mini_racer VS yt-dlp

Some years ago I was on a shitty job - not technically, but the company turned out to be inhumane - at a Ruby shop, and on the side I was toying with mini_racer and I just upgraded to some macOS beta where it failed to build. A shitty +1-1 hack† for a compiler flag later and it was back flying.

A month later I received a cold email from a CTO to chat a bit about that PR, turns out they were using mini_racer heavily and forked it for their own purpose, and also created PyMiniRacer for the Python side of things. Next thing I know I got hired. Two years later the company got acquired.

Of course conditionally adding a compiler flag wasn't what got me hired per se, it only got my profile noticed. Probably side projects such as porting go by example to Ruby by implementing a ~1:1 CSP channel API[1], an Electron desktop client for Mattermost basically on a dare[2], ex mode for the Atom editor so that I could have that frackin' `:w`[3], leveraging Blocks to bolt on object-oriented-ness onto C because "closures are a poor man's object"[4], or reverse-engineering the Xbox One USB gamepad and writing a kext to turn it into a HID device on macOS from scratch on a lonely 7+h train ride with passengers judgementally staring at me sideways[4] probably contributed to it a bit.

My takeaway: luck is when preparation meets opportunity; but don't to side projects to get hired, because if you don't get hired then that time is lost. Rather, of all things, scratch your itch, have fun, embrace whatever quirkiness you fancy; no one can take that away from you.

[0]: https://github.com/rubyjs/mini_racer/commit/2086db1bbf2b5de4...

[1]: https://github.com/lloeki/normandy

[2]: https://github.com/lloeki/matterfront

[3]: https://github.com/lloeki/ex-mode

[4]: https://github.com/lloeki/cblocks-clobj/blob/master/main.c

[5]: https://github.com/lloeki/xbox_one_controller

Cue libv8-node+mini_racer from which PyMiniRacer was born. It is non-trivial but not as hard as one might think.

The most painful part is the libv8 build system and Google tooling, which makes it an absolute PITA for libv8 consumers that are not Chrome.

This is why the libv8 gem was atrocious to keep up to date and to build for several platforms, and why libv8-node was born, because the node build system and source distribution are actually sane.

Disclaimer: worked at Sqreen, now maintainer of libv8-node and collaborator of mini_racer

https://github.com/sqreen/PyMiniRacer

https://github.com/rubyjs/mini_racer

https://github.com/rubyjs/libv8-node

Eventually, we’ll want to call this JavaScript from a Rails controller using ExecJS or MiniRacer or some similar tool. None of the Ruby-to-JavaScript gems I found were sophisticated enough to know how to load npm modules with common.js or ES module syntax, so my solution is to just build the JavaScript with a watcher and have that run as part of bin/dev.

https://github.com/rubyjs/mini_racer/issues/190 has some info an then this PR: https://github.com/rubyjs/mini_racer/pull/210 that has been merged. Hope that all helps!

You can put these options in a config file and they will become the default: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp?tab=readme-ov-file#configur...

Yep. yt-dlp and youtube-dl

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

Will also start to feel the impact. My theory is that we will see a bunch of new video hosting sites as youtube itself attempts to lock down its ecosystem. They haven't paid attention in any adversarial way as far as I can tell.

When they do, it wont be great.

The points you make aren't unreasonable.

It is necessary to establish clear boundaries of what can and can be provided by the maintainers. If not done at an earlier stage of the project, the support burden becomes too much to bear at which point the maintainer transfers ownership, and the project suffers from catastrophic consequences such as the xz backdoor we're talking about here, or other cases where the project mostly stalls and serves as an ego-boosting platform for the new maintainer, as was the case with PhantomJS[6].

This can also happen in your life, where a "friend" sees that you possess a certain skill, and then gradually tries to push an inordinate amount of their personal work related to this field onto you.

Personally, I think it's best to use an approach with extremely clear communication as to what the maintainer can and cannot provide. This can be seen, for example, in yt-dlp[1], where the consumer is clearly informed upfront that not providing detailed information as requested will lead them to block said consumer; or sqlite where their position regarding contributed patches[2] and support[3] is similarly made clear.

Having a shouty BDFL like Torvalds can also help improve code quality[4] and questionable contributions[5], though it is better that the shouty BDFL makes statements that are professional and do not show as much aggression; so for example, "Mauro, shut the fuck up"[7] would become "Mauro, your response is completely unbecoming for a Linux kernel maintainer, and is not in line with the promise of not breaking userspace."

[1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/new?assignees=&label...

[2] https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html

[3] https://www.sqlite.org/support.html

[4] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/29/linux_6_8_rc2/

[5] https://cse.umn.edu/cs/linux-incident

[6] https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/14541

[7] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75

Or just "yt-dlp "

yt-dlp ( https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp ) still works pretty well at the current state of Twitter.

To download audio from YouTube videos, you'll utilize the widely used yt-dlp library, which can be installed using the pip command as follows:

Use: `yt-dlp with --write-comments --no-download --batch-file FILE`

- FILE is a text file with a list of YouTube id's/URL's

- https://superuser.com/a/1732443/4390

- https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

> Then youtube-dl wasn't a thing anymore (maybe it is again?)...

yt-dlp is definitely a thing: <https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp>