Huh, I missed that when skimming through the post and source code

I am considering implementing my own ActivityPub server to remove the dependency on a Lemmy server to get votes,

I saw that part and misunderstood it as if he didn’t run an instance.
Thanks for pointing it out!

Honestly surprised you’re able to get lemmy votes without an admin account, I thought that data was restricted to instance admins.

I think they limit it to upvotes for normal users

University students get free pro licenses for jetbrains IDEs I think

While I agree to some extent, if not var is more than clear enough for anyone that knows python. If that pattern confuses someone, they probably aren’t at level where they should be dealing with python at a professional level. The same way you would expect people to understand pointers and references before delving into C code.

This sort of stuff is something I taught first year engineering student in their programming introductory course, it’s just how python is written.

For what it’s worth, it’s sort of similar in Erlang/Elixir. If you want to check if a list is empty, checking the length of the list is discouraged. Instead you would use Enum.empty?().

I’d argue that if it’s strict explicitness you want, python is the wrong language. if not var is a standard pattern in python. You would be making your code slower for no good reason.