Bewelge

Are you sure they are exempt? I was always under the impression that their practice is pretty obviously illegal. I just did a quick google search and didn't find anything about exemption. So they are as exempt from the GDPR as much as Al Capone was exempt from taxes ;)

What they seem to be exempt from is getting consent if they require the data for journalistic purposes.

IANAL, but I think they are simply not following the law and waiting for a definitive decision by a court.

ed: So I kept reading and from my understanding it's TBD whether the practice is lawful. The European Data Protection Board has issued an opinion against it a year ago.

Can you explain how you mean this in the context of software?

What you describe sounds like the paradox of intolerance but I fail to see how that can be applied to free software.

Freedom in general: You can't have absolute freedom because that includes the freedom to take the freedom from others.

In software: You can't have absolutely free software because ... ? I fail to see how free software might infringe on the freedom of others.

Ah thanks! I only have Safari protection enabled, the advanced one requires me to pay (though I don't remember that from when I installed it a couple of months ago).

Saw someone else in this thread mention the Orion browser - I will give that a try for now. If I'm not satisfied I'll try paying for AdGuard. Thanks for the reply though!

My experience has been that installing AdGuard on my iPhone made no noticeable difference. To be fair, I barely browse on my phone. Basically only news sites and Reddit/HN. But apart from HN I see ads on all of those pages.

So I am just a puzzled by your point of view :) May I ask which App you are using? I would love to be proven wrong and have an ad-free browsing experience in the future.

How would you implement that scrolling background? Particularly the mouse interaction, where it scrolls with a dynamic speed ( depending on how far to the side the mouse it) and even has some smooth damping when you stop scrolling.

And what part uses the visibility state? The grayscale seems to be triggered by focus which I think would be doable with CSS

To be fair, for me at least, that weird chat bot only appears on https://help.shopify.com/ while the technical documentation is on shopify.dev/.

Everytime I land on help.shopify.com I get the feeling it's one of those "Doc pages for sales people". Like it's meant to show "We have great documentation and you can do all these things" but never actually explains how to do anything.

I tried that bot a couple of months ago and it was utterly useless:

question: When using discountRedeemCodeBulkAdd there's a limit to add 100 codes to a discount. Is this a limit on the API or on the discount? So can I add 100 codes to the same discount multiple times?

answer: I wasn't able to find any results for that. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you're looking for?

Telling it more did not help. To me that seemed like the bot didn't even have access to the technical documentation. Finding it hard to believe that any search engine can miss a word like discountRedeemCodeBulkAdd if it actually is in the dataset: https://shopify.dev/docs/api/admin-graphql/latest/mutations/...

So it's a bit like asking sales people technical questions.

edit: Okay, I should have tried that before commenting. They seem to have updated it. When I ask the same question now it answers correctly (weirdly in German) :

Die Begrenzung von 100 Codes bei der Verwendung von discountRedeemCodeBulkAdd bezieht sich auf die Anzahl der Codes, die Sie in einem einzelnen API-Aufruf hinzufügen können, nicht auf die Gesamtanzahl der Codes, die einem Rabatt zugeordnet werden können. Ein Rabattcode kann bis zu 20.000.000 eindeutige Rabattcodes enthalten. Daher können Sie mehrfach jeweils 100 Codes zum selben Rabatt hinzufügen, bis Sie das Limit von 20.000.000 Codes erreicht haben. Beachten Sie, dass Drittanbieter-Apps oder benutzerdefinierte Lösungen dieses Limit nicht umgehen oder erhöhen können.

~= It's a limit on the API endpoint, you can add up to 20M to a single discount.

Not sure if I'm missing something but the way I'd always test orders is generate some 100% discount. You don't need any payment info then. I only ever needed a CC if I wanted to actually test something relating to payment. And on test stores you can mock a CC

From a personal website, that's been pretty constantly getting 2k hits from Google each week:

Bing 150-200 / week

Yandex ~100 / week

DDG ~50 / week

ChatGPT is now at ~50 hits a week.

So from that data it looks like Google still has their comfortable 80%+ market share. But I think it's interesting if you think about the kind of users that use these products. In my mind, the alternative search engines are used mostly by techies and people that care about their privacy (also often techies), but ChatGPT is used by a much broader slice of the population.

But maybe I'm projecting because my own search behaviour has changed so dramatically with ChatGPT & Claude having replaced a substantial part of my Google searches.

I agree that the process is unnecessarily complex, but I also think hiring someone for that would be the wise choice in most places anyway.

And even in Germany hiring someone for that would probably amount to paying 500-1000€ for the whole registration of the company instead of doing everything yourself and only paying the 100-200€ notary fees. It's not as bad as you might think.

> I will never try it in my home country.

May I ask, where would you try it? As I understand it, it's not really possible to found in a different European country while you're still living in Germany.

That feels like an exaggeration. I did that last year. They took several months to process the registration itself.

