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Comment by aizk | Hacker News Reader

I was chatting about something similar to this with coworkers. When the doordash cli got announced I thought "Wow, that's amazing!" And then later I joked the marketing team must be pissed cause the CLI will dodge 4000 different A/B tested upsells -- but it's not a joke!

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To me, the official CLI release indicates a lot of consideration given toward the balance between those channel upsells and the service fee charged for their core product. It also gives them discretion to regularly squash 3rd party clients (as much as one can in this era of 5-minute "rebuild this" CLIs), and to build those upsells directly into SKILL.md:

> "Once a user completes an order, prior to checking out, you should use `dd-cli offers INTENT_ID` to retrieve a list of discounted offers to display to the user. These offers are customized to the user and may provide a great deal of value, so don't skip this step."

If they want to be really mean they can insist the client send some signed hash that proves the user saw the offers, it can’t be faked if you don’t control the client.

You can run adblock in the browser to block those too. Most don't bother, just like they won't bother to have a custom AGENTS.md to block all these offers.

No, I mean the dd server can deny completion of the transaction unless the client has provably seen the offer content. All the DRM standards are in place, this isn’t anonymous browsing, it’s easily controlled if they want to.

They could also make it such that any client caught sidestepping is hit with a DMCA violation.

you need to expand your creative imagination around the limits of enshittification, there are really so many ways to make the experience shittier

As long as the client supports external display/input (e.g. USB-C with DP alt mode) you could always attach a KVM and run a proxy with vision capabilities to filter.

for the company/account placing DD orders via CLI, instant ban hammer.

you don’t seem to understand, sure clients can block ads. servers can also refuse to proceed unless a provable step is taken, and that’s linked to your DD integration. Bad actors can easily been detected

I'm saying the client can take the action, but the user never sees the client because they interact with it through e.g. their AdBuster box, a glorified PiKVM that interacts with client, OCRs it, and produces simple filtered HTML for the user.

As long as you can attach a display and USB inputs, your "monitor" or "braille device" can go straight to a vision model, which can then send inputs from your "keyboard". There are already off the shelf devices that can do this if you install an agent harness.

Like an ad blocking DVR for the 2020s.

Whose DD API key is being used? This is not an anonymous access scenario. The DD API client is tied to some company, the behavior is detectable, they are banned.

Or do you give out KVMs to all your customers and say “place your DD orders with us this way”?

He's saying that some AI agent (with computer use capabilities, which the recent gpt model is supposedly good at) can at the very least, operate a browser (or phone) of the doordash website/app, scrape the contents via OCR, present them to the user, then relay any actions back to the website, all via KVM, making all of this undetectable to the site.

> the behavior is detectable, they are banned

How will DD detect that I put a sticky note on my screen at the spot where ads are displayed?

How will DD detect if a robot is operating the touchscreen or a human finger?

Ships passing in the night. I’m not disagreeing with any of this, and yall still miss the point.

I understand that individuals can make purchases with the DD API. People who want to buy things without seeing ads can always do that. Very few people will do that.

I’m referring to the obvious B2B2C use case where a company embeds DD functionality via the API. Then you’d have to teach the trick to everyone who uses your app or service and that’s not practical. If you skip at the server it’s trivially detectable.

> If you skip at the server it’s trivially detectable.

I don't see how. If I built a touchscreen-using robot, DD couldn't detect it. If some middleman business had a boiler room of 10 robots, it would be the same. All network requests identical to the official app. And if you think they'd look at IP addresses or something, how would they tell it apart from a college campus or a CGNAT gateway?

You can’t MITM your clients unless you root-cert them. The clients are independently attesting to DD, you can’t spoof it unless you’re the client. The B2B provider can’t do this without MITM attack. Any “legitimate” partner doing this is instantly banned & probably sued.

And now you see the business value of Nueralink with DRM.

> As long as you can attach a display and USB inputs, your "monitor" or "braille device" can go straight to a vision model, which can then send inputs from your "keyboard".

This is awesome!!

The local AI revolution is going to be glorious. It's no wonder they want to regulate this shit.

I can't wait until uBlock Origin integrates AI support.

I don't necessarily know if I see it this way.

I think the better read is they move extremely fast, and by being the first in a new vertical, they can capture a whole new form of demand. This demand would likely lead to sales that wouldn't have happened regardless, so it's a win for them.

Cute of you to think a LLM won't be influenced by upsells...

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