iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 26/12/2025

This is what happens when you try to skip to an endgame factory in factorio

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.

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 30/11/2025

Bagpipes! Where disassembly and maintenance is half of the fun

A group of bagpipes player, preparing for a small concert in front of a bar

Disassembled bagpipes, ready to be cleaned up, oiled, then working on airtightness

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 22/11/2025

Next one: "Now it can be told", by Leslie Groves, the general who oversaw the Manhattan project. While the stories and movies about Oppenheimer and the physicists are interesting, this digs into the fascinating details of logistics and organization of a project at quch a scale

Book cover of "Now it can be told, the story of the Manhattan project" by Leslie Groves

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 02/11/2025

There's "learning the britton bagpipes" hard, and there's "having learned britton bagpipes and trying out scottish airs where everything is wrong by a halftone because they were too lazy to rewrite their sheets" hard

Annotated scottish air sheet, where what they call a B is actually a C

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 22/09/2025

Il voulait un prestataire pour l'audiobook ASMR de son roman, mais il a fait une typo dans sa recherche www.usine-digitale.fr/editorial/de...

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 22/09/2025

How many names does your pet have? Please meet Nixon, nix, nunuche, Pfft le chien, nigaud, pépère, papi, Lord Fartalot

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 17/09/2025

Ha I knew the book had a section on the appropriate level of involvement in decision making

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 12/09/2025

Sometimes it feels like making software is mostly about convincing people that no, 2 circles don't make an owl, you still need to draw the rest of the fucking owl

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

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 06/09/2025

Sometimes in your developer journey, you will come up with a grand foundational idea that would solve software if we could just and I want you to resist that urge because no, we cannot just. Software is complicated because the world is complicated, people are complicated, physics is complicated

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"

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 26/08/2025

Now witness the firepower of these fully armed and operational bagpipes

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 26/08/2025

Ah, I messed up the ropes 😅

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 26/08/2025

Almost fully reassembled. I just need to redo some of the joints with the waxed thread. For other instruments you would typically ask a professional to do the maintenance, but there are not that many for bagpipes, so you do it yourself. And the plumbing is half the fun

Cleaned up, oiled bagpipes, ready for the last step of plumbing

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 24/08/2025

To help it keep the air in, we massage the leather inside with seasoning, a kind of oily product that seeps into the pores (the outside of the skin, the epiderm, is on the inside of the pouch) and plugs the holes. Now letting it the excedent seasoning flow out

Newly seasoned bagpipes pouch hanging upside down over a funnel in the seasoning bottle

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 24/08/2025

Checking how air tight it is right now. By default the bagpipes pouch is not air tight, it does not really want you to play it

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 24/08/2025

There we go. Now, onto seasoning the pouch

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 24/08/2025

Nice and shiny. The oil not only makes the wood nicer to look at, it also helps the air flow a bit better

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 24/08/2025

Much better with all the rings polished up

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 24/08/2025

It's time for the yearly pipe cleanup

Bagpipes drones, ready to be polished and oiled up

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 23/08/2025

This has gone too far. Atlassian wants me to be in a codependent relationship with Jira

Automated email sent at 8PM on a Friday, titled: "Geoffroy Couprie, your Jira instance needs you"

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 15/08/2025

I guess I'm that kind of guy now

A metal lathe with a disassembled cross slide

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 12/08/2025

I'll add "Seeing like a state" to the book list. A bit long, and simplistic in its explanations, but asks some good questions on standardisation and planning politicalscience.yale.edu/publications...

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 27/07/2025

That was a very nice place to stay for a while www.eveildelaforet.com/fr/

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 25/07/2025

I could quote so much from this. The method is not only about accelerating production or improving quality, but also building the culture around it. Here, selecting and growing leaders that get the job done instead of hiring the loud leaders we see everywhere

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 24/07/2025

I've been trying that, it's surprisingly soothing. Especially because it neutralizes the red notification circles

Grayscale screenshot of the Discord app visual notification circle

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 23/07/2025

Having worked both at "engineering driven" and more balanced companies, this hits a bit too close to home 😅 charity.wtf/2022/01/20/h...

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.

