YouTube throttling

YouTube recently began throttling their underlying video segments to around 400Kbps, meaning it was often faster to torrent a 2 hour movie than to download a 4 minute music video. I've fixed youtubedown to work around this. Let me know if I broke something.

It turns out that if you divide the URL into pieces and load them all in parallel, each of those loads gets rate limited, but not in aggregate, so downloading it by spanking their servers with 30 parallel connections makes it load 30× faster.

Let's see how long this lasts.

(It's possible that rate limiting is related to your IP address; some people report getting no limits at all.)

I did not want to write this code. Everything about the modern tech ecosystem is just... so... exhausting.

Previously.

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DNA Lounge: Wherein it's Infrastructure Week

Turns out, our nation's crumbling buildings include this one.

Last month, during the heavy rains and heavier winds, some chunks of concrete fell off our building! They weren't huge, but still not the sort of thing you want coming at you from 30' in the air. So it was time to do some concrete repairs. They basically walked the face of the building and any time they saw a crack, they'd hit it with a hammer and chisel until pieces stopped falling out. Then they filled in the holes. For some of the corner bits, they had to build molds.

Some of the concrete comprising our front wall is only 20 years old (the part inside those 8 large inset rectangles on the first and second floor) but the rest of it is 98 years old at this point. Pieces will be falling off of you at that age too.

And, since the scaffolding was up anyway, we also had them give us a snazzy new two-tone paint job. It looks very nice.

And, just a reminder that both the club and DNA Pizza are closed Thursday and Friday. We'll see you Saturday for Bootie's Dranksgiving.

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