Helps that Lemmy has orders of magnitude less content. After the third time refreshing with no new content, it gets much easier to put the phone down.

“they could just as easily present them in a way that wouldn’t be blocked” would be a more accurate way of phrasing it. Facebook is not the one blocking this content - rather, it’s detecting that it has been blocked (clientside)

In that context, having all packages be “system-wide” made sense. All the virtual env shenanigans won’t ever fix that.

Sorry, but you’ll need to explain this a little bit more to me. That’s precisely what virtual env shenanigans do - make it so that your environment isn’t referencing the system-wide packages. I can totally see that it’s a problem if your virtual env tooling fails to work as expected and you can’t activate your environment (FWIW, simply old python -m venv venv; source venv/bin/activate has never let me down in ~10 years of professional programming, but I do believe you when you say that Poetry and Conda have broken on you); but assuming that the tools work, the problem you’ve described completely goes away.

packaging woes

My own hot take is that I hear this criticism of Python a lot, but have never had anyone actually back it up when I ask for more details. And I will be very surprised to hear that it’s a worse situation than Java/TypeScript’s.

I remember having a lot of doubts/criticisms of the book when I read it, but that was a long-ass time ago and I’ve forgotten it - what do you dislike?