ah06

Web Scraping Workshop

Using Requests and Beautiful Soup, with the most recent Beautiful Soup 4 docs.

Getting Started

Install our tools (preferably in a new virtualenv):

pip install beautifulsoup4

Don't use VPN services.

No, seriously, don't. You're probably reading this because you've asked what VPN service to use, and this is the answer.

Note: The content in this post does not apply to using VPN for their intended purpose; that is, as a virtual private (internal) network. It only applies to using it as a glorified proxy, which is what every third-party "VPN provider" does.

A Russian translation of this article can be found here, contributed by Timur Demin.
A Turkish translation can be found here, contributed by agyild.
There's also this article about VPN services, which is honestly better written (and has more cat pictures!) than my article.

No, your cryptocurrency cannot work

Whenever the topic of Bitcoin's energy usage comes up, there's always a flood of hastily-constructed comments by people claiming that their favourite cryptocurrency isn't like Bitcoin, that their favourite cryptocurrency is energy-efficient and scalable and whatnot.

They're wrong, and are quite possibly trying to scam you. Let's look at why.

What is a cryptocurrency anyway?

There are plenty of intricate and complex articles trying to convince you that cryptocurrencies are the future. They usually heavily use jargon and vague terms, make vague promises, and generally give you a sense that there must be something there, but you always come away from them more confused than you were before.

Normies just don't care about privacy

If you're a privacy enthusiast, you probably clicked a link to this post thinking it's going to vindicate you; that it's going to prove how you've been right all along, and "normies just don't care about privacy", despite your best efforts to make them care. That it's going to show how you're smarter, because you understand the threats to privacy and how to fight them.

Unfortunately, you're not right. You never were. Let's talk about why, and what you should do next.

So, first of all, let's dispense with the "normie" term. It's a pejorative term, a name to call someone when they don't have your exact set of skills and interests, a term to use when you want to imply that someone is clueless or otherwise below you. There's no good reason to use it, and it suggests that you're looking down on them. Just call them "people", like everybody else and like yourself - you don't need to turn them into a group of "others" to begin with.

Why does that matter? Well, would *y

Download a McGraw Hill Education eTextbook

If you purchase a textbook from McGraw Hill, the website to view it is clunky and only works on some devices. You can't go to specific page numbers, the search is super slow, etc. That's why I wrote this script to download the textbook as an ePub file for your own viewing.

Using this script is 100% legal. McGraw Hill publicly hosts their ebooks online in order for their web client to download it. Moreover, to use it, you must already have purchased the book you would like to download, so it is legally yours to use as you please. However, it IS illegal to use this for piracy purposes. DO NOT DISTRIBUTE ANY TEXTBOOKS YOU DOWNLOAD USING THIS SCRIPT.

Anti-hype LLM reading list

Goals: Add links that are reasonable and good explanations of how stuff works. No hype and no vendor content if possible. Practical first-hand accounts of models in prod eagerly sought.

Foundational Concepts

Pre-Transformer Models

Browser Based

Web Wormhole https://webwormhole.io/ https://github.com/saljam/webwormhole
ToffeeShare https://toffeeshare.com/
FilePizza https://file.pizza/
~~ShareDrop sharedrop.io https://github.com/szimek/sharedrop~~ (SOLD, not recommended, use one of the forks)
1. ~~A clone SnapDrop snapdrop.net https://github.com/RobinLinus/snapdrop~~ (SOLD, not recommended, use one of the forks)
  1. A fork PairDrop https://pairdrop.net/ https://github.com/schlagmichdoch/pairdrop
Instant.io https://instant.io/
FileTC https://file.tc/

	<!DOCTYPE html>
	<html lang="en">
	<head>
	<meta charset="UTF-8" />
	<title>parseTable</title>
	</head>
	<body>
	<table>
	<thead>
	<tr>

	/*
	Export bookmarks from Chrome as text.
	Go to Bookmarks Manager->Organize->Export to HTML file.
	Then open that file, open console and run this command:
	*/

	[].map.call(document.querySelectorAll("dt a"), function(a) {
	return a.textContent + " - " + a.href
	}).join("\n");

	###
	###
	### UPDATE: For Win 11, I recommend using this tool in place of this script:
	### https://christitus.com/windows-tool/
	### https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
	### https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UQZ5oQg8XA
	### iwr -useb https://christitus.com/win \| iex
	###
	###