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Yeah it's sort of weird that people are so used to using their computer to interact with other computers across the internet that the whole thing has become inv
by jt2190 1mo ago
Yeah it's sort of weird that people are so used to using their computer to interact with other computers across the internet that the whole thing has become invisible to them: They completely forget that they're using a computer at all. Along come "bots" and suddenly everyone remembers that the whole thing involves computers. Driving the computer by hand for hours was never efficient, but is marginally entertaining I guess.
- wasmperson 1mo agoThis reminds me of all the confused comments that pop up whenever someone calls plain HTML with forms and links a "REST API." "But APIs are for programs! People visiting websites aren't programs." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32141027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32141027
- quectophoton 1mo agoTangential but still related to that story, but the battle for the meaning of "REST" is already lost. Saying an API follows REST but doesn't implement HATEOAS (part of its definition), is like saying a database follows ACID but doesn't implement Atomicity. Or like saying a software is Open Source but doesn't allow use for commercial purposes. Yet somehow for one of those 3 cases it became accepted to misuse the term that way ("[original meaning] but without this one constraint"), but if someone misuses the term for the other two cases then everyone suddenly cares and insist that people should use a different term to describe their thing.
- hk__2 1mo agoI’m not forgetting anything here. Bots and humans behind browsers are different things.
- illiac786 1mo agoHow is the difference relevant here?
- hk__2 1mo agoI care about people reading my content with their browser. I don’t care about bots.
- illiac786 1mo agoThat wasn’t the question. Do you care about humans using a bot to grab your webpage and extract information about it? If not, that’s fine, you just don’t care about a specific category of human users.
- psd1 1mo agoThe webmaster is publishing for humans.
- illiac786 1mo agoNot for browsers then?
- psd1 1mo agoWhen your reach the end of your journey across the sea of semantics and arrive at the shore of a lonely island, you can be king of it. Here, we are examining hosting costs.
- illiac786 1mo agoI simply don’t get why a human using a browser and a human using a bot using wget to load a page are different for a hoster, from your point of view. My suspicion is that you did not read the great grand parent post before replying to it and are now engaging in evasive tactics in order not to answer this simple question.
- psd1 1mo ago> hosting costs I think you missed that, in my last comment, and _in every word of the article_. You insist on a semantic equivalence that straddles two disjoint behaviours which incur vastly different cost profiles on publishers. Fishing with dynamite might be OK to feed a village, but when any twat can kill all the fish for a hundred metres in order to eat just one, then it's useful to draw a distinction. People who refuse to acknowledge a pertinent distinction are called "obtuse". One possible cause is ideology. I don't think you're stupid, just motivated.