ronjouch

uBOL bug report: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/issues/438 , from discussion https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/discussions/408#di...

    uBOL doesn't work in apps, it works only in Safari, it's a pure browser extension, the "app" part of uBOL is an Apple requirement just for the sake of installing the extension.

    Copied from #408:

    uBOL will stay a webextensions-based browser extension, I do not plan to go further than this, I do not have the time and motivation to take on more work than I already do.
    What people may ask though is that Apple maybe supports webextensions in WebApp, if that is possible at all.

I hope this changes, it’s what keeps me on AdGuard :-/

Full uBlock Origin is dead in Chrome, yes, but https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home is the next best thing if you cannot leave Chrome

"Ad blockers" nowadays do much more. From the horse’s mouth, which describes itself as a “wide-spectrum content blocker” [1]:

“uBlock Origin (uBO) is a CPU and memory-efficient wide-spectrum content blocker for Chromium and Firefox. It blocks ads, trackers, coin miners, popups, annoying anti-blockers, malware sites, etc., by default using EasyList, EasyPrivacy, Peter Lowe's Blocklist, Online Malicious URL Blocklist, and uBO filter lists. There are many other lists available to block even more [...]

Ads, "unintrusive" or not, are just the visible portion of the privacy-invading means entering your browser when you visit most sites. uBO's primary goal is to help users neutralize these privacy-invading methods in a way that welcomes those users who do not wish to use more technical means.”

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock?tab=readme-ov-file#ublock-...

Similar experience here: I setup Debian stable for my 76 yo mother, and for a 79 yo friend. Works like a charm, and the 2 years release schedule is perfect for people who don’t care about bleeding edge and would rather have stability.

Unattended security upgrades keep it secure, and in my experience a bit of initial “locking things down and simplifying” is valuable, but after this it’s smooth sailing compared to other older folks I help with Windows systems where MS is constantly throwing at them insane bugs, complete UX changes, ads, or Copilot everywhere.

Sadly, doing the trick with a single ball yields a FactorySingleton and scores an extra Java point, but doesn’t impress as much. We can’t have nice things ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .

Gaaaah, words. Yes thank you ! Coz in another thread I was mentioning both.

The above post -which I can no longer edit- compares The Black Parade / TBP (a mod for Thief I / The Dark Project / TDP) to The Dark Mod (TDM, a mod for the doom3 engine). Phew :D

As for the original question of comparing TBP to TDP: I’m personally not fond of Thief I and prefer Thief II, as it focuses on what works: stealth! Thief I is wildly creative, but also full of muddy combat with unconvincing monsters & zombies, and annoying maps / missions. So, to me, TBP (which is pleasingly weird and avoids TDP gameplay pitfalls) kinda beats its parent game TDP at its own game.

> the Dark Parade

You probably meant The Black Parade (a mod for Thief I), not to be confused with The Dark Mod (a standalone thief-inspired game based on the Doom3 engine)

Agreed, thx for the additions :) . While we’re here sharing Thief goodies:

1. The essentials: TFix (https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=134733) and T2Fix (https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=149669)

2. The best place to find Fan Missions (FMs) is https://www.thiefguild.com/fanmissions/ , and the best GUI to manage & play them is https://github.com/FenPhoenix/AngelLoader .

3. For a good “enhanced, yet true to the original” visual textures + models pack, grab https://github.com/NamelessVoice/Thief-Enhancement-Pack

4. These days even Thief III is enjoyable, thanks to the https://www.moddb.com/mods/thief-3-sneaky-upgrade megapatch doing crazy things like stapling back together maps that had to be cut-with-loading-screen due to Xbox limitations!

Both are fabulous community efforts, and I agree with the sister comment by HN user klaussilveira. Now, they are very different things:

- The Black Parade is a single experience: one campaign with a beginning and end, on the oldschool Thief I foundations. Nothing more, nothing less.

- The Dark Project as of today is more of a “platform”: a modern base engine for creators and players who want a shinier Thief, and who acknowledge that with today’s graphical standards comes extra effort to create a satisfying map/campaign (need bigger assets, less “blunt” architecture, etc). To add to the “platform-ness”: as of today, out-of the box TDP has only a couple built-in missions and no meaty story arc. There are many excellent 3rd-party Fan Missions (maps in Thief lingo, go visit https://www.thiefguild.com/fanmissions/ ) for TDP, but it’s not “a game” the way Black Parade is clearly a game. This is not a judgement call and I had an excellent time with many TDP maps, and community members do discuss expanding the campaign & story... but for now it’s more of a technical foundation to download maps and tinker with, than “a game” :) . You can do some spelunking on the TDP forums if you want more details, the maintainers make no mystery of this.

Link: https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches

To Thief heads who played I and II and want more of it: play The Black Parade, an enormous mod 7 years in the making that is actually an entire new game.

New gigantic maps full of secrets, style faithful to the original, weird universe, new story with cutscenes and voice acting. https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152429

I am not affiliated, just a fan.

This specific point about maintaining his own version of python2 to not move to python3 was addressed by Calibre contributors who did the job (that author didn't want to do) of migrating to python3.

> the Go proverb "a little copying is better than a little dependency"

What a nice way to put it! Thanks for the mention and thanks for making me discover https://go-proverbs.github.io/ .

