I mean, you’re free to continue using your crescent wrench as a hammer if you find it drives nails for you decently well and you are comfortable using it that way. But it was neither designed with that purpose in mind, nor does anyone expect you to use it that way, so no one will be writing how-to guides on it.

I just got home from a 12 hour day of work. This has been my entire week.

Help.

it’d be poor style to put more than one statement on a line

Unlike Python, most languages do not endorse a specific concept of style. You’re free to dabble in all the bad style choices you like, on the off chance that once in a blue moon they prove to be situationally useful.

The only difference between a novice and a professional is that a professional checks what they are copying to understand it first before allowing it into their codebase.

Novices copy code to avoid having to understand it. Professionals copy code to avoid reinventing the wheel.

Nvidia and AMD broadly cover the same use cases. Nvidia cards are not intrinsically better to my knowledge, Nvidia simply offers ultra high-performance cards that AMD doesn’t.

If you just need nonspecific games to run decently, a card from either brand will do it. If you need to run the most intensive games there are on unbelievable settings, that’s when Nvidia should be edging out.

ML dabbling may complicate things. Many (most?) tools are written for CUDA, which is a proprietary Nvidia technology. I think AMD offers a counterpart but I do not have details. You will need to do more research on this.

I am going to continue to tell people “just get an AMD card”, but only if they have indicated to me that they are shopping for new parts and haven’t committed to any yet.

Giving that advice to someone who already has an Nvidia card is just as useless as those StackOverflow answers that suggest you dump your whole project architecture and stuff some big dumb library into your build to solve a simple problem.

Stateless functions still deal with state, they just don’t hold onto it. Without state to mutate, a so-called stateless function doesn’t do anything.

In declarative languages, your state is the sum of everything you’ve declared. You don’t query results out of thin air. Computational results logically conclude from everything you set up.

HTML ““has state””, as in it has a DOM, but it doesn’t do anything with it. You don’t mutate the DOM after it’s built, or query the DOM to compute results that weren’t trivially evident from the state you declared.

You can do those things with JavaScript. But all that proves is JavaScript is a programming language, and HTML is just a data format it can interact with.

Sure. Which is why I would only make this distinction in a place where I can reasonably expect people to know better. Like, perhaps, a niche community on an experimental social media platform dedicated to programming.

The bar for me is whether the language describes an executable program that has state and control flow.

You could perhaps be generous and describe the DOM as a (write-only) state and the parser as a control flow. I don’t, personally.

HTML is just a data container format to me. Belongs with the likes of XML, JSON, JPG, PNG, GIF, MP3, MOV, etc.

The umbrella term I’d use for all of these is “coding”. That’s the skill of understanding structured languages and format specifications, and understanding how you can and can’t piece things together to make something coherent. This is a critical requisite skill to programming. But programming is more.

Programming is the art of juggling of state and control flow in clever ways to trick funny rocks into computing something you don’t know. It doesn’t need to be general purpose, but I would argue it indeed needs to have a purpose. It has to be something more than just a pile of declarations you know from the outset. Otherwise it’s just structured data.

This is almost word for word what I said in another friend group today. Protecting individuals is literally why LLCs exist. It’s what “LLC” stands for.

Nintendo Hyper Beam’d them into oblivion but they got a Substitute up first. The defense strategy was smart. The strategy that put them in the position of needing to use the defense strategy was idiotic, yes, but the defense was smart.

Short of Nintendo doing nothing at all, this is probably the best outcome that could have realistically happened.

There are really only three licenses you should ever consider when making a new project in earnest: GPL if you want it to stay free forever, MIT if you don’t care. Put an L in front of GPL if your project is a library. The end.

Any CC license including CC0 looks fine on paper, and they are court-tested, but anyone with a legal department won’t risk dealing with one in the context of software, because CC licenses are for creative works and scientific research, not software. The main thing they’re missing is a warranty release.

