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?

When you work in enough diverse codebases, with enough diverse contributors, you begin to understand there isn’t one objectively right way. There are many objectively wrong ways to do something. Picking a way to do a certain task is about picking from tradeoffs. A disturbingly common tradeoff is picking rapid development over long term maintainability, but that isn’t not the right way to do it in a competitive space.

Needs change over time and certain tradoffs may no longer apply. You’re likely to see better success making lots of little hacky fixes until it’s not a hack anymore because you’ve morphed it slowly over time.

Version control, git et al, allows you to make multiple commits in a single PR, so you could break the changes up to be more reviewable.

Hear, hear! I would add that it multiplies again, again when other people are actually using the product. Engineers famously build tools for engineers which can leave something to be desired for the layman.

My experience, ymmv, the most work went into configuring everything you need or want the first time. The right drivers for your graphics card, for your webcam, wifi, acpi multimedia keys, etc. Though I don’t use a gnome/kde/DE, so some of that may automagically work for you. After that though, updates don’t tend to break the things you’ve already fixed.

One time in 5 years the names of some acpi keys changed, and I had to update the script, and that wasn’t really arch’s fault. Also Google did a funny thing with their monospaced font that xft couldn’t handle, again not an arch specific thing.

And here’s a hot take for you, I only update about every 18 months. That’s usually how long it takes Discord to become binarily incompatible with installed libraries. Update the keyring first and never a problem.

Maybe this goes a bit deeper than the question intended, but I’ve made and shared two patches that I had to apply locally for years before they were merged into the base packages.

The first was a patch in 2015 for SDL2 to prevent the Sixaxis and other misbehaving controllers to not use uninitialized axes and overwrite initialized ones. Merged in 2018.

The second was a patch in the spring of 2021 for Xft to not assume all the glyphs in a monospaced font to be the same size. Some fonts have ligatures which are glyphs that represent multiple characters together, so they’re actually some multiple of the base glyph size. Merged in the fall of 2022.

I appreciate the reference. I do always want to credit the original artist.

Either I have a headache or some form of red/green blindness I wasn’t previously aware of.

There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who have to ask how much garlic to put in the recipe and those who know you measure that shit with your heart.

That edit is on point. Love me some potato salad.

Judging by the responses, I feel I should convey I relate to the professor and absurdity is that the student would ask such dumb off-topic question.

As for the question itself, people like what they like, they don’t need to justify themselves. Which is what makes question dumb.

Wasn’t mine. Moldy Monday and all.

I feel like both rules suffer from the same problem of spectrum. We can all point to a bad moldy/ai post and point to a good moldy/ai post. The issue is going to be those ones in the grey space between. It’s like the threshold test for obscenity.

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.” -Justice Potter Stewart

I agree ai generation can be exploitative, but I don’t believe it’s only exploitative. I’m sure there are fine artists out there who can use it responsibly to make genuine art. I think it’s like the Unity game engine. There are plenty of games pumped out that are just trash trying to make quick money, but there’s also gems being made by people with passion.

This genuinely made me burst into laughter. Well done 196er.

I didn’t censor it, but it’s probably enough to pass by some image recognition.

This image was saved way before AI image generation was a thing. This is a real McCoy.

I had to get Xfinity on the line for my grandmother last year. The phone options for modifying or canceling an account or service went to holds that eventually just dropped the call. The option for adding a service went right to a human though and they were able to cancel the services anyway.