Wow, tell me you've never shipped anything important / heavily used without telling me that.
I expected this to suggest a tick-tock deprecation cycle, where one version deprecated and the next removed, but this is definitely an idea that belongs on the domain "entropicthoughts.com"
Google Sites exists. Buy a domain, point it at a free Google site. So easy a religion major can make a site that looks pretty decent (ha ha, only serious; I thought he'd used Wordpress at first) for just the cost of domain registration.
IIRC, in New York it’s illegal to absorb sales tax on individual items because by law it’s a consumer tax collected by the business and explicitly not a tax on the business itself, but - and it’s a pretty big exception - anything sold as a bulk good can include the tax in the price. That includes things like liquid fuels, grains or candy by the scoop in the supermarket, loose sand/gravel/salt/whatever for outdoor use, and things like that. It’s been a long while since I had to set up an ecommerce site for New York though.
Who actually pays the tax depends on the Elasticity of the consumer and the business. Who the law says it should be collected from, is really irrelevant.
The law only says by whom and how the tax is collect, it doesn't specify the tax burden, because it can't, that's only observable and happens due to supply and demand.
The guidance published by the state says explicitly that a business collects the tax from the consumer as an agent of the state, and that the taxes collected belong to the state rather than to the business. If it was a tax on the business, then it could be paid later out of the business’s general funds.
Whether you believe the above or not - and I’m not going to discuss that part further, because this is all easy to find online - the fact remains that most sales taxes must be charged separately from the product price at checkout. There are, as I said, exceptions for bulk goods.
Please send your thoughts and prayers to Gemini 2.5 Pro hopefully they can recover and get well soon enough, I hope Google lets them out of the hospital soon and discharges them, the last 3 week has been hell for me without them there.
The thing is, the site earns me maybe $100-200 in Amazon Affiliates referral links per month (which is nothing to sneeze at... but that's not moving the needle on a mortgage payment).
I put maybe 10-15 hours/month into writing and prepping blog posts (every one is either fully written from scratch _after_ making a video, or is my transcript edited for blog/readership).
My blog is mostly a scratchpad for my own needs (I like being able to Google my projects, so I can use Google/DDG as my own note search engine), but I get why many people who make video (which can earn an income) don't spend the extra time and write up decent blog posts as well.
(But I prefer reading much more than video content).
I recently noticed that Skatterbencher does this, with articles for each video. It’s a fantastic format, especially in cases where the content is something you might want to refer to later without having to rewatch the whole thing.
This is probably something AI can help with. Given a published video, write a blog post version. With some work you can probably get a first draft with solid links and appropriate tone, reducing the effort down to an hour per post or better.
I had a Google Play app whose dev died. It was just a simple local app -- no network server usage. When I last upgraded my phone (due to imminent failure of the previous one) it refused to copy the app over -- and the app was no longer in the Play store.
I still have the APK for one called "Backitude" and have kept migrating it for years since the disappearance of the developer.
It's nothing special, just a location tracker that logs to a file every so often based on time and/or distance moved (could also ping a URL with encoded location info instead). Basically the underlying data for location history without relying on Google. Its notable feature years ago was that it would do location 'steals' - instead of just triggering a then-expensive location check, it would grab the most current available location info as triggered by some other application and only force an update if that information was too old.
a more distant example is VLC on apple devices. I don't remember what happened anymore and any guesses would be speculation, but at one point on iphones you could not get VLC unless you had already gotten VLC.
I expected this to suggest a tick-tock deprecation cycle, where one version deprecated and the next removed, but this is definitely an idea that belongs on the domain "entropicthoughts.com"