The Unlicense feels like an earnest attempt to fill the void that CC0 fails to fill, but it isn’t a tested license. Everyone with a lawyer won’t touch it with a 10 foot pole because they don’t want to be the ones to find out how enforceable it really is. Besides, the only thing it gains you over the MIT is the ability to go uncredited. Which is nice feature; if people didn’t want this we wouldn’t have so many attempts to make a license that has it. But I feel like of all the features of a free software license one should be concerned about, explicit lack of credit is a pretty low-rung one.

Direct public domain insertion is good and effective, but is not global. Many places in the world have no formal legal system to do this (Germany is a famous example). PD dedication without a permissive fallback license makes your code completely unusable in these places. It’s exactly why the CC0 and Unlicense exist in the first place.

Every single other license is either a meme license not worth the toilet paper it’s written on, a weaker version of the GPL/MIT, or the GPL/MIT with extra steps.

Indeed, it is my choice. And as of now, even in light of all of this article’s information, I have chosen Discord. For now.

Deal breaking flaws to others are not necessarily deal breaking flaws to me. If their differences in principles prevent them from reaching me on my preferred platform, tough noogies for them.

You’d certainly think so. But never underestimate a user’s ability to jury-rig a piece of software into doing something it wasn’t designed to do, ignoring any and all obviously better solutions as they do so.

I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen documentation published on Discord and nowhere else. But I do very often see no documentation whatsoever except a “just ask around on the Discord” link serving the role.

Discord probably isn’t used as a robust ticketing system either; usually if anything it’s a bot that will push all tickets to an actual GitWhatever issue, which is fine. But again, what I do see often is projects with no ticketing system whatsoever, and a Discord link to just dump your problems at. If the issue tracker on the repo isn’t outright disabled, it’s a ghost town of open issues falling on deaf ears.

Announcements can be pretty bad. Devs can get into a habit of thinking the only people who care about periodic updates are already in the Discord server, so they don’t update READMEs, wikis, or docs on the repo as often as they should, allowing them to go out of date.

Fwiw I’ve also seen several projects that have Discord servers with none of these problems, because they handle all those other parts properly.

I don’t mind Discord being a centralized platform for open source project discussion, if and only if the only roles it serves specifically play to its one strength, which is real time discussion. Asking for live support (from the dev if they are there, or the community if they are not) and doing live bug triage are the two big use cases.

Should contact for these things be real time? Maybe, maybe not. Async discussion like you get on forums or via email can do the job. But if you value real-time chat, Discord does it well.

Everything else? Do it elsewhere. Do not make Discord your only bug tracker. Do not make it your only wiki. Do not make it your only source of documentation. Do not make it the only place you broadcast updates or announcements. Do not make it your only distribution platform for critical downloads. And for the love of god please do not make it the only way to contact you. I don’t care if you allow Discord to additionally do these things using integrations, that’s fine, just stop trying to contort Discord into your only way of doing these.

Is Discord the only capable option for real time chat? No. But it has several things going in its favor, namely how one can reasonably expect a good sum of their target user base is already using it independently for other purposes, in addition to its numerous QoL features.

It can also better integrate into the dev’s personal routine if they already use it independently. Like, do I have an email address? Yeah. Do I read my email on any reasonable interval? Hell no. My email inbox is little more than a dustbin for registration confirmations and online order receipts. I’ve had email for decades and I think I can count the number of non-work, non-business conversations I’ve held over it in that whole span of time on one hand. Meanwhile, I’m terminally online on Discord. So if I’m gonna be a small independent FOSS project developer, am I gonna want to interface with everyone over email? No. I’ll still make it an option, because being only contactable on Discord is cringe, but it will not be fast. Discord will be my preferred channel.

Should I put more effort into being contactable on other platforms, because it’s the right thing to do? Meh. I have no duty of stewardship to be available on platforms available to anyone in particular. I maintain this hypothetical project for free, on my own time, of my own volition, and I provide it to you entirely warranty-free. I have the courtesy to make all static resources available in sensible public places, and I provide email as a slow, async way to reach me. But if you want to converse with me directly in real time, you can come to me where I’m hanging out.

