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Money as voltage is an interesting idea. I've determined that "wealth" is really just low entropy (both in terms of energy and information), and economics is really just thermodynamics underneath it all.

"Technological advancement" could just be a decrease in the amount of thermodynamic waste created by an economy (or a particular company) as it converts oil/uranium and calories into useful work.

There's another layer of thermodynamics where wealth acts like heat. Moving jobs from a rich (hot) country to a poor (cold) one is like attaching a thermal conductor. Eventually, the two countries reach equal temperature and it's no longer possible to extract useful work (profit) from the heat transfer. AI is probably like an infinitely cold heat sink that can absorb all the heat you pour into it until your heat source reaches absolute zero.

The purpose of this project is probably to create something that can be pointed to while saying "This is evidence that the entire Linux kernel could be rewritten in Rust! So now you have to agree to rewrite the modern kernel!"

That's odd. Abstractions in other programming languages reduce the line count.

I've gotten rid of it even on Linux. You're right in that the full-featured desktop environments all do it the FreeDesktop way as far as I know. Even old-school XDM demands that D-Bus and seatd exist, which it didn't in the pre-Systemd days.

Seat belts are one thing, a car with a top speed of 35 mph is something else entirely.

So if Bethesda fires all its developers and then gets its next game made by hiring those same developers as independent contractors, then Bethesda would be a solo developer?

When Python got its popularity, programming was an in-demand skill, so the thing that determined adoption was being easy for beginners to learn. Python was extremely beginner-friendly, so it became popular.

Now, the thing that determines popularity is popularity. So Python still wins, even though its beginner friendliness isn't so important anymore.

Our entire profession has been moving more and more in the "bondage-and-discipline" direction over the past 10 years or so, tracking with broader sociological trends that are also justified with arguments involving "safety". That by itself can explain why Lisp has such low adoption. While Lisp has never been the most-popular language, it was never as unpopular as it is today. If that pendulum swings the other way, Lisp will get more popular again.

>This matches my experience because you don't chose who you work with.

That's what job interviews are supposed to be for. It should be easy to hire only the most skilled programmers, especially with the massive number of unemployed programmers out there right now.

You have it inverted. Your "Light Side" is what previous generations of programmers called "Bondage and Discipline", because this philosophy assumes that a good programming language has built-in shackles to impose the will of a so-called "benevolent dictator" on all programmers.

What if you hire voice actors for each of the characters? And level designers? And animators? At what point does it stop being a solo project? Only when outside investors get involved? Or does it only stop being "solo" if those investors demand board seats? Or can it _still_ be considered "solo" even then?

If a project is far more work than one person can do (as this train simulator obviously is), the term solo developer is no more justified than it would have been if Steve Jobs claimed to have solo-developed the iPhone, even if he could have justified saying he "brought the iPhone from idea to the finish line."

If that's how it was developed, then it wasn't made by a solo developer. What you're describing is called a team.

What does this have to do with my comment? You don't get to the "negotiating a price" part if you never knew what the customer might buy.

>While working with networking stuff, I deployed OpenBSD and FreeBSD machines for routing, security and email serving. I was always in awe that I could just do stuff easily. You want to do something at boot time? There is a script that gets run at boot time; put whatever you want in it.

Linux has this too, it's called Devuan. 90% of the reasons you'd want to move from Linux to BSD can be addressed by getting rid of everything associated with FreeDesktop.org.