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Note that it is possible to set up sync infrastructure yourself to keep all your information (passwords, bookmarks, history, open tabs, etc) on your machines. See here for a walk-through. I strongly doubt Google would allow you to do something like this with their browser since it contravenes their business model- almost entirely built around tracking you.

there's nothing to say that websites can't sell ads to legitimate advertisers and put up advertisements.

This works for Daring Fireball and Read the Docs. But before you recommend requiring the ad-supported web at large to adopt their business model, please consider the following nothings:

1. A publisher selling ads on its own website has to somehow convince advertisers that the publisher exists in the first place, is worth the advertisers' time, and can detect and not charge for fraudulent page views or clicks. If a web publisher hired you to market the publisher's ad space to advertisers, what steps would you recommend taking to do so?
2. Interest-based advertising pays three times the CPM compared to context-based advertising according to a study by Beales and Eisenach.

Your content isn't worth the trouble. Toss me an add and let me see the content.

Some sites don't even toss me an ad. They toss me the URL of a third-party proprietary computer program written in JavaScript that surveils my browsing history across multiple websites and uses the battery life and Internet bandwidth that I pay for to choose an ad from one of a dozen or more ad networks. And if I say no to proprietary software or no to surveillance, these sites are incapable of falling back to a publisher-hosted ad like those seen on Daring Fireball and Read the Docs because interest-based ads pay three times the CPM.

Such old-fashioned ads can be seen on Daring Fireball and Read the Docs. But their cost per thousand impressions (CPM) is one-third of what interest-based advertising can produce according to a 2014 study by Beales and Eisenach.

Unlike your naive world of 2007, here in the future all ads are in fact user hostile

I agree with you that the vast majority of web ads are user-hostile. This includes any ad hosted by a third-party ad network or ad exchange, as those have a habit of stalking users across multiple websites to infer their interests in order to give advertisers the feeling of more control over what viewers see their ads. Ad networks and ad exchanges do this because interest-based advertising reportedly pays out three times as much per view as context-based advertising.

But "all" is stretching it. I don't see how ads that are hosted by a website's publisher, such as the display ads on Daring Fireball and Read the Docs, are user-hostile. Newspapers and magazines got along fine with this model for decades, despite web publishers complaining that they could never make money that way.

Whatever Ad-Blocker is installed by default will be the ad-blocker that all the websites that want to show Ads spend their efforts detecting and making workarounds for

The Mozilla Firefox web browser is installed by default on most GNU/Linux distributions and available for Windows, macOS, and Android. Private Browsing is installed by default (but not enabled by default) in Firefox. Private Browsing includes a "tracking protection" feature that causes Firefox not to connect to servers involved in large-scale surveillance of viewers' browsing habits across multiple websites to gather interest data and "retarget" viewers.

Sites could work around tracking protection by falling back to different ads that do not stalk the user, particularly ads hosted by the website operator such as those seen on Daring Fireball and Read the Docs. But they don't. Instead, sites using Google's Funding Choices, Admiral's Engage, and the like require users of Private Browsing to click "Disable protection for this site". They do this because the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) of interest-based advertising is three times the CPM from contextual advertising alone.

Strawman argument.

Why? Because there NEVER would have BEEN USB Thumb Drives in the first place, if not for Apple and the iMac.

HAHA good one.

Proof? USB Ports had been on EVERY Wintel motherboard for YEARS with virtually NOTHING to plug into them... UNTIL THE IMAC CAME ALONG.

That's hardly a proof. http://tylervigen.com/spurious...

I applaud your healthy skepticism; however, in this case, the vast majority of non-Apple-Hating tech experts would agree that Apple, through the iMac, pretty much singlehandedly put USB "on the map".

https://www.macworld.com/artic...

" Apple Inc.'s iMac was the first mainstream product with USB and the iMac's success popularized USB itself.[12] Following Apple's design decision to remove all legacy port from the iMac, many PC manufacturers began building legacy-free PCs, which led to the broader PC market using USB as a standard.[13][14][15]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Citations from above:

12. "Eight ways the iMac changed computing". Macworld. 15 August 2008. Archived from the original on 22 December 2011. Retrieved 5 September 2017.

13. "Compaq hopes to follow the iMac". Archived from the original on 22 October 2006.

14. "The PC Follows iMac's Lead". Business week. 1999. Archived from the original on 23 September 2015.

15. Popular Mechanics: Making Connections. Hearst Magazines. February 2001. p. 59. ISSN 0032-4558. Archived from the original on 15 February 2017.

So, no; in this particular case, the consensus is that the iMac made USB into a viable alternative to parallel and RS-232 Serial (as well as other buses, such as ADB) interfaces popular at the time.

