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

I'll just quote from their blog post from January.

https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/anubis/

Anubis also relies on modern web browser features:

- ES6 modules to load the client-side code and the proof-of-work challenge code.

- Web Workers to run the proof-of-work challenge in a separate thread to avoid blocking the UI thread.

- Fetch API to communicate with the Anubis server.

- Web Cryptography API to generate the proof-of-work challenge.

This ensures that browsers are decently modern in order to combat most known scrapers. It's not perfect, but it's a good start.

This will also lock out users who have JavaScript disabled, prevent your server from being indexed in search engines, require users to have HTTP cookies enabled, and require users to spend time solving the proof-of-work challenge.

This does mean that users using text-only browsers or older machines where they are unable to update their browser will be locked out of services protected by Anubis. This is a tradeoff that I am not happy about, but it is the world we live in now.

I think TFA is generally quite good and has something of a good point about the economics of the situation, but finding the math shake out that way should, perhaps, lead one to question their starting point / assumptions[1].

In other words, who said the websites in question wanted to entirely prevent crawlers from accessing them? The answer is: no one. Web crawlers are and have been fundamental to accessing the web for decades. So why are we talking about trying to do that?

[0] Mentioning 'impenetrable wall' is probably setting off alarm bells, because of course that would be a bad design.

[1] (Edited to add:) I should say 'to question their assumptions more' -- like I said, the article is quite good and it does present this as confusing, at least.

lets see, the thing that I am trying to say is that, in my opinion even with AI art, that is not the point.

The point remains whether anubis is actually useful at what it does and is it worth it.

Also I understand free ruined the internet very quickly, but this is free and open source. Open source has made the internet better a 100 times imo.

I genuinely don't think that the author had any wrong intentions with using AI art.

and since we have opened the box, might as well, talk about the AI thoughts.

Basically, I think that there are two schools of thoughts towards AI/Ai art. Its efficacy at doing what it is advertised to say, its effect on markets, its effect on climate.

The efficacy at doing what it can do : I absolutely agree that there is a lot of hype around it but AI art even open source models have become good enough for some very "basic tasks" imo, Like I had a discord server and I actually used AI art as the logo because people wanted a logo and I am not an artist and I can't comission anyone just for something so small. I immediately told everyone this and nobody seemed to care and afterwards and after some more people joined,literally noone asked if it was ai generated or not. I was expecting a single person to notice but nope.

Another point is about climate, I think that AI itself is pretty efficient, there were posts about how it compares to a lightbulb but the problem is how massively it is used at scale and how much the demand can change and how it can affect the power demand of that datacentre and if power demand changes, then that requires the power generators to tweak their speed and tldr, in that process, it becomes really inefficient but still I am actually surprised that we are calling out on AI when there is bitcoin which literally all it does with its pow is waste energy and there are other cryptocoins which can literally have close to 0 fees and instant but nope the crypto market is in a bubble. Stablecoins are the only good thing to come out of it.

Now that being said, its effect on job markets. I am not an artist but I imagine it is frustating to see AI replicate art. but the point is, nobody wants AI art!! There is no economic incentive to make AI art unless genuinely can't comission someone (which is what I did in my server) or just are using it as a backup art untill you can comission one (which is what anubis did) but in my opinion, if someone can't already pay like I couldn't in my discord server, I would have just build one myself or used some CC:0 art with full credits .

Which is why I don't consider AI art "art". Its a backup, more like editing. The people will throw wrenches at you if you get caught using it. And that's a good thing. but we do need to realize maybe using ai art as a backup and people should definitely push against ai art so that if possible, real artists gets the job done.

I don't consider ai art to be anymore of a gimmick but even then, I mean I can understand if people are using ai art as backups untill they can comission real art or build one themselves.

Seriously though I do think we are going to see increasing interest in alternative nets, especially as governments tighten their control over the internet or even break away into isolated nation nets.