PHP stack traces are effectively identical to Java’s in every metric I’m concerned about.

If you get them sensibly in a log file, anyway. If you allow PHP to render this god awful fugly table inline with your page? Well, have fun. Yes, all the same info is there, and on paper it’s organized in an easier to read format. But oftentimes the table will collide with and mangle with other elements and styling on your page, making the trace irritating or impossible to read.

This isn’t much of a problem of course, because aforementioned log file is absolutely the way to do it in the first place, and PHP lets you. And hey, absolutely obliterating your page DOM in strange and exciting ways on error sounds like a fantastic way to ensure errors get caught and addressed in testing, so even the unpredictable mangled DOM bullshit is useful in its own way.

But if someone wants to dunk on PHP for at least outwardly appearing to promote trying to debug it with these awful stack trace tables, I think that’s a well-earned roasting.

Making more money back than they paid.

It amazes me how every time a for-profit company that provided a free service goes mask-off and starts aggressively monetizing it so many people put on a shocked Pikachu face.

This is exactly how this works, people! The free shit is always bait to draw you in and get you invested. The trap was designed from the start to snap shut once there was enough of you in it. They fully intend to not just extract value from you to run the service, but also to retroactively pay for all the free shit they gave you. It was always a loan. An investment.

Oh, sure, you can always be sly by taking the free shit and ditching once monetization comes over the horizon. But do so knowing that every time you need to do this is the rule, not the exception. Companies aren’t suddenly slighting you one by one out of the blue, it was always the strategy from the beginning for all of them.

There is a long, long list of classifications they may put you in. I believe appointing one to you is their job, so you don’t get to pick. I read through all of these and couldn’t decide which of them really applies to, “I am building a FOSS app/library”.

There is a “scientific research” designation. Does that count? Well, if so, it says this:

Scientific research does not include activities of a type ordinarily carried on as an incident to commercial or industrial operations, as, for example, the ordinary testing or inspection of materials or products, or the designing or construction of equipment or buildings.

Is building software “designing or construction of equipment” that is “incident to commercial operations”?

Maybe it belongs under classification U41, which is Computer Science? Does building software count as “research” into comp sci for the benefit of the general public?

Maybe it’s W80, public utilities? I think that’s intended more for municipal utilities like electricity, water, gas, and sewer, not public software projects.

I really have no clue. Here be dragons.

IANAL and I have zero experience doing anything remotely like this.

But from my cursory reading of the IRS instructions on their website, doing this in the US specifically is more or less a two step process:

1. Form an organization by filing with your local state. Every state handles this process differently; in some (most?) this can be as straightforward as filling out a form, paying a processing fee on the order of $100 or so, and waiting for approval. Just don’t form an LLC in particular, as that complicates the next step.

2. Fill out Form 1023-EZ with the IRS. This requires proving your organization qualifies for tax exemption (it is not clear to me whether this would) and a filing fee of $275. Your org also cannot possess more than $250,000 of assets, cannot receive more than $50,000 of revenue from donations within the span of a year, and cannot be registered as an LLC. If you fail to meet these, you need to fill out the regular Form 1023, which I believe is more involved and has a more expensive filing fee.

If both of these forms are accepted, kapow! You are now a tax-exempt organization, and other corporations can charitably donate to your project for tax breaks. Just remember to do your station-keeping tasks like filing your annual company and tax exemption status renewals, reporting your earnings to the IRS, and sending receipts to donors.

Too many experts who value the deeper teaching potential angle seem to never want to acknowledge the bounce rate it will also have.

No, not everyone asking about how to get into the Linux ecosystem is doing so specifically because the knowledge itself is its own reward. Those who are will tighten their belts, whiten their knuckles, and figure it out just like you hoped they would. Those who aren’t will collapse under the sheer weight of all the bullshit and bail out. Frankly I’d consider the bulk of curious new users to be the latter and I default assume it for everyone who appears unless they indicate otherwise.

Some people think this kind of filtering based on willingness to learn is a good and healthy thing. I call it elitism and gatekeeping.