Will they actually work? UK has the second most cameras after China, but pretty much none of them work or are accessible by police, so they do fuck all.

There’s a good reason for that, VPNs are extensively used by bot networks for all kinds of activity. But VPN use by bots is actually coming down slowly as bot networks start to switch to residential mobile networks - it’s impossible to block them and you can cycle connections automatically like you do with VPN when using specialised residential mobile IP providers. So maybe web sites will stop blocking VPNs in a few years.

Lemmy is nowhere near the wealth of information available on Reddit. And if we’re talking about hobbies, then literally no one gives a shit about Lemmy. The whole of the Fediverse has only 50k daily active users, most of them are on Mastodon. Lemmy is just a tiny fraction of those 50k. The main 3D printing sub alone has more active users than the whole Lemmy.

That leads to a situation where knowledgeable people from the industry and hobby leaders don’t post anything here. I’m not even sure many of them even heard of it.

So, if you want some help or to learn something, you either go to specialised forums or to Reddit. Lemmy is for memes and throwing feces at each other. Which is fun.

Bots use VPNs a lot for scrapping and other activities.

How would I know without looking at the app binary?

That’s not due to kotlin.

Every decent piece of software has crap loads of resources: icons, texts, translations, manuals, sounds, fonts, etc. Even hello world app contains at least one resource - “hello world” string and what’s funny is that executable meta data required by operating systems and the string take more space than the actual code to print this string.

Most resources are not consumed by wonky code or dependencies. Most resources are consumed by images and sounds.

Kotlin doesn’t have much impact on binary size.

HDDs from the factory should come in a parked state, that means they don’t require any additional packaging apart from what they come in.