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  • mccmcc@mastodon.social
    Oct 9, 2026, 8:27 PM

    A thing that just keeps striking me hard. We are told, oh agents are the future. Agents will be able to perform every task you could imagine. It will change how you engage with the computer. You just give a directive and the AI operates every website and computer program on your behalf.

    Meanwhile, EVERY WEBSITE I VISIT makes me jump through hoops to make absolutely certain I am not some sort of AI before I can do something as simple as visit the Merriam-Webster thesaurus page for "gullible"

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Replies

  • mccmcc@mastodon.social
    Oct 9, 2026, 8:29 PM

    Now, in *practice*, I'm pretty sure I know exactly what the endgame is, and the endgame is large yearly checks being cut to Cloudflare by every major cloud AI provider for "certification" in their "trusted agents program" in exchange for which the specific AI agents operated by those specific providers are allowed to directly visit the websites that humans have to wait 8 seconds for the "making sure you're not an AI agent" challenge. No, the websites themselves don't get a cut of this.

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  • mccmcc@mastodon.social
    Oct 9, 2026, 8:59 PM

    By the way, I looked up "Gullible" in the Merriam-Webster thesaurus today. That was a real thing I actually did

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  • margotemaytch@mastodon.social
    Oct 9, 2026, 8:53 PM

    @mcc really love this technology that makes the world worse for everyone except the owners of that technology

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  • Drew Scott Danielsdrewdaniels@mastodon.online
    Oct 9, 2026, 11:51 PM

    @mcc ai browsers and extensions so far don’t seem to be blocked as consistently as curl. Many models now seem to offer to bypass checks, or have a person assist.

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  • Jef Poskanzerjef@mastodon.social
    Oct 11, 2026, 7:09 PM

    @mcc Not only do the web site not get a cut of the grift but we have to pay our ISP for the "trusted agents" trying to fetch non-existent files hundreds of times per second.

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  • Fabian ¯\_(ツ)_/¯BafDyce@chaos.social
    Oct 11, 2026, 9:22 PM

    @mcc Most brainsloped people will probably react with something like "But where's the problem? Just tell your agent to open the website for you and return a summary of its content back to you!" and shrug it off as perfectly normal.

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  • dragonfrogdragonfrog@mastodon.sdf.org
    Oct 11, 2026, 8:56 PM

    @mcc meanwhile, purpose designed captcha-solving AI bots consistently outperformed humans at captchas already in 2023 (something like 99% success for the bots vs 80% for humans), while LLM AI bots are now only slightly worse at captchas than humans are and hundreds of times less efficient than the purpose designed ones.

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  • OffbeatmammalOffbeatmammal@mastodon.social
    Oct 12, 2026, 12:52 PM

    @mcc I used to be able to ask Alexa to "add bread and butter to my shopping list" and it understood I meant two different things. Now ... it fails. When I can reliably give an agent a shopping list and not have it mess it up, I will believe we are making progress.

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