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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • koper@feddit.nltoFuck Cars@lemmy.worldtaking up pavement
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    17 hours ago

    They are both a problem. Cars took up most walkable areas and now venture capitalists are exploiting what little is left by littering it with their electric scooters and bikes. Rentals are an important part of a mobility strategy, but they should be run by the government and get their own parking infrastructure.







  • To be clear, I am not minimizing the problems of scrapers. I am merely pointing out that this strategy of proof-of-work has nasty side effects and we need something better.

    These issues are not short term. PoW means you are entering into an arms race against an adversary with bottomless pockets that inherently requires a ton of useless computations in the browser.

    When it comes to moving towards something based on heuristics, which is what the developer was talking about there, that is much better. But that is basically what many others are already doing (like the “I am not a robot” checkmark) and fundamentally different from the PoW that I argue against.

    Go do heuristics, not PoW.


  • It depends on the website’s setting. I have the same phone and there was one website where it took more than 20 seconds.

    The power consumption is significant, because it needs to be. That is the entire point of this design. If it doesn’t take significant a significant number of CPU cycles, scrapers will just power through them. This may not be significant for an individual user, but it does add up when this reaches widespread adoption and everyone’s devices have to solve those challenges.


  • It is basically instantaneous on my 12 year old Keppler GPU Linux Box.

    It depends on what the website admin sets, but I’ve had checks take more than 20 seconds on my reasonably modern phone. And as scrapers get more ruthless, that difficulty setting will have to go up.

    The Cryptography happening is something almost all browsers from the last 10 years can do natively that Scrapers have to be individually programmed to do. Making it several orders of magnitude beyond impractical for every single corporate bot to be repurposed for.

    At best these browsers are going to have some efficient CPU implementation. Scrapers can send these challenges off to dedicated GPU farms or even FPGAs, which are an order of magnitude faster and more efficient. This is also not complex, a team of engineers could set this up in a few days.

    Only to then be rendered moot, because it’s an open-source project that someone will just update the cryptographic algorithm for.

    There might be something in changing to a better, GPU resistant algorithm like argon2, but browsers don’t support those natively so you would rely on an even less efficient implementation in js or wasm. Quickly changing details of the algorithm in a game of whack-a-mole could work to an extent, but that would turn this into an arms race. And the scrapers can afford far more development time than the maintainers of Anubis.

    These posts contain links to articles, if you read them you might answer some of your own questions and have more to contribute to the conversation.

    This is very condescending. I would prefer if you would just engage with my arguments.



  • I get that website admins are desperate for a solution, but Anubis is fundamentally flawed.

    It is hostile to the user, because it is very slow on older hardware andere forces you to use javascript.

    It is bad for the environment, because it wastes energy on useless computations similar to mining crypto. If more websites start using this, that really adds up.

    But most importantly, it won’t work in the end. These scraping tech companies have much deeper pockets and can use specialized hardware that is much more efficient at solving these challenges than a normal web browser.





  • koper@feddit.nltoADHD memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comTaxed indeed
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    6 days ago

    I told you to get lost and yet here you are still telling me that my lived experience is incorrect actually. Yes everyone forgets things sometimes, but ADHD and executive dysfunction means it happens more often and also it’s more difficult to deal with even when you do remember. Maybe go read up on those things because you are now blocked.


  • koper@feddit.nltoADHD memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comTaxed indeed
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    6 days ago
    • Not everyone has access to treatment
    • Even with treatment, these things are still much harder than for neurotypical people
    • Even with treatment and great effort, you will still just slip up sometimes and fail at these things at a higher rate than neurotypical people.

    So the point still stands.




  • koper@feddit.nltoADHD memes@lemmy.dbzer0.comTaxed indeed
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    6 days ago

    Coming into a community to gatekeep our experience is very disruptive. Please stop.

    I could go into detail about why the ADHD condition actually does make it much harder to deal with stuff like subscriptions, but frankly you are not entitled to an explanation.