I run a visa agency in Bali, and the least glamorous job in it is turning a name into a person. A conference badge list, a referral from a client, a staff CV, a row in the CRM that says only "Agus Pratama, Jakarta" — before anyone writes an email, somebody has to find out which Agus that is and where he works now. I automated the step with an Apify Actor that reads LinkedIn's public people directory — linkedin.com/pub/dir , the page LinkedIn serves to logged-out visitors and to search engines when a person is looked up by name. No account, no cookies, no session to get restricted.

To make sure it kept working I pointed a cron job at it months ago with the dullest input I could invent:

{ "names" : [ "Satya Nadella" , "John Smith" ], "maxResultsPerName" : 20 , "includeFullProfile" : false }

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One famous rare name, one maximally common one. Thirty-one rows, under thirty seconds, about a cent a run. I only ever looked at the exit status.…