jeremyparker @ jeremyparker @programming.dev

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Follow up question -- I'm not OP but I'm another not-really-new developer (5 years professional xp) that has 0 experience working with others:

I have trouble understanding where to go on the spectrum of "light touch" and "doing a really good job". (Tldr) How should a contributor gauge whether to make big changes to "do it right" or to do it a little hacky just to get the job done?

For example, I wanted to make a dark mode for a site i use, so i pulled the sites's repo down and got into it.

The CSS was a mess. I've done dark modes for a bunch of my own projects, and I basically just assign variables (--foreground-color, --background-color), and then swap their assignments by the presence or absence of a ".dark-mode" class in the body tag.

But the site had like 30 shades of every color, like, imperceptibly different shades of red or green. My guess was the person used a color picker and just eyeballed it.

If the site was mine, I would normalize them all but there was such a range -- some being more than 10-15% different from each other -- so i tried to strike a balance in my normalization. I felt unsure whether this was done by someone who just doesn't give a crap about color/CSS or if it was carefully considered color selection.

My PR wasn't accepted (though the devs had said in discord that i could/should submit a PR for it). I don't mind that it wasn't accepted, but i just don't know why. I don't want to accidentally step on toes or to violate dev culture norms.

Me: Oh, I get it, this "Lemmy" website -- it's like The Onion but for nerds?

My fellow lemmings: No, they're serious. run0 is real.

Me: Hah. The Onion, but for nerds! I love it.

While you're not wrong, it's important to retain a global perspective. There are "communist" leaders that were total pieces of shit and while they did have help, that help wasn't always capitalist. Stalin is an example here.

And then there's pieces of shit who were supported by external forces, but not by capitalist regimes seeking to undermine them. I'm not 100% confident in this history, and there's no way I'm going to spell his name right, but, the Romanian piece if shit, Caucescu (???) came to power riding a wave of support from the Nazis. Hitler didn't do it to destabilize Romania, but because he was like, "there's some good old fashioned fascist genociders down there, let's give them more guns." And those fascist genociders were technically communists.

What I'm getting at is that the enemies of a worker-ruled communist state are many, and many of those enemies are within their own systems. Communism, like every other system, suffers from the fact that there are humans involved. Just because a communism exists doesn't mean it's going to be utopia.

But that also doesn't mean that communism can't be good, or at least better.

Lol you just provided the simplest counter to the most common capitalist argument.

"You don't understand capitalism, bro. The problem isn't capitalism, it's the regulation on capitalism. Under a true capitalist system, there can't be monopolies because capitalism rewards competition."

Ok so what happened to all the reddit apps

Edit: I really like the reddit app example because it's simple: no regulation or anti-capitalist force made them to that, it was literally just a capitalist decision.

But regulatory capture is an important part of capitalism, and no matter how many ancap bullshit artists say otherwise, government is absolutely part of the capitalist plan. Giving the workers a "say" (or the illusion of one) keeps them a bit quieter, but more importantly, having a government outsources a lot of crap they would otherwise have to pay for, like infrastructure, which would be a huge strain on profits.

In fact, the ancap bullshit idea that unregulated markets would improve things is an artificial limitation on capitalist power. Total lack of regulation is a restriction on capitalism.

Tbf reddit used to be a lot more lefty. Back when Shit Reddit Says was the dominant subculture it was a lot of fun... But then Steve Bannon wanted Trump to be president and SRS lost the war against red hats and bots.

Copy designs you like, and keep a couple of CSS files +/- web components that you can carry along with you from project to project. Tweak then as you go.

Like everything else, getting good at making designs that you like will take time and effort, so if you want you get good at it, do it! I find it fun, and my designs aren't to everyone's taste (I too like black tshirts), but whatever.

Plus, getting good at making designs that i like has made me better at making designs clients/projects will like, so, win/win.

