you know what a browser is called by the web site? check the header that tells the version.

USER AGENT

not user, an agent on behalf of the user.

the web was intended to be usable by agents belonging to users. in our path of the multiverse, the main agent we think of happens to be live interactive browser. but that need not have been, nor will it be in the future, the dominant USER AGENT.

for a glimpse at one possible futureverse, check out what the home assistant community is up to, how they assemble then update the ambient information displays on their walls. their USER AGENTS are doing what most HN-style "hackers" dreamed of reading scifi as kids.

the alternative is all your in home information owned by corpos when the info should be from user agents not corpo feeds. if you want to vote this idea down, you might be a corpo. :-)

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zamadatix 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I fancy the approach myself... but, much like the grand ideas of OSI in networking, Tim Burners Lee's idea of the Web was never what was going to be used and a lot of the original terms/concepts just plain don't make sense for the Web that exists. It was, originally, a true document system, nothing more. It wasn't until many changes from the original idea that it started to be what people wanted & actually use today. Nor was it even part of Tim Burners-Lee's original concept that 99% of Web traffic would be something other than users viewing & editing HyperText documents.

The User Agent would get a HyperText document from a Web server, render it, and show it to the user. You could parse HTML, display images, and follow links - with the assumption the user would want to edit them like any other document. There was no encryption. There was no scripting for dynamic content. Styling was done via semantic markup. There wasn't even any POST when the User Agent term was initially applied. Everything was supposed to be like one big distributed document store instead of centralized hosting on few servers for many client devices.

All that is to say: Regardless what I think sounds nice myself, if the web was just the original vision & definitions instead of everything it changed and grew to become we wouldn't even be using it to have this conversation.

Interestingly, people seem glad to have telephony companies filter bots even though the original idea of the telephone did not call out robocallers as invalid clients. Probably because, unlike the modern Web, the average person gets a chance to see what it means to allow anything inbound even though the original concept never considered robocallers.

	▲	Terretta an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I was on the internet before HTML and long before Mosaic... I agree with one aspect of the narrative you're saying, his idea was held as being for «documents». To be sure, document was more abstract than document on a Mac. Either way, I'm very sad it mostly turned into animated brochures instead. But the reason styles were separate, the reason everyone talked about semantics, was always about the universal knowledge DAG and enabling machines to help us navigate and retrieve it. It's why so many of the early agents referenced navigation (Spyglass, Navigator) or the interconnectedness of things (Mosaic). So, ok, big document “store”, but that's a lifeless noun. The information you are looking for, the dots connected for you surfacing what you didn't know, that's a living growing thing, an agentic retrieval savvy knowledge engine, distributed for curation and resilience. The librarian was always to be a machine or many, on our behalf.

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jt2190 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This 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

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deathbob 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> for a glimpse at one possible futureverse, check out what the home assistant community is up to, how they assemble then update the ambient information displays on their walls. their USER AGENTS are doing what most HN-style "hackers" dreamed of reading scifi as kids.

I would love some pointers to read up on this, what are some examples of this? Genuinely, not being a troll or ironic

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baby_souffle 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> I would love some pointers to read up on this, what are some examples of this? Genuinely, not being a troll or ironic

There's a "look what I built!" thread every few days on the /r/homeassistant sub and the home assistant forums, too.

The data sources vary but it's usually a mix of devices that the user has locally and some remote data sources like weather/public transit schedules APIs or RSS and in some cases also utility rate info all integrated into a SPOG that is then displayed on some ambient screen (usually a hacked tablet or other cheap ARM device)

	▲	wredcoll an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It's an interesting example. People did very similar things during the "desktop shell modification" scene in the early 2000s, by far the most common thing people modified their desktop shell to do was display a bunch of charts and graphs of semi-random information, usually about their local computer. It was useless in 99.9% of the cases. You don't need or want to have constant access to how much free ram your computer currently has, as if that even meant anything. So, after a few steps, that leads to the question "what is useful information? How do you define that?" A basic attempt at it might be: useful information is something that causes you to make or change a previous decision. Take an action you wouldn't have otherwise done. If you're living in the american southwest, and it's between the months of like, march and, dunno, septemeber, you probably don't need to know the current outside temperature to decide if you're wearing shorts or a jacket when you get up in the morning (you're wearing shorts because it's always hot) Theoretically there could be some kind of "extreme" weather, aka rain, that causes you to do something different, bring an umbrella, but it's pretty difficult to not notice it currently raining, even if you're inside a house. So what other information do you want? There's all sorts of stuff that's considered "news", but I'd argue that at least 98% of that is basically just entertainment. We'd need some kind of article or perhaps even a book to hammer out all the nuances involved, but seeing a headline in the morning that trump has caved in to iran again or killed some more random people on a boat, while sort of important to know, doesn't really change what you're going to be doing that day. Knowing ICE is trying to do some domestic terrorism near where you might be could be useful information, but there's not a real good way to track that. So yeah, what kind of information is actually useful to have in the morning? Stuff like calendar appointments would count, knowing you have things scheduled at specific moments or tasks to do, go grocery shopping, etc, todo lists in otherwords, but what else? That's basically all self-generated stuff by you about you, you don't really need any outside data sources.

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pessimizer 10 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> you know what a browser is called by the web site? check the header that tells the version.

You mean that key whose only legitimate values also call every browser Mozilla? Arguing from the dictionary is so tedious. I'm going to scrape your site, but the idea that you have some obligation to like it because of the definition of the word "agent" is profoundly stupid.

A lot of people live off ads. I block ads. People who live off ads aren't obligated to like it - and are free to take any means to block it without moral hazard.

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asgraham 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Can you recommend a specific home assistant community to check out?

	▲	nickthegreek 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		r/homeassistant

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charcircuit 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This website refers to browsers as browsers. Just because a header in the underlying protocol is named a certain way, that doesn't necessarily reflect what the humans intend.

https://www.ycombinator.com/legal

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hluska 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I downvoted it because you don’t use capital letters and still feel inclined to make people read this rant. Corpo is a really stupid slur and reading this rant was a waste of my time.

	▲	nickthegreek 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		So instead of adding of addressing his point about User Agents, you decide its better to make a low level bullshit comment about the very last sentence to stand up for... checks notes... Corporations and dismiss everything else. Top notch quality content that for sure added to the conversation.

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doc_ick 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

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dspillett 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> not user, an agent on behalf of the user.

Identified by the user agent header. Which most bots fake or leave out to increase the chance of getting where they are not wanted.

Your bot is a good bot? Great, let us know when you've dealt with all the bad bots and we'll open the doors to the remaining (good) bots again.