Nathan Labenz: belief

Transcript context

…So this has been far and away the hardest part of everything I'm presenting, and a lot more grief, like, far and away the biggest time sync, and there's eight different solutions, and, you know, just each one was different. It is generally pretty real-time, and I pushed to get that, 'cause I wanted to have this attention firewall inbox view. So, like, Gmail, like, there are great APIs, they're a pain to use, but that's Claude's pain, not mine, and so, yeah, there's some kind of real-time sync And I think the calendar is also-- Google provides a sync API for the calendar. I don't even remember about contacts, but that doesn't need to be real-time. WhatsApp, there are a bunch-- as it sounds like you've found, there are lots of bad solutions for WhatsApp, and it's hard to find a good one. But it turns out-- and I hope that no one from Meta is listening to this-- but what I'm about to describe is not a secret, or I would have never found it out. If you install WhatsApp Desktop on your Mac, and I imagine on Windows, it is obviously syncing down all of your messages. Turns out it stores them in an SQLite database, which is not encrypted, so you can read it. So you're just... I'm just piggybacking off of WhatsApp's own real-time sync. There are a lot of WhatsApp integration solutions out there that... actively talk to some internal WhatsApp API, and there's a lot of stories about people getting their accounts banned, and other stories of people saying, I don't know what you're talking about, it's fine. I don't know exactly how dangerous it is to use those kinds of hacks, but I didn't want any dangerous. But this is, you know, there's no way for WhatsApp to know that you're looking at its read-only access to its database file. So I have just a cron job that runs probably once a minute, I don't remember. And this is on my Mac. So again, you know, there's pieces of this everywhere. There's inside the Docker container, there's outside the Docker container, there's up in the cloud, there's on my phone. So this one is running on my Mac outside the container looking at the WhatsApp SQLite database, Slack. is another API integration. Twitter is the worst, hardest one. I found some very shaky fly by night -- fly by night's an exaggeration, but some very kind of shady borderline looking service that will let you query Twitter And I don't know how they do it and I don't want to know. It's not like reading my feed, which would be nice. I have to manually poll every individual who I follow, but that's only about 80. And so this is the slowest one. It probably rotates through them about once an hour. It would start to cost noticeable money in API fees if I were polling more often than that. And this was like glitchy to get working. But they're all working now, like, you know, it's not like they break every day. Google Docs, again, is an API. Signal, I don't remember. And SMS is an Android app that's watching notifications on my phone. Signal might be similar. The new Twitter API, I think, is going to be probably a big hit for them, as much as it is a quite painful one to try to make work. I had a version of Twitter that was-- basically using a headless browser with my login and it would sort of try to use the cookie that I had most recently logged in with for as long as possible until it expired. And then you'd have to kind of reauth and whatever. And that worked like okay. It wasn't terrible. Certainly wasn't super reliable. But now I'm like, you know, I might just sign up for the paid API. And even though it's going to, you know, cost me a few cents to do a few things, it's probably. I didn't, I didn't realize they had an official API that would work for this. That didn't come up in my research.…

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