cphoover

This is like when cryptocurrency was in full hype cycle, but even more severe as it touches every inch of the industry.

Anybody have a cache/mirror of this? This is blocked by a corporate firewall... sigh

Seems a bit silly (especially given how easy LLM's make building such an accessory)

I'm afraid I am addicted to short-form video and wish I could go back to spending more of my free-time reading books.

I wonder if someone educated in this could provide the neurological benefits of reading, outside of communication. They are numerous, are they not? Memory, neuroplasticity, focus, stress relief—I'm sure there are many other benefits too.

Asking customers to pay anything prior to purchase is a non-starter... Imagine a brick-and-mortar shoe store asking customers to pay an entry fee to shop before customers enter the door?

That's just going to be a really different from the shopping experience customer's are used to today, and I don't think customers would go for it. I know for at company asking customers to pay for the shopping experience would be a non-starter... If bot traffic became untenable we would probably do something like required account creation + sms verification, and even that would be a huge change in expectations for our customers.

Some of the agents out there today can bypass Cloudflare's CAPTCHA challenges.

As I understand it as models driving agent behavior of headless browsers are getting more and more sophisticated it's getting harder to reliably predict.

The same way LLM's without watermarking cannot be reliably classified as "not-human" neural-network driven scraping tools are getting harder to detect.

Cloudflare, and DataDome position themselves as companies that can detect automated traffic using things like IP reputation, behavioral signals, timing... But these things can be faked through proxy-networks, human behavior signals can be imitated with generative AI the same way text can be, web bots can utilize neural networks to generate trajectories and timings similar to those of humans.

If you can have an AI use a browser the same way a human can how can you distinguish the two?

This doesn't seem to solve the issue that website operators face... which is providing a free public experience to humans while the price of hosting is driven up by increased bot traffic. The issue isn't charging for API access with request caps, that's not hard to do. It's preserving the free experience for our users while our traffic is increasingly made up of bots. The problem is that AI has made it increasingly difficult to tell bot from human. Baking microtransactions attached to APIs into an internet standard does not solve the core issue... And if we can't tell bot from human, why would bots choose to pay rather than just use the public endpoints we serve to our customers?

For example, take a large online retailer... They have to show their products to customers (for free) for people to be able to shop, but increasingly they see spikes in traffic that match what would be expected from targeted bot attacks or scraping... But this traffic is getting more and more difficult to distinguish from legitimate traffic to the website. They could easily add this x402 middleware to their services, or they could offer API access to their product catalog for a price and enforce usage limits... But if they cannot reliably detect human users from bot/agent users, they have no way of pushing the bot/agent users to paid access... And why would the people running these bots pay when they're already getting what they need for free? Now Cloudflare cannot even reliably block bot traffic, and there are AI based browsing/scraping tools available now for bypassing Cloudflare.

We couldn't possibly be in a bubble.

I missed the sarcasm at first. This is how people think... as Ebola spreads through central and eastern Africa. Why should we care?

I don't hate AI. What I hate is while billionaires are promising us a utopian future where work is optional, the price of food, housing, and healthcare in the USA is through the roof. Many people my age (millennials) cannot afford to buy a house for themselves like prior generations were able to. The supposed riches being produced by AI are not being realized for the majority of Americans.

At the same time they are enacting another round of massive layoffs.

Why does this company deserve tax-breaks on their AI data-centers again?