Is this something akin to what Apple does by adding application layer functionality to SMS messaging? And, please correct me if I’m wrong about how the apple stuff works.

Are you thinking about daylight savings time? I’d agree there, but timezones absolutely make sense, and we’ve always used some version of it. “See you at noon” has a sort of built in timezone, as does sunrise and sunset. We (all human societies) relate hours to the day in a similar, albeit more regular way. If you did away with timezones, you’d replace a minor inconvenience with a monstrous one. Everyone uses what, GMT? Naah

My TV OS isn’t based on android.

Aha. For the desktop, I just use FreeTube that has those built in. Downside is not having the same interaction with the YouTube account to keep track of what you’ve seen.

For the mobile device I used a modded version of the official app that also does them.

For the TV I have a custom android app that I share a YouTube URI to, and it sends it to the home server, downloads the video with yt-dlp and makes it available on jellyfin.

For some reason, having extensions on the browser just creeps me out. They have permissions to do so much, and know so much.

Which ones?

There are two common types of laser printers. Those that have special paper that react to heat, such as receipt printers, would fit the description.

The other laser printers… Hm, I don’t think your description is accurate either. It’s more that the laser electrically charges ink particles so that they jump on to a separate roller that gets rolled on to the paper.

I’m no expert though.

I don’t think the Unix philosophy of having lots of small tools that do one thing and do it well that you compose together has ever been achieved

Why do you think this might be the case? It’s not remotely accurate, which suggests that you must understand it very differently than I do. To some extent, I am curious.

I’ll give you a recent example. Which is just from yesterday. I had a use case where some program had a memory leak, which would eventually lead to the system running out. So, I “built a program that would monitor this and kill the process that used the most memory”. I don’t know how complicated this is in windows and PS, but it took about 2 minutes in Linux, and it very much leverages the Unix philosophy.

Looks something like this:

get_current_available_memory_mb() {
    cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemAvailable | grep -oP '\d*' | xargs printf "%d / 1024  \n" | bc
}

Functionality based on putting together very small pieces that do their things well.

• /proc/meminfo is a file pipe that gives you access to information related to memory usage.
• cat just outputs data from a file or a named pipe, here the latter
• grep lets you filter stuff. First time the relevant line. Then again to strip out the number with a regex.
• xargs does one thing well, and lets you pass that on to another command as arguments, instead of stdin.
• printf formats the output, here to express the numerical operation of dividing the value by 1024 as “[number] / 1024”
• bc evaluates simple mathematical operations expressed in text

Result: 1 file pipe and 5 simple utilities, and you get the relevant data.

The PID of the process using the most memory you can get with something like:

ps aux --sort=-%mem | head -n2 | tail -n1 | awk '{print $2}'

Same sort of breakdown: ps gives you access to process information, and handles sorting by memory usage. head -n2 just keeps the first two lines, but the first one is a header so tail -n1 keeps the second line. awk is used here to only output the second column value. And, you get the relevant data. Also, with simple tools that leverage the Unix philosophy.

You then check if the available memory is below some threshold, and send a kill signal to the process if it does. The Unix way of thinking also stops you from adding the infinite loop in the script. You simply stop at making it do that one thing. That is, 1. check remaining memory. 2. if lower than X, kill PID". Let’s call this “foo.sh”.

You get the “monitoring” aspect by just calling it with watch. Something like watch -n 2 -- ./foo.sh.

And there you go. Every two seconds, it checks available free memory, and saves my system from freezing up. It took me 10 times longer to write this reply, than to write the initial script.

If memory serves me correctly, PS also supports piping, so I would assume you could do similar things. Would be weird not to, given how powerful it is.

I could give you an endless list of examples. This isn’t so much a case of “has ever been achieved”, but… a fundamental concept, in use, all the time, by at least a dozen people. A dozen!

