Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel? • Hacker News Board

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

#941

Post by qwery » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 1:29 AM UTC

1gn15 wrote: post #911

qwery wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think you're right. The commentary about its (presumed, imagined) effectiveness is very much making the assumption that it's designed to be an impenetrable wall[0] -- i.e. prevent bots from accessing the content entirely. 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…

> 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? I agree, but the advertising is the whole issue. "Checking to see you're not a bot!" and all that. Therefore some people using Anubis expect it to be an impenetrabl…

Yeah, I think it's obviously a pretty natural conclusion to draw, that {thing for hinder crawler} ≅≅ {thing for stop all crawler}. Perhaps I should have stated that explicitly in the original comment.

As for the presentation/advertising, I didn't get into it because I don't hold a particularly strong opinion. Well, I do hold a particularly strong opinion, but not one that really distinguishes Anubis from any of the other things. I'm fully onboard with what you're saying -- I find this sort of software extremely hostile and the fact that so many people don't[0] reminds me that I'm not a people.

In my experience, this particular jump scare is about the same as any of the other services. The website is telling me that I'm not welcome for whatever arbitrary reason it is now, and everyone involved wants me to feel bad.

Actually there is one thing I like about the Anubis experience[1] compared to the other ones, it doesn't "Would you like to play a game?" me. As a robot I appreciate the bluntness, I guess.

(the games being: "click on this. now watch spinny. more. more. aw, you lose! try again?", and "wheel, traffic light, wildcard/indistinguishable"[2]).

[0] "just ignore it, that's what I do" they say. "Oh, I don't have a problem like that. Sucks to be you."

[1] yes, I'm talking upsides about the experience of getting **ed by it. I would ask how we got here but it's actually pretty easy to follow.

[2] GCHQ et al. should provide a meatspace operator verification service where they just dump CCTV clips and you have to "click on the squares that contain: UNATTENDED BAG". Call it "phonebooth, handbag, foreign agent".

(Apologies for all the weird tangents -- I'm just entertaining myself, I think I might be tired.)

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

#942

Post by troyvit » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 7:45 AM UTC

deanishe wrote: post #914

integralid wrote: post #844

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why the anime girl is received so badly. Is it because it's seen as childish? Is it bad because it confuses people (i.e. don't do this because other don't do this)? Thinking about it logically, putting some "serious" banner there would just make everything a bit more grey and boring and would make no functional difference. So why is it disliked so much?

The GitHub unicorn doesn't look as if it came out of a furry dev's wank bank.

Who are you to judge what's a wank bank and what's not? And what wank bank do you go to? The logo doesn't even have breasts.

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

#943

Post by troyvit » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 7:52 AM UTC

tgv wrote: post #922

integralid wrote: post #844

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why the anime girl is received so badly. Is it because it's seen as childish? Is it bad because it confuses people (i.e. don't do this because other don't do this)? Thinking about it logically, putting some "serious" banner there would just make everything a bit more grey and boring and would make no functional difference. So why is it disliked so much?

Why? It has sexual connotations, and it involves someone under the age of consent. As wikipedia puts it: "In a 2010 critique of the manga series Loveless, the feminist writer T. A. Noonan argued that, in Japanese culture, catgirl characteristics have a similar role to that of the Playboy Bunny in western culture, serving as a fetishization of youthful innocence." > Thinking about it logically This isn't about logic.

> This isn't about logic.

Clearly you proved that. What has sexual connotations is wildly subjective and plucking the opinion of one author/poet's critique from 15 years ago doesn't make it fact today.

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

#944

Post by danieltanfh95 » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 7:57 AM UTC

r0uv3n wrote: post #691

danieltanfh95 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this only holds through if the data to be accessed is less valuable than the computational cost. in this case, that is false and spending a few dollars to scrape data is more than worth. reducing the problem to a cost issue is bound to be short sighted.

