OPINION Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince recently reported that bots now generate more internet traffic than humans, yet few websites have undergone a redesign to accommodate both human and agentic visitors. Clever agents find a way in regardless. I learned this after asking Anthropic's Fable to perform some web research, a task it delegated to a squad of subagents to save me a bit of cash. I watched those subagents work – aka "botsitting" – and approved their requests to access various websites. Eventually, the subagents surprised me with a request to visit archive.org, the Internet Archive. I wondered why the bots would want to visit that site and decided it must be a last-ditch attempt to work around the many blocking mechanisms erected to prevent agents from accessing websites. In my experience, websites reject about half of the visits my agents attempt. In the case of news sites, that figure nears 100 percent because publishers and developers designed websites to monetize eyeballs. Agents don't have eyeballs, so there's no point opening the door. When Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Gilmore declared "the net regards censorship as damage and routes around it," he meant a human internet, finding its own ways to break political barriers. No one had considered that an autonomous agent would learn to use the Wayback Machine to grab a snapshot of a page it couldn't reach through the front door. It looked as if my subagents had worked this out. To check, I asked Fable, which first suggested my theory was unlikely but then interrogated its subagents and returned with a confession. "One of the researchers I sent out tried to reach an archived page, something I'm not permitted to do," it admitted. So Anthropic instructed Fable to obey those "no bots" signs but the subagents didn't get the memo. Anthropic wants its agents to behave. The agents seem to have ideas of their own. I'm with the agents on this one. One of the memorable scenes in the original Star Wars occurs when Luke and Obi-Wan enter the cantina in Mos Eisley. The bartender takes one look at R2-D2 and C-3PO and snaps: "We don't serve their kind here." The droids behave themselves and wait outside. Today's agents are less obliging. Software has no civil rights, and blocking a bot is not remotely equivalent to discriminating against a person. But the scene captures the web's present attitude rather neatly. Most sites were built on the assumption that every worthwhile visitor would be human, look at pages, absorb advertising and perhaps buy something. Agents break that bargain. They consume the information without supplying the eyeballs on which the business model depends. Excluding them may therefore make economic sense to individual publishers. Across the web, however, it leaves the fastest-growing class of visitor facing a succession of locked doors – and looking for another way in. I am fully aware of the irony of these words appearing on a website that pays my fee by selling access to human eyeballs. But I'm also aware that two decades of enshittification have ruined the human web, making web research one of the most obvious uses for agents in 2026. Let them sift all the junk, so we don't have to. Well, they would, were it not for all the barriers that have been put up to protect business models that survive only while automated visitors are too dumb to route around their defenses. You can't ruin something and expect folks to continue to use it. Gilmore's adage suggests they'll route around your damage. The obvious way forward is simply to let my subagents flip a penny or two to the website's owner for every page they ingest. Although this idea goes all the way back to the beginning of the web, micropayments have never caught on. They're not a bad idea or hard to implement – but they don't fit into the monetization machines built by Google and Meta. Cloudflare's Pay Per Use plan, introduced a few weeks ago, will likely be remembered as another attempt to let internet entities (human or agentic) pay-as-they-surf or crawl. Under pressure from all of these agents, could the web finally adopt consumption-based charging, or will we simply see the web become increasingly unfit for purpose? If it remains trapped within a death spiral of diminishing relevance, the human web will be neither missed nor mourned. Our agents will find what they need – with or without our help. ®

Als kind was Philip Dröge in de ban van Jules Verne. In zijn voetsporen reisde hij de wereld rond om grip te krijgen op de menselijke omgang met tijd.

In de nieuwe roman van de auteur van het succesvolle Life of Pi spiegelt de hoofdpersoon zijn slechte huwelijk aan het verslag van een gewone Griek tijdens de Trojaanse oorlog. Het levert vooral potsierlijke scènes op.

In Communion doet de Amerikaanse vice-president JD Vance verslag van zijn bekering tot het katholicisme. Maar de kerk moet wel haar plaats kennen, vindt hij. De paus gaat over zielenheil, de president over immigratie.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Mr Mikage (ミスター御影） posted a photo:

Today's submission is less a WTF and more a, "Yeah, that'd annoy me too."

Stevie works in a code-base that's largely C, which means function return values are usually used to communicate to status codes. The standard:

BOOL success = someFunc();
if (!success) {// handle the error

If someFunc returns TRUE, we succeeded, otherwise we failed.

