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I hate compilers

xeiaso.net

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Re: I hate compilers

#101

Post by beached_whale »

ericpauley wrote: post #84
antirez wrote: post #76

So to avoid those energy-hungry LLM companies from scraping your website, you force each browser to compute a lot of hashes in a necessarily energy-hungry loop, creating, at the same time, all the kind of accessibility problems?

I don’t get how people believe there’s a PoW function that both: 1. Allows access in reasonable time/battery use to me on my phone 2. Poses any meaningful challenge to the most compute-resourced organizations on the planet I wonder how many cumulative hours of human life have been wasted waiting on Anubis.

There are a lot of people writing really bad scrapers and running them on far from high compute power systems. This is the prevent DoS because of those. The big companies are often far more clever and know they are traversing the whole internet and can come back later.

Re: I hate compilers

#102

Post by titularcomment »

ctrlmeta wrote: post #71
Animats wrote: post #47

I hate proof of work code running on my machine for the benefit of someone else. It's like planting a crypto miner.

Do proof-of-work pages actually stop AI bots? Big AI companies have enough compute to solve these challenges at scale. And if their bots are already doing much heavier work to fetch, read and process each page, then solving a small challenge first seems unlikely to be a serious barrier. Who are these proof-of-work challenges actually helping?

I believe poisonous loops of non-sense text are the best choice in terms of LLM capabilities and human distinguishing potential; the next iteration could be non-sense with reasonably intact grammar and content. At the very least, show some content whilst doing the PoW (isn't the point rising computational costs? Give me something like YouTube video decryption instead of having me wait at least) OR use the PoW for some useful protein-folding, finding the next prime, or an alternative monetization scheme.

Re: I hate compilers

#103

Post by xena »

trexd wrote: post #81
edude03 wrote: post #77

Could have sworn the author was a nix(os) user already. I know it’s a meme but what all the problems they’re describing literally is solved by nix. The nix sandbox even catches calls for time for example to replace it with 0 for determinism.

They stopped using Nix due to disagreements with how the project was run. https://xeiaso.net/blog/2024/much-ado-about-nothing/

Nix doesn't help when the issue is a compiler bug, sadly.

Re: I hate compilers

#104

Post by xena »

titularcomment wrote: post #102
ctrlmeta wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do proof-of-work pages actually stop AI bots? Big AI companies have enough compute to solve these challenges at scale. And if their bots are already doing much heavier work to fetch, read and process each page, then solving a small challenge first seems unlikely to be a serious barrier. Who are these proof-of-work challenges actually helping?

I believe poisonous loops of non-sense text are the best choice in terms of LLM capabilities and human distinguishing potential; the next iteration could be non-sense with reasonably intact grammar and content. At the very least, show some content whilst doing the PoW (isn't the point rising computational costs? Give me something like YouTube video decryption instead of having me wait at least) OR use the PoW for som…

Anubis does this: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/honeypot/overview

Getting in the maze influences your client's challenge difficulty.

Re: I hate compilers

#105

Post by KolmogorovComp »

xena wrote: post #100
KolmogorovComp wrote: post #86

I’m still surprised by Anubis’ decision not to make the PoW have a useful output, for example a crypto, protein-folding like, or something else. And I speak as being generally very critical of cryptos, but here rewarding the website owner with some cents to have access seems fair, and resolves the traditional issues about micro-payments.

Patches welcome. I'd love to do protein folding too.

what about something (crypto being the only idea I have) that could be leveraged to reward the website owner?

Re: I hate compilers

#106

Post by xena »

KolmogorovComp wrote: post #105
xena wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patches welcome. I'd love to do protein folding too.

what about something (crypto being the only idea I have) that could be leveraged to reward the website owner?

Anubis is not a cryptocurrency miner: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/user/frequently-asked-questi...

Re: I hate compilers

#107

Post by drunner »

trexd wrote: post #81
edude03 wrote: post #77

Could have sworn the author was a nix(os) user already. I know it’s a meme but what all the problems they’re describing literally is solved by nix. The nix sandbox even catches calls for time for example to replace it with 0 for determinism.

They stopped using Nix due to disagreements with how the project was run. https://xeiaso.net/blog/2024/much-ado-about-nothing/

From what I gather you fear determinate systems will guide future Nixos dev like google steers chromium or am I way off base?

Re: I hate compilers

#108

Post by KolmogorovComp »

xena wrote: post #106
KolmogorovComp wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what about something (crypto being the only idea I have) that could be leveraged to reward the website owner?

Anubis is not a cryptocurrency miner: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/user/frequently-asked-questi...

it does not answer if it's a conscious design choice or just a technical limitation of the PoW, or just a "patch welcome" issue.

Re: I hate compilers

#109

Post by charcircuit »

harrouet wrote: post #74
charcircuit wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Being able to reproduce the binary from the source code and being able to verify that it's the same as the original is quite important in some contexts. I disagree. The contexts that people come up with are purely theoretical, and are not practically important. Please do try and convince me otherwise by sharing such a context. From my view the juice of trying to accomplish this is no where worth the squeeze.

You disagree but you're wrong. Military context: a government would want to review the code and compile themselves. Provide a hash of the target binary to ensure they've compiled it correctly. SDLC: provide auditors with _proof_ that the tested binary is indeed coming from the audited code

>a government would want to review the code and compile themselves. Provide a hash of the target binary to ensure they've compiled it correctly.

The government doesn't want to do this. A lot of the time the government doesn't even get the source code in the first place.

>provide auditors with _proof_ that the tested binary is indeed coming from the audited code

This can be done by showing to the auditor how one's CI is setup to build checked in code and sign it.

Re: I hate compilers

#110

Post by xena »

KolmogorovComp wrote: post #108
xena wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anubis is not a cryptocurrency miner: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/user/frequently-asked-questi...

it does not answer if it's a conscious design choice or just a technical limitation of the PoW, or just a "patch welcome" issue.

It's a conscious design choice. Doing that gets you considered a botnet/malware. I don't want Anubis to be considered a botnet/malware.
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