The assumption is that there will always be some population distribution in terms of effort expended as well as in terms of problems caused. At present it's the lowest effort actors that are causing the highest number of problems. So an 80% (or even just a 20%) solution largely solves the practical problem faced by site operators.

If against all odds it turns out that skiddies (or agents or AI billionaires or what have you) are willing to burn inordinate amounts of RAM and CPU just to scrape autogenerated cgit pages that are of approximately zero value to them to begin with then I guess we'll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it.

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XorNot 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Okay but it's like no RAM at all. Thats the problem: you've got stupid bots causing a bunch of issues - these can be stopped.

And then regular users: who now can't really browse your site.

And then smart bots - anyone with even a moderate amount of funding in the AI space, who aren't even slightly slowed down.

The solution basically makes the favored customer well funded AI scrapers, not users.

	▲	fc417fc802 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> And then regular users: who now can't really browse your site. That's entirely up to how the site operator configures the PoW challenge. > anyone with even a moderate amount of funding in the AI space, who aren't even slightly slowed down Do you have any evidence that it is the large well funded AI companies DoSing sites by (for example) scraping absurd numbers of permutations of cgit url parameters? Even if it is (which I doubt), if all this accomplishes is getting them to spend 10 minutes optimizing their bots to not do that it will be a major win.