this is an increasingly common situation. it goes something like:
- i have a free, niche resource
- it becomes too popular
- i make it more efficient
- now it's really popular, and people are "abusing" it
- let's make them proof-of-work
- ... and proof-of-work harder
- but now "legitimate" users can't use it
- ???
the core problem is that the average person uses a mobile device where work is expensive, and the "attackers" use servers where work is cheap. if you require expensive proof-of-work, next comes a cheap-work-as-a-service where inefficient mobile devices pay small amounts of money to get efficient servers to complete their work for them. now everyone has an interest in making their usage efficient, but there's still an obvious inefficiency in the system: why have people pay unknown 3rd parties to burn cpu cycles to reduce costs for a free service, when you could just have people make small payments that cover the service's costs?
which is called l402/x402. micropayments' day has come
I mean generally what you said is true. But who is actually going to look at the linux kernel from their phone (probably just the maintainers in extreme circumstances)
What's actually stopping them isn't the PoW, it's the customisation effort. If one site has Anubis nothing scrapes it. If many sites have Anubis they write counter scrapers. Today if you make a slight change to the Anubis algorithm on your site, they'll burn CPU endlessly computing hashes with the original algorithm and submitting wrong ones.
The author of Anubis hates this fact and will ban you if you mention it, so don't. He insists it's the PoW.
Searching around for this, found "make users click the mouse three times"[1] as an anti-bot idea. Generally, makes sense that smaller site owners can make small customizations to existing anti-bot tech and see positive results until they're either (1) deemed valuable enough to receive custom attention or (2) the scrapers include LLM-based anti-antibot methods.
>will ban you if you mention it
Even if mentioned really politely?
[1] would hope anyone trying this makes it accessible to visitors with disabilities
I have a work-in-progress called Modus. 100% written by Claude, so take that however you will. The current release boots on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. The next release (unreleased in the pipe for ~ months) is standard Common Lisp on bare aarch64 (pi) and x64 (qemu for now), with linux aarch64 and x64 command line interfaces à la sbcl.
Since you can't use an OS by itself, I've rounded out the Common Lisp environment with portable ssh client and server, web browser, and a bitcoin node. Framebuffer with VNC in the pipe
Fun fact: under the hood atproto bears many similarities to blockchain... it was funded in during the 2019/2020 crypto craze. I'm not too involved, but outside of a consensus mechanism, atproto looks a bit like a chain, kinda like IPFS.
I'm very deep into ATProto development, in particular I have the first Permissioned PDS implementation [1]. It definitely has roots in blockchain / federated, but makes tradeoffs for UX.
The more interesting perspective is a Plug-n-Play Distributed System [2]
These all seem like OCR errors...? Why would there be OCR in this workflow? Did they print this out and then generate a PDF from a scan instead of the original source? To maintain an air gap maybe?
It is possible to accept that one can’t know the absolute, complete, detailed truth without giving up on identifying and rejecting lies.
That’s the whole authoritarian / fascist shtick: if you can’t be 100% certain that no formulation of any vaccine has ever increased illness, then “vaccines kill people” is just as true as “vaccines save lives”.
I don’t need to have personally reviewed all records of every single version of every single vaccine to confidently assert the two statements are not remotely equivalent in accuracy.
Both statements as written are true: vaccines do kill people and vaccines do save lives.
If you insert the implicit “all”, then both are false: not all vaccines save lives and not all vaccines kill people.
But your knowledge of medicine is quite deep if you know the relative rates of vaccines with zero deaths ever versus the rate at which defective vaccines are produced. Do you have a good source you can share?
So many fallacies. To be charitable, I will assume you are just trying to wind people up with nonsensical rhetoric.
There are no zero-death vaccines, as you know. There are also no zero-death diseases, as you probably know. The relative rates of death between the two are not even close, as you know.
Unless you get your eyes open to Intuitionist Math and then you realize math isn't "true".
Then again... where in the trillion or so parameters of any LLM is The Law of the Excluded Middle that classical math requires to be "true".
Even more comical is that there are certainly embeddings in there _about_ an excluded middle. With thousands of dimensions and billions of values in each one.
I’ve been reading this story since it came out, I’m actually from Savannah. It’s a very political story with bad coverage as a result. I have never read a story that wasn’t vague with no details which is why I asked.
which is called l402/x402. micropayments' day has come
reply