The whole web is based on selling people's attention, providing free services as "payment" to people. The whole value proposition of AI is to give the services without giving people's attention?
Solvable problems (just login or pay). This is more than just blocking anonymous scrapers. Sites are blocking access to agents even when they have a proper "ticket" for access.
Entire networks. GPT dot became useless as it got systematically blocked by Cloudflare, Google cloud, vercel, etc. At the same time OpenAI blocked solutions like tailscale and others effectively killing the utility of browser control by dot.
Companies don't want it to be easy to cross shop their competition, the whole premise of Amazon is that it's so easy and simple you don't even check the competition. AI agents are leveling the playing field and helping customers find the best deals, so of course they're being banned
Recently bought something online from Home Depot and it arrived damaged. When I asked them for help they said I had to drive it back to the store myself.
If I have to drive to the store to get it, I wouldn’t have shopped with them! It feels like every time I don’t order with Amazon the stores remind me why I ought to.
It's not that hard. Make an iOS app and use the remote attestation features to verify the client. In theory Android has similar mechanisms available, not sure how secure they are but Apple's is pretty good.
Now whether you want to restrict your shop to only being accessed via a mobile app is a totally different proposition.
Everyone focuses on Amazon here, but there is an entire industry of e-commerce tools and products and platforms and services designed around optimizing e-commerce sites for sales and other uses.
Agents invalidate a lot of that and so it is an existential threat to many of them. I expect the near future will result in a lot of different results tailored to agents that may actually result in higher priced products for agents browsing versus humans.
my prediction: ai agents will have their day, but not on this version of the web. websites will have a separate xml/json/yaml version that agents can peruse without all the ads/js/etc
Without the ads? The pessimist in me thinks with all the ads, prompt injections, and long-form content marketing included. Already you can see Google's AI results rehashing marketing slop in the answers about how amazing one product or another is.
Wasn't there some restaurant review site that gets accused of doing pay-to-play hiding of negative reviews and promoting positive ones that calls up businesses and basically extorts them into their services? They have all the incentive in the world now to manipulate the results shown to AI agents. You won't even see the manipulation directly yourself when there's an AI sitting between you and the source acting like an obfuscation layer.
Why would that happen if the website owners are explicitly trying to prevent access? This isn't a technical issue, the agents are perfectly capable of working with the existing websites regardless of ads and javascript. The semantic web and machine readable representations was a 90s thing, agents don't need that really.
no you are def right the agents are def capable and that is the problem, so capable we are all doing this, we are all making our own scrapers, as are big corps/small corps and it is adding up so now we are seeing managed challenges everywhere and webmasters/sysadmins going to great lengths to block any bots.
hm. for me, AI agents effectively already have their day unless there is a retrenchment. i essentially do not interact with the web (outside of a few social media sites) anymore
if the reason to do so was the ad revenue, then i definitely agree. but in terms of me happening on to your ideas, now is perhaps actually better than any time in the past. i also do pay for writing à la substack
My agents can just take that feed and render it into a custom front end just for me too. Why would I browse the adversarial, bloated, ad infested version?
I agree. I’ve been saying for years that marketing teams need to switch to include marketing to LLMs.
I have (currently free but maybe paid in the future) accounts for side projects with businesses that Claude chose for me. (I reviewed the suggestion, but didn’t see a problem or reason to change it.) Why did Claude choose those providers? No idea, but if it’s through subtle marketing to Claude, then well done to them.
And finally, we will have the future SOAP and XML schemas promised us all those years ago!
Websites cost money. Websites won't cater to bots the same way they don't cater to the scrapers of old. Some bot companies may be charged extra to integrate their bots in some websites, though!
Without a convenience moat, commerce will get even more adversarial: membership pricing, surveillance pricing, loyalty perks, varied products to avoid price comparison (like mattresses and Costco).
Fortunately, if AI is really superhuman in capabilities it may still win the battle for the customer and keep prices competitive: aggressive price comparison, alternatives discovery, negotiation, group buying, etc.
