Yes! I'm currently working on a script that modifies a bunch of sensitive files, and this the approach I'm taking to make sure I don't accidentally lose any important data.

I've split the process into three parts:

1. Walk the filesystem, capture the current state of the files, and write out a plan to disk.

2. Make sure the state of the files from step 1 has not changed, then execute the plan. Capture the new state of the files. Additionally, log all operations to disk in a journal.

3. Validate that no data was lost or unexpectedly changed using the captured file state from steps 1 and 2. Manually look at the operations log (or dump it into an LLM) to make sure nothing looks off.

These three steps can be three separate scripts, or three flags to the same script.

At least according to Statcounter, Linux is currently at 3.86% worldwide: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide.

It's slightly larger in the US at 5.28%: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...

In India, where I live, it's surprisingly at 6.51%: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india

Take this with a grain of salt, because numbers from Statcounter are not fully accurate. However, none of those numbers are small. 3.86% of the entire PC market is not something to scoff at.

If you use `uv`, you can declare your dependencies at the top of a script: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/scripts/#declaring-script-d...

I've started using Python for many more tasks after I discovered this feature. I'm primarily a JS/TS developer, but the ability to write a "standalone" script that can pull in third-party dependencies without affecting your current project is a massive productivity boost.

> I think maybe we're talking past each other then. I'm saying I don't agree with the argument that music necessarily needs to have a story to be widely consumed in a positive way.

I can imagine that this is true for a lot of people. There are certainly folks out there who see music as an interesting sensory stimulus. This song makes you dance, this one makes you cry, this other one makes you feel nostalgic. To these people, the only thing that matters is what the music makes them feel. It's a strange, solipsistic way of engaging with art, but who am I to judge?

I personally don't connect to music—or any other art—that way. The process that goes into making a piece of music is as important to me as the music itself. The people who make that music are even more important. I don't believe in separating art from the artist. In fact, I find the whole idea of separating art and artist to be fundamentally rotten.

Here's an admittedly extreme example, but it's demonstrative of how I personally relate to music. In the wake of the #MeToo movement (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeToo_movement), some of the musicians I used to love as a teenager were outed as sexual predators. When I found out, I scoured my music library and deleted all their work. The music was still the exact same music I fell in love with all those years ago, but I could no longer listen to it without being reminded of the horrible actions of the musicians. Listening to it was triggering.

And so to me, music is not just a series of sounds that make me feel good. There are humans behind those sounds, and I care deeply about those humans. They don't need to be perfect—everyone fucks up from time to time—but they need to demonstrate some level of human decency. And they certainly can't be machines, because machines aren't people.

I love machines. I've spent my life building them, programming them, and caring for them. But machines aren't people, and therefore I don't care about the art they make. Maybe one day machines will be able to make art in the same way humans do: by going out into the world, having experiences, making mistakes, learning, connecting with others, loving and being loved, or being rejected soundly, and understanding deeply what it means to be a living thing in this universe. A generative AI model doesn't do that (yet!) and so I'm utterly uninterested in whatever a generative AI model has to say about anything.

Could you put some kind of CORS proxy in front of those URLs? (I know it sucks that you have to do this at all, but c'est la vie.)

You could even write a Cloudflare Worker or a Val on val.town to do that, and add a bit of caching on top so you don't hit your providers too often.

I've started to "standardize" my own use of Markdown as "whatever works in the apps I use". For me these apps are iA Writer, Obsidian, and Astro's rendering pipeline (which uses the Remark/Rehype ecosystem under the hood).

This sucks for sharing documents with other people, but in practice it's not a problem. 99% of my writing never leaves my notes app or blog. And when it does, I often export it to PDF or Word to make it easy for non-techie people to read (I love Pandoc for this, it's easily one of the favorite tools in my daily toolkit).

> markdown is horrible, horrible format to parse...

I agree entirely. But it's a lovely format to use. Programming as a profession is entirely about making things easier for our users, even if it means making things harder for ourselves.

After all, that's the whole ethos around the web as a platform. Throw some broken HTML soup at a browser and it'll still try its best to render it.