I think this strategy makes perfect sense and is really working.

Most of the open source community uses Linux or Mac for development. Windows is pretty much an afterthought. You even sometimes see “cross platform” projects that don’t work on Windows.

But now that you can use WSL for all that development there’s much less reason to use Linux in the first place. At my company we have a couple of hundred people using Linux, and we’re considering all moving to Windows with WSL because the hardware support on Linux is just too unreliable - random crashes, laptops not going to sleep when you close them, poor thermals, bad memory management, etc.

Historically, hyphens and underscores were treated as equivalent in the names of keys appearing in the file

This is why I strongly prefer underscores; never use hyphens if you can avoid it. Eventually the names will end up as variables in a programming language where you have to use underscores, and now you’ve got some stupid and confusing translation system to deal with.

Another example of this is CSS names in Javascript. Rust also made this mistake unfortunately.

This [key name in setup.cfg] has been deprecated in 2021.

I knew Python didn’t take backwards compatibility seriously after Python 3.12, but 4 years is a joke.

I think you’d have to be a very limited kind of developer - only working in some tiny niche - to make AI completely useless for you. Most programmers occasionally have to do tedious but simple throw-away tasks, or tasks in systems they aren’t familiar with. AI absolutely can save you time in these cases.

Even accounting for that (at least in countries with national healthcare), they’re definitely more expensive than regular employees.

The games programming industry is high stress, but apart from that it isn’t. I don’t think it’s known for burnouts any more than any other industry.

AI can absolutely save you time, if you use it right. Don’t expect it to magically be as good as a real programmer… but for instance I made an HTML visualisation of some stuff using Claude, and while it got it a bit wrong, fixing it took me maybe 20 minutes, while writing it from scratch would have taken me at least a couple of hours.

Yeah obviously. Whenever a company says “we can’t get enough X workers” they implicitly mean “at the price we want to pay”.

But that doesn’t mean they were wrong. Programming is still an amazingly well paying and low stress career. Being replaced by AI is a little worrying, but I think by the time AI is good enough to really replace programmers, it will also be able to replace most white collar jobs - HR, finance, etc. - and society will have bigger problems.

Since when are contractors lower pay? Companies waste fortunes on them.

I would strongly recommend against them. The design is fundamentally flawed. To click you have to press sideways which naturally moves the cursor a bit causing you to misclick. To compensate you have to tense your hand even more which defeats the point.

How deep is your desk, and what seat are you using? Getting a deeper desk and an expensive mesh-bottomed chair (I have a HM Mira) made waaaaaaay more difference than any of the weird ergonomic keyboards or mice of unusual keyboard layouts I tried.

I find the need to have an account in order to contribute to projects a deal breaker. It causes too much friction for no real gain. Email based workflows will always reign supreme. It’s the OG of code contributions.

This is dumb. I have followed the simple 12 step process to set up git send-email and it was so much more hassle than creating an account on GitHub or Codeberg or whatever, and in the end the UX is much worse.

No developer is an island. By using an extremely unpopular VSC they increase the barrier to contribution for all external developers, miss out on support in tools and projects that only support Git, and they don’t get to benefit from the increased development effort that goes into more popular solutions.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/01/09/beyond-git-the-other-version-control-systems-developers-use/

Dead as in essentially nobody uses it. Apparently it’s used even less than SVN, which sounds kind of crazy. Doesn’t stop them developing it if they want I guess.

Facebook is relevant because they were one of the last major users of Mercurial and were big contributors to it. They’ve moved to their own VCS Sapling now though.

What what? Mercurial is dead. Not even Facebook use it any more.

It’s not a mirror. It’s the primary repository. And yes unfortunately they aren’t accepting PRs or using it for issue tracking, but it’s a start.

As far as I can tell it’s mostly the TPM requirement and pushing more ads / AI nonsense.

You can easily avoid the latter by using the LTSC IoT version. I just bought a new (second hand) computer for TPM (my old one was very due for an upgrade).

With the IoT version it’s absolutely fine. Definitely an improvement over Windows 10. The only issue I’ve noticed is it doesn’t come with Windows Game bar or some nonsense so after you run games you’ll get a random dialog about there not being an app available to handle ms-gamelink URLs or something. You can just ignore it. I might fix it one day.

I think Fusion 360 defaults to direct modelling which may be easier for beginners. FreeCAD uses parametric modelling which is more powerful and easier to use, but probably a bit confusing if you aren’t expecting it.

Also Fusion360 is commercial software that has had lots and lots of UX effort put into it. FreeCAD hasn’t. Until FreeCAD 1.0 I would say it had pretty awful UX, even for someone already familiar with parametric CAD.

With FreeCAD 1.0 it’s quite good and usable for people with experience in parametric CAD (mostly) but it definitely doesn’t hold your hand and I wouldn’t expect a beginner to be able to design a part easily first time.

Interesting. I guess as long as it doesn’t have any false positives this seems like an ok idea.

Still, it would be definitely better if it could use tsc. They mention this… but don’t really say if the Go version of tsc will allow it. IMO the slowness of tsc is largely overblown.

FreeCAD 1.0 is actually pretty good now. Definitely usable if you’re only doing basic things.

SolveSpace is also nice but it has some deal-breaker limitations like not supporting chamfers/bevels.

That means the installation is irrelevant to the use of Windows. The vast majority of people who use Linux installed it themselves.