In a fully agentic shopping experience, it's not obvious to me that providing a better product works to drive sales. Bargain-basement stores can make up a story about how their goods are lovingly handcrafted for decades of durability - adversarially tested against the 3 most common agents, so they'll believe it - much more efficiently than I can honestly provide one.
How would the agent know it's a better product? All it has to go on are whatever bot-generated spam reviews and prompt injections that they can scrape.
This is expected. A lot of these companies that are closing their doors make a large portion of their revenue based off of ads and upsells which agents can easily be instructed to ignore, and don't interact with like a human.
Another more blunt way to say it is that people can instruct their agents to look out for their best interests (and while there are cracks they continue to get better at this), and companies hate that.
People will work around it similar to how we've worked around with adblockers for years, and it will just become a game of attrition as these companies work to preserve their moats until they find a way to preserve this revenue stream off of people's agents.
Yes, same with many other things where people were under informed or did t have the time to look out for their own interests. Such as filing complaints, citing the correct legal sections, knowing the procedures, knowing their rights, noticing when they are getting an unfair deal, etc etc.
I do see that there is another side to this. I saw complaints by an event organizer (think weddings etc) who got some special requests and went above and beyond to accommodate but it turns out the extensive requests likely were AI generated fully optimizing for the customer's interests, and just shamelessly asking for many favors essentially. She used to do these things because humans had a bit of embarrassment and friction around asking too many things and so it worked on a social agreement that if you ask it likely is truly important that you made the effort to ask. Now this cannot be assumed. So things will more to more formal rules, more explicit pricing for the small asks, and generally more adversarial and low trust systems that fully squeeze out the human slack from these systems.
It’s also a “you can’t scrape us but we can scrape you” mentality these companies are getting into.
It really sucks for small businesses. Their websites get absolutely hammered and they can’t afford or don’t know how to stop it. Cloudflare ends up winning as they’re the easiest solution.
Does it suck if you offer a product and someone’s looking for it and the agent can’t look on Amazon but they can look on your small side maybe that’s good
Legit what one of our clients problem was. Normal web traffic wasn’t an issue and the logs were just a few megs. Yeah there was a problem where they were not rotating but once meta started crawling them 24/7 ignoring the robots.txt it kept filling their vps up. An annoying problem to fix once a server is completely full and you can’t even ssh in.
There are also some pathological bad use cases out there that are caused by the combination of trying to scrape all the content, a randomized param, and the scrapers trying to be anonymous. The one I've encountered is pbpBB.
phpBB will assign you a randomized session if if you visit it anonymously (without logging in), and will serve the page to you with that sid param added to all links. Using that link will load a page without the sid param appended to links, because the system assumes you have a session I'd saved in a cookie since it saw you have a sid, even I'd you don't have/didn't send a cookie with it. Following any of those links starts the chain over if you aren't sending a cookie along with a sid, which the AI scrapers never do so they can't easily be blocked by that, and a new unique sid is generated, and all the links have the new sid appended.
Every page with a unique set of params and values needs to be investigated, because it can be an entirely different page, so AI scrapers will scrap forever, always finding more and more URLs to harvest, even though they're all duplicates of what they already have. It's easy to have multiple scrapers stuck going through a very small bulletin board continuously.
Maybe they've gotten smart enough to deal with this situation in the last few months, or maybe they put in a specific workaround. I ended up just throwing the site behind cloudflare because spending time trying to outsmart AI agents in a battle of escalation doesn't seem like an effective use of my time.
Cloudflare is probably one of the most popular, reasonably priced for general public. You have fastly, akamai, cloudfront as other proxy providers and CDNs with similar capability but higher price point mostly catering to enterprise customers.
