If they don't get new guest accounts, they're all going to shut down withing 30 days. It's just left over accounts and caches giving you the impression everything is fine.

Don't forget the rolling DoS herds of scrapers having no more ways to do stuff on their own, which are now trying to use the remaining instances - killing even more.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39161194

Points: 503

# Comments: 359

The upgrade path for keycloak is also similarly broken in my experience. Especially the total change in one of the recent versions broke a lot of things, which they are still fixing. Add no visible LTS or security patching on top, and you end up with something, that isn't usable for any enterprise rollout.

We germans publicly joke about the fact that visiting the older part of your family in those "nice small villages" is always one hell of a culture shock, to put it friendly. Which starts with not saying anything about what they have for political opinions and questions regarding your choice of clothes, sexuality and job.

They probably even have their own town slang. Not any "high german". This is 100% comparable to the political landscape that you have in America (city vs farms outside).

because using a yubikey instead isn't that much more in terms of key-to-browser pipeline - the browser just requests the key from a providing entity

See NPM installations and "please sponsor this project" messages, which can also give you a virus.

Also that auto-hotkey script for automatic driving in GT is really impressive. ( https://github.com/ByPrinciple/GT7-Scripts/blob/main/PanAmer... ) So that's something between scripting and RPA. Essentially a DSL for exactly this task, which totally destroys my point. And does make a case for learning how to script with a tools that's capable enough, that it is useful for more than the best case.

But is that really RPA at that point ? Suppose your task is to scratch some data from a website, calculate something and if some condition is true also perform some form submit.

If you do have access to the actual database you can just use that. If you also have access to the API of the system, you have to "check some box", you might as well just write a normal application that calls some SQL, perform some http-posts and maybe also provides a nice website with that data it crawled, formatted in the way you wanted to calculate the data, in, let's say excel. (Some would say you wrote a microservice.) And if all of this is possible then you're apparently good enough in programming that such a solution is the way to go.

But if you're in the typical corporate environment where the API doesn't exist / you can't access the database / you're not allowed to interact with the checkbox except for the proprietary application, then you're back to what an RPA was supposed to do.

Because otherwise we're down to one question: When is it an RPA ? When you're just using a fancy UI ? When you're not accessing any API ? When you don't script ? Or is the example above with SQL + API also an RPA ?

RPA to me rings "mouse recorder for dummies" or "ugly hack that breaks depending on how good your visual detection system is". At least when you described discovering that you can actually just use real scripts instead of UI indirection, it reads like something like that. A "not invented here syndrome" of that RPA tool, instead of a helper that handles checkbox-detection + clicking for you.

- Somebody who has never read GoT so isn't part of the fandom.