I'm not aware of any underhand contributions. What might you be referring to?

I strongly believe it's perfectly reasonable to compliment a generally evil person/people when they do a good thing, but hey, my opinions are boring.

Disagree re Proton

Do you consider a post supporting a Trump policy to be as bad as being the largest donor to a far-right party?

PR departments

lol, I read this as a psuedonym for open source developers under the deluge of AI pull requests

What did you read of the article? Of course programming can be hard. Some of the brightest engineers and academics in the world have spent years on problems.

Hmmm, you might be right. It's definitely a build system. I'm trying to think if it's a package manager, and if it's not, what is playing the role of the package manager.

EDIT seems to be both, which admittedly makes my point less relevant.

https://moderncppdevops.com/pkg-mngr-roundup/#build-systems-and-environment-managers

It's been a while since I used it in earnest, so my memory is hazy enough that I can't be specific. One of the largest pieces of work I've done in C++ was not writing C++, but working out how to ask bazel to build a single shared library that imports other bazel libraries. I've never used such a confusing and frustrating package manager. It was frequently unclear how to do things, despite the project having quite a lot of documentation.

When I read it supports multiple languages, I had two thoughts:

• Why? That feels like trying to write a single style sheet for both English and Mandarin.
• That might explain why it's so confusing. I surmised: I has to bend over backwards to support all these different languages and their different module and packages architectures. And it doesn't manage to hide that complexity from the user.

If you've ever tried using bazel, you might understand why writing a single package manager for multiple languages is a bad idea (at least, that's why I assume bazel is so god-awful)

I don't believe it's hyperbole to say the money comes from sociopaths. Sociopaths assume everyone is in it for themselves, they assume everyone else thinks like this, that it's just how people do stuff.

aside from the obvious use of LLMs for the actuall project, everything was written by hand ... everything you see is my fault.

Jetbrains do use AI when writing their IDEs. But I also heard something about the Ukraine war affecting operations, cos they had people working in the countries involved. This was hearsay though.

You're only going to get so far by asking people for specific guidance. At some point you'll need to either try stuff, get stung, and learn from it, or work on a big project with people more experienced than you, even if just a bit more experienced. Preferably both.

It shows a level of technical maturity that you're asking.