I recommend the asterism to instead be adopted as the symbol for astigmatism.

I’m really skeptical about that. Either that they would do it or that such “justified” downvoting would be a clear cut or fair decision. Most people don’t vote the right way. How many people downvote content they agree with or find funny but doesn’t add to the discussion? How many people upvote content they disagree with that does add to the discussion?

And am I really going to take up a mod’s time because someone got mad at me and downvoted—the most accessible and innocuous way to express displeasure with someone? How many more complaints about downvote bullying are mods going to have to field?

I don’t know. You could be right, but I’d want to see it successful in a small scale, if possible, before deploying it everywhere. Maybe the folks suggesting it should be up to the server admin are right. That would be another differentiator and people could go to communities on servers that have their preferred visibility policy. That would serve as an A/B test and let people vote with their feet.

I’ve been thinking about this for several hours since I first became aware of the debate.

I don’t care that much in theory if anyone sees my votes. They aren’t anything I’m particularly private about. I care about conversation way more than up/down votes.

However, some people get a little upset about being downvoted. I think it will result in retaliatory downvotes. You already see that when two folks are arguing. I don’t normally waste my time downvoting a post I’m writing a rebuttal to, but when they are downvoting me I tend to do it back. I think if everyone had easy access, they would hunt down their down voters posts and retaliate regardless of the quality of the comments.

Lastly, I wonder if this will give rise to a client that lets you use one account to post/comment and a different one to vote. And if it does, will that be better all around? Then no one will be able to associate votes with a user. But it seems unnecessarily wasteful to create a whole account that does nothing but vote. It seems like it would deny mods (and everyone) a useful tool for identifying bad actors.

Technically, anyone could get access to the voters identity if they try hard enough but 99% of the users won’t put in that much effort. And technically someone could already use different accounts for different activities, but without reason to create a client to support that it’s too much of a pain to be worth the effort.

So I really think I’m on team status quo here.

Well he specified static website, which rules out WP, but yes. If your host accepts posts (in the generic sense, not necessarily specifically the http verb POST) that raises tons of other questions, that frankly were already well addressed when I made my post.

DDoS and hacking are like taxes: you should be so lucky as to have to worry about them, because that means you’re wildly successful. Worry about getting there first because that’s the hard part.

The way I’ve dealt with this before is reference the ticket number in the commit message. Now the only tickets you ever need to review are the ones relevant to the element in question, and only those creating or modifying that particular property, which should be evident in your commit log.

You don’t specify a language but I’d assume that is the footer definition/html and any scripts or styles invoked by it.

But once you have an answer, it would be wise to document it in confluence somewhere, even if it’s something like “Footer green per request from Director, Mr. Smith” or “Footer color: arbitrary, green to differentiate profile pages. Verify changes with Director.”

How to organize the documentation so that it isn’t difficult to navigate is another difficult question that is more art than science - one which has never been satisfactorily solved anywhere I’ve worked once complexity reaches a certain point, but I leave that exercise to the reader.

I have. I’ve used GPT for about 5 years. It has gotten more sophisticated and yet it’s still just a completion engine even if it has more moving parts. There is no comprehension or reasoning behind it.

I was going to make the point that there may not be an error, but because you tell it to give you one, it finds something. But that doesn’t explain VSCode, you’re right. Every once in a while an IDE is just wrong. I was going to suggest trying a different IDE which might give you a less cryptic message. I often times find bad brace errors to be a result of something much higher in the code.

But again, not knowing PHP, I could only take a stab at answering why with the AI. I’ve tried many times to have an AI help me with these tasks. And sometimes it’s very good at them, but other times I can spend hours refining my query and arguing with it and never make any headway.

I can’t read PHP, so I can’t tell you where the syntax error is, but the AI is only responding in a way to complete the conversation. It has no ability to comprehend the code you’ve written, it just knows that conversations that start off the way yours did, probably ought to end with a complaint about that closing brace - particularly if you told it what VSCode was complaining about.

This is one of the shortcomings of AI code assistants - they can’t think abstractly at all. So it’s ability to answer a troubleshooting question depends greatly on how many times the same question has been asked on StackOverflow and elsewhere.

The mismatch between rich text and html has been a pain for pretty much ever.

Have you tried putting the br on the line above instead of on its own? Barring that can you assign a css class and just create the vertical separation you want?

It doesn’t really matter all that much. camelCase is to break up the long variable names and help people find the word breaks. Like imagine linespacing. That could be line spacing or lines pacing, and a little context would help you understand which (yeah this is a bit of a stretch)

As long as it helps clarify, it doesn’t matter. That doesn’t mean it won’t bug me if I think someone has done it wrong, but it doesn’t really matter.

Thank you. Turns out I have seen that before. I played with Graphviz for a couple of months. It was fun but ultimately fruitless for my needs at the time. Thank you for reminding me.

I don’t have the vision of how that would apply to this project. Perhaps to visualize the current workflow, but it feels like it would be easier to do it by hand unless it’s constantly changing.

I don’t know how many answers you are going to get, but I suspect not many. You’re asking someone to architect a solution without any requirements. Even if that weren’t a massive ask, it’s pretty much impossible because you haven’t provided any information.

First half: I’d write a guided wizard with a state machine.

Data structure? You mean schema? Depends on what the data is, how it’s related, and how it will be used. The answer could be anything from 30 SQL tables to a big blob of JSON.

Best language? The one(s) you know.

Graphical representation? I’ve been doing this for 25 years and never used a .dot. Is that a Word template? I can tell you I definitely wouldn’t use that but maybe someone else would tell you different. I’ve only had to produce a word document a couple of times and I used Java & POI to do it (C# could probably do it easier I’d hazard a guess) but if that’s not a requirement I’d use a browser interface.

Generating a fillable form? Like I say I’d make a wizard using some kind of web framework.

Good luck. Hopefully someone else understands your needs better than I do and can give you a better answer.

That’s out of the scope of the foreseeable future though. It’s speculating on the capabilities of things that are completely theoretical at this point. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. I’m not holding my breath.

Having an AI help you code is like having a junior developer who is blazing fast, enthusiastic and listens well. However it doesn’t think about what it writes. It does no testing and it doesn’t understand the big picture at all. For very simple tasks, it gets the job done very fast, but for complex tasks no matter how many times you explain it. It is never going to get it. I don’t think there’s any worry about AI replacing developers any time in the foreseeable future.

I don’t think I’ve met a codebase that had tests that would work with the level of refactoring that would need to be done. I mean let’s be honest here, if it was well architected, refactoring wouldn’t be like the comic. It’s probably a mess of entangled concerns and bad inheritance.

For that matter the code most in need of refactoring probably has shit tests and that just assertNotNull on the happy path to appease sonar and be done with it.