Hmm, maybe I’m a bit of a simpleton. The other day, while researching Facebook’s/Meta’s open graph protocol and metadata, I had a rare bout of curiosity and clicked on the discussion section.

Is the public group page just full of bots advertising to each other? Interesting.

Discussing strategies for detecting AI agents and crawlers has its apocalyptic comedy. How many humans are bots, and bots humans? If captchas are unsolvable and work unprovable, then you are a bot. But guess what? I’m not smart enough to play captcha!

So I’m a bot (that’s a joke) and technology works in unwitting ways. The web wants smart humanoids not dumb humans — it’s robots.txt not humans.txt, silly.

Related; a developer creates an AI friend. You are impressed and buy the thousand dollar one time licence. Your developer friend chats with you from the comfort of a phone with automated assistance. I can’t believe it’s not AI?

Remember deep linking? That is, if you’ve ever done computing/science history. Deep linking was a nefarious act and for ultra brief periods (in some places) making a link (like this) was link stealing.

Basically, homepage links were a–ok, but deep links were bad, really bad, because customers skipped the front and arrived at the exact (product) page. Businesses died overnight (the hypo theory).

Deep linking is smartphone marketing lingo now and very much desired. My hunch is that something analogous to taking a screen shot will be the modern equivalent of that unworkable controversy.

Did you know that cPanel has a back end user–space API? I’ve yet to see a web front end user dashboard that’s reliable and consistent.