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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • I haven’t used this extension before but it seems like what it does is find the URLs of active videos. You can do the same manually by F9(or right click > inspect) > Network > Media > Sort by size (larger files will probably be video). This will give you the URL of the video (same as if you right clicked and chose “open video in new tab”, but some sites disable this).

    This approach usually works for me, but many sites take steps to prevent it.

    1. Send several smaller video files. They basically cut it up into short videos so you can’t access the whole thing at once. ffmpeg or a download manager (I use TurboDownloadManager) should be able to combine them relatively easily. Until recently, YouTube used this sort of method. The URL had a “range” tag that specified which frames of the video to show. Deleting this tag gave the whole video. They’ve since changed it and I don’t know any similar tricks (just use yt-dlp for YouTube). Other sites may do something similar, like changing a number or keyword in the URL will get you the whole video.

    2. Serve a preview of a full video (that you have to pay for). Many sites have very similar URLs for free and paid videos. On some sites you might be able to guess what you need to change to get the full video. Some sites have their previews named “preview.mp4” whee the full vudeo is the same URL but named “video.mp4” or something like that. You can spend some time messing around if you find something like this, but really the chances of guessing correctly are pretty low.

    3. Encrypted keys. This is basically impossible to crack. Some URLs will have long strings of letters and numbers in them. I assume this is some sort of encrypted password that needs to match up for you to access the video. Don’t even try with these ones.

    TL;DR usually it’ll work. Sometimes it won’t but you might be able to get around it.

    Also, yt-dlp works on much more than just YouTube. If I can’t figure out how to download a video, I’ll just give the URL (the webpage, not the direct video URL) to yt-dlp and it’ll often work.







  • The point is that GMT isn’t changing, the region is switching to an entirely different time zone, BST (British Summer Time). If your time is based on GMT, it won’t change due to British daylight saving time because GMT never changes.

    For a similar example, in the part of the US that uses Mountain Time, states observe MST (Mountain Standard Time) in the winter, and most switch to MDT (Mountain Daylight Time) in the summer. However, Arizona doesn’t observe daylight saving time, so they remain on MST. MST always stays the same (GMT-7), the time is only changing because the states are observing a different time zone. The same happens with GMT and BST, it’s just harder to see because you can’t pick out areas that remain on GMT all year.




  • Surely it can’t just be number present. It must be some proportion.

    Looking through the comments, it looks like it’s per 1000 Internet users.

    My question was mostly rhetorical, really, to make the point that without units listed on the map it becomes almost entirely useless. Sure, it gives some idea of proportion. I can tell that the US has more GitHub users in a certain group than Canada does in that same group, but it’s lacking a lot of context. What group (Internet users, per capita, etc.)? 11.5 out of how many (out of 100 would be significant, out of 10000 not so much).

    It shouldn’t be necessary for people to have to search through the comments to find this context. What if I want to share the map? Am I expected to caption it myself when I share it?

    Sorry to kind of go off, I know it’s not really that significant. But it’s such an easy thing to include units with your data, and I feel like it’s necessary to emphasize its importance in this community while it’s still young and developing.



  • I’d be willing to bet that for most Americans the main barrier to commuting by bike is the threat of cars and lack of bicycle infrastructure as a whole.

    I ride my bike to class often, and when I do it’s great. Well-maintained trails and frequent bike racks make it very convenient. My college is good with bicycle infrastructure, and I happen to be lucky that there are good trails between my apartment and campus. A faster ride would be nice, but I don’t see it making me bike more often. It wouldn’t affect the things that prevent me from biking on the days that I don’t: weather, time of day, or how I feel physically.

    Despite how much I bike to class, I’ve never biked to the grocery store, restaurants, or any other place that’s not on campus. This is because I’d have to ride on busy roads without bike lanes. Once you get closer to the center of the city, there are bike lanes, but they’re just painted. Actual separated bike lanes basically don’t exist in the US, which means that cyclists are still at risk of getting hit by cars even when bike lanes are present. A faster bike wouldn’t fix this. Investment in infrastructure would.

    I do understand the appeal of eBikes and I recognize them as a viable alternative to cars. But I only think people will make the switch if they live somewhere that’s already got the necessary infrastructure to make their commute safe and efficient. This is not even close to the majority of Americans. If we want people to move away from cars and toward bikes, we need to think of infrastructure first and the bikes themselves second.






  • There’s lots of stuff that could be considered innovation that is intentionally stifled due to competition laws or security concerns.

    I agree that some innovation can be harmful. I guess what I meant was “we should avoid disincentivizing innovation unless necessary.” The way I see it, though, job lots from automation is both inevitable and fairly easy to fix (as you said, UBI), so there’s no reason to try to stop it from happening.

    Really, I think automation should be encouraged. It frees people from usually-undesirable jobs and allows them time to pursue different careers or other interests. As long as we have ways to deal with the unemployment I think it’s a huge positive for people.

    they should have to continue paying taxes for those roles because the newly unemployed will need government support.

    I fully agree that there will need to be a tax increase to cover support for the newly-unemployed, but why not make that a general increase on businesses and wealthy individuals? If anything, this would be and incentive for automation as a way to decrease rising business costs.

    Innovation has removed jobs before, and we dealt with it. I don’t see businesses being taxed for using computers instead of human calculators. I don’t see why this innovation is different.



  • You can do pretty much the same thing with Firefox: you sign in to Firefox to sync your passwords and browser settings, then (assuming you’re talking about Google calendar, Gmail, etc.) You can sign into your Google account with one click. That’s not really any less convenient.

    Besides, I’ve hardly ever heard of anyone moving away from Firefox to Chrome, so I doubt the reason is any sort of convenience or design superiority. I’d attribute it to the fact that most people who already use the Internet (pretty much everyone) has already settled on a browser, with chrome-based browsers being the most common. So anyone new to the Internet will just choose the favorite as the default. This is especially true considering they most new Internet users are probably kids, so they’re not aware of concerns about privacy, monocultures, DRM, etc. that would drive someone to pick Firefox.

    Basically, it’s not that Chrome is actually better than Firefox. I think it’s that the market is growing, and the most common browsers will grow more quickly than Firefox simply for the sake of familiarity.