Bunny.net is another one that I find similar to Cloudflare from pricing and functionality perspective
Depends on the small business obviously. I've been in IT for 40+ years and enjoy torturing clankers; I ran a bot motel 20 years ago. These things are so badly written, and obviously they don't care because they're not truly conscious, but the meat in charge is ignorant or doesn't care. So web scraping, and the point cloud of nearly indistiguishable abuse it travels with, is pretty easily tripped by some simple technical tests and salting of content. At least mostly.[0]
I've been wondering to myself "how can I get people to go through a login process without going through a login process?" for a few months, and I've come up with a simple solution which I'll be implementing in the next few weeks.[1] Like the other technical measures it doesn't identify bots but there will be a gate with backpressure that at a point in time a given IP address has some probability (adjusted in realtime based on $things) of passing through, and through my mysterious process is then "logged in". Then that address is pretty much given a free pass as long as its behavior remains "human". Real humans may be denied access initially and have to try again, and their luck will be affected by how aggressively the bots are fighting it out at that point in time. This isn't much different than the extant reality, but it is in terms of what happens after an initial successful page load. It's an experiment, I'm hoping it's tunable so that the experience is more or less indistinguishable from the status quo; we will see.
I'd love to find a group of likeminded individuals where we can discuss some of this TLP:YELLOW or Chatham House Rules. If you are savvy enough to hunt me down and can demonstrate that you're a real human, small operator, and that you can keep things closely held I'll talk with you, if you want someone to run your mitigations that would cost money.
[0] Had an episode last week where somebody scanned approximately 1000 URLs (maybe 60% of the discoverable URLs) over six hours. 1200 addresses fetched exactly one URL, another 400 or so fetched two or three. Every one of those URLs was fetched exactly two times. Real showshoe stuff, nicely done.
[1] Firewall rules and fail2ban. I give fail2ban special powers in terms of the logs it follows and the actions it can invoke. Conntrack without conntrack (of course the firewall has conntrack, it's just not the best option for this use case).
It's a cognitive tax on all the parties involved. It works on buyers (websites that pay for it) much the way that llm's work on their users, by working up to the point at which the buyers can't discern it working.
As a user (bot or flesh) you have to jump through these hoops, and to the website operators they get fewer complaints when users (and bots) are able to contort themselves in predictable ways. Versus you'd perceive as a website operator, if your blocking worked at all, that you'd risk seeing a precipitous dropoff of bots if you did things in bespoke ways, as both bots (true positives, among dd and cf survivors) and people (false positives) get jammed.
The net effect in this model would be that such things as cloudflare and datadome take money from websites in order to block "dumb" bots and enfranchise "smart" bots to the point of creating a market for bot services. People that want to bot have to use AI or go to bot service providers.
For website operators that's a worthwhile exchange for dollars, in that dumb bots can cause a lot of harm in wasted compute. Bots are typically dead end users who won't buy ever anyway, or merely inefficient way of doing business if they scrape excessively. And many do scrape excessively.
"reform school for bots" is a good mental model. For this to work, the "reforms" have to be consistent so that bots can conform to them.
It's a peculiar equilibrium and I am not sure that it's all that stable as an equilibrium. Would be a good subject for a formal treatment, game theory and economics.
Mostly economies of scale. They have enough data to do the statistics to identify bad actors, and enough bandwidth and servers to facetank the request volume.
It works similar to cloudflare WAF but is an open source software. It can be on your own infrastructures even if its a $5 VPS.
The idea is same let the bot or AI agent do more work than it takes to serve that request. Also it needs to follow rules, similar to cloudflare enterprise web application firewalls. It was OWASP CRS and J4A TLS support.
Its not a rewrite and is more inspired by https://github.com/chaitin/safeline. Wanted a web interface and a distributed waf similar to cloudflare as an alternative. It supports OWASP CRS, J4A TLS trrmination handling. Comes with console-ui and also the proof of work used a different algorithm which is proven to be resistant to quantum attacks.
Yes name was anubis backwards and thats the only resemblance between the 2 projects and also I used anubis, safeline for benchmarks compparison. Each of the design records are in the repo if you want to see the evolution and algorithms used.
Small businesses should be the people happiest about AI scraping. It's a new venue opening up for them to sell their products and services. And it's easy and free to use Cloudflare so that you don't have to worry about excess traffic, if you don't want to use a different solution.
Cloudflare doesn't even stop bots very well. Many bots are using real browsers, which pass all fingerprint checks, and scripts that can click the checkbox. What Cloudflare has is mindshare.
> It’s also a “you can’t scrape us but we can scrape you” mentality these companies are getting into.
And the problem often isn't some advanced attack. It's enough to follow links with session params, generate endless urls or ignore robots.txt to turn a regular crawler into a load generator. A site owner needs crawler protection from specific behavior and not another list of known bot signatures
We host a website in Canada (physical server hosting VMs in a Canadian DC) and with the ongoing trade-war we do whatever we can to avoid anything US-based tech such as Cloudflare. So far we use Anubis to protect our services and it's been a decent experience.
it looks like this is solving itself in the usual and productive way:
> Instead of trying to fight Amazon, the company has partnered with retailers like Walmart, Gap, Sephora, Best Buy, and others, allowing Muse to shop on their sites. At the same time, Shopify has also opened its network of storefronts to AI agents.
they're making deals with the sites so that the agents can work, the sites get compensated. I hope for this "AI can do what it wants if it pays" model to expand further. Cloudflare told us months ago we'd have an option to get paid by AI crawlers. I signed up to join but of course as a nobody I never got a reply.
That's how the crawler deals work (Reddit licensing its data, Cloudflare's pay-per-crawl). For shopping agents, Meta has described the money going the other way. Zuckerberg on the Sources podcast in September: the plan for Muse is "a very small cut of whatever the transaction is… It'll come from the businesses that they're working with." Shopify currently tells merchants there's no fee, so this is the plan, not the present.
So the stores aren't being paid to let the agent in. Meta expects them to pay it.
First they forced their malware bot farms on us, now they want to rent them to us so they can turn the entire web into the dark web.
And eventually rug pull off the major retail sites and just redirect traffic to their own darker sites to scrape commissions, sell direct and keep the change.
I'm sure the teams thinking this up buy their lunches from a ghost kitchen run by illegals that's never had a health inspection,
located in the back of a laundromat with a phony business license and website that only accepts crypto.
I think people who rally against Amazon in this topic assume that the "savings" from much open price competition immediately come back to the consumer or the manufacturer. In my experience, with previous such tech improvement such as 'uber disrupting taxies', this has never been the case.
Both the consumer and the manufacturer/labor/driver/gig-worker always get the short end of the stick.... once AI-agents becomes indispensable part of life.
I would be surprised if you had enough data to be able to conclude such a lofty claim, especially accounting for increased availability of taxis in areas where there were none or few.
Either way, the benefits of price transparency are not imaginary, but they are also not the only factor. Things like insufficient buyers or sellers, government policy, etc are also in play.
All else being equal, a buyer being able to easily see seller A is more expensive than seller B for the same goods will result in lower prices for the buyer. But all else is rarely equal.
Uber is a single centralized platform that sets prices based on their secret algorithm to maximize profit, gives worse deals to drivers who look desperate and shows different amounts to two riders standing next to each other. It's as far from real competition as you can get.
It would be way different if it was an open network where drivers are allowed to set prices and reject rides without any penalty, and riders can send multiple offers at a time then take the best one. That would be a real competitive market where everyone is free to choose what they buy and sell.
In that scenario Uber would be one of many apps you can use that index the network, whitelist trusted drivers and handle payments for a small fee. And if you want to make a new app or do the whole process manually there's nothing to stop you. That's what shopping on the open web is like.
I am not disagreeing on any of those points. Just pointing it out that tech disruption only happens when someone else finds a way to steal that cut. It is never about the common good. That is why true open solutions and markets are hard to find.
An easy solution is to sell a "web search" subscription add-on that gets distributed to the sites your agents utilize. The script will flip overnight and ASO (agent search optimization) will be born. It could be a form of micropayment system that the internet has desperately needed for over a decade now.
