A governmental-ish site I'm required to use doesn't push notifications as mails, so you have to login daily to check for updates. Updates may happen multiple times daily or once a month. I automated my server to access the site once a day with my credentials, screenshot the notifications, parse them with ocr, and send myself a mail.
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2026
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Why screenshot and parse? Can't you just parse the html directly?
Since the dawn of LLMs it's virtually impossible to scrape web content. Headless browsers have become basically useless. I actually have to automate keyboard inputs to simulate the navigation. I could maybe try to write the javascript cache to file but honestly it's just faster that way.
What why, I'm scraping html just fine
What do you use for OCR parsing?
The data is non critical and doesn't contain indentifying info so I use ocr.space API. You could probably find ways to use the tesseract libraries locally.
I'm not willing to run something that risky on my own infrastructure, therefore I wont run it. I can do all of those things with a handful of scripts or Home Assistant anyway.
May I ask why you consider n8n risky?
Just look at the recent vulnerabilities it had. It just had a CVE 10 in January and March of this year.
I'm not a slop jockey and I'm watching people plug these kinds of things into public data and having it do operations with financial/business impacts.
I'd rather employ a gremlin to write scripts.
I’m not a slop jockey
Are you aware that you are not required to run AI with n8n? There are two flavors: With AI and without.
Is there a version of n8n without AI generated code?
If you are asking if you can run n8n without AI, yes. That's what I run. If you are asking whether n8n is free of any AI generated code used in it's creation, I couldn't speak to that.
I see. It uses AI generated code, I just checked.
This is going to be a very difficult hill to die on as time goes on..
OK cool.
lowcode environments are the O.G slop.
That is a profound misunderstanding of AI, wow.
No, you're thinking I'm at the low end of the bellcurve here. When you actually understand what the transformer is doing, you'd understand.
What you're really doing here is showing yourself to be a mark.
Wow! Well, you can keep your attitude.
I personally use Node-RED for several automations myself. Is it worth switching to n8n?
Tons of things 😊
- Built quite a few personal agents, long before OpenClaw or whatever that is
- Automated Social Media Images
- Set up a bot on Manifold Markets
- Created entire processes in our company using it for Sales, Marketing and Customer Support
- Automatically update the CRM using Macrodroid and n8n
- tons of other playing around.
One of the most amazing pieces of software I've ever used.
Can you elaborate on the agents? How do you handle persistant memory, what triggers them? What are they for? ☺️
n8n offers some cool agent features out of the box.
Like, if I talk about my personal agent is connected to Telegram, it can access my emails, my calendar, it can do web searches, deep research, it can access a NocoDB instance. etc. It also records a journal, any food diaries, it can take handwritten notes and convert them to text and store in my obsidian vault.
For memory, I use the standard one from n8n but for long term memory, I use NocoDB or some vector storage (I forget the name).
Honestly, it's very easy to get started and play around with, so I recommend just setting up an agent and just having a go.
That's pretty cool OP. I use n8n for various automation around the lab but the most recent would be an addition to my dashboard. The n8n routine will fetch the latest, animated, Solar Flare and Aura Forecast from sol24.net. I've always been fascinated with the sun and our atmosphere since I was a kid.
I use it for just two things, triggering a download with a docker tool over a webhook call I use in a userscript and calling a webhook of a media server on local file changes
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| NAT | Network Address Translation |
| nginx | Popular HTTP server |
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.
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