[klabb3]

Rules for thee not for me. Scraping for instance is bad only when other people do it.

Technically speaking though, user facing websites are built with quite weak UI accessibility in mind. Partly to prevent others bots from using it. I worry less about the LLM/AI particularities, and more about adding yet another comprehensive layer to the stack. It’d not exactly be standing on solid foundation.

During the 2010s Web 2.0 there was a brief moment where open APIs and such were trending, which was a bit of rejuvenation of interoperability across companies, domains, applications etc. To simplify we can call it cross-app interactions, like auto hotkey, Automator, etc. An LLM controlled broker falls in that domain as well. But now that “closed binary fuck you” model came back industry wide, it’s almost impossible to build such things. (It’s hard enough to build integrations when people are cooperating. When they’re actively adversarial, things generally break quickly, if they work at all)

[smashah]

The promises of web 2.0 were stolen from us.

Adversarial interop should be a digital human right.

Put an API layer in front of UFO and all of a sudden we're one step closer to the unshittification of our digital lives.

[drdaeman]

Just wait until application designers start to create machine-hostile interfaces to prevent vision models from recognizing what to click, or introducing rate limits on UI interactions. There is a strong desire to control how one's product (app, website, or whatever) is used.

[dartos]

I’ve worked on many sites over the past 10 years.

Never once was the conscious decision made to not be accessible to prevent bots from scraping.

[klabb3]

Me neither but I’ve also scraped sites and seen this is very commonplace. Especially the last couple of years it’s been ramped up. Twitter and Reddit locking down api access. You know that gchat and facebook chat were both open back in the day? Today you’re lucky if you can use a niche web browser to access a large web site. So I don’t mean accessibility necessarily in terms of human accessibility, but in a broader sense. Some of the anti-bot measures are creating problems for humans as well.