jasonwcfan

Yeah the ways AI models have learned to interact with the world are all hilariously skeuomorphic given their capabilities. A model that runs on silicon has to learn English and Python in order to communicate with other models that also run on silicon. And to perceive the world they have to rely on images rendered in the limited wavelengths visible to the human eye.

But I much prefer this approach over allowing models to develop their own hyper-optimized information exchange protocols that are are black box to humans, and I hope things stay this way forever.

The way we plan to handle authenticated sessions is through a secret management service with the ability to ping an endpoint to check if the session is still valid, and if not, run a separate automation that re-authenticates and updates the secret manager with the new token. In that case, it wouldn't need to be stateful, but I can certainly see a case for statefulness being useful as workflows get even more complex.

As for device telemetry, my experience has been that most companies don't rely too much on it. Any heuristic used to identify bots is likely to have a high false positive rate and include many legitimate users, who then complain about it. Captchas are much more common and effective, though if you've seen some of the newer puzzles that vendors like Arkose Labs offers, it's a tossup whether the median human intelligence can even solve it.

I mentioned this in another comment, but I know from experience that it's impossible to reliably differentiate bots from humans over a network. And since the right to automate browsers has survived repeated legal challenges, all vendors can do is make it incrementally harder to weed out the low sophistication actors.

This actually creates an evergreen problem that companies need to overcome, and our paid version will probably involve helping companies overcome these barriers.

Also I should clarify that we're explicitly not trying to build a playwright abstraction - we're trying to remain as unopinionated as possible about how developers code the bot, and just help with the network-level infrastructure they'll need to make it reliable and make it scale.

It's good feedback for us, we'll make that point more clear!

Thanks! Wasn't familiar with Browserless but took a quick look. It seems they're very focused on the scraping use case. We're more focused on the agent use case. One of our first customers turned us on to this - they wanted to build an RPA automation to push data to a cloud EHR. The problem was it ran as a single page application with no URL routing, and had an extremely complex API for their backend that was difficult to reverse engineer. So automating the browser was the best way to integrate.

If you're trying to build an agent for a long-running job like that, you run into different problems: - Failures are magnified as a workflow has multiple upstream dependencies and most scraping jobs don't. - You have to account for different auth schemes (Oauth, password, magic link, etc) - You have to implement token refresh logic for when sessions expire, unless you want to manually login several times per day

We don't have most of these features yet, but it's where we plan to focus.

And finally, we've licensed Finic under Apache 2.0 whereas Browserless is only available under a commercial license.

Oops! We tested the Oauth flow but forgot to update the email one. Thanks for the heads up, fixing this now.

Proxies are definitely on our roadmap, but for now it just supports stock Playwright.

Thanks for the feedback! I just updated the repo to make it more clear that it's Playwright based. Once my cofounder wakes up I'll see if he can re-record the video as well.

Yep. I used to be the guy responsible for bot detection at Robinhood so I can tell you firsthand it's impossible to reliably differentiate between humans and machines over a network. So either you accept being automated, or you overcorrect and block legitimate users.

I don't think the dead internet theory is true today, but I think it will be true soon. IMO that's actually a good thing, more agents representing us online = more time spent in the real world.

A close friend of mine was an associate of Mr Beast, even living in his house in Greenville for several months. He confirmed a lot of the negative press about him in the media, and was himself ultimately screwed over by Jimmy and has been trying to get recompense for years.

MrBeast has always been clear that his goal is to make the best videos in the world. Not to be the most nurturing place to work, or the most philanthropically minded. This document makes that clear. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that in becoming the best in the world at youtube, he's had to become an extremely toxic individual.

My handwriting is barely legible, even to my self. So I'll stick to Notion, thank you very much.

Seems like this doesn't solve the problem, it just changes the nature of the problem from a link rot to having a single point of failure.

What assurances does perma cc give that it will continue to maintain its index for the foreseeable future as costs increase? Wayback machine is maintained by a non-profit with a charter and >$30m in annual donations/revenues. As far as I can tell Perma is maintained by a single entity (Harvard Law Library)

Not trying to be negative here but genuinely don't see how a SPOF is better than link rot.