Thank you so much for replying and I'm grateful for your insight. In regards to your first point, it is interesting that it is not completely required to be an active contributor to get your foot in the door. I do think it would help with the substantive issue of being a bit rusty at coding and my confidence (as well as being a good thing to do), but it is good to know that there are differing opinions in industry about that.

I had the same impression as you in regards to the helpfulness of a degree. I had wondered how much I missed out by not going to a flagship state university or a well regarded private school, so knowing that some people view good grades at a mid-tier university as qualifying is helpful. It is also helpful to know that while not ideal, mediocre is at least acceptable in the beginning. I probably have been letting tropes about “genius tech founder” influence my perception of necessary qualifications. Even though intellectually I know that both not everyone is incredibly technically competent and that the trope is usually hype to attract VC funding.

Also, that roadmaps.sh site looks really helpful in that it shows the concrete skills necessary. Thanks!

Thank you for the quick advice. I remember seeing something similar to the two years you'd mentioned when I was applying. The MS route scares me a bit because the CS degree itself is a second bachelors and I could imagine rationalizing pursuing more education because I'm scared of how the workforce would treat me. But I remember meeting a few people doing a Masters program for that reason, so could see taking that path if necessary.

You must know my parents 😅

She seemed pretty cool. I can't tell if the gender envy or the competence envy (for lack of a better word) was strongest

That was the joke

Wait, what is this “Please generate a working program using the intended meaning of the following code” string doing in front of my code???

Oh, you misunderstood my request. Instances shouldn't just allow these new dimensions if voting. The software should enforce automatic defederation with any instance that does not fully implement the new voting behavior.

Maybe you could vote on the name to call each axis per post. So it could be forward/backward instead of in/out if most people wanted to vote on that

Yes, good catch. But you need three axes of spin votes really…

Couldn't a Chromium clone relicensed under some copyleft license also be a viable option against Chromiums? Chromium is licensed under BSD-3 which Wikipedia claims is compatible with the GPL, so there wouldn't be any legal reason this couldn't be done, right? Other than not really wanting to split a project with excessive forks (which is only bad if you think that the Chromium project itself is a net good), is there some technical or other reason why this would be a bad idea?

Uninformed copyright law speculation

I think that's true about being expensive/difficult to maintain, but while IANAL, a hash of music is not the music itself, something that can be converted to music, or in any way protected by copyright AFAIK.

Edit: fixed bad spoiler/cw syntax Edit 2: fixed unintentional passive aggression