Also yesterday, or it might have been Saturday. To give you another example, I scratched different itch by setting up a script that monitors the clipboard for changes, if it changes, and now matches a YouTube URL, it opens that URL in FreeTube. So… with that running, I can copy a YouTube URL, from anywhere, and that program will immediately pop up and play the video. That too, took about 2 minutes to do, and was also built using simple tools that do one thing, and one thing well. If you wanted it to also keep a local copy of that video somewhere, it wouldn’t be more effort than the 10 seconds it takes to also send that URL to yt-dlp. One tool, that does that one thing well. Want to also notify you when that download is complete? Just add a line with notify-send "Done with the thing". What about the first example, if you want to get a OS level notification that it killed the process? Just add a line to notify-send, same tool that does that same one thing well.

None of this takes much effort once you get into it, because the basic tools are all the same, and they don’t change much. The whole workflow is also extremely iterative. In the first example, you just cat meminfo. Then you read it, and identify the relevant line, so you add grep to filter out that line, and run the command again. It’s now a line containing the value, so you add another grep to filter it out the number, and again, run it. “Checks out”. So, you pipe that to printf, and you run it. If you fuck something up, no biggie, you just change it and run it again until that little step matches your expectations, and you move on.

No complaints from me. Maybe if I had to use it. The thing that strikes me as particularly noisy is what seems to be either case insensitive commands and flags, or case sensitive and using Pascal-Case for both commands and flags. Which would be my least preferred option.

Thanks for the info! Is a correct assumption that this is a “yes”, to my question?

I’m curious. Does anyone like PowerShell, and the syntax you end up with?

Why do I get the feeling you might be younger than the average age here? Maybe missing an /s?

By how some teams operate, and some developers think, there is certainly cases where the “engineering” aspect is hard to find.

This is satire, right? Surely no one would put their name on that publicly?

Like someone working in a kitchen boasting about a life hack of not wasting time with hygiene.

That seems unethical, no? Hope EU slaps them with some fines for this BS. Same with premium early access for gaming. Consumer rights are being stripped little by little.

Edit: help me out here. Why is this controversial? Maybe I should have said “premium early play” instead of “premium early access”?

Does anyone know why they shut it down? The replacement was worse on every single account. And by such a significant amount too.

to avoid all of Google’s bullshit but still watch Youtube content?

Paying for YouTube Premium.

I get what you’re saying. But, do you get what I’m saying? If someone asks “why is X Y to you”, the answer “because it is Y to me”, doesn’t add much. Now, the OP asked for a reasoning for why it was ethical. You have pretty much said “fuck ethics, I do what I want”. And, as you very much point out, you do not care what anyone thinks. Which… I find weird to point out in a discussion forum. FYI, ethics tries to be a little bit more general than “anything I want is by definition ethical to me”. I’m sure we’re both happy to leave it at that.

You are awfully reductive in your reasoning.

• Most content is corporate generated consumerist garbage anyway so it doesn’t matter
• Our right to access content is more important than a creator’s right to restrict access to it for profit
• It’s information and ideas, and we are entitled to all information simply because I say so

I find none of these statements to be particularly accurate, and as such also your reasoning. I’m sure there are good arguments for it, but the solution and approach you’ve presented is flawed. I had hoped for something more enlightening. Now, I don’t disagree with your ultimate goal or conclusion, it just needs different circumstances than reality currently allows. You either shoot yourself in the foot where creative work dies out, or we manage to create a society where such pursuits are motivated by the art itself and not the gain. But to me, you have not argued that piracy is “ethical”, you just make a point of not really caring about the ethical component of it, because the end goal of you getting access to it without making an effort towards the contribution and the sustainability of creating it, is what matters to you.

I don’t think it can be that black and white. You probably have some kind of framework in mind where that makes sense. Otherwise you would be arguing that the very thing you wish to obtain a copy of, should not be rewarded in a way that allows that work to exist. So, is the framework you have in mind some kind of egalitarian world that unfortunately doesn’t exist?

What are you on about?