The problem they’re addressing is that some sites they were scraping from have begun instituting measures to stop them. The site went from working beautifully to working barely at all, with most sources either loading incredibly slowly or failing to load at all. I followed the discussions a bit on their discord, and it seems like the first recommendation was for users to host their own proxies. From what I see on the site’s initial splash, that still is one of the recommendations. I’m guessing they also rolled out the browser extension as an alternate method for users who don’t want to set up a proxy, since they were getting tons of people on thsir discord complaining about it being too hard or whatever.

But yeah, who knows if the extension is safe. The project is open source, so you can always examine it for yourself. But at that point you may as well just host your own proxy.

Edit: looked into it a bit more; the extension’s originally proposed purpose seems to be to get around CORS restrictions on certain sources. Seems the original proposal was here: https://github.com/movie-web/movie-web/issues/581

Companies are using subscription models because it has proven to be far more profitable than a one-time purchase. Why sell the product to each person just once when you can sell it to them over and over again? You no longer have to constantly develop new products and versions, and you now only have to maintain your existing product.

And it works because people buy it.

First 1/3rd is a bit of fluff but after that, good article.

Ah yes, the Wadsworth constant.

What does “FE” stand for in this context? Sorry if it’s obvious, I just don’t see anywhere that it’s actually written out.

I sure hope this is not how most CS courses are being taught

You gonna do Rust again?

I thought problem inputs were randomized for each user?

Did we read the same article? This mentions nothing about infighting between groups.

It’s been this way for years. Really?

Saw this posted on hackernews yesterday, along with hundreds of comments of people completely misunderstanding the advice given. Glad to not see any of that here.

I usually agree with his takes, but I can’t watch more than a minute and a half of a video of his, because it’s always an unscripted rant. It’s fine though, he usually gets his point across in the first minute anyway, and then repeats himself for another ten minutes.

I think you’re spot on. It fits right in to the whole “enshittification” topic that Doctorow wrote about. Everyone started using streaming services like Netflix because it offered such a great user experience; now that they have the user base, unfortunately we are now at the point where Netflix has every motivation to make the platform as shitty as possible to milk as much money from their users as they can.

Should be titled, “demotivating a programmer with a specific personality type.” Sure, some good programmer you know doesn’t value money; that doesn’t mean every skilled programmer won’t value it.

Hard to say without being able to see the comments. I suspect that if that were the case, the entire post would have been removed.

I’m a bit confused about the premise of the article. Does anyone assert that typing speed is a bottleneck at all? I’ve been in the industry for years, and have never heard that claim.

I do agree about the whole “less code is not always more”, but I get confused when the author keeps bringing it back to typing speed.