And considering that USB Thumb Drives first appeared on the market in 2000, it is fairly certain that, if the iMac had not come along and, through its popularity, given USB the critical "push" it needed to get past the "chicken and egg" problem faced by every new technology, those USB Thumb Drives would certainly not happened in 2000, and likely not until much, much later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Heck, I'm sure that you remember: While Apple was just a few months from launching the iMac, Microsoft couldn't so much as plug in a USB SCANNER without Blue-Screening W '98, even though Windows advertises USB Support as early as W '95 OSR2.1!

https://www.theregister.co.uk/...

And, BTW, note that Windows didn't even HAVE Storage Device USB Support until W '98 SE (May, 1999). AFAIK, Apple supported Storage-Class Devices from the first release of the iMac in August, 1998 (running (Classic) MacOS 8.1 !!!).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

...and let's not even talk about Linux's sad and late adoption of USB. It wasn't even added until the 2.2 Kernel in 1999, although that was experimental support. Mainstream USB support wasn't really available in Linux until the 2.4 Kernel was released in 2001:

https://kernel.readthedocs.io/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And even now, USB and Linux is sometimes an exercise in frustration (but I guess that applies to all things Linux, doesn't it?)

https://www.google.com/search?...

1. I've had no problem putting notebooks in version control. There's even a diff/merge tool available now to operate on Notebooks: https://nbdime.readthedocs.io/...
2. That can be an issue, but in reality you can enforce it by having a git-commit hook that executes the notebooks. I just make it habit to regularly reset the kernel and run all.
3. I don't know why you think that. I always use Jupyter for my exploratory and early "enterprise" development. I'll start out with some unorganized code and then refine the notebook until I have a class developed, with test cases. Then I'll convert it to a .py. You can develop OOP in Notebooks.

The other issues you list, that's a training issue. I have the same issues with engineers. Most are mechanical or electrical, and while they are subject matter experts their code leaves a lot to be desired.

https://shaarli.readthedocs.io...

I don't know if it is feasible to demand an api for media data which the copyright holders will demand DRM, but spotify already has an API for everything else- I get the impression you can do *everything* with the api- skip tracks, get information, tell it to play certain tracks, but have the music actually play through their DRM software. So, 90% of what you want.

Official Spotify API
Of course there is a python library for it too

The Atlantic's troubleshooting guide deliberately treats users of tracking blockers the same as users of ad blockers, insistently referring to "ad or tracking blockers" in the same breath each time. The wording appears intentionally constructed to dodge "I want the ads, just not the tracking." My first guess is that ads that are not based on tracking users, such as those seen on Daring Fireball and Read the Docs, have a CPM much lower than ads that are based on tracking users, and this lower CPM is lower than the lowest CPM that will fully fund both the writing and the hosting of The Atlantic.

The real version of AdBlock Plus has been malware since they started deciding some ads were acceptable for the end user.

If you oppose all web advertisements, would you prefer having to pay $5 for each distinct domain that you visit in a month?

How about we gets less intrusive and trespassing ads?

Personally, I agree. And I admire Daring Fireball's print-like model, also seen on Read the Docs, where the advertiser sends the ad image to the publisher and the publisher hosts it. Firefox Tracking Protection blocks ads that track me but allows publisher-hosted ads, such as those on Daring Fireball and Read the Docs. But I imagine that fibonacci8 would disagree because "deciding some ads were acceptable for the end user" would amount to "malware".

They shouldn't auto-play if they're video based.

Exactly. Such an ad will pause on the first frame and cover up the page until the user clicks to start the ad playing and waits for the ad to finish playing. This is a prestitial, and Chrome would likely automatically block it because countdown prestitials before a non-video payload violate the Better Ads Standards, but a publisher* can deploy anti-adblock to send more people to the back button.

And, last but not least, they shouldn't track you.

In order for an ad not to track the viewer across websites, it would have to be hosted by the publisher, as opposed to going through an ad network or ad exchange. Sites that have adopted this more print-like model include Daring Fireball and Read the Docs. But for sites with less reach or less homogeneous readership than those two, how is a publisher supposed to find willing advertisers without having to hire an in-house ad sales team?

* In adtech jargon, a "publisher" is the operator of a website that carries advertisements.

Sometimes I submit a support request that a website mistakenly detected the tracking protection built into Firefox as an ad blocker. I tell them that I see ads hosted by the publisher,* such as those on Daring Fireball and those on Read the Docs, and sometimes I click ads hosted by the publisher. But I don't blindly accept scripts that allow third parties to insert arbitrary proprietary scripts that track my "click-stream" from one website to another in order to build an interest profile and try to sell me things I just bought. If a site's ad script requires such tracking in order to run, the site needs to fall back to publisher-hosted ads. Even if publisher-hosted ads have a lower CPM than interest-based ads based on tracking, it's still more than the zero that a site gets if I leave after hitting its adblock wall.

