First thing I was asking is the model of toothbrush that supposedly got hacked. AFAIK there are no mainstream electric toothbrushes with onboard WiFi. Both OralB and Philips use Bluetooth for their smart functionalities.
If the story was about smart ovens or washing machines I would have believed it.
Why put it in the notification about the next video? Wouldn't it be a better idea to have the favourite button in the player overlay, perhaps in a context menu?
Bad bot, you should verify whether Piped can accept an URL and not simply link all YouTube URLs to Piped.
RSS feeds are XML files which contain a list of documents hosted on the internet (articles, audio/video). The feed entries contain basic metadata (title, date, author, summary) and a link to the original website (or audio/video file in the case of a podcast).
Feed readers send a simple web request to the website hosting the feed, downloading it if it has changed since the last update. The content is then combined with other feeds and displayed. This way you can have a personalized news reading experience without needing to create an account at a a central provider or open every individual site.
Alternative YouTube clients use RSS feeds provided by YouTube (example: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC2DjFE7Xf11URZqWBigcVOQ), but they are only used to update subscriptions. All other requests (search, watching videos) are handled by the same web interface as the YouTube desktop application. Fetching the RSS feeds is a lot faster than opening the channel page, so the RSS featuee allows you update 100 or more channels in a few seconds.
The way podcast ads work is either just like YouTube sponsorships (the podcaster gets paid by a company to speak an advertisement themselves) or they are dynamically inserted by the podcast provider (these are the interrupting ads). Since most podcast apps dont store cookies, there is no way to track users and personalization is done only via the IP-based location and topic of the podcast. RSS-based podcast players have no way of directly reporting back playback telemetry. The server hosting the podcasts can only count the number of downloads/playbacks. So there is no way to count the amount of watched ads when using a RSS-based podcast player like AntennaPod or Kasts. Note: this does not apply to podcasts on Spotify, Apple Music or similar platforms. These platforms absolutely track your listening activity. I have no idea whether this affects ad/sponsorship earnings.
One important thing if you are building a RSS application is that the server should support conditional requests (the If-Modified-Since header). This way, a client does not have to download the entire feed on every update. It simply sends the last update date with its request and the server returns an empty response if the feed is up to date.
There are some applications (for example YouTube) which dont support this, resulting in higher-than-necessery data usage, especially on mobile.
You also cannot use it to store secret information like bank account/credit card details, API keys, etc.
Will they replace Consolas in Windows with this one or is it a GitHub-only-thing?
In Consolas the characters 1 and l look very similar, making the font unsuitable for coding and terminal use, so it would be good if they replaced it with something else.
Did they accidentally buy UVC sterilization tubes instead of the relatively harmless UVA party lights?
No, it is Notepad++ and it is called like that because it is written in C++.
Web applications may have vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to run code on the host system (Remote Code Execution). Famous example would be the log4shell vulnerability.
If you want to expose your server to the internet, you have to make sure you are not suffering damage if an attack like this occurs.
They do publish some open source software like Whisper TTS. Their core products are all proprietary though.
Just star the project on GitHub. They have a feed on the startpage where you'll get notified of releases.