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Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

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Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#161
post #144
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the mascot/logo for the Linux kernel a cartoon penguin?

I have a plushy tux at home (about 30cm high). So now I'm in the same league as the people with anime pillows?

It depends. What do you do with the plushy?

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#162
post #144
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the mascot/logo for the Linux kernel a cartoon penguin?

I have a plushy tux at home (about 30cm high). So now I'm in the same league as the people with anime pillows?

Well, the people with anime plushies would be a better comparison. There's plenty more of those than pillows.

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#163
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the images aren’t the kind of sexualized (or downright pornographic) content this implies… having cutesy anime girls pop up when a user loads your site is, at best, wildly unprofessional. (Dare I say “cringe”?) For something as serious and legit as kernel.org to have this, I do think it’s frankly shocking and unacceptable.

Isn't the mascot/logo for the Linux kernel a cartoon penguin?

Right, but, that's different. Penguins are serious and professional.

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#165
post #15

This is neither here nor there but the character isn't a cat. It's in the name, Anubis, who is an Egyptian deity typically depicted as a jackal or generic canine, and the gatekeeper of the afterlife who weighs the souls of the dead (hence the tagline). So more of a dog-girl, or jackal-girl if you want to be technical.

... but entirely lacking the primary visual feature that Anubis had.

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#166
post #133

I don't care that they use anime catgirls. What I do care about is being met with something cutesy in the face of a technical failure anywhere on the net . I hate Amazon's failure pets, I hate google's failure mini-games -- it strikes me as an organizational effort to get really good at failing rather than spending that same effort to avoid failures all together. It's like everyone collectively thought the standard o…

I hear this

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

How so? He brings good points and now there's two responses trying to make emotional appeal instead of address the hypocrisy. I know it's 2025, but I expected a bit better from this community.

Are you arguing that "poorly thought out solution from an AI sympathizer, it was probably vibecoded" is not an emotional appeal, or do you think it's unfair to respond to an emotional appeal with an emotional criticism?

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#168
post #50

My biggest bitch is that it requires JS and cookies... Although the long term problem is the business model of servers paying for all network bandwidth. Actual human users have consumed a minority of total net bandwidth for decades: https://www.atom.com/blog/internet-statistics/ Part 4 shows bots out using humans in 1996 8-/ What are "bots"? This needs to include goggleadservices, PIA sharing for profit, real-time ad…

> The difference between that and the LLM training data scraping

Is the traffic that people are complaining about really training traffic?

My SWAG would be that there are maybe on the order of dozens of foundation models trained in a year. If you assume the training runs are maximally inefficient, cache nothing, and crawl every Web site 10 times for each model trained, then that means maybe a couple of hundred full-content downloads for each site in a year. But really they probably do cache, and they probably try to avoid downloading assets they don't actually want to put into the training hopper, and I'm not sure how many times they feed any given page through in a single training run.

That doesn't seem like enough traffic to be a really big problem.

On the other hand, if I ask ChatGPT Deep Research to give me a report on something, it runs around the Internet like a ferret on meth and maybe visits a couple of hundred sites (but only a few pages on each site). It'll do that a whole lot faster than I'd do it manually, it's probably less selective about what it visits than I would be... and I'm likely to ask for a lot more such research from it than I'd be willing to do manually. And the next time a user asks for a report, it'll do it again, often on the same sites, maybe with caching and maybe not.

Thats not training; the results won't be used to update any neural network weights, and won't really affect anything at all beyond the context of a single session. It's "inference scraping" if you will. It's even "user traffic" in some sense, although not in the sense that there's much chance the user is going to see a site's advertising. It's conceivable the bot might check the advertising for useful information, but of course the problem there is that it's probably learned that's a waste of time.

Not having given it much thought, I'm not sure how that distinction affects the economics of the whole thing, but I suspect it does.

So what's really going on here? Anybody actually know?

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#169
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crazy ( especially considering anime is more popular now than ever; netflix alone is making billions a year on anime) that people see a completely innocent little anime picture and immediately think "pervent-dwelling imageboard".

Even if the images aren’t the kind of sexualized (or downright pornographic) content this implies… having cutesy anime girls pop up when a user loads your site is, at best, wildly unprofessional. (Dare I say “cringe”?) For something as serious and legit as kernel.org to have this, I do think it’s frankly shocking and unacceptable.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.miwd.11...

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.miwd.11...

“The future is now, old man”

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#170
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not bypassing it, that's them finally engaging with the PoW challenge as intended, making crawling slower and more expensive, instead failing to crawl at all, which is more of a plus. This however forces servers to increase the challenge difficulty, which increases the waiting time for the first-time access.

Obviously the developer of Anubis thinks it is bypassing: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/issues/978

Fair, then I obviously think Xe may have a kinda misguided understanding of their own product. I still stand by the concept I stated above.
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