Is it really? I don't doubt it's fast, but in my experience it's very hard, if not impossible, to scrape these "mostly JSON" services without the whole thing failing spectacularly as soon as the site shuffles their data model a bit.
Maybe YouTube is more amenable to this than the services I'm thinking of -- I personally have no qualms deferring to youtube-dl so I wouldn't know -- but for things like my university's lecture recordings my efforts seem to consistently be mooted within a matter of months or weeks.
That doesn't sound right to me[1]. Surely physics + enough detail is biology? Maybe it's not a level of detail we actually understand with contemporary science -- hence the addition of higher level abstractions like biology which are derived "top down" rather than "bottom up" (i.e., empirically) -- but "emergent systems" != "magic".
We should distinguish the field of physics, which is a human study, from the world, which it attempts to map or model on a fundamental level. We can say biology and chemistry are made up of the fundamental stuff of the world which physics seeks to understand, but that's different from saying chemistry and biology are just the science of physics. We have different domains for a reason. How that cashes out in the world itself are metaphysical questions of ontology, emergence, reductionism, mereology and Platonism/universals. Also the status of causality and laws of nature.
But then again, philosophy is also a domain of human inquiry. The world is just whatever it is, however we think it best to describe. Problem is that our different domains of descriptions and questions don't always fit easily with one another. So to say it's all just the domain of physics is to mistake one map for the territory.
Is it really? I don't doubt it's fast, but in my experience it's very hard, if not impossible, to scrape these "mostly JSON" services without the whole thing failing spectacularly as soon as the site shuffles their data model a bit.
Maybe YouTube is more amenable to this than the services I'm thinking of -- I personally have no qualms deferring to youtube-dl so I wouldn't know -- but for things like my university's lecture recordings my efforts seem to consistently be mooted within a matter of months or weeks.