Yt-Dlp Sequence Diagrams
79 points by billyp-rva 4 hours ago | 17 comments

meindnoch 2 hours ago
Auto-generated sequence diagrams are almost always useless. This one is no different.
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chongli 37 minutes ago
Why are people upvoting this? I thought I was missing something.
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bt1a 2 hours ago
"Auto-generated"? As in... a defined translation from one abstraction layer to another? Disagree
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Bjartr 40 minutes ago
As in not authored by a human who knows which details are important and which are noise for a given level of abstraction.
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perching_aix 50 minutes ago
A mechanistically generated diagram, i.e. a program reading in something and then emitting a diagram, following a specific algorithm.

> a defined translation from one abstraction layer to another

A solution like the aforementioned cannot reliably present a view with a raised level of abstraction, as that necessitates either making unsound assumptions, or being provided with hints (which can be wrong or expire). Just like with code (because they are code).

And so if this is indeed just a rote visualization like that, sticking to the same level of abstraction (thereby not encountering this issue), then they stipulate it is "almost certainly useless, just like they usually are".

I personally find this agreeable, but then I rarely find diagrams particularly illuminating in general, so...

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Retr0id 23 minutes ago
> Disclaimer: [...] generated using an LLM and may contain inaccuracies.
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risyachka 8 minutes ago
Speaks a lot about the HN audience that upvotes these kinds of articles
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TacticalCoder 15 minutes ago
BTW the year is 2026 and we've got LLMs, is there, at long last, an easy way to have an YouTube downloader I can run in a container (say with Podman) that actually works?

Do I need to be logged in with a Google account for it to work?

I always, since decades I want to say, ran into troubles whenever I download Youtube vids (no matter which tool I use, yt-dlp or other). It works, then doesn't anymore.

Are you simply, reliably, downloading Youtube vids? How? From a VM? From a container? From your main machine while being logged on?

P.S: congrats to the guys at Google, you sure made that hard

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amlib 7 minutes ago
You always had to keep whatever youtube video downloader you were using updated at a minimum. For a good while login cookies were only required for downloading restricted videos (whatever youtube considered 18+). Now you need half a web browser to do anything and the update cadence is even crazier.
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sampullman 7 minutes ago
Somebody is doing it, given all the ad ridden free YouTube download sites that exist.
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felooboolooomba 2 hours ago
Arrows need to be thicker. "Bold" doesn't work. Nitpick: "bold" doesn't really make sense in opacity settings.
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albert_e 2 hours ago
is there a "format" of describing an architetcure/design in such a way that it lens itself to such visualization?
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itsfarseen-1 3 hours ago
How was this created?
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billyp-rva 2 hours ago
Hi, author here. The app itself (Ilograph[0]) is fairly old; its first ShowHN was in 2019.

These particular yt-dlp diagrams were an experiment in getting meaningful sequence diagrams from a code repo using Claude. If you open the black tab on the left, you can see the source of the diagrams. Claude was able to generate most of this, albeit with a good amount of back-and-forth to get the details right, plus some manual tweaking in the end.

[0] https://www.ilograph.com

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embedding-shape 2 hours ago
Kind of despised the way you didn't even let me see a preview of my own created graph without having to signup, and the signup prompt didn't show up until I fixed the mistakes in the YAML. So I pasted something (generated), spent some minutes fixing the mistakes, then get hit with a signup prompt, before being able to see the graph... Just be upfront with the signup requirement, don't let me edit anything, if you're gonna gate it like that.
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billyp-rva 2 hours ago
Thanks for the heads up; that shouldn't have been happening. Please try again.
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mike_hock 2 hours ago
Hey guys, look at what I didn't make. I paid money to have someone/something else do it.
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