Thomas Brand:
In 2020 I am watching less stupid on YouTube by skipping the algorithm. Instead of letting the YouTube decide which videos it wants to show me, I am watching only the videos I want to see by subscribing to my favorite content creators via RSS.
[…]
[Append] the Channel ID to the end of this URL https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=
The combined URL + Channel ID is the Feed URL of that YouTube channel, and can be added to my feed reader.
Too bad there’s no way to do this for Twitter.
Nick Heer:
YouTube isn’t the only website that buries its RSS feeds in this manner. I don’t know that it’s deliberate — in the sense that they’re trying to discourage the use of RSS. I think it might be a result of product teams convincing themselves that RSS is something used only by the technically-proficient, so it’s put in a place where that group can find it. The trouble is that only the technically-proficient will end up using it, so it’s cyclical.
Why not just put it in a <link> tag?
Previously:
In several feed readers (e.g. Reeder) you don’t need to figure out the feed yourself: paste the channels’s URL and it’ll auto-detect the feed
If you want the feed for a specific youtube playlist, use https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=
It works in News Explorer, too.
RSS Twitter Web YouTube
Fabián Cañas (tweet):
The problem is that since Swift doesn’t think this value can be nil, it’s not trivial to check.
[…]
It says the non-optional value shouldn’t be compared to nil, and that it’s always false. But at run time, the nil is detected, and we print the statement.
[…]
What’s interesting here is that the argument to the bridge function is an Optional<NSCalendar>. The static method, by its signature, accepts nil. What’s happening then? In this case, The culprit for the crash and what saves us from unexpected behavior later on is a force unwrap. Though the value that’s actually passed in to the function is Optional<NSCalendar>.some(nil), which is still not a valid value and we’re still in undefined behavior territory, so it’s pleasantly surprising that a force unwrap catches this case.
[…]
Having the the compiler automatically check and assert that nonnull Objective-C types returned by Objective-C methods are indeed present would be fantastic, whether for debug builds or as an independent flag.
Brent Royal-Gordon:
To make sure we’re all on the same page: returning null from a nonnull imported API is full-on, demons-flying-out-of-your-nose undefined behavior. There’s no guarantee that it will do what you saw.
Unfortunately, it’s rather easy to get the annotations wrong, and even Apple does this. For example, the SecDigestTransformCreate() and SecTransformExecute() calls can return NULL in Objective-C, but Swift acts as if they can’t fail. I filed a bug about about this, which Apple recently said was so old that they wanted to close it and have me open a new one. Meanwhile, I’m able the work around the issue because these two APIs have a separate error pointer that can be examined. Without that, I think you would need an Objective-C wrapper to safely detect whether an error has occurred.
Update (2020-01-24): Quinn the Eskimo (via Thomas Clement):
The SecTransform API is effectively deprecated, and has been so since 10.12. Unfortunately it’s taken a while for us to formally deprecate it (r. 25183002).
Bug iOS iOS 13 Mac macOS 10.15 Catalina Objective-C Programming Swift Programming Language
wyoung (Hacker News):
I worry that Git might be the last mass-market DVCS within my lifetime. Git effectively has a global monopoly on DVCSes, and I don’t see how you replace such a thing.
Replacing RCS with CVS was easy. Replacing CVS with Subversion was a big fight in many places. Replacing the remaining CVS and Subversion repos with something modern may never happen. Replacing Git with something better looks impossible.
Via Greg Hurrell:
My take: scalability is the biggest hurdle (weak spot) that must be overcome; complaints about usability are majorly exaggerated – version control has some inherent complexity that can’t be elided.
I think that’s right. The command-line weirdness is gradually being addressed, and you can mostly avoid it by using a GUI, anyway. The alternatives I’ve seen are also inherently complex.
Previously:
Fossil Git Mercurial Programming Version Control
J3nRa1n:
No one asked for this. But here it is: every macOS wallpaper from Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah to macOS 10.15 Catalina combined.
The full-resolution image is here, and there’s also one for iOS.
Previously:
iOS iOS 13 Mac macOS 10.15 Catalina Top Posts Wallpaper
wh0 (via Nick Heer):
Conveniently, the emojis studied in this post depict the scissors from a viewpoint parallel to the axis of the hinge.
This allows us to simulate swinging the blades with basic image rotations.
I collected a dataset of emojis from different vendors from Emojipedia.
In the following experiments, I swing the blades around the hinge until the handles collide with each other.
Design Emoji Facebook iOS iOS 13 Mac macOS 10.15 Catalina Twitter Web Windows
