Comment by rootsudo
Comment by rootsudo 4 days ago
When I instantly read it, I knew it was anubis. I hope the anime catgirls never disapear from that project :)
Comment by rootsudo 4 days ago
When I instantly read it, I knew it was anubis. I hope the anime catgirls never disapear from that project :)
I feel the same. It's a distinct part of nerd culture.
In the '70s, if you were into computers you were most likely also a fan of Star Trek. I remember an anecdote from the 1990s when an entire dial-up ISP was troubleshooting its modem pools because there were zero people connected and they assumed there was an outage. The outage happened to occur exactly while that week's episode of X-Files was airing in their time zone. Just as the credits rolled, all modems suddenly lit up as people connected to IRC and Usenet to chat about the episode. In ~1994 close to 100% of residential internet users also happened to follow X-Files on linear television. There was essentially a 1:1 overlap between computer nerds and sci-fi nerds.
Today's analog seems to be that almost all nerds love anime and Andy Weir books and some of us feel a bit alienated by that.
> Today's analog seems to be that almost all nerds love anime and Andy Weir books and some of us feel a bit alienated by that.
Especially because (from my observation) modern "nerds" who enjoy anime seem to relish at bringing it (and various sex-related things) up at inappropriate times and are generally emotionally immature.
It's quite refreshing seeing that other people have similar lines of thinking and that I'm not alone in feeling somewhat alienated.
I think I'd push back and say that nerd culture is no longer really a single thing. Back in the star trek days, the nerd "community" was small enough that star trek could be a defining quality shared by the majority. Now the nerd community has grown, and there are too many people to have defining parts of the culture that are loved by the majority.
Eg if the nerd community had $x$ people in the star trek days, now there are more than $x$ nerds who like anime and more than $x$ nerds who dislike it. And the total size is much bigger than both.
You don't have to get it to be able to accept that others like it. Why not let them have their fun?
This sounds more as though you actively dislike anime than merely not seeing the appeal or being "ignorant". If you were to ignore it, there wouldn't be an issue...
Well, this is their personal project. You're welcome to make your own, or you can remove the branding if you want: it's open licensed. Or if you're not a coder, they even offer to remove the branding if you support the project
I don't get the impression that it's meant to be annoying, but a personal preference. I can't know that, though whitelabeling is a common thing people pay for without the original brand having made their logo extra ugly
I don't think it's relevant to debate if anime or other forms of media is objectively better. But as someone who has never understood anime, I view mainstream western TV series as filled with hours of cleverly written dialogue and long story arches, whereas the little anime I've watched seems to mostly be overly dramatic colorful action scenes with intense screamed dialogue and strange bodily noises. Should we maybe assume that we are both a bit ignorant of the preferences of others?
Let's rather assume that you're the kind of person who debates a thing by first saying that it's not relevant to debate, then putting forward a pretty out-of-context comparison, and finally concluding that I should feel bad about myself. That kind of story arc does seem to correlate with finding mainstream Western TV worthwhile; there's something structurally similar to the funny way your thought went.
It's not the only project with an anime girl as its mascot.
ComfyUI has what I think is a foxgirl as its official mascot, and that's the de-facto primary UI for generating Stable Diffusion or related content.
OK, you've been all over this thread being negative and angry. On a new account, which makes it even more sus. Take a break from social media.
It's more likely that the project itself will disappear into irrelevance as soon as AI scrapers bother implementing the PoW (which is trivial for them, as the post explains) or figure out that they can simply remove "Mozilla" from their user-agent to bypass it entirely.
> as AI scrapers bother implementing the PoW
That's what it's for, isn't it? Make crawling slower and more expensive. Shitty crawlers not being able to run the PoW efficiently or at all is just a plus. Although:
> which is trivial for them, as the post explains
Sadly the site's being hugged to death right now so I can't really tell if I'm missing part of your argument here.
> figure out that they can simply remove "Mozilla" from their user-agent
And flag themselves in the logs to get separately blocked or rate limited. Servers win if malicious bots identify themselves again, and forcing them to change the user agent does that.
