What I meant with “things like this are awful for the web,” I meant that automation through AI is awful for the web. It takes away from the original content creators without any attribution and hits their bottom line.

My story was supposed to be one about responsible AI, but somehow I screwed that up in my summary.

I’ve developed my own agent for assisting me with researching a topic I’m passionate about, and I ran into the exact same barrier: Cloudflare intercepts my request and is clearly checking if I’m a human using a web browser. (For my network requests, I’ve defined my own user agent.)

So I use that as a signal that the website doesn’t want automated tools scraping their data. That’s fine with me: my agent just tells me that there might be interesting content on the site and gives me a deep link. I can extract the data and carry on my research on my own.

I completely understand where Perplexity is coming from, but at scale, implementations like this Perplexity’s are awful for the web.

(Edited for clarity)

That was an interesting read, thanks for sharing!

No doubt they are all overpriced, but I thoroughly researched my Škoda before buying it in 2020 and it was competitively priced, especially with its reliability score and relatively low maintenance cost. In my case of course anecdotal, but I’ve had no issues after 90,000 km with a lot of Autobahn.

Ah, my apologies. I had interpreted your message to suggest that pouring cement from a robotic arm fully replaced all of the construction work of framing and finishing all of the walls of the house, interior and exterior, plus attaching them and insulating them, with a single step.

I understand your point, but have you driven a VW in the past decade? They are reliable, relatively easy to repair and have comfortable interiors that aren’t with “hard plastic.” Perhaps you’ve confused VW with Ford?

Spoken like a person who has never been involved in the construction of a home. It’s effectively doing the job of (poorly) pouring concrete which isn’t the difficult or time consuming part.