Using an ad-blocking DNS server solves most of those problems. Mullvad offers a public DNS server with no account required, but there are plenty of options out there.

You should still use a browser extension on top of that for pattern-based URL blocking, but a DNS-based blocker should be your first line of defense.

A good ad-blocker goes a long way. You can block all Google domains with minimal impact to non-Google services.

30 years ago, maybe. Post-Napster, not relevant. Most online piracy is non-commercial now, and it’s still illegal across most of the world.

In practice, Python is not easy to learn programming with. Not at all. I see beginners wrestling with Anaconda and Jupyter notebooks and I weep.

The fact that pip is intentionally broken on macOS and some modern Linux distros sure doesn’t help. Everything about environment management is insane.

This is how Arc behaves by default, and it drove me crazy. The cons of it appearing when I don’t want it far outweigh the pros of saving me a single click when I do want it.

A simpler, less ambitious alternative is Clickbait Remover: https://github.com/pietervanheijningen/clickbait-remover-for-youtube

It replaces thumbnails with stills from the video. You can select between beginning, middle, and end.

It doesn’t change titles but it lets you force capitalization to lowercase, titlecase, or sentence-case. Keep in mind that this has no logic to retain capitalization of proper nouns no matter which option you choose. I set mine to lowercase just to have some kind of consistency, because I got sick of random ALL CAPS TITLES.

I haven’t used DeArrow myself. Crowdsourcing titles sounds interesting but I appreciate that Clickbait Remover behaves exactly the same way with 100% of videos.

All temperature scales are arbitrary, but since our environment is full of water, one tied to the phase changes of water around the atmospheric pressure the vast majority of people experience just makes more sense.

But when it comes to weather, the boiling point of water is not a meaningful point of reference.

I suppose I’m biased since I grew up in an area where 0-100°F was roughly the actual temperature range over the course of a year. It was newsworthy when we dropped below zero or rose above 100. It was a scale everybody understood intuitively because it aligned with our lived experience.

Who do we arrest if a crime is organized via phone call on T-Mobile’s network

I guarantee you, T-Mobile does not hesitate to hand over any and all data they have to the government. And they don’t encrypt shit, as evidenced by their many many data breaches.

or via mail?

The postal service is from a different era, and has legal protections I wish online equivalents had. Logically they should. Realistically they probably never will.

Not all use-cases require a high speed:capacity ratio.

I mean, I have an 18TB USB hard drive, which sustains transfer at about 50MB/sec in practice. It is nearly full, and its level of performance has never been a show-stopping problem.

It’s hard to imagine a use case where a NAS would be a viable alternative to an SD card.

It’s incredibly annoying, but it gets easier over time as you fill out you whitelist.

One of the big advantages to something like NoScript is that it lets you enable scripts only from certain domains. So you can enable the functionally-required scripts while still blocking other scripts.

But yes, it’s a giant pain in the ass. It’s absurd that the web has devolved into such a state.

Switching to another Chromium-based browser is a half-measure. Other Chromium-based browsers are on borrowed time.

As time goes on, it will become more difficult for them to maintain v2 support. Nobody has the resources to properly maintain a browser fork with more than minor modifications. And you can bet Google will go out of their way to make this difficult for everybody else.

I mean, sure, use what you’re comfortable with if you really can’t use a non-Chromium-based browser for some reason. But it means you’re likely going to have to jump ship again sooner or later. Why not just jump once, to something with better long-term prospects?

Then again, the folks behind Arc Browser have expressed interest in becoming engine-agnostic, so perhaps there will be a Chromium-free Arc version in the future. That would be very cool.

I don’t know about strictly “unable” but there are a million contexts where it is a bad idea and simply not done. Like a spreadsheet or financial document. Or anywhere you want your text to behave like text — with a consistent font, color, style, etc. The difference between $ (text) and 💲 (emoji) is pretty stark in most contexts.

This will likely be rejected for one the same reasons that they decided they would not add any new flag emojis. Flags come and go. Bitcoin hasn’t even been around for 20 years yet, and its future is highly uncertain.

Also, considered as a currency, it would be better as a regular text character, not an emoji. Like $, €, ¥, £, etc.

Give it time. This is Microsoft we’re talking about. Look at GitHub or Skype.

Monocultures are bad. Popularity very rarely tracks quality. And once something is overwhelmingly popular, it usually goes to shit, because the momentum is enough to keep it successful.

See: Windows. Outlook. Reddit. CrowdStrike.

everyone and their mother uses VS Code

This is usually a good reason to avoid something. Especially if that something comes from Microsoft.

This doesn’t seem to be a problem with disaster recovery plans. It is perfectly reasonable for disaster recovery to take several hours, or even days. As far as DR goes, this was easy. It did not generally require rebuilding systems from backups.

In a sane world, no single party would even have the technical capability of causing a global disaster like this. But executives have been tripping over themselves for the past decade to outsource all their shit to centralized third parties so they can lay off expensive IT staff. They have no control over their infrastructure, their data, or, by extension, their business.

The solution to the whitespace gripe is strictly enforced formatting standards with a git hook running a manually invokable script.

Throwing a linter into the pipeline just hardcodes the formatting at that point in the pipeline. That doesn’t really solve the issue, which is that style is not a one-size-fits-all concept, and displaying text appropriately is really the job of a text editor. To quote PEP 8, “default wrapping in most tools disrupts the visual structure of the code”. In other words, “most tools” suck at displaying code, because they are not language-aware. That’s the real problem. Hardcoding style is a workaround, not a solution.

That said, I wouldn’t consider intelligent editors to be a replacement for formatting standards, either. Ideally my text editor would display my Python code the way I like it, and then save to disk in accordance to PEP 8.

4 is sheer madness. 1 is common sense. 2 is just the cooler version of 1.

I’ve always found hardcoded style to be an obnoxious and counterproductive paradigm. It’s the text editor’s job to handle line wrapping, and there’s no reason a coding editor shouldn’t be able to format code intelligently. I hate hard line breaks that do not have meaning. Not everybody is using the same size windows! It’s 2024! We have the technology!

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/on-the-etiology-of-fuckers