> That's what it's for, isn't it? Make crawling slower and more expensive.
The default settings produce a computational cost of milliseconds for a week of access. For this to be relevant it would have to be significantly more expensive to the point it would interfere with human access.
I thought the point (which the article misses) is that a token gives you an identity, and an identity can be tracked and rate limited.
So a crawlers that goes very ethically and does very little strain on the server should indeed be able to crawl for a whole week on a cheap compute, one that hammers the server hard will not.
Sure but it's really cheap to mint new identities, each node on their scrapping cluster can mint hundreds of thousands of tokens per second.
Provisioning new ips is probably more costly than calculating the tokens, at least with the default difficulty setting.
...unless you're sus, then the difficulty increases. And if you unleash a single scrapping bot, you're not a problem anyway. It's for botnets of thousands, mimicking browsers on residual connections to make them hard to filter out or rate limit, effectively DDoSing the server.
Perhaps you just don't realize how much did the scraping load increase in the last 2 years or so. If your server can stay up after deploying Anubis, you've already won.
The explanation of how the estimate is made is more detailed, but here is the referenced conclusion:
>> So (11508 websites * 2^16 sha256 operations) / 2^21, that’s about 6 minutes to mine enough tokens for every single Anubis deployment in the world. That means the cost of unrestricted crawler access to the internet for a week is approximately $0.
>> In fact, I don’t think we reach a single cent per month in compute costs until several million sites have deployed Anubis.
If you use one solution to browse the entire site, you're linking every pageload to the same session, and can then be easily singled out and blocked. The idea that you can scan a site for a week by solving the riddle once is incorrect. That works for non-abusers.
Wasn't sha256 designed to be very fast to generate? They should be using bcrypt or something similar.
> Sadly the site's being hugged to death right now
Luckily someone had already captured an archive snapshot: https://archive.ph/BSh1l
Im not on Firefox or any Firefox derivative and I still get anime cat girls making sure I'm not a bot.
There's some sites[1] that can print your user agent for you. Try it in a few different browsers and you will be surprised. They're honestly unhinged.. I have no idea why we still use this header in 2025!
> PoW increases the cost for the bots which is great. Trivial to implement, sure, but that added cost will add up quickly.
No, the article estimates it would cost less than a single penny to scrape all pages of 1,000,000 distinct Anubis-guarded websites for an entire month.
Once you've built the system that lets you do that, maybe. You still have to do that, though, so it's still raising the cost floor.
I thought HN was anti-copyright and anti-imaginary-property, or at least the bulk of its users were. Yet all of a sudden, "but AI!!!!1"?
a federal crime
The rest of the world doesn't care.
> I thought HN was anti-copyright
Maybe. But what’s happening is ”copyright for thee not for me”, not a universal relaxation of copyright. This loophole exploitation by behemoths doesn’t advance any ideological goals, it only inflames the situation because now you have an adversarial topology. You can see this clearly in practice – more and more resources are going into defense and protection of data than ever before. Fingerprinting, captchas, paywalls, login walls, etc etc.
Don’t forget signed attestations from “user probably has skin in the game” cloud providers like iCloud (already live in Safari and accepted by Cloudflare, iirc?) — not because they identify you but because abusive behavior will trigger attestation provider rate limiting and termination of services (which, in Apple’s case, includes potentially a console kill for the associated hardware). It’s not very popular to discuss at HN but I bet Anubis could add support for it regardless :)
> Fuck AI scrapers, and fuck all this copyright infringement at scale.
Yes, fuck them. Problem is Anubis here is not doing the job. As the article already explains, currently Anubis is not adding a single cent to the AI scrappers' costs. For Anubis to become effective against scrappers, it will necessarily have to become quite annoying for legitimate users.
This anime thing is the one thing about computer culture that I just don't seem to get. I did not get it as child, when suddenly half of children cartoons became animes and I just disliked the aestheic. I didn't get it in school, when people started reading mangas . I'll probably never get it. Therefore I sincerely hope, they do go away from anubis, so I can further dwell in my ignorance.