This sounds like an acoustic fingerprint, such as AcoustID[0]. I think AcoustIDs and XSPF[1] would be a good combination for shared playlists. It's a shame that development stopped on the Tomahawk music player[2], it would have been an ideal platform for shared playlists like this.
You may be thinking of YouTube's "increase strictness" feature, which helps flag spammy comments so creators can delete them more easily. This new policy is different: it doesn't allow the video creators to post links in comments or descriptions. That's much more restrictive.
In any case, YouTube should allow links in comments as long as they're not spammy. YouTube used to redirect external links to a page that said, "Are you sure you want to leave YouTube?"[0] This seems like a reasonable compromise to help inexperienced users while still allowing external links.
Instagram also forbids links,[1][2] which is bad for the open web.[3] This policy change by YouTube looks like more of the same: walled gardens and disempowered users. Cross-domain links are what make the Web the World Wide Web.
California already has a pretty good prescribed burn program, but it needs to be expanded, in part because the climate is significantly different today than it was a hundred years ago. There are some obstacles to prescribed burns: smoke inhalation is a public health hazard, firefighters need to be paid, private landowners are worried about liability, etc. Perhaps the biggest issue is that most of California is federal land, and the U.S. Forest Service does not have funding to perform prescribed burns.
The private sector hasn't solved the problem either, in part because a lot of the fuel isn't desirable timber. Californians who are serious about this issue should lobby their federal and state representatives.
> Our results show that California and Oregon are the only severe-risk US states to conduct prescribed fire programs that are impactful at reducing wildfire risks, while other southeastern states such as Florida maintain fire-healthy ecosystems with very extensive prescribed fire programs. Our study suggests that states that have impactful prescribed fire programs (like California) should increase their scale of operation, while states that burn prescribed fires with no impact (like Nevada) should change the way prescribed burning is planned and conducted.
> California has historically resisted prescribed burning to control their already big smoke problem
> There are various reasons preventing California from conducting more Rx [prescribed burns], including lack of enough firefighters and 57% of land being owned by the Federal Government which lacks the funds to conduct Rx, especially after recent budget cuts to the U.S. Forest Service
> Academics warned that the financial incentives offered by mechanical thinning may be elusive, given the high ratio of thinning to merchantable timber in many locations. Legislative staff and analysts criticized the traditional forestry model of removing large-diameter, valuable trees and leaving smaller, less valuable and more flammable biomass.
There's one consideration missing from your list though, which is the fact that controlled burning is way more risky now than ever before, due to the immense fuel build up. The reduced frequency of controlled burns has contributed to making them much harder to implement. Hard to put the cat back in the bag at this point.
> But is it good for people to know who is more likely to win an election? Are these predictions beneficial to society or democracy? I sometimes think they may actually be harmful, decreasing voter turnout by convincing people (correctly or incorrectly) that the result is preordained.
For plurality voting (a.k.a. first-past-the-post[0]) with more than two candidates, voters have to cast their ballots strategically[1]. This is especially common in primary elections and non-partisan positions.
Unless all elections switch to a method that is not subject to the spoiler effect (like approval voting or instant runoff voting), voters need more information about which candidates are most likely to win, not less information. Sometimes candidate competitivness can be inferred from things like endorsements or fundraising numbers, but polls -- and aggregated models based on polls -- are an important tool.
But it's also worth considering where the browser gives priority. For example, while browser extensions can add custom keyboard shortcuts, they can't override the keybindings a website uses. Want to use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-1 for a browser extension while a Google Docs page is focused? Nope, sorry, can't be done.
It's pretty clear that while a browser extension can access browser APIs that a web app can't, the extension is still a second-class citizen in other respects.
> Browsers have never let anything (not even JS) have raw access to the host FS
I'm not sure what you mean by "raw access", but the File System Access API certainly allows web applications to do a lot of things.
> The File System Access API (formerly known as Native File System API and prior to that it was called Writeable Files API) enables developers to build powerful web apps that interact with files on the user's local device, like IDEs, photo and video editors, text editors, and more.
> After a user grants a web app access, this API allows the app to read or save changes directly to files and folders on the user’s device. Beyond reading and writing files, this API provides the ability to open a directory and enumerate its contents. Additionally, web apps can use this API to store references to files and directories they’ve been given access to, allowing the web apps to later regain access to the same content without requiring the user to select the same file again.
> Additionally this API also makes it possible for websites to get access to some directory without having to first prompt the user for access.
It's not just a draft, it's been part of Chrome since version 78 in 2019.
> After a user grants access, this API allows web apps to read or save changes directly to files and folders on the user's device. It does all this by invoking the platform's own open and save dialog boxes.
Yup. Firefox had RSS support from first release in 2002 (inherited from Netscape, so even older than that) until 2018 when Mozilla decided it wasn't a priority.
This is a perennial topic. Related prior discussion on this forum alone is voluminous:
> I'm surprised never to have seen any support for CSV files using US/RS instead of TAB/(CR)LF or comma/(CR)LF. Or any support in Unix to use RS instead of LF or NUL to delineate records.
February 27, 2022, on: "The Great Curly Brace Trace Chase (2003)"
> The record separator ship sailed long ago. The advantage of newline is that it’s easy to use with a bunch of standard tools like less/head/tail/your text editor.
> Easy: CSVs are human readable and writeable and humans tend to have a comma sign on their keyboard, while they don't have the ASCII record seperator visible (teaching them to use eg Alt + 30 will not work).
May 15, 2020 on: "So you want to write your own CSV code (2014)"
> ASCII also includes control characters for delimiting text records. If people used these purposed-designed characters instead of comma or tab characters as delimiters, we could avoid many headaches quoting and escaping CSV data.
September 26, 2019, on: "Four Column ASCII (2017)"
> ASCII actually contains four control characters for this purpose: file, group, record and unit separator. I'm sure a lot of problems would be solved if people just used these.
> It really makes me sad that CSV even exists: ASCII defines field ('unit') & record separator characters (also group & file, but those are less-useful), as well as an escape character.
June 8, 2016 on: "ParaText: CSV parsing at 2.5 GB per second"
> Good old ASCII has characters specifically devoted to separating fields, keys, etc. that no-one uses for anything else. Why not use them instead of inventing a new character that does the same thing?
June 5, 2015 on: "Almost every Cassandra feature has some surprising behavior"
[0] https://musicbrainz.org/doc/AcoustID
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_Shareable_Playlist_Format
[2] https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk