The language and tooling have improved a lot over the last few years - to the point where starting a new CRUD web project using Laravel is a good default choice unless you have very special requirements.

I assume you're referring to the IR35 laws - which were brought in specifically to combat a form of tax avoidance by highly paid contractors on long-term projects, who functioned exactly like employees (by being a contractor instead of an employee you could save a whole bunch of tax in the UK).

Yes, IR35 is a complicated pain - but everyone and their dog in the UK tech scene knows that contracting is/was the way to pay less tax. So it makes sense that HMRC is attempting to close the loophole.

> Uber paid their taxes as they understood UK tax law.

They were specifically attempting to use a loophole to avoid paying VAT the standard way (by claiming they're a "Tour Operator"). They've already lost multiple cases around the world for doing similar bad-faith interpretations of laws - so I think in this case it's Uber doing the exploiting.

This usually works by the PSP embedding iframes for the CC fields on the merchants site (so you're inputting directly to e.g. stripe.com)

If you pre-compile the HTML using something like Jekyll, so that the webserver is just serving HTML files without any dynamic/on-the-fly processing at request time, then it's considered static.

Text book example of being condescending.

This is your issue - PHP < 5.3 is very different to PHP 7+. Not just at the language level - but the community, frameworks and best practices too. No more random scattering of SQL statements in HTML files!

Modern PHP (with a framework like Laravel or Symfony) is probably one of the most productive ways to build web applications.

> It's not beautifully well thought-out the way Python is.

This is definitely an interesting take... Python hasn't even solved package management yet. And the 2.7 => 3 migration is probably the most famous example of making a mess of an ecosystem with backwards incompatible changes. In contrast PHP has Composer and 5.3 code is pretty much compatible with 8.0 (although ideally all code from the 5.3 era should be burned at the stake).

> and people who don't know any better keep championing it. I think people do eventually catch up with what's going on though as soon as they personally experience writing anything remotely serious (5-10,000+ LOC) that isn't a simplistic web-app.

You've basically just said that PHP devs are too inexperienced to be able to scale a codebase past 10k LOC? Pretty much every serious web dev using Symfony/Laravel would disagree with you.

When did this happen? When I was in Munich a few years back there were poster ads for cigarettes everywhere. I remember them being not very subtle about their “smoking is cool” message.

This is only for cases where you have a specific class like User, and you don’t want people setting random dynamic properties on it.

If you do you can also mark the class with an annotation to allow dynamic properties.

After 6 months Maplibre doesn't appear to have changed that much from the original MapboxGL version - which makes sense, because Mapbox pay a bunch of people a bunch of money to work on it full time.

And the engineering effort to implement this would be significant (probably an understatement, given how much this likely complicates the codebase going forward too). So I don't know where Maplibre will get the resources to do this (although it would be amazing if they did)

It’s probably the busiest day of the year for them.

Hint: It’s J A N K Y

This is because Bluetooth _could_ be used to determine a user's location by using beacons and constantly scanning or whatever.

But this has led to nothing but endless confusion for users (and constantly gets highlighted as suspicious in online forums), so they really need to come up with better wording. Like "This app is requesting Bluetooth permissions, which _could_ be used to determine your location".

Even without that loophole there are probably a bunch of tricks their financial planners have to minimise taxes (e.g. using trusts/charities, various tax free allowances).

Or alternatively, because they essentially get to defer taxes for as long as they like (by refinancing the loan), it means they have the full tax free amount of cash available up front to buy more wealth generating assets.

The minimum purchase price on iOS is $0.99, so at worst you'd be paying basically the same rate (~30%).

But most payment processors offer separate pricing for micro-transactions (e.g. Paypal is 5% + $0.05 IIRC). Which works out at around 10% for a $0.99 transaction.

And actually - Adyen offer much better pricing than the "Stripe rate" of $0.30 + 2.9% in the first place.