In the past I've considered forking Chromium so every asset that it downloads (images, scripts, etc) is saved somewhere to produce a sort of "passive scraper".
This article made me consider creating a new CDP domain as a possible option, but tbf I haven't thought about this problem in ages so maybe there's something less stupid that I could do.
Ha, I've had the exact same thought before as well, but due to lack of experience and time constraints I ended up using mitmproxy with a small Python script instead. It was slow and buggy, but it served it purpose...
While searching for a tool I found several others asking for something similar, so I'm sure there are quite a few who would be interested in the project if you ever do decide to pick it up.
It's not quite the same, but in the past I've written (in python) scrapers that run off of the cache. E.g. it would extract recipes from web pages that I had visited. The script would run through the cache and run an appropriate scraper based on the url. I think I also looked for json-ld and microdata.
The down sides were that it only works with cached data, and I had to tweak it a couple of times because they changed the format of the cache keys.
ultimately it turned out that after years of i3/sway scrollable tiling doesn't feel natural at all (and neither do dynamic workspaces, but that's less significant). when i resurrected my desktop a couple of months into the experiment i found it also lagged quite badly on my desktop with an nvidia card (a 3090, tried both drivers) and i couldn't be bothered to figure that one out so that was the final straw and i went back to sway
i was quite impressed with the level of thought that went into the ux and the amount of polish in everything though. it already feels like a serious, well-made piece of software, and it's not even that old yet
> Web users will be charged £2.99 a month and mobile phone users £3.99 a month to scroll through Facebook and Instagram without targeted ads.
I wonder how much information this provides about the relative value of mobile users vs web users. It's complicated by the fact that part of the pricing strategy here is likely not maximizing revenue as much as it is…making it just too expensive for many people to want to pay, thus shaping public opinion in the right direction.
> If the accounts are linked, users only need to pay one monthly fee.
Is this because they manage to get some value from that edge existing in the graph even if they can't turn that into ad revenue?
I think the price discrepancy is due to Google and Apple taking a cut of in-app purchases. Meta should get roughly the same amount of money either way.
This is also true on Apple's app stores, to be fair. I didn't know this until I got a MacBook Pro recently and my assumption that Apple's controls would be tighter than Google's was proven quite wrong when I opened the Mac App Store for the first rime.
For all of those app stores, the current approach prints them money and lets them claim impartiality, while still allowing some control through acceptance rules, ToSes and automated security measures. All those things scale well. Any other approach I can think of ends up having corner cases that involve human support or interfacing with regulatory systems - and these things do not scale well.
I don't know if curation is really the problem. Nearly every other platform has a search that when you search for "Mr Beast" on YouTube or "Elon Musk" on X they know you mean the popular one and not some 2-bit dork's fan page or parody that happens to have those words in the title/keywords.
I think they just (A) have no idea what they're doing when it comes to search and (B) the scamware that fills all their App Stores makes Apple a ton of extra money compared to people finding the real apps which usually are monetized outside the app store due to Apple's absurd revshare.
A lack of oversight is what I see as the problem, and the solution would require a significant human element.
Expecting a retailer to know/inspect the product they collect margins on shouldn't be a big ask.
The retailer has to know what they're selling, but Apple seems to turn a blind eye to shady listings because of the way Mac App Store results are shown and the lack of useful filtering available to the user.
Lack of care, like previous commenters mentioned, each sale is a sale, and 30% to Apple. It does not matter what you sell. One step deeper and it does matter what you sell: it seems to incentivise spammy apps, why block these money makers?! It is all about money. Nothing else.
When we propose alternatives the answer is that they want to protect customers.
But they don’t protect their cash cow from massive daily influxes of scam apps. It’s better one million scam apps generating 50k per month and drowning my two or three apps for which I spent months of work than a few thousand quality apps from which everybody would profit.
Let’s be real it takes a special kind of mad developer to try to make a business that relies on the AppStore. First if you are unlucky you get rejected on day one or two. And if you aren’t and are wildly popular you risk Apple copying your business model.
Because deep down some people at Apple despise the App Store developers and think they can do much better. This has been at the core of Apple culture for ages.
Anyway we legit indie developers who care about our products get drowned in irrelevance. Who cares.
> Nearly every other platform has a search that when you search for "Mr Beast" on YouTube or "Elon Musk" on X they know you mean the popular one and not some 2-bit dork's fan page or parody that happens to have those words in the title/keywords.
Well, that's what you expect as a user and as a technology person, but as the TFA demonstrates, this doesn't apply to Google without an ad-blocker.
> Nearly every other platform has a search that when you search for "Mr Beast" on YouTube or "Elon Musk" on X they know you mean the popular one and not some 2-bit dork's fan page or parody that happens to have those words in the title/keywords.
In fact, I just tried searching for "Microsoft Word" in the Mac App Store, and it was the first hit (with other Office apps coming next).
I did a search for "Instapaper" and again, first hit.
On my iPhone I did the same thing, there was a single sponsored app as the first item (and oddly completely unrelated), and the first app after that was the one I typed.
There's that saying about "I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating." The apple and play stores are like that. They don't care what you buy as long as they get to control the choices you choose from.
It's pointing out that the person who posted something couldn't be bothered to actually write it themselves. The "content" is the prompt, which is of course never shared because it's probably so trite that it's not going to get anyone's interest unless it's stochastically decompressed into a large amount of text.
Like the sibling commenter, I do not write Ruby and do not care about this conflict apart from a general interest in supply chain stuff. I'm merely tired of the constant encroachment of obvious LLM prose in HN submissions and (albeit less commonly) in comments.
This article made me consider creating a new CDP domain as a possible option, but tbf I haven't thought about this problem in ages so maybe there's something less stupid that I could do.