ProofHouse

I gave a solid laugh. I heard in Saw XI , they're going to make them play this. It honestly for a certain type of ppl is probably actually insanely fun. For me I like some rules and regs, but gall dang, I might have had a minor stroke when the side panel popped up.

TLDR;

The Danger List

Your robots.txt "Do Not Scrape" signs become legally useless: robots.txt is just a voluntary preference, not a law. While Meta says in PR statements that it will respect robots.txt, it left that promise out of the binding legal contract. By keeping your business account active, you are signing a contract that legally authorizes Meta to ignore your site’s block-lists.

- Meta can create fake accounts to bypass registration walls: The terms explicitly authorize Meta to "create test credentials" to crawl your site. Legal experts warn this gives Meta permission to sign up as a fake user to scrape gated content behind login screens or basic paywalls that anonymous bots usually can't see.

- Your entire domain is fair game, not just links you post: Because the terms cover any domain "associated with your products or services" (or shared by regular users on Meta), Meta isn't just scraping the specific landing pages you run ads for—it has a green light to crawl your entire website from top to bottom.

- AI training is still allowed through a backdoor: Removing the word "train" is a PR smokescreen. The contract still lets Meta scrape your site to "develop, improve, and research... advertising and business products." Because "business products" isn't strictly defined—and Meta builds AI tools for businesses "developing" legally covers training AI models on your proprietary articles, data, and work.

- Third-party companies get the same access: The terms grant these scraping rights to "any entity acting on our behalf," meaning external contractors or third-party scraping vendors hired by Meta also have legal cover to harvest your site.

- It is a non-negotiable hostage situation (Zero Opt-Out): There is no toggle or form to reject this before the October 30 deadline. Your only legal way to decline is to completely delete your commercial presence across Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp—forcing you to choose between surrendering your content for free or losing access to your audience.

The Bottom Line: Starting October 30, their updated terms give it sweeping permission to scrape entire websites linked to any Meta Business account (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp). Despite a last-minute wording tweak after backlash, legal experts warn the rules still let Meta harvest publisher content to build AI tools—with zero option to opt out.

1. What Exact Things Can Meta Do?

If you have a Meta Business account, you authorize Meta (and its third-party partners) to:

a) Deploy automated bots: Use web scrapers, crawlers, spiders, and user agents on your site. b) Bypass basic walls: Create "test credentials" to access, index, cache, analyze, and collect your content. c) Monitor continuously: Periodically pull updates from your domains, web pages, and URLs.

2. What is the Extent of the Scraping? - What gets scraped: Any domain, webpage, URL, or content "associated with" your business or shared by users on Meta platforms. Legal experts note this is broad enough to let Meta scrape entire websites, not just specific landing pages. - - Who it affects: Virtually every news organization and business that uses a Meta account to manage Facebook Pages, Instagram profiles, Threads, or WhatsApp channels.

How it expanded:

  - Previously: Meta could only scrape your site if you specifically used its generative AI ad features, and only to "optimize your ads."
 
  - Now: It applies to all business accounts by default, and scraped data can be used for all "advertising and business products" (plus platform security/integrity).

3. Why Legal Experts Say Meta's "Fix" Changes Nothing After initial outrage, Meta revised the text on Friday to remove the word "train" and claimed it still respects robots.txt (the code websites use to block scrapers). Legal experts aren't buying it for three reasons:

- "Develop" still means "Train": Meta replaced "train" with permission to "develop, improve, research, and maintain advertising and business products." Attorneys point out that "business products" isn't strictly defined, and "developing" AI business tools naturally includes training AI models on your data.

- The robots.txt loophole: While a Meta spokesperson publicly promised to respect robots.txt flags, Meta refused to put that promise into the actual legal terms. Because robots.txt is voluntary, signing a contract that explicitly authorizes scraping legally overrides your robots.txt preferences.

- Take it or leave it: There is no opt-out. To avoid giving Meta permission to scrape their websites, businesses and news outlets would have to abandon Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp entirely before October 30.

I think to many, and equally as many will argue the counter to this point, and I am not speaking to the validity either way, but I think Elon felt even if not available to the public, his reputation was on the line. He has done amazing things thus far, but also made lying and exageration the norm. He had to come through with 'a flying car'. Credit to him, he essentially did, available or not.

"Consent." It's not consent.

To be honest, I used Wspr so much I only recently started realizing just HOW bad it gets trying to 'improve' your diction, especially coding. I have seen totally opperate directives. I had no idea it was potentially occuring, but it gets past a point where it is WAY to confident in guessing what you meant, sometimes to the extent of changing DON'T to DO, for example.

I would stick with this. There's huge potential here. I'm not going to lie, I did a video of this, and it was pretty slop. Some of it didn't even make sense and was super irrelevant. That being said, refined, there's really actually some major potential with this idea.

I don't mind if it's in the cloud if I consent. I always prefer a local-first option. I'm usually attracted to products that offer that. Maybe there are extra features or functionalities if my data is stored on the cloud, but any product that offers a local-first approach is always my preference.

VIM should be in the title here as well

I know a guy in LA who basically spent every waking minute of his life past year or two building a spec for this. Announced soon apparently. I’ve spent hours reading some of it.

Pretty damn compelling.

gulp

The scam that anthropic pulled, is they remove free tier (bad idea for Github honestly), but blame it on AI vibe code abusers. Instead of for example finding the 1-5% of absolutely aggregous users like Steipete and restricting them.

I’m done reading anthropic propaganda

Best marketing

I did a triple take. Many years old but an early ground breaking project. Has some exploratoy ideas a year or two ago last I looked. Crazy to see Petals at 16 frontage (at time of writing)

didn't Anthropic distil a few tens of millions of books?

the answer is many! This would take hours to write. Full teams and research on nearly every part. So many 'unlocks' coming.

i once thought the same

ask AI to help

It’s literally a paradox. It cannot be changed. Open Source AI will ultimately win. Think it through.

'metaverse' aka the spatial internet (prolly by a new name).

Agreed!

Personally, I would say very likely, to be honest. I gotta go through this a little more, but I actually use 5.5 codex an obscene amount, and I almost never use it for reasoning anymore. It's not even in the same galaxy as far as actually taking out the thinking and using GPT-5.5 or even Claude and then coming back and giving it the reasoning. Blah blah blah, it's the same model. Well, let me tell you, no, it's not, for several reasons, and the delta on intelligence is pretty staggering.

Props

I’ll have to try, I’ve only recently learned Exa pricing is a bit crazy (especially on searches where you source 30-40 sources)I just used it be default and then was like oh damn when I got hit

Very cool I have something that does this as well along these lines. I’ll dig into yours over the next few days and contribute where and if I can too, awesome to see!

Yup your upstash is rate limited

Is this a joke? Grok all day. Thing is gonna get a beer with ya!

imagine them laughing through the cigar smoke and brandy as someone proposes this

Made something very close to this, but not model specific. Ill try to shape it up tonight and tmr and drop it, would be cool to colab!

Could be but needs a serious UI/UX revamp (easy). Maximally remove friction when asking for user contributions. Like literally on the first page it puts adding public clocks, I repeat, PUBLIC CLOCKS (and other such things), on equal footing as adding a restaurant. Like, no.