Huh. When I took Calculus II in community college, the professor introduced sum notation and like 2/3 of the class was like “wow that’s cool I didn’t know about that”. I don’t remember ever being formally taught it before that but it still surprises be how few people where already familiar with it.
I started working on a similar project about a year ago, except I was doing it fully by hand in the vanilla game (journey mode in a blank world), custom 8-bit instruction set, all that. I took an extended break from the project and kept thinking “this idea is so obvious, someone else is gonna do it first and I’m gonna look like a copycat” but not getting around to finishing work on it anyways. I’ll post pictures if anyone is interested, maybe a world download if I can find somewhere to host it.
I’m not super familiar with the details of either (as I’ve gotten so used to the AUR having everything I might want), but I can say with some confidence that snap was rolled out in a way that doesn’t do it any favors.
I have an old laptop that I occasionally boot into to do some stuff, but not super often. After an update, it appeared as though Firefox had forgotten everything; I wasn’t logged in, default start page, all settings reset, etc. I was super confused and mildly annoyed, but I set everything back up anyways. Then a bit later I ran Firefox again and it opened to what it was before the update??? Then I realized there were two installs, one apt and the other snap, and the latter was installed without my permission (or knowledge, maybe apt said in one of its 10k lines it spits out that ‘btw here’s a snap package’ that I was somehow supposed to notice).
I find containerized packages really nice for things that are very dependant on how the system is setup but are unlikely to get updated if that system changes (either by me not updating it or it just going unmaintained). Firefox is not that though.
If you are to believe that Reddit is setting the API pricing as high as proposed to eliminate 3rd party apps, rather than to recoup costs of allowing their existence (which I wouldn’t put it past them to lie like that to make it sound more palletteable), then it’s reasonable to believe Apollo’s existence doesn’t cost them 20M$. In fact I’d be surprised if it even costs them the 10M$ figure because Reddit’s reaction implies a number that high must be extortion.
I wouldn’t say that it’d be strictly impossible, however if it can be done then it would come at a considerable cost to useability, versatility, etc.
One adjacent concept that comes to mind is the use of the
:visitedCSS tag to extract a user’s browsing habits. I remember seeing a demonstration of this where an “are you human” captcha was shown but the choice of image in each box was controlled by the:visitedtag. I can’t find that post, but this medium article demonstrates a similer concept. There are mitigations to this luckily, but a fullproof solution would be to remove the tag’s functionality altogether, which would make certain websites (like the one we’re on right now!) much more inconvenient to use.It seems trivial to me for a website to detect user behaviors that indicate the use of an adblocker. For example, if a request for a page is immediately followed by a request for a video on that page, rather than after 5-60 seconds, then they’re likey using an adblocker. If there is an ad placed between two paragaphs in an article, but two distant paragraphs are visible at the same time, it is more likely (although not guaranteed) that they are using an adblocker. If a user triggers an abnormal amount of those heuristics then they get flagged as an adblocking user.