* In the web advertising market, a "publisher" is the operator of a website on which advertisements appear.

Those who hate cross-site tracking can answer a mix of 1 and 2 in a constent manner.

1. I hate ads. I'd rather pay for my content directly.

I'd rather pay for my content directly, but I'm not buying a month's subscription to ten different sites just to read one article on each of those sites. So how do I spend 1-5 cents on a single article or pay $10 per month for a bundle of sites? Adult Check would have been great for this, but the publisher of Perfect 10 magazine sued it out of business when too many publishers on Adult Check's network displayed infringing photos from the magazine. Google Contributor appears to be ideal except for two things:

1. The same company also operates DoubleClick and AdSense. This makes it more likely that Google will share my article purchase history with its advertising division to trigger "interest-based ads" on third-party sites.
2. Reloading the same article counts as an additional purchase at full price. This disincentivizes publishers from increasing server reliability, as each reload means more revenue.

2. I don't mind ads.

I don't mind ads hosted on the publisher's server because they have no third-party ad network or ad exchange to track "click-stream" (viewing history) across multiple sites. Daring Fireball does it right, selling display ad space directly to advertisers. So does Read the Docs. But I don't see how a smaller publisher can reach advertisers in order to do this.

minimap2 works better for long reads, and can be used in the Canu assembler as the overlapper component for doing read correction.

So what's the difference between an advertising site and a tracking site?

A publisher* that doesn't track your browsing across multiple websites will sell its ad space directly to advertisers and host its own ads rather than handing the ad space off to a third party ad network or ad exchange. Daring Fireball and Read the Docs are examples.

* A "publisher" is a site that shows ads, and an "advertiser" is a company that pays a publisher for ad space.

. . . and demand a 394% salary increase from your manager!

The real gag here, is that I am actually working with Blockchain at the moment.

But no, if I ask my manager where my 394% salary increase is . . . well, the language he would use in his answer would not make it through the Slashdot posting filters.

Hey, y'all give it a try: http://hyperledger-fabric.read...

It could be worth 394% to you!

. . . and even more!

Or at least you can learn what Blockchain can't do, which these days is more important, since marketing folks are running around claiming that Blockchain can cure toenail fungus.

As a Python programmer, I use types and check them before it runs.

So, you perform a totally optional and currently experimental static analysis that may or may not cover most (or even some) of the code, and which doesn't affect the production of the program at all? You seriously think that that sort of thing is what we mean by "type-safety"?

As a Python programmer, I use types and check them before it runs.

Cobal is a crazy nuanced language that is hardware specific.

Where in the world did you hear that? I'll admit that most production implementations using it today are usually AS/400 and Z-Series, but there are plenty of other operating systems that support it:

https://www.gtsoftware.com/net...
http://opencobolide.readthedoc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.microfocus.com/pro...

Crockford is half-right. We need to get rid of spaces too. I understand that linear text is a very versatile way to express programs, but it really lacks expressive power. Basically almost all of its expressive power comes from the syntax of the language you're using. Maybe that's a small part of why we have so many languages. Imagine if code were written in something like HTML, and when you edit it, your CSS (or CSS-like) settings determine how it looks. In fact you might have different CSS settings to emphasize different things in the code, with some parts being visible only in certain views. Imagine tools which could analyze the code in some way, perhaps involving external data such as a run profile, or a repository history, and generate a new view.

I understand that this would require a lot of tooling. I also think that any approach that doesn't work for all popular languages is not going anywhere. But there are a lot of concepts which are common across programming languages. Obviously one of the tools that would be needed is one that takes a linear text file in some language, and uses knowledge of that language to produce a marked-up output. We already have editors which understand something about specific languages, but they need to also understand the markup. For compilation, I think it should be possible to have a tool to strip out the markup, which works for any language.

Jupyter Notebooks are an interesting development in programming expressiveness. But their focus seems to be more on expressing the integration of the program code and the results of running the program. I actually think that's a great way to present scientific results. But when it comes down to code blocks in a notebook, it's back to linear text. It's ironic really, since the linear text actually is embedded in markup.

Look, I know it took the prokaryotes a long time (~1 billion years) to evolve into eukaryotes, but it was worth it, wasn't it? And what I'm proposing is not nearly as difficult.

The only documentation I can find gives some bare bones installation instructions, then refers back to itself, claiming to be the "complete documentation." What am I missing?

The first release of pypy (well, technically pypy3) that supported Python 3 was over a year ago (February 2015). However it is still Python 3.2.5 (they're working on 3.3+ support).

Regarding the rest of your post, a common approach is to write the low-level access code in C and everything on top in Python. The C code can release the GIL (only need to reacquire it if calling back into the Python subsystem).

Have a look at cffi.