feet thick and were covered by six feet of concrete.
A group of bagpipes player, preparing for a small concert in front of a bar
Book cover of "Now it can be told, the story of the Manhattan project" by Leslie Groves
Annotated scottish air sheet, where what they call a B is actually a C
Often written off as irrational, unpredictable, and unnecessary, the sensual and erotic are what connect us to our humanity. The ability to feel, and feel deeply, is not a bug but a feature of being a human, of being mortal. It is this fact that the ultra wealthy so despise. It is clear that they see the body as a gross, inefficient object that connects them to people they deem lower than them, that is, people in general. It makes sense, then that the world they seek to create for everyone is as removed from the corporeal and sensual as possible. Digital money, machines that make art, a robot that keeps track of your friends, a God that isn’t a god but a graphics processing unit."
"Mental gymnastics meme" with on top a gymnast casually walking on the mat then saluting, with the mentions: - find a bug - fix the bug - ship the fix And at the bottom another gymnast doing incredibly hard and unneeded acrobatics with the mentions: - find a bug - open a jira ticket - triage - change advisory board - prioritization - quarter planning - fix the bug - release planning - the bug is abandoned
Meme about a bad drawing lesson that shows 2 circles as first sketch, then on the second step a fully drawn owl, with no in between steps
Excerpt from an article that I will not link because we won't annoy the author directly: "When a system exceeds this threshold, we start making mistakes, missing edge cases, and losing track of how changes ripple through the codebase. Type checking, the argument goes, becomes essential precisely when systems cross this cognitive boundary. But here’s the hidden assumption: that crossing this boundary is inevitable. That large software systems must, by their very nature, become cognitively overwhelming. That the only solution is to build tools sophisticated enough to navigate the complexity we’ve created. What if this assumption is wrong? What if the need for type checking is not a natural consequence of scale, but a symptom of poor architectural choices? What if we’ve built systems that are unnecessarily complex, then mistaken that complexity for an inherent property of software? The evidence for this alternative view is hiding in plain sight. UNIX pipelines routinely compose dozens of programs into complex workflows, yet they require no type checking at the transport layer"
Bagpipes drone without all the waxed thread
Cleaned up, oiled bagpipes, ready for the last step of plumbing
Newly seasoned bagpipes pouch hanging upside down over a funnel in the seasoning bottle
Bagpipes drones, oiled and polished
Bagpipes drones, ready to be polished and oiled up
Automated email sent at 8PM on a Friday, titled: "Geoffroy Couprie, your Jira instance needs you"
A metal lathe with a disassembled cross slide
Grayscale screenshot of the Discord app visual notification circle
Excerpt from the article: On being “engineering-driven”: Self-described “engineering-driven” companies tend to fall into one of two traps. Either they alienate the business side by pinching their nose and holding business development at arm’s length (“aaahhh, i’m just an engineer! I have no interest in or capacity for participating in developing our marketing voice or sales pitch decks, get off me!”), or they act like engineering is a sort of super-skillset that makes you capable of doing everybody else’s job better than they possibly could. As though those other disciplines and skill sets aren’t every bit as deep and creative and challenging in their own right as developing software can be.
