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> But probably more difficult to get app developers on board. That's it. The problem is getting Postmates to agree to give away control of their UI. Giving awa

> But probably more difficult to get app developers on board. That's it. The problem is getting Postmates to agree to give away control of their UI. Giving away their ability to upsell you and push whatever makes them more money. Its never going to happen. Netflix still isn't integrated with Apple TV properly because they don't want to give away that access. I'm not convinced this is the path forward for computers either though.

jsheard 2y ago
> I'm not convinced this is the path forward for computers either though. With this approach they'll have to contend with the agent running into all the anti-bot measures that sites have implemented to deal with abuse. CAPTCHAs, flagging or blocking datacenter IP addresses, etc. Maybe deals could be struck to allow agents to be whitelisted, but that assumes the agents won't also be used for abuse. If you could get ChatGPT to spam Reddit[1] then Reddit probably wouldn't cooperate. [1] https://gizmodo.com/oh-no-this-startup-is-using-ai-agents-to-flood-reddit-with-marketing-slop-2000548827 https://gizmodo.com/oh-no-this-startup-is-using-ai-agents-to...
- xnx 2y ago
  > With this approach they'll have to contend with the agent running into all the anti-bot measures that sites have implemented to deal with abuse I expect many more sites to adopt login requirements. This has the added benefit of more tracking/marketing data.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  The solution is simple, and it's what's already done with search by proprietary LLMs: reasoning happens on the LLM vendor's servers, tool use happens client-side. Whether for search or "computer use", the websites will register activity coming from the user's machine, as it should be, because LLMs act as User Agents here. Of course, already with LLM-powered search we see growing number of people doing the selfish/idiotic thing and blocking or poisoning user-initiated LLM interactions[0]; hopefully LLM tools following the practice above will spread quickly enough to beat this idea out of peoples' heads. -- [0] - As opposed to LLM company crawlers that scrape the web for training data - blocking those is fine and follows the cultural best practices on the web, which have been holding for decades now. But guess what, LLM crawlers tend to obey robots.txt. The "bots" that don't are usually the ones performing specific query on behalf of users; such bots act as User Agents, neither have nor ever had any obligation to obey robots.txt.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
Analemma_ 2y ago
And it's why you can't have a single messaging app that acts as a unified inbox for all the various services out there. XMPP could've been that but it died, and Microsoft tried to have it on Windows Phone but the messaging apps told them to get fucked. Open API interoperability is the dream but it's clear it will never happen unless it's forced by law.
Nevermark 2y ago
This is classic disruption vulnerability creation in real time. AI’s are (just) starting to devalue the moat benefits of human-only interfaces. New entrants that preemptively give up on human-only “security” or moats, have a clear new opening at the low end. Especially with development costs dropping. (Specifics of product or service being favorable.) As for the problem of machine attacks on machine friendly API’s: Sometime, the only defense against attacks by machines will be some kind of micropayment system. Payments too small to be relevant to anyone getting value, but don’t scale for anyone trying to externalize costs onto their target (what all attacks essentially are).
- plaguuuuuu 2y ago
  Internet subscription, anyone? Access over 500 websites for $39.99 a month.
  - Nevermark 2y ago
    I am thinking cents per some small usage unit, refundable for operating per sites terms. That convention, implemented well to distribute & decentralize spike impacts, would force any direct overuse attack to take on significant financial risk. While essentially not costing anyone else. It might still be damaging to availability, but as a service provider I would rather get paid handsomely for periods of being too overwhelmed to service my legitimate customers than not. The main benefit is having machine interfaces, but those kinds of attacks being heavily disincentivized.

jsheard 2y ago

> I'm not convinced this is the path forward for computers either though. With this approach they'll have to contend with the agent running into all the anti-bot measures that sites have implemented to deal with abuse. CAPTCHAs, flagging or blocking datacenter IP addresses, etc. Maybe deals could be struck to allow agents to be whitelisted, but that assumes the agents won't also be used for abuse. If you could get ChatGPT to spam Reddit[1] then Reddit probably wouldn't cooperate. [1] https://gizmodo.com/oh-no-this-startup-is-using-ai-agents-to-flood-reddit-with-marketing-slop-2000548827 https://gizmodo.com/oh-no-this-startup-is-using-ai-agents-to...

xnx 2y ago
> With this approach they'll have to contend with the agent running into all the anti-bot measures that sites have implemented to deal with abuse I expect many more sites to adopt login requirements. This has the added benefit of more tracking/marketing data.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
The solution is simple, and it's what's already done with search by proprietary LLMs: reasoning happens on the LLM vendor's servers, tool use happens client-side. Whether for search or "computer use", the websites will register activity coming from the user's machine, as it should be, because LLMs act as User Agents here. Of course, already with LLM-powered search we see growing number of people doing the selfish/idiotic thing and blocking or poisoning user-initiated LLM interactions[0]; hopefully LLM tools following the practice above will spread quickly enough to beat this idea out of peoples' heads. -- [0] - As opposed to LLM company crawlers that scrape the web for training data - blocking those is fine and follows the cultural best practices on the web, which have been holding for decades now. But guess what, LLM crawlers tend to obey robots.txt. The "bots" that don't are usually the ones performing specific query on behalf of users; such bots act as User Agents, neither have nor ever had any obligation to obey robots.txt.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

Analemma_ 2y ago

And it's why you can't have a single messaging app that acts as a unified inbox for all the various services out there. XMPP could've been that but it died, and Microsoft tried to have it on Windows Phone but the messaging apps told them to get fucked. Open API interoperability is the dream but it's clear it will never happen unless it's forced by law.

Nevermark 2y ago

This is classic disruption vulnerability creation in real time. AI’s are (just) starting to devalue the moat benefits of human-only interfaces. New entrants that preemptively give up on human-only “security” or moats, have a clear new opening at the low end. Especially with development costs dropping. (Specifics of product or service being favorable.) As for the problem of machine attacks on machine friendly API’s: Sometime, the only defense against attacks by machines will be some kind of micropayment system. Payments too small to be relevant to anyone getting value, but don’t scale for anyone trying to externalize costs onto their target (what all attacks essentially are).

plaguuuuuu 2y ago
Internet subscription, anyone? Access over 500 websites for $39.99 a month.
- Nevermark 2y ago
  I am thinking cents per some small usage unit, refundable for operating per sites terms. That convention, implemented well to distribute & decentralize spike impacts, would force any direct overuse attack to take on significant financial risk. While essentially not costing anyone else. It might still be damaging to availability, but as a service provider I would rather get paid handsomely for periods of being too overwhelmed to service my legitimate customers than not. The main benefit is having machine interfaces, but those kinds of attacks being heavily disincentivized.