If you don't want to read the whole article, it starts with this summary:
Django, not Flask, is the better choice for beginners' first serious web development projects.
While Flask's simplicity and clear API make it great for learning and suitable for experienced developers, it can mislead beginners about the complexities of web development. Django, with its opinionated nature and sensible defaults, offers a structured approach that helps novices avoid common pitfalls. Its comprehensive, integrated ecosystem is more conducive to growth and productivity for those new to the field.
The modern answer to that are probably books like "the three body problems". Also old French science fiction can be excellent, e.g: anything Barjavel. Not to mention there are always UK outliers, like Douglas Adams.
But personally, I'd say Bande dessinée, the European cousin of comic books, is where you will find the most untapped underrated wonders.
Anything Moebius or Jodoroski, like "L'Incal" or "La caste des Meta-barons" is truly special. The aesthetics have a lot of personality, the writing is messed up, and the world building is all kind of twisted and provoking.
The main problem is that they sometimes take you for a whole run then end up nowhere. But the ride is awesome, and some of it has left scars inside me, I'm not kidding. And it has been translated to English.
Even without aiming for extremes, you'll find all kind of fun stuff.
Like "Aldébaran" that really sells this sense of discovery of new exotic places with a rag tag expedition, like African jungles in the past, but on new planets. It's a big saga too.
"Sillage" that packs your read with a futuristic black window amidst a galactic political turmoil.
Bilal's immortal trilogy giving the Egyptian alien concept some wind.
Or "Le gipsy" for a no brain adventure with a truck driver coasting on a road that wraps around the entire world.
It's crazy to me that given the lack of creativity of Hollywood they scrap everything they can from books and even mangas or video games, but they rarely attack this treasure.
Plus those SF master pieces have equally good fantasy sisters.
A problem with Barjavel - as I remember it - is the stylization of the stories: there is little detail, little background, little world ambiance in these books. Just a one big story. And that makes them paraboles or something - exercises about ONE idea. And not worlds.
In something like L'Incal on the contrary, the world around the story is very rich. In the way the Neuromancer world is rich. There is not JUST the story going on. It goes on in front and in the middle of a richness of OTHER ideas. Which is to me more thought-provoking because less artificial.
I’ve listened to From the Earth to the Moon and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, and between the lists of things that mean nothing to me[0] and the humans being unrealistic[1], I have to assume something was lost in the translation, because they… are just not any good.
[0] 10 kinds of seaweed? I think?
[1] I spent my life betting against you and losing! / I challenge you to a duel! — followed by both parties getting distracted before the duel and be found chasing butterflies. Was this a secret code for them pretending to hate each other so they could have a gay affair back when such things were forbidden? Because that would make a lot more sense than the actual words in the audiobook.
Both the language and the day-to-day life has aged and not in a good way. (Shockingly, The Three Musketeers' language and concerns hasn't! It's still great fun. But not scifi.)
I really don't do anything other than work so this is a really nice change - a way to help people/give back a bit - and every time I do one, I learn something new.
They will setup DRM, or render the full site in canvas, or with wasm, or something, or requires a TPM trusted signatured in an approved web browser or some shit.
The new generation will accept a limited client, because they know mostly locked down phones. So only a few will not accept it, and they will not have to care about it a single bit.
They won't. The movie industry has been trying to stop piracy with technical measures forever. Things still get pirated. Every measure they take will be broken.
They'll win over the masses, which is what they really care about. But they won't ever defeat the die-hards.
Previously Google was not a monopoly in so many areas. Now the Internet goes through Google. It caters to investors, not to users. It controls search engine, and a browser, and phones. It can decide what is happening on client side, and on search server side.
The wild west of the Internet has ended. We have the corporate Internet now, that is surveilled and scanned, and they became quite efficient with that.
Previously you could find pirate links through Google, this has ended. You could run pirate software, but software more and more ask OS for approval to be executed. Android will scan sideloaded apps for example.
While environment becomes safer, it also becomes more controlled by corporations. Piracy eventually will be very hard to do. All blockades can be broken, but there more and more of them.
The die-hards aren't really doing it for any practical purpose, they're just doing it to show it can be done. Mainstream media have been ignoring. them for decades now and continue to make boatloads of money.
Depends on how highly you value your privacy. Ads aren't just annoying visually, they contain little tracker bits spying on you.
Long before I had an adblocker, I developed "banner blindness", the real benefit my adblocker gives me is less info leaking out to the platforms. (and since ublock/umatrix is so great, also more security and better loading times, but these are cherries)
If that counts as a "practical purpose" is up to you.
By providing a better service. Not by combatting the pirates in a technological arms race. Incidentally, movie/TV piracy is on the rise again as streaming has become more fragmented and more expensive.
Netflix with account sharing has perhaps killed Torrents, which to me doesn't seem that different. People I know went from free torrents to free Netflix (or a "ok I'll pay your beer for letting me use your Netflix"). Now account sharing is out, Torrents will increase again.
Torrents never left. I've had no issue over the last 15 years with either torrents or newsgroups, everything's just as accessible and quickly released as it was then.
Netflix had the chance to become the Steam of Movies, effectively killing piracy in the field, however between every company creating their own streaming service and hiking prices, my (admittedly anecdotal) impression is that some people are going back to pirating at least some of the time.
There is like a decade between Napster ending and Spotify launching. No, it's iTunes that killed mp3 pirating, Spotify killed what was left of it plus optical media.
Netflix may have dampened torrents at some point, but boy are those making a comeback with the splintered enshittifcation prone streaming world we live in.
They will setup DRM, or render the full site in canvas, or with wasm, or something, or requires a TPM trusted signatured in an approved web browser or some shit.
That was going to be WEI [1] but they shelved it for now. I expect they will be more subtle with the next project release after it gets renamed.
