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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 22nd, 2023

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  • About ten years back, I had moved away from home and was living in a small town with no Internet in my apartment. The only internet connection I had was the local library.

    I remember being so surprised at the amount of viruses on those dumb computers. I wondered what the heck people were doing to them to get them in that state, and then one time I saw some dude looking up porn and just downloading whatever programs the pages he came to told him to.

    Anyway, I’m glad I have Internet in my apartment now.







  • 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


  • I used to work at a company that held to the concept of “don’t be a hero.” Basically, if you were having to step up, work overtime, and always go out of your normal routine to “fix” stuff, then you’re actually enabling bad processes.

    I think the same concept applies here. If you can’t let any code be submitted without personally reviewing it, then there is something wrong with either the review system, the onboarding system for new devs, or the continuous integration system that should be catching mistakes. Same goes for triaging: if no one is triaging because it’s too exhausting and leads to burnout, then some other system may need to be devised for handling outstanding issues.

    Obviously this is much harder to deal with in an organization where most contributors are volunteers. But if we want the project to survive and not be taken over by corporations who can afford to pay people to deal with this stuff full time, I think it should be addressed in a different way.