So, there are a lot of words in the post that I’m not familiar with (LoRA, Oobabooga, CivitAI). However, I think those are details about the actual library or package you’re looking at, so I will not touch any of that.

I can strict answer the question “what is Yarn?”

Long story short, it’s a direct “competitor” to NPM (Node Package Manager). In the earlier days of Node and NPM, Yarn was an attempt to improve certain weaknesses perceived in NPM (including speed and security). Yarn is still used in many codebases, but it’s become less popular over the years as NPM has resolved many of the things that Yarn sought to fix. Also, Yarn version 2 made a major design change which some have viewed as too radical (though I’m unclear on the details as I’ve only dabbled in v2).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarn_(package_manager)

Reboot

It may not be the answer I gave at the time, but it’s the best balance now of “liked it as a kid” and “like it as an adult”

I get it…I’ve never been the maintainer of a codebase that’s deployed on trillions of devices, and backwards compatibility is something to be taken seriously and responsibly when you’re that prolific. I do not begrudge SQLite or any large projects when they make decisions in service to that.

However

It always makes me feel oddly icky when known bugs (particularly of the footgun variety) become the new standard that the project intentionally upholds.

So, I will start by saying “Yes, you can do it. It’s not too late and programming is fun and fulfilling”.

However! One thing my experience has taught me in seeing people approach and bounce off programming is: programming is a fail-til-you-get-it type of endeavour. Your first several years will be littered with broken code, because there are a thousand little things you have to bump up against before you unlock one more puzzle piece.

So! If you go for it, persevere! You aren’t a bad programmer, or a slow learner, because you can’t get your code to work. Every single one of us ran into the same issue, and we just had to push through, learn to Google, and try again until it sorta-kinda works. You in 10 years will be embarrassed by what you write in your first years