This is just because agents don’t see ads right? Regardless, this is one of the advantages of software heterogeneity. The cost to detect rises substantially and the false positive rate will eat you alive. My agent buys me things. On Amazon too, yeah. OpenTable is hard to handle but I’m sure it’s fixable.
That's perfectly fine by me. I'll read those arguments and buy those things my agents can find on the open web; which is plenty.
Want to argue for a shining new world, but you're on a locked site? I guess we'll have to live with dystopia. Want to sell the greatest widget since the invention of sliced bread? Well, I never found it. Sorry, I bought inferior widgets from your competitor instead. I'm at a physical sales location, but I can't access your spec-sheets? Your competitor the next shelf over doesn't have that problem, I'll go buy theirs.
Exactly. Shut yourself off, you get shut off. I don’t give a damn you want me working the mouse on your site. Your site probably sucks ass and loaded with ads and popup offers and cookie banners and login hoops other bullshit I can’t stand that wasted my time. Oh check my email for a one time code becuase you don’t like passkeys.
I hope the irony isn't lost on these companies. Meta is one of the most aggressive companies against any sort of automation, perhaps after LinkedIn.
I'm trying to build a personal social media client to stop the platforms from shoving their feeds down my throat and to consume only the content I care about, so this hits home.
(I just got blocked from LinkedIn for letting an agent set all of the 77 email notification toggles off, which in hindsight was obvious but I wasn't going to do that manually since every toggle has their own separate page, it's a lot of clicks.)
Pro-tip: it costs very, very few tokens to have an agent (harness) sleep a random amount of hours between each toggle. Just tell it to. It's not burning tokens on `sleep`, just to call it.
It might not hit input cache at that rate but better than a block or ban. Keep the context window small.
"Companies" are not capable of feeling irony. They absolutely will demand the unfettered right to scrape your stuff while demanding that your scrapers be outlawed at the same time, and if you go "hey, that's hypocritical of you", you won't get any response, not even a half-hearted rebuttal or uncaring shrug. Taking about "hypocrisy" or "philosophical consistency" with regard to corporate behavior is almost a category error, these aren't concepts which even exist in that space.
138 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 12.6 ms ] threadIf I have to drive to the store to get it, I wouldn’t have shopped with them! It feels like every time I don’t order with Amazon the stores remind me why I ought to.
Now whether you want to restrict your shop to only being accessed via a mobile app is a totally different proposition.
Agents invalidate a lot of that and so it is an existential threat to many of them. I expect the near future will result in a lot of different results tailored to agents that may actually result in higher priced products for agents browsing versus humans.
Wasn't there some restaurant review site that gets accused of doing pay-to-play hiding of negative reviews and promoting positive ones that calls up businesses and basically extorts them into their services? They have all the incentive in the world now to manipulate the results shown to AI agents. You won't even see the manipulation directly yourself when there's an AI sitting between you and the source acting like an obfuscation layer.
Grim. No point in writing blog posts or publishing anything for free if that's the future.
I have (currently free but maybe paid in the future) accounts for side projects with businesses that Claude chose for me. (I reviewed the suggestion, but didn’t see a problem or reason to change it.) Why did Claude choose those providers? No idea, but if it’s through subtle marketing to Claude, then well done to them.
Websites cost money. Websites won't cater to bots the same way they don't cater to the scrapers of old. Some bot companies may be charged extra to integrate their bots in some websites, though!
Fortunately, if AI is really superhuman in capabilities it may still win the battle for the customer and keep prices competitive: aggressive price comparison, alternatives discovery, negotiation, group buying, etc.
I mean there are multiple reasons not just the AI agents but that's also a part of it
Another more blunt way to say it is that people can instruct their agents to look out for their best interests (and while there are cracks they continue to get better at this), and companies hate that.
People will work around it similar to how we've worked around with adblockers for years, and it will just become a game of attrition as these companies work to preserve their moats until they find a way to preserve this revenue stream off of people's agents.
