Pedestrians can cross anywhere in the UK, except motorways. The barriers near crossings is likely to funnel nearby pedestrians to that one spot to cross, rather than spreading out, as it's usually at a traffic light or intersection.

Yes, I understand the point of the funnel. They are pedestrian hostile.

Ironically, they make it more difficult to “jaywalk” safely, as they block the easiest place to cross, forcing pedestrians to cross at a cross junction typically.

> It's insane to me that people don't see that agents are going to be how you interact with your computer going forward, almost exclusively

You are in a bubble. Normal people (i.e. 99% of people) will not use these agentic tools:

* Some, probably most, won't use them because they don't trust them

* Agentic tool providers can't possibly supply everyone with their own free agentic tooling

* The vast majority of people will not pay providers what it will cost to run these agentic tools (or even anything)

* The vast majority of people cannot afford to buy their own hardware to run their own agentic tools in-house

* Agentic tooling is mostly useless for most people (who cares that it can check you into flights, most people don't have that kind of problem)

If that's true, why bother blocking the tools? Either they are useful in saving money (and more important, hassle), or they're not. If they're not useful, the problem simply won't materialize.

Because not blocking these tools causes additional operational costs.

For example, higher return rate for online shopping (because the tools didn't buy the correct thing, or maybe they bought something that they shouldn't have).

Or, the tool ignores the adverts on an ad-supported website, intended for humans, basically just adding costs for no benefit to the site.

Or, the tool wastes customer services' time on something that ultimately the agent's operator didn't even want in the first place.

They're just off the top of my head.

It's a mistake to think the sites have a choice. I'm hardly going to trust an AI agent to shop on my behalf if it isn't smart enough to operate the browser on my behalf in a way that's indistinguishable from a human. They're almost good enough to do that now; it won't be long.

So the end result will be that the sites spend money on bandwidth to shove ads and dark patterns at me, which I will never, ever see.

You'd think they'd understand who's going to end up with the power to say "No" here, but apparently not.

.public seems dangerous to me.

They need to keep you watching to a certain extent, otherwise you'd eventually question why you're subscribed in the first place.

And not all EU members have ratified CETA either, so I'm not sure why everyone's getting their hopes up about "associate membership", whatever that is (it's not defined in the EU treaties). They can't even fully ratify a trade deal after almost a decade.

> they don't want cheap gas

You don't strengthen an enemy (Russia) by buying their products. Defence is more important.

> as well as shutting down reactors

A German problem, not a wider European one.

The solution is to accelerate the transition into electric vehicles (including HGVs etc.), renewable energy, and nuclear. Oil is obviously still needed for materials production, air fuel, and so on, but extricating ourselves from situations where oil is becoming optional as fast as possible is the best course, not continuing to buy cheap gas from an aggressive neighbour that's fucking your elections and invading its neighbour.

There's also the JA4+ suite (https://github.com/FoxIO-LLC/ja4), in addition to standard JA4.

> My point is that this term has been used so loosely, it has lost its meaning.

Have you taken a look at X/Twitter lately? There is a lot of out and out racism. Don't give the benefit of the doubt that it's just people who want "border control".

In the same vein, dont assume that anything negative said about a group of people is racism.

Bright Data et al.

Bright Data's business is legal, but they could be subpoenaed to find out which customer is making these requests, but first you would have to prove they were actually involved, because there are many residential proxy providers.