"Gifts exist in the startup world. They are things like "we were both in YCombinator so I will intro you to this investor I like" or "I got extremely rich so let me invest in your startup and incidentally I get a lottery ticket for becoming even more rich." These absolutely are still gifts. They each strengthen social ties. The startup world is a society, and the society is built up from these gifts. It's a society that largely ignores the trials and tribulations of anyone who isn't a rich software engineer insider, but history has hosted many past societies of that sort and it takes a long time to build and deploy enough guillotines, and anyway they are having fun and producing a lot and surely that counts for something"
Excerpt from "The Toyota Way": The mid-century corporation's workplace training and many-layered hierarchy built a pipeline through which the top jobs the might be filled. The saying "from the mail mail room to the corner office" captured something real, and even the most menial jobs opened pathways to promotion. Much of this pathway to the top ended as professional executives were hired from outside and worked with large consulting firms to cut labor costs and "rationalize" the enterprise: When management consulting untethered executives from particular industries, it also led them to embrace the one thing common to all corporations: making money from for shareholders.. Executives raised on the new, untethered model of managment aimed exclusively and directly at profit: their education, their career arc, and their profssional role conspire to isolate them from other worker and train them single-mindedly on the bottom line. Toyota apparently did not get the memo. The primary company mission still is to add value to society. It invests in its team members, value chain member and local communities. It begins by providing employees with a stable income. Profits will come, but they are an input to Toyota's broader purpose-and def minitely are not the ultimate goal. Outdated thinking? Yesterday's news? Need consulting firm to rationalize them? When we understand how interconnected and uncertain the world is, we can begin to see the business case for a more people-centered way of thinking and acting for the long term.
Excerpt from the Techdirt article by Mike Masnick: "But here’s the thing: there’s a reason this “tech-friendly dictator” fantasy has been bubbling up in VC circles and startup accelerators for years. It’s not just about cutting red tape—it’s about the fundamental belief that techbros like themselves shouldn’t have to deal with the messy compromises that democracy itself requires. They’d rather sweep away all those pesky democratic institutions and let the “smart people” (spoiler: they mean themselves) run things. The basic pitch is seductive: democracy is messy, slow, and often staffed by people who don’t understand technology. Wouldn’t it be better to have someone in charge who just… gets it? No. No, it would not."
Go implementation of datalog fact iteration for biscuit tokens
Screenshot of a metrics dashboard from a hosting provider, with cpu, ram and disk usage graphs
On May 29, 2025, a new feature was added to Service Control for additional quota policy checks. This code change and binary release went through our region by region rollout, but the code path that failed was never exercised during this rollout due to needing a policy change that would trigger the code. As a safety precaution, this code change came with a red-button to turn off that particular policy serving path. The issue with this change was that it did not have appropriate error handling nor was it feature flag protected. Without the appropriate error handling, the null pointer caused the binary to crash. Feature flags are used to gradually enable the feature region by region per project, starting with internal projects, to enable us to catch issues. If this had been flag protected, the issue would have been caught in staging.
"You must struggle with your own beliefs if you are to make any progress in understanding the possibilities and limitations of computers in the intellectual area. To do this adequately you must formalize your beliefs and then criticize them severely, arguing one side against the other, until you have a fair idea of the strengths and weaknesses of both sides. Most students start out anti-AI; some are pro-AI; and if you are either one of these then you must try to undo your biases in this important matter. In the next chapter we will supply more surprising data on what machines have done, but you must make up your own mind on this important topic. False beliefs will mean you will not participate significantly in the inevitable and extensive computerization of your organization and society generally. In many senses the computer revolution has only begun!"
Political compass on the "is woke"/"is chud" axis vs the "acts woke"/"acts chud" axis
Drawing of the "I refuse your question" ponytail guy
Screenshot from Patricia's mastodon thread on the book: "Anyway, that is the whole ideological basis of this entire book and all its associated reorg consultancy operation: People talk too fucking much, it's fucking with my architecture drawing."
Cover for the book "on the brink: the inside story of Fukushima Daiichi" by Ryūshō Kadota
A tulip stem, without the flower
In reality, the “scrub” has many more mental obstacles to overcome than anything actually going on during the game. The scrub has lost the game even before it starts. He’s lost the game even before deciding which game to play. His problem? He does not play to win. The scrub would take great issue with this statement for he usually believes that he is playing to win, but he is bound up by an intricate construct of fictitious rules that prevents him from ever truly competing. These made-up rules vary from game to game, of course, but their character remains constant
Graph of transformations between types in the rust elliptic curve crates
dismantled bagpipes ready for their quarterly pouch seasoning