Trump took a LOT of money in gifts from China while in office so I would guess they like him

Edit to add source. There are lots more articles, this is far from the only one

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/04/us/politics/trump-hotels-foreign-business-report.html

So like uh I'm not trying to out myself as a boomer but how do they use Tiktok nefariously? I used it for about 5 minutes once, the whole experience was just not for me. Do they just take people's videos and put captions on them?

jQuery is a lot smaller and less nebulous than its competitors (looking at you,React literally every JavaScript framework).

Jquery was what was popular when i learned js. I'm kinda glad it was, honestly: jQuery is a little unique in that it doesn't have magic to it the way js frameworks do. Everything you can do in jQuery, you can do in vanilla JavaScript pretty easily. With, say, React, how is a newcomer supposed to understand how a series of React components become HTML?

So jQuery kept it "real" for me. Fewer abstractions between me and the HTML meant it was easier for me to connect the dots as a self taught developer.

As for how it's changed, it's more any how vanilla JavaScript has changed. A lot of the things that made jQuery so much easier and cleaner than vanilla are now baked in, like document.querySelector(), element.classList, createElement(), addEventListener()... It had Ajax methods that, before jQuery, were a tremendous pain in the ass.

jQuery was great, but, you basically had to use it with something like PHP, because it had no back end. So when angular came out (and a few others that aren't around anymore and I've forgotten), it allowed you to replace both PHP and jQuery, and developers rejoiced.

Why did they rejoice? I'm not actually sure there was reason to, objectively speaking. As developers, we like new tech, especially if that new tech requires us to think about code differently, even if, in retrospect, it's a hard argument to make to say that, if we had just stuck with PHP and jQuery we would be somehow worse off than we are with React.

Of course, in tech, when a new system changes how we think, sometimes (not as often as we'd like) it helps us reconsider problems and find much more elegant solutions. So, would we have all the innovations we have today if all these js frameworks has never existed? Obviously we can't really answer that -- but it's a toke of copium for when we get nostalgic for the PHP/jQuery days.

(Also, for you newer people reading this, you should probably be aware that the PHP/jQuery mini-stack is still very quietly used. You'll definitely see it, especially in php-baaed COTS.)

arguably, that's a good thing because it means project decisions are made uncorrupted by profit motive

Argue-er here, chiming in. This statement could be interpreted as considering only half of the central relationship of capitalism. (Capitalism isn't just about deriving profit from the control of surplus, it's about the relationship between surplus and scarcity. Surplus doesn't mean shit if no one wants what you have.)

The decisions that volunteers make may not be motivated by the desire/ability to make profit, but they can be (and often are) motivated by the opposite; they have to account for the fact that their volunteer work is labor that isn't contributing to their survival -- aka, their day job. The demands placed on them by their other responsibilities will have to take precedence over the volunteer project.

In practice, this means they have to take shortcuts and/or do less than they would like to, because they don't have time to devote to it. It's not exactly the same end product as if it was profit-seeking, since that can tempt maintainers into using dark patterns etc, but they're similar.

Ideally, they would have all the money they needed, didn't have to have regular jobs, but also had families/friends/hobbies that would keep them from over-engineering ffmpeg.

To say this in a simpler/shorter way (TD;DR), their decisions can be motivated by the fact that they aren't making money from it, don't have enough time or resources to do everything they might want.

(Why is this so long?? I'm bored in the train, gotta kill the time somehow..why not say in 1000 words what I could have said in 100)

The idea is sound but for most places I've heard of (ie in my city), condos just pay a management company to do all the landlord stuff, so even as an owner, I still have to call some crabby woman when the roofers drilled a hole in my A/C and fight with her -- and then also fight with the roofers -- to get it fixed

When my daughter was about 5 years old, we made an entire dessert dinner for April fools. We made mashed potatoes and scooped them onto the plate like ice cream, and a gravy that looked like chocolate syrup. We made meatloaf in the shape of candy bars, and there was some kind of vegetable thing to but I forget what it was.

It was awesome. When her mom feigned surprise, she let out those deep belly laughs that little kids do.

I'm sure some of you toxic, horrible people don't have fun on April fools, but the rest of us are crushing it.

And I'm sure Microsoft would be happy to not have to do it anymore. And I personally would much prefer an actual typing system rather than a glorified linter.

