But affine transformations are indeed not linear. The augmentation trick creates a new, linear transform in n+1 dimension, which is related but different to the affine transform in question.
> Oh. Well this is weird. They seem like awfully indirect measurements of relevant skills and perspective
Documentation or discussion could use language that means some demographic groups aren't comfortable getting involved, when they could otherwise be great contributors. It's a reasonable idea that some people already think computer programming "isn't for them", and that correcting that misconception is important. I agree that people should be judged by their merits, so we should focus on not deterring people for non-technical reasons.
I agree that PDF is effectively universal as a distribution format for graphical and formatted text. There are some cases where plain text is still nicer, like when trying to read documentation without an X server.