Depends on which part the coworker needed. If it was passing around a reproducible environment, sure, Docker works. But if they needed "here's a thing I can double-click and it'll just work" then Docker has no real advantages.
For the parser itself, there is work being done on something that's more structured. The new parser lets you round-trip from the wikitext to the generated HTML and back, which means that it's entirely possible to work with wiki content by just manipulating a DOM rather than having to work with the wikitext yourself.
The problem for any "Wikipedia alternative" is that there's one obvious way to bootstrap themselves: importing Wikipedia's content. But that leaves them either needing to work out how to impose structure on it themselves (difficult), or just importing it as-is and leaving it messy.
It's legitimately a pain to do, because most Wikipedia articles use a bunch of templates. So for anything outside the most-simple of articles you suddenly have to implement a lot of the more painful bits of wikitext. Then if you want to import them back to Wikipedia, you've got to match those things back up or you'll get reverted for messing up the page...
Plus complying with CC BY-SA requirements for the content, of course.
It'd be more convincing if the "problems with Wikipedia" section referenced anything from the last decade. (Also, one of the three things that apparently warranted being called out as an example was pretty petty -- the ArbCom member's on-wiki job didn't have anything to do with how they misrepresented their credentials.)
Yeah, all of that Siri stuff you're trying isn't there yet.
18.1 (the current beta) has minor improvements to Siri for immediate follow up requests and parsing requests where you stumble over words. 18.2 is supposed to be picking up ChatGPT integration so Siri can ask it about things. The "personal context" recall is apparently in 18.4, so we won't see it until next year.
Honestly, 18.1 launching the new Siri UI (the glowy look) feels like a bad idea -- I'd have kept it until 18.4 when the real intelligence improvements actually land.
Fanfiction.net is trivial... apart from it having Cloudflare bot blocking turned up to aggressive levels. I've not seen an approach that works, other than using headless browsers to fetch the content.
Having written my own one of these, the interesting thing about this one is really the UI for iterating on extracting content from an arbitrary site. Having a full GUI for working through the extraction is much more flexible than the norm.
Similarly, I switched away from Castro when it was melting down, and I tried out PocketCasts and Overcast.
PocketCasts is pretty great, but has one crucial flaw that makes it unbearable to me: at the time I was using it it was fairly slow to update feeds automatically, and you can't force an update of a specific feed. This got really annoying with subscriber-only feeds, because I'd know an episode had been released and had to wait a few hours for them to decide to actually let me see it.
Overcast is good at what it does (the audio boost features are the best of any client I've tried), but it's opinionated about a certain workflow in ways that don't play incredibly well with people who want to subscribe to a lot of podcasts and only listen to occasional episodes that catch their eye. Previous statements by Marco suggest that he likes Overcast's workflow and doesn't really want to adjust it to support inbox/queue users. In some ways the recent rewrite helped (the UI no longer locks up regularly when you have a lot of subscriptions), but in other ways it hurts (there's no way to give it a global episode-limit setting, and the default limit now actively wrecks playlists).
I'm inclined to say that if Overcast's workflow fits you, it's probably the best client to use. But if it doesn't, you have to make some choices...
For people with large numbers of podcasts as well as many paid subscriptions there is a lot that can be done to better manage the situation, including deduplication. This falls into the power user bucket so it's less valuable to these apps than the basic and mid-level users.
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