movfuscator VS Invidious

Everything can be reduced to assignments. https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator

However, the movfuscator as implemented does still require a sigaction(2) syscall to set up a signal handler, under the justifications that "it is not actually part of the program" and that "if we were in ring 0, we wouldn't need help from the kernel" [0]. However, the latter part seems a little dubious to me: without the help of the kernel running non-MOV instructions, you'd never be able to escape from 16-bit real mode into 32-bit protected mode, since you wouldn't be able to load a valid GDT with the LGDT instruction (as far as I am aware).

[0] https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator/blob/90a49f31219...

I _think_ the idea is thinking of an "interface" as "something that you use as a way to interact with something from outside an abstraction". I'd summarize their argument as reasoning that if the goal of an abstraction is to avoid having to care about the internal details of something, an interface is a way to expose a subset of ways to interact with it, and the more you expand it, the more it exposes the internals of the thing being abstracted. I don't think they necessarily mean this only in terms of programming, but you could apply this argument to a programming language interface; if you use an interface for interacting with something instead of its direct functionality, each additional method you add to the interface exposes more details of the inner value, which makes it less of an abstraction.

Assuming my interpretation is correct, I'm not sure I totally buy this argument because there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to define the "size" of an interface where it holds true. The naive way to define the size would be number of methods, but I'd argue that methods can vary so much in terms of the amount of cognitive overhead they "expose" to the user that it's not very meaningful. Consider the Movfuscator compiler[0], which compiles code into binaries only using MOV x86 instructions because it happens to be Turing complete; as complex as it might be to learn x86 assembly as a whole and start writing programs directly in it, I'm dubious that trying to do so only with MOV would somehow be easier. Put another way, an x86 instruction set that only contains the MOV instruction is not a "stronger" abstraction than the actual one because it _introduces_ complexity that doesn't exist in the original. Does adding an ADD instruction alongside MOV increase the strength of the abstraction, or weaken it? I don't think there's an answer that we'd immediately all agree on for this sort of thing.

Ultimately, I think trying to measure interfaces through the number of methods they expose is similar to trying to measure code by the number of lines in it; while there are some extreme cases where we'd likely all agree (e.g. for a fizzbuzz implementation, having 10 lines of code is probably better than thousands of lines of code[1]), we can't really come up with a good objective metric because the "target" number is based on the complexity of what you're trying to define, and we don't have a way of quantifying that complexity. I think the ideas here are still super interesting though, not because they have definitive right or wrong answers, but because thinking about stuff like this overall improves one's ability to write good software for usage by other programmers.

[0]: https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator

The mov instruction in x86-64 is Turing complete. Someone even made a C compiler using only mov.

Are you sure they didn't use the MOVFUSCATOR?

Yep. In fact you can reduce everything to just one simple assembly instruction.

Youtube seems to be doing some A/B testing with the comment system which has made proxies like Invidious and yt-dlp/Newpipe unable to load comments. There is a patch for Invidious [1] which solves this problem but it is not in master yet. I tested it on my own instance and it does solve the problem.

[1] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/pull/4576

BTW, I don't understand the workaround: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/pull/4552/files

Which was taken from here: https://github.com/LuanRT/YouTube.js/pull/624

Could anybody explain it to me?

Use a Youtube proxy like Invidious [1], problem solved and you get to subscribe to channels without telling the Beast about your interests. Add Sponsorblock (which supports Invidious) to get rid of any in-stream advertising which remains and you'll be transported back to those hallowed times of yore when men were men, women were women and advertising was something you found in newspapers. Youtube will try to make this harder just like Xitter is trying to make it harder to use proxies like Nitter [2].

[1] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

[2] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

Going to drop this here for others who haven't heard of it https://invidious.io/

Now, how do we fix this? YouTube's ad model sucks. Their algorithm sucks. Their front page sucks. They've captured a bunch of creators though so often YouTube is the only place you can find someone.

I want those creators to benefit from me viewing their videos. I want the fact that I view a video and like it to help other people find that video in their recommendations. I want an algorithm that shows me things that are interesting and relevant not one that promotes the spammiest and most ad heavy videos that barely have anything to do with my watch history.

Having an alternative front end is nice but I don't want to rob YouTube of the money they spend on hosting the videos.

So, how do we do this?

Peer to peer fails when there is little interest in something or when most people leech and it sucks for archiving old content.

Hosting it all in one place is super expensive and hard for a small group to manage without turning into YouTube.

Maybe we could find a way for the creators to host their own content and get paid when people view it while being part of a large federated network for easy discoverability?

Please list any projects you know of, I'm sure there are a lot of people here who would be willing to contribute or donate.

Sometimes a half-solution will do, like Invidious or Piped.

[0] https://invidious.io/

[1] https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped