This conflict is popping up everywhere. There is a push by a lot of companies to allow agentic use of their services (and new companies explicitly offering "X for agents"), ignoring the fact that "agent" means the same thing as "bot" which we've spent the last couple of decades actively filtering out. Will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Solid insight. What was once profane is now sacred. And it feels like it happened overnight. Lots to ponder on that.

The catalyst is probably the consent of payment processors, if I had to speculate.

The catalyst may be the upcoming elections.

In defense of old-school bots, we had to code them up by hand.

The future is the internet will be entirely bot activity and humans will ether be strapped in to the metaverse reels ai slop feed or they will be outside interacting with people in person again. Both of these seem like likely futures and probably both at the same time.

This reality also crystalized for me earlier this week when I saw a post about unchecked AI slop videos about WWE being posted to YouTube. Many of the videos suffer from the LLM stroking out (for lack of a better term) and devolving into mumbling, screaming and white noise. Yet, the comments are replete with obvious bot content which doesn't mention this at all and talks past the larger, flimsy narrative on display (i.e. AI-generated), anyways. We're exhausting our natural resources and reducing quality of life for a great number of real, live people so bots can talk past each other on YouTube.

So, if you're looking for me, I'll be hiking while it's still legal.

Here's the post I was referring to: https://bsky.app/profile/ompu.co/post/3mkjnnvvupk2b

You better mean “hiking” as in through the metaverse forest strapped into your corporate-sponsored VR headset, because outside time is for citizens only, friend.

So pne step towards the Neuromancer universe.

My wildest dream: we make a superintelligence, which destroys humanity to free up resources for it to make and consume an endless stream of impossibly cute kitten videos.

And before anybody replies: no, I don't mean "and puppy." They're just not as cute.

> By agreeing to these Terms, you represent and warrant to us: (i) that you have not previously been suspended or removed from the Websites and Online Services

CloudFlare ToS has you covered. A human must accept it, even with the new agentic flow.

I think this is just saying you can’t sign up for a new account after a previously created account gets suspended, not that the act of suspension itself causes you to violate the the terms of service in perpetuity because, pedantically, any suspension that has happened, happened “previously”.

Also be aware most website ToS are worth the paper they're printed on.

Perhaps more accurately they’re worth what it costs YOU in legal fees to defend them coming after you. Those are real dollars you still have to spend.

That cuts both ways though. Nobody is coming after you unless it is worth their legal department's time (which cost much more than your own lawyer).

Aaron Swartz faced 50 years in prison and $1 million in fines for sharing academic research papers on a local network. Meta/OpenAI/et al. rip off copyrights for profit and the Pentagon comes calling with flowers.

"Prove that you are a human" is such a nasty hack for lack of thought out solution for rate limiting. I'm really happy we are moving away from this.

Money talks.