I'm not moralizing. The sites running Anubis are owned by people who like Anubis and are fully within their rights to run Anubis. I don't care how enthusiastic they are about it. It's their call.

I'm just saying, it's bad computer science.

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harshreality 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You're arguing worst-case, and people running anubis are saying it dramatically helps in their experience, because they're not getting too many of the sorts of bots that people like you and Tavis (correctly) argue are theoretically possible. So the argument that it's "bad CS" falls flat.

A better, perhaps the best, argument is that a worse bot mix might appear tomorrow, so anubis should be used as a runway for a better solution, and not as a solution in itself. If only everyone with a website had the desire (or AI tokens) to implement their own better solution. In some cases even desire or a lot of tokens isn't enough. I mean, you think kernel.org folks haven't put some serious thought into it? And yet, as HN argues about it, there's kernel.org running anubis at difficulty 5.

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tptacek 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't know what you mean by "the best argument". My entire argument is that it's bad CS. I'm not trying to convince people not to run Anubis. If anything, I'm trying to convince Anubis to use better computer science. That would make more people run it! But even that's just a faint subsidiary goal; the real goal, as someone who works in this field and has designed proof-of-work antiabuse systems before, is just to add clarity about what can and can't work and why.

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harshreality 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I too would love anubis to use better CS, if available. Perhaps you have some ideas for @xena, instead of just letting anubis continue on the trajectory of iterating its PoW approach?

	▲	rvz 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Same here. But of course and as expected; 5 hours later, the GP comment offers no proper solutions for this "better computer science" they speak of. It shows they really don't care and they are just rage-baiting readers in their weekly grumpiness without any suggestions. Unless they come up with said "solution", they can completely ignored in their complaints.

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inigyou 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Which part of computer science is about getting DDoSed by billionaires who are above the law?

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TeMPOraL 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Where on Earth do people get the belief that:

- It's the SOTA companies doing it?

- Scrapers are doing it for training data?

Those are two assumptions I see in posts and threads around Anubis, that are taken at faith, and never once substantiated.

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shakna an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Because Anthropic already admitted it? [0]

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/07611b74-3d69-4579-9089-f2fc2af61...

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mschuster91 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It's the SOTA companies doing it?

There are more than just the American top dogs (OAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, Facebook)... especially the Chinese government with all its infinite cash resources and next to zero ethical constraints.

I don't trust the US top dogs at all, but I think the fear of discovery alone would lead them to not use "residential proxy" services. Non-US/EU entities however... who cares?

	▲	figglestar 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Why would they directly use a proxy service? I'd just launder the data scraping through some third party company that I could slough off if it ever turned into a news story. Not that anything would happen to them if they directly used these services anyway.

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inigyou 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What's your alternative hypothesis?