I do see that there is another side to this. I saw complaints by an event organizer (think weddings etc) who got some special requests and went above and beyond to accommodate but it turns out the extensive requests likely were AI generated fully optimizing for the customer's interests, and just shamelessly asking for many favors essentially. She used to do these things because humans had a bit of embarrassment and friction around asking too many things and so it worked on a social agreement that if you ask it likely is truly important that you made the effort to ask. Now this cannot be assumed. So things will more to more formal rules, more explicit pricing for the small asks, and generally more adversarial and low trust systems that fully squeeze out the human slack from these systems.
It really sucks for small businesses. Their websites get absolutely hammered and they can’t afford or don’t know how to stop it. Cloudflare ends up winning as they’re the easiest solution.
phpBB will assign you a randomized session if if you visit it anonymously (without logging in), and will serve the page to you with that sid param added to all links. Using that link will load a page without the sid param appended to links, because the system assumes you have a session I'd saved in a cookie since it saw you have a sid, even I'd you don't have/didn't send a cookie with it. Following any of those links starts the chain over if you aren't sending a cookie along with a sid, which the AI scrapers never do so they can't easily be blocked by that, and a new unique sid is generated, and all the links have the new sid appended.
Every page with a unique set of params and values needs to be investigated, because it can be an entirely different page, so AI scrapers will scrap forever, always finding more and more URLs to harvest, even though they're all duplicates of what they already have. It's easy to have multiple scrapers stuck going through a very small bulletin board continuously.
Maybe they've gotten smart enough to deal with this situation in the last few months, or maybe they put in a specific workaround. I ended up just throwing the site behind cloudflare because spending time trying to outsmart AI agents in a battle of escalation doesn't seem like an effective use of my time.
Bunny.net is another one that I find similar to Cloudflare from pricing and functionality perspective
I've been wondering to myself "how can I get people to go through a login process without going through a login process?" for a few months, and I've come up with a simple solution which I'll be implementing in the next few weeks.[1] Like the other technical measures it doesn't identify bots but there will be a gate with backpressure that at a point in time a given IP address has some probability (adjusted in realtime based on $things) of passing through, and through my mysterious process is then "logged in". Then that address is pretty much given a free pass as long as its behavior remains "human". Real humans may be denied access initially and have to try again, and their luck will be affected by how aggressively the bots are fighting it out at that point in time. This isn't much different than the extant reality, but it is in terms of what happens after an initial successful page load. It's an experiment, I'm hoping it's tunable so that the experience is more or less indistinguishable from the status quo; we will see.
I'd love to find a group of likeminded individuals where we can discuss some of this TLP:YELLOW or Chatham House Rules. If you are savvy enough to hunt me down and can demonstrate that you're a real human, small operator, and that you can keep things closely held I'll talk with you, if you want someone to run your mitigations that would cost money.
[0] Had an episode last week where somebody scanned approximately 1000 URLs (maybe 60% of the discoverable URLs) over six hours. 1200 addresses fetched exactly one URL, another 400 or so fetched two or three. Every one of those URLs was fetched exactly two times. Real showshoe stuff, nicely done. [1] Firewall rules and fail2ban. I give fail2ban special powers in terms of the logs it follows and the actions it can invoke. Conntrack without conntrack (of course the firewall has conntrack, it's just not the best option for this use case).
What prevents other hosting sites from providing similar tooling?
As a user (bot or flesh) you have to jump through these hoops, and to the website operators they get fewer complaints when users (and bots) are able to contort themselves in predictable ways. Versus you'd perceive as a website operator, if your blocking worked at all, that you'd risk seeing a precipitous dropoff of bots if you did things in bespoke ways, as both bots (true positives, among dd and cf survivors) and people (false positives) get jammed.
The net effect in this model would be that such things as cloudflare and datadome take money from websites in order to block "dumb" bots and enfranchise "smart" bots to the point of creating a market for bot services. People that want to bot have to use AI or go to bot service providers.
For website operators that's a worthwhile exchange for dollars, in that dumb bots can cause a lot of harm in wasted compute. Bots are typically dead end users who won't buy ever anyway, or merely inefficient way of doing business if they scrape excessively. And many do scrape excessively.
