221–229 of 229 posts
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A plugin protocol that allows “applications” to interact with LLMs.
wouldn't it be for LLMs to interact with applications?
For LLMs to interact with applications (without a two way protocol) is achievable just with tools/functions.
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This automatic sense of entitlement to surveil users is the absolute embodiment of the banality of evil. It's 2025 - we want informed consent and voluntary participation with the default assumption that no, we do not want you watching over our shoulders, and no, you are not entitled to covertly harvest all the data you want and monetize that without notifying users or asking permissions. The whole ToS gotcha game is…
You're making a huge jump from "gathering anonymous counters to understand how many people use the thing" to "harvest all the data you want and monetize it". If they were tracking my identity across sites and actually selling it to the highest bidder that's one thing that we'll definitely agree on. This is so so far from that. You're welcome to build and use your own MCP browser automation if you're so hostile to the…
Any covert, involuntary, automatic surveillance of a person for any reason whatsoever should have a court order and legal authority behind it - it's gross and exposes the target to vulnerabilities they're not cognizant of.
For telemetry tracking user behavior to be useful at all, it's got to be associated with a user. The idea of telemetry anonymization is marketing speak for "we obfuscated it, we know deanonymization is trivial, but people are stupid, especially regulators."
Any anonymization done is sufficiently obfuscated such that corporate asses get covered in the case of any regulatory investigation. There's no legitimate, mathematically valid anonymization of user data that you could do without destroying the information that you're trying to get in the first place through these tools. This means that any aggregation of user data useful to a malicious actor will inevitably be compromised - the second Posthog or Amplitude become a desirable target, they'll get pwned and breached, and much handwringing will be done, and there will be no recourse or recompense for damages done.
The only strategy to prevent the dissemination of surveillance data is not to collect it in the first place. It should be illegal to collect the data without voluntary, user initiated participation, and any information collected should be ephemeral with regular inspection to ensure compliance. Any violation of user privacy should result in crippling fines, something like 5% of the value of the company per user per day of violation - if you can't responsibly manage the data, you shouldn't be collecting it.
This means all the automatic continuous development a/b testing intrusive corner cutting corporate bullshit would have to stop. Continually leaking surveillance data to malicious actors year over year with no repercussions has thoroughly demonstrated that people cannot be trusted with safekeeping data.
I will build and use my own automation if I need to, based on products that don't covertly, involuntarily, ignorantly surveil their users, without even being aware of potential for harm, and I'll continue to point it out when it shows up in random projects and products, because it's wrong and it should stop.
We should stop embracing the things that enshittify the world, and stop sacrificing things like "other people's privacy" for convenience or profit.
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> Suppose it does become a thing, what then? We end up with an internet which is heavily optimised for bots (arguably it already is to an extent) and unusable for humans? As opposed to the Web we now have, which is heavily optimized for... wasting human life . What you're asking for, what "large companies such as CloudFlare have spent millions on", is verifying that on the other end of the connection is a web browser…
Sorry it wasn't entirely clear that I was by no means saying the web in its current form is anything close to what it could/should be. My main point was that, by making backdoors for MCPs there will be a new possible entry point for bad actors by exploiting said backdoor. As for the optimisation to _waste human life_ I do agree but the reality is that the sites which waste the majority of human life/time are the ones…
On the topic of:
> whether we really believe that the VC funders whom are largely responsible for the current state of the web will continue pumping money into something which would hurt their bottom line from another angle?
No, I don't believe that at all - which is why I keep saying the current situation is an anomaly, a brief moment in time. LLMs deployed in form of general-purpose chatbots/agents are giving too much power to the people, which is already becoming disruptive to many businesses, so that power will be gradually taken away. Expect less general-purpose AI agents, and more "AI powered features" that shackle LLMs behind some limited UI, to ensure you can only get as much benefit from AI as it fits the vendors' business strategies.
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I don't see this being a solution for full e2e regression testing. Having to run inference for each command/test seems expensive. I do think there's room for self-healing tests after failure.
If this works well enough couldn't you save the selectors and only use inference running the test for the first time and when the UI has changed. Cheaper than dev?
Crazy, in looking up some info on the web and creating a Spreadsheet on Google Sheets to insert the results, it worked almost perfectly the first time and completely failed subsequently on 8-10 different tries. Is there an issue with the lag between what is happening in the browser and the MCP app (in my case Claude Desktop)? I have a feeling the first time I tried it, I was fast enough clicking the "Allow for this c…
example: https://x.com/xing101/status/1903391600040083488 set up: https://github.com/xing5/mcp-google-sheets
When I go to a shopping website I want to be able to tell my browser "hey please go through all the sideboards on this list and filter out for the ones that are larger than 155cm and smaller than 100cm, prioritise the ones with dark wood and space for vinyl records which are 31.43cm tall" for example. Is there any browser that can do this yet as it seems extremely useful to be able to extract details from the page!
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Correct. Telemetry should _always_ be opt-in and explicitly an easy choice to not engage. Any other mode of operation is morally bankrupt.
Really? The hyperbole does not help anyone here. I don't sign a term sheet when I order at McDonalds but you can be damn sure they count how many big macs I order. Does that make them morally bankrupt? Or is it just a normal business operation that is actually totally reasonable?
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You're making a huge jump from "gathering anonymous counters to understand how many people use the thing" to "harvest all the data you want and monetize it". If they were tracking my identity across sites and actually selling it to the highest bidder that's one thing that we'll definitely agree on. This is so so far from that. You're welcome to build and use your own MCP browser automation if you're so hostile to the…
The supply chain vulnerability in any extension is obvious. The problems with telemetry - any at all - are wide ranging and it's crazy to me that people don't see this. Any covert, involuntary, automatic surveillance of a person for any reason whatsoever should have a court order and legal authority behind it - it's gross and exposes the target to vulnerabilities they're not cognizant of. For telemetry tracking user…