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Is there any closed source android app that you wish had a good open source alternative?
(programming.dev)
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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Why is there not an app that tells you which grocery stores have the best prices? I should be able to give it a list and it'll tell me where to buy each item.
Because grocery stores don't make that data accessible to third party developers, otherwise someone would do what you're suggesting and they'd risk you shopping elsewhere.
Bah, the data is on their websites, figure out how to collect it.
Go ahead and try scraping an arbitrary list of sites without an API and let me know how that goes. It would be a constant maintenance headache, especially if you're talking about anything other than the larger chains that have fairly standardized sites
I bet an AI could do it
@Dogyote @Zetaphor
And we also explored the AI option, it always turned out unrealistic. Either you would have to scrape the content and send it to the AI to parse the info, but then you'd be paying for every scrape, or run a powerful rig nonstop, but the results would still be hit and miss. Or you might let the AI generate the code for the scraping module, still not ideal, they were constantly hallucinating things that weren't there.
I don't think you understand how AIs work
@Dogyote @Zetaphor
I've been webscraping in my job for 6 years. Yes, it's a constant headache, they keep updating their sites and improving their antibot protections. But it can be done and some companies are doing it (on a biiiiig scale). It's just not very realistic that an open-source project would be able to invest that much effort into all the updates. Well some do, youtube-dl is basically webscraping and they are pretty up-to-date. It's just very rare.