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Posted inProgramming Projects

Python – Simple URL Extractor

This one is pretty basic tier, but more useful than most. I had a website full of links to pages of video files. I wanted a list that I could stick into yt-dlp. I could do a bunch of copy and pasting, or I could use Python to scrape and take all the links. It takes a URL as a CLI Argument, specifically like: > main.py https://website.com It skims the page with Beautiful Soup and spits out a text file with the date-time-url.txt format. Useful if a site changes over time. The site I was scraping was using some relative…
Coding with Perplexity AI – Hirst Painting Drawer
Posted inProgramming Projects

Coding with Perplexity AI – Hirst Painting Drawer

Ive not been using AI a lot, frankly, I find it to be pretty lame for the most part, the images are almost always weirdly uncanny and ugly, and the writing is just bland. I've heard it's pretty good at coding though, and I have not tried using it for code at all. So I decided to give it a go. Specifically, I wanted to use it to augment an existing project from when I was taking that 100 Days of Python course. Specifically, Day 18, the Hirst Painting Project. The full original code is here: import colorgram from turtle import…
Social Media is Dead, Long Live Social Media
Posted inPolitics and News

Social Media is Dead, Long Live Social Media

And other Hyperbolic click baity headlines. Two articles today. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/mastodon-becomes-nonprofit-to-make-sure-its-never-ruined-by-billionaire-ceo/ And https://www.heise.de/en/news/Unprecedented-growth-Facebook-blocks-links-to-Instagram-alternative-Pixelfed-10237928.html Basically, Mastodon, the Federated Open Source client for microblogging is shifting itself to be a not for profit company. John Mastodon os no longer in control. Or, he won't be. These things apparently take a few months to do. Tangentially related, its picture centric counterpart Pixelfed, has experienced unprecedented growth. I saw one post where a Pixelfed instance was no longer allowing Instagram importing and Facebook is apparently blocking links to Pixelfed. Both of these moves are very good for the internet as a whole, but they also…
The Dead Internet Reality
Posted inPolitics and News

The Dead Internet Reality

Facebook and Instagram introduce AI bot ‘user’ accounts Hey Facebook, you ok there? Meta plans to roll out generative AI (genAI) characters on Facebook and Instagram this year in an effort to boost user engagement. Also, they apparently also deleted these accounts after the backlash, with some excuse about it being a "test product" and that it was run by humans on the backend. You know it will come back though. These companies have wasted too much time and money on this AI garbage to turn back now. But one, I don't know why they need to do this, these…