Indeed, one point for MacOS! I use GNOME.

Precisely. Thank you.

Yeah, and thx for the link to the neat crx explorer.

Close to what you do, I started writing my own addon to replace a couple addons whose featureset I use only partially.

For example, when I use Chromium I want 1. to customize the New Tab page, and 2. to add a keyboard shortcut to pin/unpinTab. These two features are absolutely part of extensions, but in addition to the security risk I find them heavy (I don’t need the kitchen sink, just need 2 micro-features!). And so, I have my little personal addon with zero resource usage with just these two features. It’s tiny (20 lines of code!), git-versioned, and never changes / gets pwned. When I need an extra micro-feature, it’s easy enough to add it by searching addons docs, of asking an LLM.

No I don’t. But Wladimir Palant is where I get most of my information on the topic (and is probably where I got this link). His blog might have a post (or a comment) that links to similar lists: https://palant.info/categories/security/

For an example of a scary list of such offers, see https://github.com/extesy/hoverzoom/discussions/670

And similar recomp projects include Zelda { Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask } and Starfox.

- https://github.com/HarbourMasters/Shipwright

- https://github.com/HarbourMasters/2ship2harkinian

- https://github.com/HarbourMasters/Starship

If you use Firefox, have my userContent.css DIY dark mode. Or you can massage it into the syntax expected by { Arc’s custom CSS, uBlock Origin, your CSS injecter of choice }:

  @-moz-document domain(news.ycombinator.com) {
    @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
      body {background-color: #111 !important;}
      #hnmain {background-color: #181818 !important;}
      .c00, a:link, .subtext a:link { color: #eee !important; }
      .comhead { opacity: 0.5 !important; }
      a:visited, .subtext a:visited, .pagetop, .reply a { color: #777 !important; }
      button, select, input, textarea { -moz-appearance: none !important; color: #eee !important; background-color: #444 !important; border: 0.5px solid gray !important; }
      pre, code { color: #9d9 !important; }
    }
  }

Obvious caveats apply: it’s mine, it’s certainly incomplete, yadayada. But hey, been working for me for years! Also, now that you know that the feature exists, you can probably search "Hacker News dark mode userContent.css" and find better / more complete ones :)

Always a pleasure helping tasoeur.

Previous discussion: Google.com search now refusing to search for FF esr 128 without JavaScript (2025-01-16, 92 points), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42719865

Yes, see EDIT at the bottom of my post.

This won't help indeed, the noJS page now is only this redirect and contains no search results.

It’s a blank page with one line of text: “Please click here if you are not redirected within a few seconds”.

DDG gets a large amount of their results from Bing: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources...

Kagi I don’t know much about, but quickly reading about it, seems to indeed pay Goog.

> “While a week is a long time, is it possible that the other search engines just hadn't got around to indexing it yet?”

I doubt it, search engines these days are much faster, and this is double-confirmed by 1. articles linked in sibling comments, 2. reading https://www.reddit.com/robots.txt

That's exactly what they are doing:

    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <html>
      <head><title>Google Search</title>...</head>
      <body>
        <noscript>
          <meta content="0;url=/httpservice/retry/enablejs?sei=..." http-equiv="refresh">
          <div style="display:block">Please click <a href="/httpservice/retry/enablejs?sei=...">here</a> if you are not redirected within a few seconds.</div>
        </noscript>...

> “Edit: maybe you are thinking about the AI deal which is exclusive to Google. That's not the same thing as search engine indexing.”

@mastazi that’s what I’m talking about, and I think your AI vs. indexing nuance is incorrect. I wasn’t sure, so I just did a quick N=1 verification: searching for the name of a random 1week-old popular Reddit post with a precise unique title,

- Insta-found it on Goog as top result

- Didn't find it on DDG, with or without site:reddit.com

Looks like sibling comment from @cpressland (thanks!) is correct: as of today and until other search engines sign licensing agreements with Reddit, “non-Google search engines cannot get new results from Reddit”. See https://www.reddit.com/robots.txt , which links to https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/26410290525... , section “Reddit may license public content for commercial or non-commercial use”

Google is currently the only search engine allowed to crawl Reddit, which sometimes yields good original user content of actual { non-blogspam, non-SEOed-to-hell, non-AI } value.

Generally works for me with https://www.google.com/search?gbv=1&q=test with JS blocked at domain-level by uBlock Origin.

With the caveat that this used to 100% work, but since a couple months, it indeed occasionally redirects to the “Turn on JavaScript to keep searching” page you mention, https://www.google.com/httpservice/retry/enablejs . I'd say the refusal happens 1 / 20 searches. Said differently, I’d prefix your “refusing” with a “sometimes”.

I haven’t investigated the reason for this sometimes-ness. Would love to find an answer here, or ideas/leads (aside switching to another search engine, yes I do know about them, but sometimes Google remains better). Or maybe the sometimes-ness was just A/B testing, and the full switch is happening and this is now a thing of the past.

EDIT you must have posted precisely at the moment of the end of the A/B test: I did several non-JS searches today at $job, and to confirm what I was writing here I did a test one, successfully. But 30min later, I confirm your observation: 100% blocked.

Good recommendations, including a neat tool to audit your GHAs: https://github.com/woodruffw/zizmor , “A static analysis tool for GitHub Actions”.