"reform school for bots" is a good mental model. For this to work, the "reforms" have to be consistent so that bots can conform to them.
It's a peculiar equilibrium and I am not sure that it's all that stable as an equilibrium. Would be a good subject for a formal treatment, game theory and economics.
It works similar to cloudflare WAF but is an open source software. It can be on your own infrastructures even if its a $5 VPS.
The idea is same let the bot or AI agent do more work than it takes to serve that request. Also it needs to follow rules, similar to cloudflare enterprise web application firewalls. It was OWASP CRS and J4A TLS support.
Look like rust rewrite to make more performant?
And the problem often isn't some advanced attack. It's enough to follow links with session params, generate endless urls or ignore robots.txt to turn a regular crawler into a load generator. A site owner needs crawler protection from specific behavior and not another list of known bot signatures
> Instead of trying to fight Amazon, the company has partnered with retailers like Walmart, Gap, Sephora, Best Buy, and others, allowing Muse to shop on their sites. At the same time, Shopify has also opened its network of storefronts to AI agents.
they're making deals with the sites so that the agents can work, the sites get compensated. I hope for this "AI can do what it wants if it pays" model to expand further. Cloudflare told us months ago we'd have an option to get paid by AI crawlers. I signed up to join but of course as a nobody I never got a reply.
So the stores aren't being paid to let the agent in. Meta expects them to pay it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx8lrn-cytc&t=1551s
First they forced their malware bot farms on us, now they want to rent them to us so they can turn the entire web into the dark web.
And eventually rug pull off the major retail sites and just redirect traffic to their own darker sites to scrape commissions, sell direct and keep the change.
I'm sure the teams thinking this up buy their lunches from a ghost kitchen run by illegals that's never had a health inspection,
located in the back of a laundromat with a phony business license and website that only accepts crypto.
Both the consumer and the manufacturer/labor/driver/gig-worker always get the short end of the stick.... once AI-agents becomes indispensable part of life.
Either way, the benefits of price transparency are not imaginary, but they are also not the only factor. Things like insufficient buyers or sellers, government policy, etc are also in play.
All else being equal, a buyer being able to easily see seller A is more expensive than seller B for the same goods will result in lower prices for the buyer. But all else is rarely equal.
It would be way different if it was an open network where drivers are allowed to set prices and reject rides without any penalty, and riders can send multiple offers at a time then take the best one. That would be a real competitive market where everyone is free to choose what they buy and sell.
In that scenario Uber would be one of many apps you can use that index the network, whitelist trusted drivers and handle payments for a small fee. And if you want to make a new app or do the whole process manually there's nothing to stop you. That's what shopping on the open web is like.
https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/l40...
I ended up creating a browser-use solution that can pose as me. Works great and gets around the blocking of things like curl.
Want to argue for a shining new world, but you're on a locked site? I guess we'll have to live with dystopia. Want to sell the greatest widget since the invention of sliced bread? Well, I never found it. Sorry, I bought inferior widgets from your competitor instead. I'm at a physical sales location, but I can't access your spec-sheets? Your competitor the next shelf over doesn't have that problem, I'll go buy theirs.
I'm trying to build a personal social media client to stop the platforms from shoving their feeds down my throat and to consume only the content I care about, so this hits home.
(I just got blocked from LinkedIn for letting an agent set all of the 77 email notification toggles off, which in hindsight was obvious but I wasn't going to do that manually since every toggle has their own separate page, it's a lot of clicks.)
It might not hit input cache at that rate but better than a block or ban. Keep the context window small.
"Companies" are not capable of feeling irony. They absolutely will demand the unfettered right to scrape your stuff while demanding that your scrapers be outlawed at the same time, and if you go "hey, that's hypocritical of you", you won't get any response, not even a half-hearted rebuttal or uncaring shrug. Taking about "hypocrisy" or "philosophical consistency" with regard to corporate behavior is almost a category error, these aren't concepts which even exist in that space.