And this was just to freelance as a developer. In my case I was allowed to start while they were processing the registration. But had it been something that would require their permission, I'd have to wait several months before I could start my business, while they wave through a form that basically says "I'll be selling goods".

I'm not one to blindly hate on all bureaucracy. But in this case it feels unnecessarily complex.

I'm not sure if they still buy the books, but I know from someone who worked as a judge in Germany, that they personally stopped buying the books only ~5-10 years ago, because they saw that the online availability was good enough now.

But my point is that, as far as I know, there is no official version of the final text. The official publications are made in the Bundesgesetzblatt (which had been privatized in the past, but that's another story). The publications might look like this:

1947: We hereby make the following text a law called Grundgesetz "Artikel I: Human dignity is inviolable"

2026: We hereby change the law called Grundgesetz by changing the first article to say "Human or Alien" instead of "Human".

Now there are a lot of entities that will consolidate these changes into a final text. But this consolidation isn't done officially. So, while in this example its easy to see, that in 2026 the law would read "Human and Alien dignity is inviolable", it becomes less clear when these changes are spread over 80 years and are only available as PDFs.

In the example I checked the mistakes wouldn't have changed the interpretation. It were mistakes like additional or missing commas, missing spaces or missing articles.

buzer.de actually has a list of things that differ in their consolidation compared to gesetze-im-internet.de: https://www.buzer.de/quality.htm

In that list you can actually find mistakes that would alter the interpretation. But I think this also sounds worse than it is. It's just a funny thought that whatever source you are using, you are essentially trusting one party to not have made any mistakes, consolidating 1000s of pages of pdfs :)

That's exactly like the German law works. And as far as I know, it's how all law system that aren't common/case law work.

Changes will either add, delete or change an existing law.

There is actually a website where someone has all changes dating back to 2006 and you can display diffs (called Synopsis in Germany) - for example: https://www.buzer.de/gesetz/5041/v322454-2025-03-25.htm

Very cool! I came across your project last year while building https://digebu.de .

I wanted to build an "IDE-inspired" law reader. It has selection highlighting and you can open references within the same window. It scrapes gesetze-im-internet.de daily, processes the XML to JSONS and builds static HTML pages, hosted on Github pages. The entire build process for the 6000+ pages takes 5-10 minutes. It uses up less than <20% of my actions minutes that come with Github pro.

It was a really fun rabbit hole to go down.

What I found most fascinating is that: There doesn't seem to be an official version of the German law. The state just publishes official announcements like "Law X will be changed as follows", "Law X will be removed" or "Law X will be added". So the official version of the German law really is something akin to a git tree. AFAIK, all consolidated versions are created by private entities.

I did a test by picking a law at random, finding the first time it was published and then applying all the changes from subsequent years. Turns out all available versions (gesetze-im-internet, dejure.org, buzer.de) had at least a couple of small mistakes. I found that quite fascinating (and a little scary).

It's also funny how often laws are referenced that don't even exist anymore. The collection of laws really are is as tidy as you would imagine an 80 year old system, where the maintainers change every 5 years, to be.

The background-color and content is missing when pressing the little question mark next to keyword details on the pricing page.

Also thank you for sharing and congratulations on shipping. Will definitely try this out in the coming days!

You can paste this into your console :-)

Not entirely sure that I parsed all the dates correctly. Simply used the first occurrence of "Date: **" for each link.

https://gist.github.com/Bewelge/1f42c4ba999128ae1ded6f0ecc63...

I once built a tool to generate buttons with particle effects using this CSS technique [0].

Always thought it'd be a fun project to build a small "image" editor with basic shapes that automatically outputs them as CSS code. Is anyone aware of any such tools?

[0] https://bewelge.github.io/CSS-Button-Particles/ (I just checked and the UI looks horrible on mobile. The buttons effects should still work fine though).

Lovely detail! Thank you for pointing this out!

I added an url parameter so you can load it up with any sequence.

Example for sequence 5,2,7

https://bewelge.github.io/aNumberGame?seq=5,2,7

Thought the same, you beat me to it! Really like the tree-like view, might steal that idea later :-)

https://bewelge.github.io/aNumberGame/ (does not format well on mobile)

Code: https://github.com/Bewelge/aNumberGame

Ohh Hi! I've come across pianojacq before! Definitely love how clean the sheet music looks and on first glance the way the song plays smoothly even when you hit the note a little late/early works really well! That's one aspect I really need to improve.

I see you're also using Vexflow. Are you using a library to go from Midi to Vexflow format? It's a rabbit hole I sometimes wish I hadn't entered :)

@OP Can really recommend VexFlow [0] when you do get to implementing sheet music.

[0] https://github.com/0xfe/vexflow

This is such a cool concept, congrats on shipping!

I've been developing a webMIDI app myself for the past couple of years [0] and adding a multiplayer feature is something I've been eyeing for a while. May I ask how good the latency is?

