yup, though without access to the code it's much harder to pull the state of the components - becomes more like a web scraping problem, it's a brittle and much hackier than just intentionally exposing component state like we can do in the sim.
more importantly though are use cases that depend on the data. the data on real google flights/expedia is constantly changing, so it's impossible to build datasets based ground truth, e.g. the answer for a task like "Find the cheapest round-trip flight option from Bologna (BLQ) to Dushanbe (DYU) if I leave on 2026-05-05 and come back on 2026-05-15. Return the total price and the flight numbers for all flights." isn't stable. on our site, we control the data, so that answer is stable (deterministically random). so controlling the whole clone rather than running on the prod site unlocks richer and more repeatable tasks/testing.
lastly, our site runs the exact same locally as deployed, it has zero internet dependencies. so it can be run offline directly on the cluster with no issue for network latency/failures
With so many references to Hume, Hobbes, Leibniz, and others, I find the lack of appeal to Descartes odd: "Extension in length, breadth and depth constitutes the nature of corporeal substance" (AT VIIIA 25, CSM I 210). Our author considers his leg "no longer part of anything...Nothing and Nowhere" and yet he still "[regards] the leg as ‘a thing’." The notion of thingness and nothingness stand in mutually destructive opposition. His leg may have the property of nothingness from the persective of his Humean chain of perceptions, but how can one hold both observations simultaneously? It must be resolved through the words of Descartes: "nothing else but thinking substance itself and extended substance itself, that is, mind and body" (AT VIIIA 30–31, CSM I 215). Our author's leg has lost all mind qualities, and the body-qualities of shape and extension that remain are too novel to be reconciled with his former state of being.