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Friday Fun Thread for July 25, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I finally got around to using ChatGPT Agent and it is actually, finally, tingling my "this thing has reasoning and problem-solving capacity and might actually be sentient" senses.

Used it for creating a delivery/pickup order from the Sam's Club website. It hunted down the items, navigated challenges that I intentionally threw up for it, and successfully completed the task I gave it, with very minimal prompting to get it there.

Yet another "Future Shock" moment for me, which is happening every two months nowadays. My benchmark is very, very close to being met.

Anyhow: Anyone have any ideas for some non-mundane, but also non-illegal and non-dangerous ways to make use of a slow but reliable personal assistant that can navigate the internet?"

I haven't tried agent, and thought I didn't have access till I just checked. So consider my thoughts preliminary:

I lack the confidence that the Agent will be able to do much actually useful work for me, a likely cause being stymied by CAPTCHAs (which I believe it's intentionally designed to not solve even if it easily could), or simply because it doesn't have access to my computer. That's where all my credentials and login details live. I feel like I'd babysit it enough to not make it worth the hassle, and would rather have o3 make a plan or guide me if I ran into hurdles.

If you think it can do better than that, I'd be curious to know.

If it encounters captchas or similar blockades, it politely stops and alerts you so you can help solve them before it continues.

How this will impact website's security measures going forward, I do no know.

I have never used a captcha solving service, but I know they exist and claim to be very cheap per solved captcha. Less than a penny cheap.