I was thinking of experimenting with a Firefox extension that upon hitting a YouTube page, it just launches yt-dlp [url] && mpv [downloaded file]. Is there any interest here in that sort of thing?
Oh! Good to know. I guess that’s there to prevent people from reaping 2 years worth of development for a 1 year fee. That still seems reasonable to me.
As far as I’ve seen, they don’t provide any advantage over a string with spaces, which doesn’t work well either when you’ve got values with spaces:
<span style="color:#323232;">not_what_you_think=( "a b" "c" "d" )
</span><span style="color:#323232;">for sneaky in ${not_what_you_think[@]}; do
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> echo "This is sneaky: ${sneaky}"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">done
</span>
<span style="color:#323232;">This is sneaky: a
</span><span style="color:#323232;">This is sneaky: b
</span><span style="color:#323232;">This is sneaky: c
</span><span style="color:#323232;">This is sneaky: d
</span>
That’s actually very helpful, thanks. I’ve been working on another project to open certain URLs in specific browsers/profiles, and wanted to be sure that I wasn’t missing a more obvious design pattern. The project is here if you’re curious.
Is there another way to do this? This hack was the only way I could figure out how to get Firefox to invoke an external binary, but if there’s a more conventional way to do it, I’d like to know 'cause I have another more complicated project in need of a pattern much like this one.
There’s a couple angles you can take on this. My favourite is from the dotCommunist Manifesto:
Society confronts the simple fact that when everyone can possess every intellectual work of beauty and utility—reaping all the human value of every increase of knowledge—at the same cost that any one person can possess them, it is no longer moral to exclude.
Essentially, this argues that the unethical position is the one that creates the false scarcity.
Another less extreme position would be that many countries allow for exemptions for format shifting: if you buy a CD with some music, you’re legally permitted to rip it so long as you don’t distribute copies. One could argue that someone in your position is operating within the spirit of these laws… provided that you haven’t torrented the videos since that necessarily includes some partial distribution.
Finally, the least generous interpretation would point out that you didn’t buy the videos in the first place, but rather a licence to let Vudu stream them to you. Given that you don’t own anything, you’re not morally entitled to own it in a different format. This is why many people have rejected the streaming model.
As someone in camp #1, I think you’re a-ok ethically, but I thought you might want a broader perspective.
Oops, sorry I didn’t notice that part. I’ve never seen anything like that to be honest. It kinda violates the whole “do only one thing and do it well” UNIX ethos. As a decent work-around, you can just open the resulting images in Gimp?