Most new books I find are books I check out from my local library. While the library did pay for a copy, so it's not quite the same, as a reader I didn't pay anything for it. The barrier to trying the new book is very small, and if I don't like it I haven't lost anything.

Readers finding your book online for free are having the same experience. Maybe not everyone who reads it will want to buy copies, but some will. Just like how some who find your book in a library would want to buy their own copy.

The problem they're addressing is that some sites they were scraping from have begun instituting measures to stop them. The site went from working beautifully to working barely at all, with most sources either loading incredibly slowly or failing to load at all. I followed the discussions a bit on their discord, and it seems like the first recommendation was for users to host their own proxies. From what I see on the site's initial splash, that still is one of the recommendations. I'm guessing they also rolled out the browser extension as an alternate method for users who don't want to set up a proxy, since they were getting tons of people on thsir discord complaining about it being too hard or whatever.

But yeah, who knows if the extension is safe. The project is open source, so you can always examine it for yourself. But at that point you may as well just host your own proxy.

Edit: looked into it a bit more; the extension's originally proposed purpose seems to be to get around CORS restrictions on certain sources. Seems the original proposal was here: https://github.com/movie-web/movie-web/issues/581

I used to work at a company that held to the concept of "don't be a hero." Basically, if you were having to step up, work overtime, and always go out of your normal routine to "fix" stuff, then you're actually enabling bad processes.

I think the same concept applies here. If you can't let any code be submitted without personally reviewing it, then there is something wrong with either the review system, the onboarding system for new devs, or the continuous integration system that should be catching mistakes. Same goes for triaging: if no one is triaging because it's too exhausting and leads to burnout, then some other system may need to be devised for handling outstanding issues.

Obviously this is much harder to deal with in an organization where most contributors are volunteers. But if we want the project to survive and not be taken over by corporations who can afford to pay people to deal with this stuff full time, I think it should be addressed in a different way.

First 1/3rd is a bit of fluff but after that, good article.

Ah yes, the Wadsworth constant.

Why the heck does it need to be dynamically allocated? Just put that puppy on the stack.

I would argue that in this case the maintainers are in the wrong for not even responding to the issue, not the reporter responding with memes.

I usually agree with his takes, but I can't watch more than a minute and a half of a video of his, because it's always an unscripted rant. It's fine though, he usually gets his point across in the first minute anyway, and then repeats himself for another ten minutes.

Should be titled, "demotivating a programmer with a specific personality type." Sure, some good programmer you know doesn't value money; that doesn't mean every skilled programmer won't value it.

Cheaper? Yes, I guess so, depending on how you measure cost. More useful? Absolutely disagree.

If you want to go one step further, a lot of game development uses a generational index, where the index is both a value and a generation, allowing you to know whether the index you currently have stored references an object that has already been destroyed and replaced by another object. Basically every ECS framework I've ever seen uses this pattern.

It's explicitly illegal in California? I've never heard that before.

Have you tried the Book?