Some feedback on the landing page:

- As others already pointed out, a video example showing the app would be really helpful.

- I think allowing visitors to try out the piano and only prompting to login when trying to access the remote features would work best

- All those buttons that are clickable/selectable but don't do anything when clicked were a little confusing.

On the app: - Connecting the keyboard worked flawlessly (and without any permission prompt). But I'd add some indication that a MIDI device is connected

- Pressing the keys using my mouse doesn't produce any sounds

- Pressing keys on my MIDI keyboard (Yamaha P120) will cause the keys to be selected indefinitely, so I can only ever press them once. Somehow the noteOff events don't seem to be getting registered. Make sure you also register noteOn events with velocity = 0 as a noteOff event (although I don't believe that that's the issue here) and I would suggest calling noteOff yourself if you register a noteOn event for a note that's already playing. That way you can prevent keys from getting stuck.

- I wouldn't hide keys automatically based on screen size. It does look better but imagine someone trying to play this on a tablet/phone where they can't change the scaling

Again, really cool concept and good luck with further development! Feel free to reach out if you want any help :-)

[0] app.midiano.com

I replied specifically to a comment concerning the ability of an extreme right wing government to use them as a propaganda channel by pointing out that there are some checks and balances in place.

And you reply to that by saying the inclusion of women, churches, unions and LGBT-organisations is a left thing and insinuating I have a political agenda. And the last quote actually says it does not live up to being a cross-section of society because underprivileged groups are not adequately represented. Going by your logic that would mean they're not left after all, right?

But seriously, you're spreading some pretty radical opinions all over this thread, calling people names and calling for the jailing of entire groups of people. I'm not going to further interact with you. Have a good night :-)

While I agree with your statement of not giving states too much power over the news, it overlooks the special organizational structure and paints a false picture. The highest controlling body of the öffentliche-rechtliche is the Rundfunkrat which is structured so that it represents "a cross-section of society". It includes organisations like unions or churches.

The Rundfunkrat appoints the Intendant who in turn has autonomy when it comes to programming.

I'm not saying that there's nothing to criticize about the structure but it was especially created in this way to provide checks and balances and not giving politicians direct control over the news. When some tried that in the past it made the news [2].

I think a right wing government would have an easier time defunding and replacing it with its own propaganda channels instead of using it for propaganda.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rundfunkrat [2] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/zdf-anruf-wird-zu...

Links are in German.

That's interesting.

I used to get it all the time and haven't experienced it since switching to an account where it's enabled. I guess it may have just been a coincidence.

Yea I guess you're right that in this case it probably boils down to extra cost.

Though I still think "not remembering watch history" (and adjusting what you are shown based on that) to mean that a functionality that doesn't have anything to do with tracking (because it only requires information from your current session) to be a little lazy.

You wouldn't expect a slide-show of images to be shown in random order, just because you didn't consent to the cookie banner.

But in all fairness - I really like youtube's auto-play and suggestion algorithm when it comes to music. I use it for free and I haven't seen an ad in years so I don't want to complain :)

I have had the (conspiracy) theory for a while that this is by design. Kept happening to me on an account where I've disabled watch-history. Now I'm watching on an account where it's enabled and it hasn't happened even once. And it's been months since I switched.

Actually not sure if it's even that far fetched. Making the logged-out-experience worse on purpose is something all the big internet firms do.

Can only recommend checking out https://www.fxhash.xyz/. It's an NFT platform for generative art. Think of NFTs what you will but that platform really brought together lots of artists and in my opinion the field has advanced a lot these past two years due to that platform existing.

Personally I really like @KilledByAPixel and @piterpasma simply from a technical perspective. If you're into vector / plotting work @zancan is definitely worth checking out.

I have some, though maybe outdated, experience with that: In 2008, I was 15 and had the idea of creating youtube videos using MIDI files of classical piano songs that had entered the public domain. They're free to use and in theory, videos stay up forever and these classical songs are timeless, so that means after uploading I'd earn passive income forever!

Or so I thought... Every single video was copyright claimed. Youtube falsely thought it was a recording (which do have copyright). The second a claim was created I stopped earning money. I would then dispute the claim, explaining that it's not even a sound recording and they had a month to react to my answer.

In almost all instances the claims were retracted but it would only take a couple of days until another claim would be filed on that video. Answering all those claims took up more time than producing the videos so I gave up after a while.

But in my experience it wasn't really malicious actors filing these claims but youtube's filter simply not managing to distinguish between a recording of a classical piano piece and a well synthesized version of it. I actually remember most claims being filed by Sony.

It's interesting to hear that it's still this way because I don't really believe that nowadays, youtube still can't distinguish between different recordings of classical music. I guess they have no incentive to improve in that regard.

But I think the fact that nobody but the large labels are able to earn money with classical music on these large platforms is actually an excellent argument against upload filters and in my experience it's an argument that non-tech people can much better relate to than hash-collisions.

Thanks for the explanation!