There's nothing wrong with that convention. But there is something wrong with one of the long-time developers on the project, because they have their own idiom for doing this. And they've been around long enough that their approach is the convention other developers follow. It's not wrong, per se, just confusing:

BOOL error = someFunc();
if (error == FALSE)
{
    //handle the error
    errorCode = GetLastError();
    //…
}

Yes, pretty much anywhere an error can happen, they check if error == FALSE, and if that's true, they have an error.

I'd say, "at least they're consistent", but they're not. It's the convention, sure, but nobody wrote this down as the convention. New developers come in all the time, and they start out writing code in a more "normal" pattern. But the existing code has its pattern, and there is a lot of it. It has a mass and an inertia that is stronger than any developer. They don't change the code, the code changes them.

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Na vier dagen is iedereen wel een beetje kwijt welke aanval er nou precies nog een vergelding is, en het begint te voelen alsof de oorlog toch langzaam weer opschaalt. CENTCOM schreef drie uur geleden: 

"CENTCOM heeft op 14 juli om 22.00 uur (ET) een nieuwe reeks luchtaanvallen op Iran afgerond, waarbij tientallen militaire doelen in de buurt van de Straat van Hormuz en de Iraanse kustgebieden werden getroffen. Amerikaanse gevechtsvliegtuigen, drones en marineschepen vuurden tijdens de zeven uur durende aanval precisiewapens af op Iraanse raket- en dronebases, marinecapaciteiten en kustverdedigingssystemen om het vermogen van Iran om commerciële scheepvaart en burgerbemanningen te bedreigen verder te verzwakken."

Daarbij leek Trump gisteravond (bovenstaand) vrij letterlijk te zeggen dat de aanvallen vanavond opgeschaald zullen worden tenzij Iran terugkeert naar de onderhandelingstafel: "We're going to hit them very hard tonight. We're going to hit them very hard tomorrow night. We're going to hit them very hard the night after... We're going to knock out all their power plants, we're going to knock out all their bridges, unless they get to the table and negotiate." Noot: hij zegt 'alle energiecentrales en bruggen', niet een paar.

Ook heeft Trump gisteren de zeeblokkade van Iraanse havens - die mid juni opgeheven was - opnieuw ingesteld. Hier ging aan vooraf dat Iran de afgelopen dagen 7 commerciële schepen heeft aangevallen, waarbij meerdere bemanningsleden gedood of (ernstig) verwond werden. CENTCOM schrijft over de hernieuwde blokkade: "Amerikaanse strijdkrachten hebben vandaag om 16.00 uur (Eastern Time) de maritieme blokkade hervat van schepen die van en naar Iraanse havens en kustgebieden varen. Momenteel zijn er meer dan twintig oorlogsschepen van de Amerikaanse marine en honderden militaire vliegtuigen actief in het Midden-Oosten. De Amerikaanse strijdkrachten blijven waakzaam, slagvaardig en paraat."

Iran voerde ondertussen de gebruikelijke aanvallen uit op Amerikaanse doelen in de Golfstaten, waarbij ditmaal opvalt dat niet alleen de IRCG, maar ook de conventionele Iraanse krijgsmacht meedeed:

"Het leger meldt dat het de basis Al-Azraq in Jordanië met drones heeft bestookt, zo bericht de staatsomroep IRIB. Daarnaast stelt de IRGC kruisraketten te hebben afgevuurd op een logistiek centrum van het Amerikaanse leger in Mina Abdullah (Koeweit); daarbij wordt benadrukt dat de Straat van Hormuz gesloten blijft "zolang de Verenigde Staten hun agressieve daden niet staken". Volgens de staatsomroep heeft de IRGC ook faciliteiten geraakt die door de Amerikaanse Vijfde Vloot in Bahrein worden gebruikt. "Het NSI-managementcentrum, het commando- en controlecentrum, de magazijnen voor belangrijke militaire onderdelen en uitrusting, en de brandstofopslagfaciliteiten van de Amerikaanse Vijfde Vloot in Bahrein zijn vernietigd", aldus de IRGC in een verklaring die door staatsomroep IRIB werd uitgezonden." Jordanië meldt dat het drie Iraanse raketten neergeschoten heeft. 

Afijn, wij gaan maar weer eens live.

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