dbaupp

UTF-8 encodes each character into a whole number of bytes (8, 16, 24, or 32 bits), and the 10 continuation marker is only at the start of the extra continuation bytes, it is just data when that pattern occurs within a byte.

You are correct that it never occurs at the start of a byte that isn’t a continuation bytes: the first byte in each encoded code point starts with either 0 (ASCII code points) or 11 (non-ASCII).

People use stars differently.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.07643 is some investigatory research describing, among other things, 4 clusters of reasons for starring: to show appreciation, bookmarking, due to usage, due to third-party recommendation.

FWIW, pex now also has options to unzip the archive to a cache directory on startup (I believe this happens by default now, but am not at a computer to confirm), to side step the zipapp limitations that you reference.

As of a few months ago, pex supports including an interpreter, either directly inline or lazily downloaded (and cached): https://docs.pex-tool.org/scie.html