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Re:Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding... by Brian_K_White on Monday February 21, 2022 @04:44AM (#30413730)
All those lines of code in a browser are automation.
Re:Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding... by withinboredom on Monday February 21, 2022 @05:14AM (#30413959)
Not to mention screen readers.
Re:Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding... by fredoliveira on Monday February 21, 2022 @05:28AM (#30414094)
Do you always go for the technicality and the gotcha? Isn't that best applied elsewhere rather than here? Because sure, lines of code in a browser are technically automation, but they don't automate your actions so your whole point is moot. And you know this, I'm sure, so you're wasting your (and everybody else's) time.
Re:Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding... by Brian_K_White on Monday February 21, 2022 @06:08AM (#30414383)
They do exactly in fact automate your actions.

You decided you wanted to kick off a rather large process by clicking a link, and the browser performed countless individual and dynamic actions as a result.

Just to take one macroscopic crude simple example since we apparently don't have much imagination to work with here, did you evaluate every one of the individual http fetches in that page to decide if you wanted to fetch or render tgem, or did your ublock origin plugin do that for you?

You may not like the inconvenience implied by the fact that a statement like "no automation" is invalid and therefor unusable, but that doesn't change the fact. It's inconvenient not incorrect.

Re:Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding... by fredoliveira on Monday February 21, 2022 @07:00AM (#30414818)
> since we apparently don't have much imagination to work with here

Oh, I'm much more likely to engage in a great conversation after an ad hominem. Sigh.

I am well aware of how browsers work and what they automate for you. But you called them bots. You lumped them with several other types of software, which doesn't make sense. I never said you were incorrect — I said you were going for the technically correct and the gotcha.

Do browsers include automation? Yes. Do things get automated when you use them? Yes. Is software development automation at heart? Yes. The fact that you are correct about these things doesn't make the deception any less obvious: you are using these technicalities to misrepresent what a browser is — which doesn't make sense in the context of the thread -, and that's all I pointed out.

Re:Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding... by Brian_K_White on Monday February 21, 2022 @08:06AM (#30415466)
Pedantic was not an insult, but unimaginative was, got it.