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Video scraping: extracting JSON from a 35s screen capture for 1/10th of a cent

(simonwillison.net)
302 points simonw | 1 comments | 17 Oct 24 12:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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zahlman ◴[20 Oct 24 15:58 UTC] No.41896206[source]▶
>You should never trust these things not to make mistakes, so I re-watched the 35 second video and manually checked the numbers.

>I could have clicked through the emails and copied out the data manually one at a time. This is error prone and kind of boring. For twelve emails it would have been OK, but for a hundred it would have been a real pain.

This seems contradictory to me.

replies(1): >>41896485 #
1. simonw ◴[20 Oct 24 16:28 UTC] No.41896485[source]▶
Why's that?

Navigating to and then copying and pasting specific text out of twelve different emails (and then removing commas and dollar signs and reformatting dates as YYYY-MM-DD) is still a whole lot more work than watching a 35s video to check that it did the tedious data entry for you.

For the 100 email version I'd do more of a spot check, depending on how high the stakes were.