It's that time of the week again!

Process:

• Ned Batchelder’s Expert asterisks explains why precision can be counter-productive when helping newbies.
• Lisanna Dettwyler explains how The Decimal Versioning Standard v1.0 avoids the distressingly common problem of software not parsing version numbers correctly.
• TheBorys’s Substack figures out What is the size of Yemen? by resolving a century of misinformation.
• Mike Cardwell goes far beyond the standard steps in Hardening Container Images.
• Lawrence Kesteloot explains a simple maintainability pattern in Keep if clauses side-effect free.

Community:

• Glyph Lefkowitz’s Who Is Open Source About? adds much-needed nuance to Rich Hickey’s classic Open Source is Not About You.
• In The AI Pascal’s Wager, Lionel Dricot argues that if there is even a tiny chance of damaging the long-term health of an open source project, the pragmatic approach for now is to forbid LLM-generated contributions.
• Jeff Atwood urges developers to keep cultivating online communities in If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?.
• MIT faculty members Catherine D’Ignazio, Marah Gubar, Tanalís Padilla, Dwai Banerjee, and Karrie Karahalios go full sarcasm against their administration in How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Campus Surveillance.

Misc:

• Sebastian Lague, a master software experimenter, makes a pen plotter.
• Matt Parker’s Humble Pi has a lot of interesting and sometimes funny anecdotes about mathematical errors.