Tho I wonder if it will end up being like jQuery, in the sense that, by the time core jQuery features got added to vanilla js, jQuery had developed new features that validated its continued existence. Maybe TS will go further than what gets absorbed into JS and keep it alive.

Imo they'll add typing to vanilla js, which will kill ts.

For sure. Look, I hate Stack Overflow as much as the next guy but you gotta admit, for the big picture, long term, best practice for the future of software development, that's the correct format: one question, focused discussion, end.

Discord's failure to make its history available is really going to put a big hole in the middle of our cultural wisdom.

Mumble does that one thing just fine, but it doesn't do all the things discord does.

And it's not just the fact that discord does all those things that's made it so dominant; it's the fact that it does all those things in one place.

Even just the core features of voice chat, text chat, and the ability to set up a new server where you have extensive moderation control in one click -- it's what people wanted.

They don't need a handful of different programs to glue together a shittier experience, they need a FOSS discord/slack.

??? I hope you don't actually think this

There's no reason to require everyone on earth to prioritize a better computer interfacing environment over their free time.

My time is worth way more to me than video game voice chat -- but it's not either/or. Thanks to other developers, I can have both.

Edit: tldr: I think I probably could've saved myself a lot of time by just saying that discord is like slack but for friends/fun.

I didn't think people use it like lemmy/Reddit. People use it like IRC. That's the analogous tech. IRC is better in almost every way, but not in the most important ways: ease of use, and voice chat.

I know only a handful of people who could set up a server for IRC, but in discord, it's a one-button process. Sure, you can use a public IRC server, but then your channels are harder to organize and you don't have as much moderation control. I dn't think

I would vastly prefer IRC, but even if it was easy to set up, I would still need something for voice chat, and, sure, there are plenty of voice chat tools, but not ones that integrate with text chat so well.

I think a lot of people like the API and the bots built from it, tho personally that's not something I use much.

I'm in probably ~50 servers: groups of friends, video game guilds, tech chat (eg HTMX, Lit, Svelte), random interests (eg mechanical keyboards), and community servers for video games (eg a couple of LFG servers, a couple servers where I can ask questions to tryhards, streamers' communities, etc).

I would vastly prefer to use something FOSS, but there just isn't something that does it so well and so easily -- and even then, I'd probably have to use discord for a bunch of these things.

The Bibles have nothing to do with his campaign. In the context of the Bibles, he's just a dude selling bibles, he's not a representative of his campaign, the money isn't going to his campaign, and it's not being spent on his campaign.

To be specific, there's no law against a church giving money to a political figure; there are laws against donations to political causes -- and political campaigns are political causes. Trump the person can sell whatever he wants and use that money however he wants, or, in this case, license his name to whatever, etc.

There's no reason a person can't pay for their own campaign, and there's no reason someone with more money than sense can't just give another person free money with no strings. We don't tend to this because we don't tend to have candidates that could believably get money from people for reasons unrelated to their campaign -- with any career politician, it would be a transparent pretense. But not with Trump, he legitimately can get people to buy whatever, because it's him they like, not just him-as-president. The shoes, the Bible, the steaks -- they're proof of that fact.

The money he's getting from the Bibles is not political money and he's not spending it on his campaign. There's just no there there.

Trump's debts are not "political," especially the fraud verdict (the $400m one) which is his biggest problem rn. There's no reason a person can't sell a Bible and use it to pay for the judgement against him for fraud. Like, that's a weird sentence, but it's true.

His campaign is definitely short on money, but, financially, his main concern right now is the fraud judgement, and after that the rape/defamation judgement, then maybe the lawyers next? Tho he probably doesn't plan on paying them. So, yeah, Trump's going to need some money for his campaign, but he needs to keep the Trump in Trump Tower or he's completely fucked -- legally, financially, and even politically.

Look, I hate him too, but this is just not money laundering.

Like, seriously, this. "Vote for me and I'll help make laws that you like!"

This is literally what democracy is supposed to be doing. If this was what Trump was actually doing here, it might be the first time he's just followed regular principles of politics.