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Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

How do they stop providers (like Amazon, etc.) from detecting and blocking these agents if they are running on cloud? I know that openai wasn't able to avoid this which is why they moved to 'computer use' on your local machine.

I almost wonder if this is a place where SpaceX, as an internet provider through starlink, has a unique advantage because websites are unable to block their networking as it could be residential starlink consumers.

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I use Hermes locally and it’s constantly hitting bot blocks. Just trying to shop clothes for me it gets blocked.

This exactly! It sounds like a good thing in theory, but in practice everything is blocked that I've ran into, using Hermes to try to automate things like this. It's not just bot blocks either, but things like Captcha and such.

Interesting. A residential IP was enough for me to get my Hermes agent grocery shopping successfully on a website with quite aggressive bot protection.

I run Hermes on a VPS, and the website was blocking its IP. I gave it a reverse SSH tunnel to a remote-debugging Chrome profile on my local Mac and now it works fine.

I think it creates a loop back connection, basically a reverse socks5 or a VPN if they are more sophisticated. That’s how I would do it. Note that I am also working on a such bot/AI os and mine is better (for now) . If you have trillions, billions to or millions to invest feel free to reach out.

This would imply you need to have your computer on in order for it to function, which seems like a deal breaker for many consumer usecases imo. I'd like to be able to say "order my groceries" and then I hop on the subway.

Not a big deal at all. Claude Code and Codex both support keeping your computer awake. That'll just be a default thing that gets turned on when you install one of these apps.

i just completely disagree. lots of people don't even have laptops and how will they keep my laptop alive and performing tasks while it's in my backpack on the subway not connected to internet?

i feel like there's an obvious advantage if your agent can work truly in the background

I agree, but I made myself laugh pondering a solution to this in which I came up with a Raspberry Pi like device that acts as the loopback for the agent. Always keep it on and plugged in.

I would like to introduce the Grok Box

I actually have set up something similar myself and it is much easier now that codex desktop for linux just came out (which has computer use/browser driving abilities). The issue is that on an rpi, I have to usually manually log into everything once.

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