ericra

Lemme just give my grandma a list of instructions for doing this so she can get to Facebook. I'll let you know how it works out.

This problem is compounded by several factors. One is that older/slower phones cannot always use fully-featured browsers such as Firefox for mobile. The app is takes too many resources on its own before even opening up a website. That means turning to a pared-down browser like Firefox Focus, which is ok except for not being able to have extensions. That means no ublock origin, which of course makes the web an even worse experience.

Another issue is that some sites will complain if you are not using a "standard" browser and the site will become unusable for that reason alone.

In these situations, companies frequently try to force an app down your throat instead. And who knows how much space that will take up on a space-limited device or how poorly it will run.

Many companies/sites used to have simplified versions to account for slower devices/connections, but in my experience these are becoming phased out and harder to find. I imagine it's much harder to serve ads and operate a full tracking network to/from every social media company without all the javascript bloat.

Articles like this are extremely annoying. Nearly every educated person knows everything this article says. It just comes across as condescending in a "I can do this, so anyone can" sort of way.

It could be run by an international non-profit or as a collaboration between governments. It wouldn't be particularly expensive to run when weighed against the huge long-term benefits.

It's really a failure of the U.S. and EU governments to not clamp down on the Elseviers of the world who bring very few benefits at a high cost to open science and society at large.

I agree there is a lot of bloat in some cases. All I'm saying is that one has the option use Python in a more "responsible"/efficient way, and there are plenty of projects which do so.

For instance, I don't see how it's necessarily a memory hog. I wrote a (relatively simple) Windows/Linux GUI application in Python that I use regularly, and it uses around 20MB of RAM.

I'm not familiar with how many breaking changes have been made in Python 3, but I suspect there haven't been many major ones in the last 10 years (since 3.4). It would be interesting to see a list, though.

[1] https://github.com/EricRa/python-scripts/blob/main/modules/p...

For instance, I love hatch (Nex Mexico) chiles, but they seem quite difficult to get fresh outside of the region or at least during a very particular time of year. They are so much more flavorful than jalepenos imo, and have a similar amount of spice (not much). At least they are typically available canned, and they are still great.

I'm not entirely sure this is always accurate, but that is the distinction afaik.

But practically speaking, you're right. You can just cut away the outsides and get most of the flavor without much spice at all.

This product looks incredible...

Please keep doing what you're doing!

https://github.com/EricRa/python-scripts/tree/main/modules/p...

Appreciate everyone's suggestions and time!

I was looking at feedparser last night, and it definitely seems like the go-to for rolling my own as a learning exercise.

Cheers.

https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/hot-money/episode-1-murder-b...

I am given the option to either listen to the embedded podcast on the site (with no easy way to right-click/save as the actual mp3. Or I can get directed to one of the following:

Apple podcasts Spotify Stitcher (I don't think this even exists anymore?) IHeart RSS

So if I'm attempting to get the podcast using a browser, my options are to:

1) Click the RSS feed, search the feed for the episode, find the direct sound file link, and download it that way

2) View the page source and search the source for the link to the MP3 (this is possible here, but sometimes it is obscured depending on the site).

Just adding a simple "download" link among these which directly downloads the mp3 file without addition clicks would be great here imo.

I wonder if this ad insertion happens for downloading directly from RSS feeds as well. Typically, there is a link in the RSS feed directly to an .mp3 file, and I don't know if it would be possible to set the RSS link to a URL which would custom "build" a new mp3 for each download with dynamic ads injected. Is it just the case that some podcasts do not have "public" RSS feeds? I don't know if i've come across any...

A lot of this question is really just motivated by trying to understand the reasoning for not having a simple download option on (many) podcast websites.

I think that the key to this model working is that the podcasters are not (necessarily) reliant on big tech. On twitch and youtube streams for instance, algorithmic ads are used mainly to reimburse amazon/google for their hosting services (+ a significant profit). Since a podcast is small in size and does not need to be streamed on-demand, hosting costs are negligible. It seems like this model could also be effective for websites, but it requires an actual human to find and vet advertisers. I'm not sure what the solution could be for sites like youtube where self-hosting content is a much higher barrier to most content creators.

I had not previously heard about this one, but they all sort of run together. Some vague stuff about protecting children which would undoubtedly result in 1) not doing much at all to protect children and 2) actively making the internet worse for everyone.

The fact that this is a bipartisan-introduced bill is even worse news.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/01/24/religious-no...

The archive.is capture does not allow scrolling through the faces, so made an imgur post with the images in sequence:

https://imgur.com/a/XXmUoNs

While it's true that Facebook creates some valuable "true" open source projects (like React), I anticipate seeing a lot more complicated (and restrictive) open source licensing from them and other big tech for upcoming projects.

(details below from memory, so don't consider this authoritative)

The game was released recently, and it's an auto-battler akin to Teamfight Tactics but with a fairytale theme. It is essentially a complete remake of the game Storybook Brawl which was created in part by Magic the Gathering veteran pros like Luis Scott-Vargas. Storybook Brawl was reported to be a favorite game of Sam Bankman-Fried, and FTX ended up purchasing the game from the original creators (in 2022, I believe). Right after this happened, the devs started to introduce some ideas about incorporating some kind of crypto nonsense into the game, and most of the community was turned off immediately. It was also already abundantly clear at this point what a fraud this guy was, and most of the community soured and turned away from the game. When FTX collapsed after the scandal, the servers were abruptly turned off, and the game was dead.

This "remake" is being developed by a single dev. There are still a lot of placeholder AI-generated type of assets, but they are doing a great job with balance and listening to the community. The community around the game is quite friendly and active on the game's Discord.

In any case, I know there is a large community of strategy-game players lurking here, so I wanted to bring this little-known game some attention. I've been having a lot of fun with it.