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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • StarDreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    6 months ago

    Nothing but effort. Nobody wants to constantly baby a project just because someone else may change their code at a moment’s notice. Why would you want to comb through someone else’s html + obfuscated JavaScript to figure out how to grab some dynamically shown data when there was a well documented publicly available API?

    Also NewPipe breaks all the time. APIs are generally stable, and can last years if not decades without changing at all. Meanwhile NewPipe parsing breaks every few weeks to months, requiring programmer intervention. Just check the project issue tracker and you’ll see it’s constantly being fixed to match YouTube changes.


  • StarDreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    6 months ago

    An API is an official interface to connect to a service, usually designed to make it easier for one application to interact with another. This is usually kept stable and provides only the information needed to serve the request of the application requesting it.

    A scraper is an application that scrapes data from a human readable source (i.e. website) to obtain data from another application. Since website designs can update frequently, these scrapers can break at any time and need to be updated alongside the original application.

    Reddit clients interact with an API to serve requests, but Newpipe scrapes the YouTube webpage itself. So if YouTube changes their UI tomorrow Newpipe could very easily break. No one wants to design their app around a fragile base while building a bunch of stuff on top of it. It’s just way too much work for very little effort.

    It’s like I can enter my house through the door or the chimney. I would always take the door since it’s designed for human entry. I could technically use the chimney if there’s no door. But if someone lights up the fireplace I’d be toast.



  • And I did the same as a kid in the late 2000s in order to play World of Warcraft. Found someone’s info on a random online dump, filled it in and didn’t think more about the id theft. What I then learned is that there is NO “fake” IDs that can pass this test. It’s just plain old ID theft of actual people.

    The ID itself is encoded as 3-digit city/3-digit district/8-digit dob/and 4 random digits. There is no “generated” name that works with a specific ID since the name isn’t encoded anywhere. Most reputable vendors perform the check backed by an actual government DB.

    The problem is that it IS the exact same info used to apply for bank accounts, loans, mobile phone numbers, etc. And nobody bats an eye when a pirated gaming app asks for it. This could be legitimate, but I’m more willing to say this is someone’s ID collection scheme. If that’s the case, it could be doing more than just collecting IDs (cause why not?) or it’s at least facilitating more ID theft.



  • Some people play games to turn their brains off. Other people play them to solve a different type of problem than they do at work. I personally love optimizing, automating, and min-maxing numbers while doing the least amount of work possible. It’s relatively low-complexity (compared to the bs I put up with daily), low-stakes, and much easier to show someone else.

    Also shout-out to CDDA and FFT for having some of the worst learning curves out there along with DF. Paradox games get an honorable mention for their wiki.





  • Is there a specific reason you’re looking at shadowsocks? The original developer has been MIA for years. People who used it in the past largely consider it insecure for its original stated purpose

    trojan-gfw is a better modern replacement. However that requires a certificate in order to work. You can easily get one via lets encrypt.

    At this point, let Shadowsocks, obfs, and kcp die a graceful death like GoAgent before it did.


  • I don’t think either of us is the target audience here. I can see a “cheaper” (questionable) Pro laptop being useful for students going into college with a limited budget. An undergrad CS/graphic design degree shouldn’t tax an 8gb machine too much, assuming students shut down everything else when doing their once-a-semester major rendering/compiling/model training. If people just want Macbook pro software with more ports, a “cheaper” machine is better than none. Personally, I would still get a used/refurbished machine though.

    That being said, my current laptop workload tends to be emacs, qpdfview, Firefox, and tmux on EL9. For the remaining stuff, I usually just spin up a VM then ssh/xrdp into it. As for slack, teams, jabber, etc, I’m happy to report I’ve been out of industry/IT for 1+ years and don’t plan on going back anytime soon. For all I care, Apple can call their models unicorn edition. As long as it sells it’s not stupid.






  • 8gb RAM and 256 gb storage is perfectly fine for a pro-ish machine in 2023. What’s not fine is the price point they are offering it (but if idiots still buy that, that’s on them and not apple). I’ve been using a 8gb ram 256 gb storage Thinkpad for lecturing, small code demos, and light video editing (e.g. zoom recordings) this past year, it works perfectly fine. But as soon as I have to run my own research code, back to the 2022 Xeon I go.

    Is it Apple’s fault people treat browser tabs as a bookmarking mechanism? No. Is it unethical for Apple to say that their 8GB model fits this weirdly common use case? Definitely.