1016: More Bots Than Humans

**CJ** (0:00)
Now, I'm just super skeptical when I'm on Reddit, and I see a post that gets a bunch of upvotes, or I go to the comments, and all of a sudden, I'm reading comments that I completely disagree with, or is also just an overdone take. We're just interacting with bots on social media as well, which is totally another problem as well.

**Wes Bos** (0:17)
People think that Reddit is this beautiful place, but it's not. It's starting to get absolutely awful. Where do we now turn? I guess as friends? Do we need friends now? Is that what it is?
What's up, everybody, thanks for joining Syntax Weekly. Tons of news has happened in the last seven days since you've joined us. We've got a lot to cover. We're gonna cover, there's more bots than humans on the internet. That certainly happened quicker than I thought. A couple new agent frameworks out. Vercel has released their own agent framework called Eve, and Fred Schott, who's the creator of Astro, also released kind of a similar one. We're gonna be digging into those and seeing what they're at. Deno released an electron type thing, a Deno desktop, which is really nifty, and a whole bunch of other stuff. My name is Wes. With me, as always, is CJ and Scott. How you doing today, guys?

**Scott Tolinski** (1:14)
What's up, what's up, what's up?

**CJ** (1:16)
You're good. Ready.

**Wes Bos** (1:18)
All right.

**CJ** (1:19)
Wow.

**Wes Bos** (1:20)
Let us know down in the chat if you have anything else that we should be covering as well. We'd love to talk about it after this. We've got maybe 20 different things that we want to cover today. But should we get into the first one that we have here, Scott? More bots than humans?

**Scott Tolinski** (1:35)
Yes, more bots than humans. The bots are taking over. Actually, real quick, guys, I want to show you something real quick before I even mention this chart here. I was having Codex work on some. I haven't used Codex in a little while.
Codex has a very specific design smell to it. So check this out. This is the most Codex-ass design of all time. Like, this just like nails the Codex aesthetic. The upper case, the gradients, the unnecessary labels.

**Wes Bos** (2:08)
Yeah, letter spacing, yeah.

**CJ** (2:10)
Did you ask it for orange, too, or did it just choose orange?

**Scott Tolinski** (2:13)
It just choose orange. It was like, teenage engineering? Sure, let's throw some orange on this thing. But it's like, yeah, that's it. The cards within cards within cards within cards. It's just so classic here.
This is the modern stink of Codex these days.

**CJ** (2:29)
I'll say I skipped over sharing some sites today because they looked exactly like this.

**Wes Bos** (2:33)
And I was like, just put some effort in, like, just come on, you know, it's it's too bad because this is not like a it's not a bad looking design, right? Like it's not if if you would have shown me this maybe a year ago, I would have been like, this is a decently clean sign. It's just the fact. And I know we talk about this so much, but it's like they all look exactly the same. And my brain just immediately goes to this might not be very good because knowing where it's it's come from, which is kind of we're kind of in a weird spot with all this right now.

**Scott Tolinski** (3:07)
Yes. Yes.
I made this in contrast to the bots taking over things. This is made by a bot for a human because I didn't feel like I was getting enough out of my OPXY and so I have the whatever 100 pages of manual for it. And I wanted it to build me individualized lessons to tell me what buttons to click on. And it even does like the overlay on what buttons here to do what.

**Wes Bos** (3:32)
What's an OPXY Scott?

**Scott Tolinski** (3:34)
It's a sequencer by teenage engineering sequencer.
So it's very powerful and dope. And I'm good at it, but I'm not great at it. So I was like, I want to, I want to like find into some of the functionality that's in the instructions that I, I'm not going to read an instruction booklet. You kidding me?
Yes. So let's talk about this bots versus humans. The Cloudflare folks have had this radar.cloudflare.com for a little bit. And recently, I think in the past couple of weeks here, they've added this bot versus human traffic to show you what percentage of traffic going through Cloudflare is a bot versus a human. And what's shocking here is that at some points, it's as high as 63% bot getting up into that 63% of the traffic coming through as just from bots. And this is in the past seven days. The chart doesn't go back that far because of when they released this. Oh, unknown error. That's always fun. I actually found this radar.cloudflare.com to be an interesting page anyways in regards to just general internet traffic. But the bot stuff, the bot versus humans, has been making the rounds in terms of the internet is now basically just a bunch of bots talking to each other with 40% of it being human interaction. Which feels like it's been something that people have been talking about for a long time, but I mean, here it is in a trend through Cloudflare.