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swiftcoder commented on The Whole App is a Blob   drobinin.com/posts/the-wh... · Posted by u/valzevul
fainpul · 8 hours ago
From the title, I assumed this is about an app distributed as a binary blob.

Regarding learning languages, I'm not a fan of this style of learning. It seems to me this is still Duolingo, just with a different interface. I had good success with https://www.languagetransfer.org/

swiftcoder · 3 hours ago
> I had good success with https://www.languagetransfer.org/

Yeah, I tend to think for the specific case of languages that share a common root, language transfer is unbeatable value (especially since it's entirely free).

swiftcoder commented on The Whole App is a Blob   drobinin.com/posts/the-wh... · Posted by u/valzevul
philipallstar · 4 hours ago
> Your life is allowed to exist

I like this article, but statements like this go far too far. An app cannot disallow someone's life. It's not that important.

swiftcoder · 4 hours ago
> An app cannot disallow someone's life

Tell that to the folks busy turning every app into a miniature casino...

swiftcoder commented on Rust Coreutils 0.5.0 Release: 87.75% compatibility with GNU Coreutils   github.com/uutils/coreuti... · Posted by u/maxloh
lnkl · 20 hours ago
Were they also open source?
swiftcoder · 18 hours ago
Legally, no, but plenty of people had copies of the source.
swiftcoder commented on Stop crawling my HTML – use the API   shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/... · Posted by u/edent
tigranbs · 20 hours ago
When I write the scraper, I literally can't write it to account for the API for every single website! BUT I can write how to parse HTML universally, so it is better to find a way to cache your website's HTML so you're not bombarded, rather than write an API and hope companies will spend time implementing it!
swiftcoder · 18 hours ago
> BUT I can write how to parse HTML universally

Can you though? Because even big companies rarely manage to do so - as a concrete example, neither Apple nor Mozilla apparently has sufficient resources to produce a reader mode that can reliably find the correct content elements in arbitrary HTML pages.

swiftcoder commented on Stop crawling my HTML – use the API   shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/... · Posted by u/edent
shadowgovt · 19 hours ago
On the other hand, I already have an HTML parser, and your bespoke API would require a custom tool to access.

Multiply that by every site, and that approach does not scale. Parsing HTML scales.

swiftcoder · 18 hours ago
You already have a JSON and XML parser too, and the website offers standardised APIs in both of those
swiftcoder commented on Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help   hey.paris/posts/appleid/... · Posted by u/parisidau
smakt · 2 days ago
>good luck getting transactions done without one

you mean like I do all the time with my high-tech plastic code card? At any time of day or night, workday or weekend? I must be lucky because I have been doing it for decades.

Your mistake was telling them you agree to use their app in your insecure smartphone. You were not obligated to do so.

swiftcoder · a day ago
> Your mistake was telling them you agree to use their app in your insecure smartphone. You were not obligated to do so.

Must be nice to have such choice. In rural areas you generally only have one bank in the local area, and unless you want to drive an hour to the city to do your banking, them's the breaks

swiftcoder commented on Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help   hey.paris/posts/appleid/... · Posted by u/parisidau
smakt · 2 days ago
None of those require smartphones if you live in a free country (1) (2).

(1) Unbanked population in Uganda or india don't have options. Funnily, it's become the same with everyone, banked or unbanked, in the USA. The USA a third world dictatorship now, so expect that and more. Please vote for the orange buffoon a third time! He will most surely try to get on a third term.

(2) No bank in the EU requires a smartphone; it's banned by law (you know, law that protects people, the type you lost). "Banks" that are app-only are not banks but financial casinos. No bus driver in the EU can refuse small coins. In some countries they cannot refuse that you get on the bus without paying. No shop in the EU can refuse cash. No EV charging requires any app; you can pay right at the charging station with a credit card. Uber is not a universal right but a trinket. Same with tinder/food delivery and all the impoverishing tech for the disowned.

Enjoy the USA.

swiftcoder · 2 days ago
> No bank in the EU requires a smartphone

They may not require one, but good luck getting transactions done without one. My EU bank branches are now only open 3 hours a day, and to approve an online transaction without the app means phoning the bank during business hours…

swiftcoder commented on GNU Unifont   unifoundry.com/unifont/in... · Posted by u/remywang
swiftcoder · 2 days ago
> Unifont only stores one glyph per printable Unicode code point. This means that complex scripts with special forms for letter combinations including consonant combinations and floating vowel marks such as with Indic scripts (Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil, etc.) or letters that change shape depending upon their position in a word (Indic and Arabic scripts) will not render well in Unifont. In those cases, Unifont is only suitable as a font of last resort. Users wishing to properly render such complex scripts should use full OpenType fonts that faithfully display such alternate forms.

An important caveat, that while this is potentially a useful fallback font to at least something for unknown glyphs, without any sort of combining/shaping, it's not going to usefully render a whole bunch of languages (i.e. languages like Arabic will be a disaster)

swiftcoder commented on CRISPR fungus: Protein-packed, sustainable, and tastes like meat   isaaa.org/kc/cropbiotechu... · Posted by u/rguiscard
YeGoblynQueenne · 3 days ago
Just for some context, is the guy on the left with the white shirt a vegan who however supports ethical farming practices or did I get totally the wrong impression?
swiftcoder · 3 days ago
I believe he was a vegan for a long time, but has since started eating some ethically-farmed meat
swiftcoder commented on CRISPR fungus: Protein-packed, sustainable, and tastes like meat   isaaa.org/kc/cropbiotechu... · Posted by u/rguiscard
Brendinooo · 3 days ago
I did ~100 chickens last year, and more like 85 this year.

12 weeks is incorrect, you can buy the same Cornish crosses that the big farms use. So they can be ready in as little as 6-7 weeks but I usually stretch it to 8 or 9; my time to process them is fixed so I might as well get a little bit more meat for my efforts.

I use a chicken tractor that is big enough to let me hold about 33 at a time.

So it’s an operation that needs to run for about half the year. If you time it right, you can work around vacations and stuff. Daily operations are actually pretty minimal in terms of time spent, but you do lose three weekends a year to process them if you don’t outsource that.

All of that to say: I’m not sure if I want to agree with your characterization. It’s less of a time commitment than you think. But there is a substantial cost to it all: capital costs are notable and the cost of feed and birds is such that you basically break even against high-end organic products for sale. You’re always going to look at the Costco chicken and wonder why you are doing it. I treat it as a “touch grass” hobby that kinda breaks even.

No real point, just excited to have something to say about this haha

swiftcoder · 3 days ago
> the cost of feed

Note that in the scenario I was responding to, they are arguing for input-neutral chickens, so they can't just buy in feed, and have all the complications of maintaining their feed source as well

Average household probably isn't going to produce enough food scraps to feed 25+ chickens (we've done it in the past, but we had a restaurant kitchen to supply the food scraps)

u/swiftcoder

KarmaCake day5430September 26, 2018
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Former BigTech engineer. Procedural generation and 3D rendering enthusiast. Restauranteur
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