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 22/07/2025

And another topic of interest for me: can you build functional large organizations while decentralizing information and decisions? Surprisingly, standardisation helps, if it's driven from the bottom up

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 22/07/2025

This was written 8 years ago. Things only got worse since then www.huffpost.com/entry/i-dont...

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 22/07/2025

"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" 😏 apenwarr.ca/log/20211229

"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"

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 21/07/2025

I expected a management book in "The Toyota way", I did not expect the critique of late stage capitalism, love to see it. Yes, other kinds of companies are possible, not purely centered on short term profits

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.

Page 41 from "the Toyota way". Sorry for the missing alt text, I'm missing time, my connection will drop before I finish that post

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 20/07/2025

Wtf happened since I posted that

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 19/07/2025

This is so very well put. The startup ecosystem is quick to forget that it can only exists thanks to stable institutions

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."

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 13/07/2025

Don't mind me, I'm just committing crimes with Go channels

Go implementation of datalog fact iteration for biscuit tokens

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 05/07/2025

It's interesting how, whenever a hosting provider make metrics dashboards for customers, they show the metrics they care about like CPU and RAM usage, not what the customers would care about to operate a modern web app

Screenshot of a metrics dashboard from a hosting provider, with cpu, ram and disk usage graphs

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 14/06/2025

That incident looks harsh status.cloud.google.com/incidents/ow... That's some fast response though

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.

Within 2 minutes, our Site Reliability Engineering team was triaging the incident. Within 10 minutes, the root cause was identified and the red-button (to disable the serving path) was being put in place. The red-button was ready to roll out ~25 minutes from the start of the incident. Within 40 minutes of the incident, the red-button rollout was completed, and we started seeing recovery across regions, starting with the smaller ones first.

Within some of our larger regions, such as us-central-1, as Service Control tasks restarted, it created a herd effect on the underlying infrastructure it depends on (i.e. that Spanner table), overloading the infrastructure. Service Control did not have the appropriate randomized exponential backoff implemented to avoid this. It took up to ~2h 40 mins to fully resolve in us-central-1 as we throttled task creation to minimize the impact on the underlying infrastructure and routed traffic to multi-regional databases to reduce the load. At that point, Service Control and API serving was fully recovered across all regions

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 08/06/2025

Advice on AI from 31 years ago, by Richard Hamming

"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!"

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 08/06/2025

Illustrating my point, here's yet another political compass making the rounds. Yes, it's for fun, but what does it accomplish? It reduces opinions on a wide range of topics to 2 dimensions. To show your friends who has the purest worldview? How far do you need to go?

Political compass on the "is woke"/"is chud" axis vs the "acts woke"/"acts chud" axis

Question of the compass to agree or disagree on: The presence of another culture is no threat to my own

Question of the compass to agree or disagree on: My country or people should apologize for crimes and wrongdoing our ancestors have committed

Question of the compass to agree or disagree on: I think it's particularly offensive for people to say slurs

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 08/06/2025

We should also reject loaded questions. A lot of questions in public debates are bait to get you to choose sides. You can refuse. You don't have to accept the worldview of the asker. You may not even use the same meaning for the same words. Try to find common ground first, then study the difference

Drawing of the "I refuse your question" ponytail guy

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 08/06/2025

What's really dangerous here is that any attempt at nuance and thinking out loud is met with injunctions to take sides. Even being deeply embedded in your tribe, you can hardly make it evolve

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 07/06/2025

Establishing good engineering practices in factorio

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 26/05/2025

Definitely adding the excellent summary of Team Topologies by @patigallardo.bsky.social to the list of required reading bsky.app/profile/pati...

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."

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 17/05/2025

Surprising new player in this year's accounting

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 10/05/2025

That's a fun way to separate science from engineering

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Geoffroy Couprie @geoffroycouprie.com · 30/04/2025

It's a bit weird that right at the moment I get interested in project management issues, my book list includes those. Which book should I add to that list?

Cover for the book "on the brink: the inside story of Fukushima Daiichi" by Ryūshō Kadota

Cover for the book "Rules for radicals" by Saul Alinsky

Cover for the book "the unaccountability machine" by Dan Davies

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