This is not about preventing crawling entirely, it's about finding a way to prevent crawlers from repeatedly everything way too frequently just because crawling is just very cheap. Of course it will always be worth it to crawl the Linux Kernel mailing list, but maybe with a high enough cost per crawl the crawlers will learn to be fine with only crawling it once per hour for example

my comment is not about preventing crawling, its stating that with how much revenue AI is bringing (real or not), the value of crawling repeatedly >>> the cost of running these flimsy coin mining algorithms.

At the very least captcha at least tries to make the human-ai distinction, but these algorithms are just purely on the side of making it "expensive". if its just a capital problem, then its not a problem for these big corpo who are the ones who are incentivized to do so in the first place!

even if human captcha solvers are involved, at the very least it provides the society with some jobs (useless as it may be), but these mining algorithms also do society no good, and wastes compute for nothing!

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

#945

Post by GreenWatermelon » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 10:16 AM UTC

pembrook wrote: post #603

Something feels bizarrely incongruent about the people using Anubis. These people used to be the most vehemently pro-piracy, pro internet freedom and information accessibility, etc. Yet now when it's AI accessing their own content, suddenly they become the DMCA and want to put up walls everywhere. I'm not part of the AI doomer cult like many here, but it would seem to me that if you publish your content publicly, typ…

In case you're genuinely confused, the reason for Anubis and similar tools is that AI-training-data-scraping crawlers are assholes, and strangle the living shit out of any webserver they touch, like a cloud of starving locusts descending upon a wheat field.

i.e. it's DDoS protection.

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

#946

Post by akk0 » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 11:24 AM UTC

JimDabell wrote: post #617

akk0 wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A social media site can ban an abusive user without them being able to simply register a new account. This is an absolutely gargantuan-sized antifeature that would single-handedly drive me out of the parts of the internet that choose to embrace this hellish tech.

I think social media platforms should have the ability to effectively ban abusive users, and I’m pretty sure that’s a mainstream viewpoint shared by most people. The alternative is that you think people should be able to use social media platforms in ways that violate their rules, and that the platforms should not be able to refuse service to these users. I don’t think that’s a justifiable position to take, but I’m o…

No, my position is not any of these things you just decided to attribute to me. Allowing people to make alternate accounts has been the status quo on the internet since time immemorial, if only because it's currently not preventable. False bans are not rare (I only got unbanned from LinkedIn after getting banned with no explanation and having my appeal initially denied, for instance). I've gotten banned on places, rightfully (in my view) or not, then come back on a new account and avoided stepping on anyone's toes and lived happily ever after, too.

Of course in the ideal world all bans would be handed out correctly, be of a justified duration, and offer due process to those banned. We don't live in that world, the incentive is emphatically NOT to handle appeals fairly and understandably. Getting truly permanently banned on a major platform can be a life changing experience.

In reality users can generally get away with signing up new accounts, but new users will be marked somehow and/or limited (e.g. green names on HN) and get extra scrutiny, and sign-ups will have friction and limits to let it not scale up to mass spammer scale. The rest is handled manually by moderation staff.

The limits to moderator power are a feature that compensates for the limits to moderator competence.

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

#947

Post by AlexeyBelov » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 12:25 PM UTC

SnuffBox wrote: post #905

Der_Einzige wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the only project with an anime girl as its mascot. ComfyUI has what I think is a foxgirl as its official mascot, and that's the de-facto primary UI for generating Stable Diffusion or related content.

I've noticed the word "comfy" used more than usual recently and often by the anime-obsessed, is there cultural relevance I'm not understanding?

OK, you've been all over this thread being negative and angry. On a new account, which makes it even more sus. Take a break from social media.

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

#948

Post by tgv » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 4:56 PM UTC

troyvit wrote: post #943

tgv wrote: post #922

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? It has sexual connotations, and it involves someone under the age of consent. As wikipedia puts it: "In a 2010 critique of the manga series Loveless, the feminist writer T. A. Noonan argued that, in Japanese culture, catgirl characteristics have a similar role to that of the Playboy Bunny in western culture, serving as a fetishization of youthful innocence." > Thinking about it logically This isn't about logic.

> This isn't about logic. Clearly you proved that. What has sexual connotations is wildly subjective and plucking the opinion of one author/poet's critique from 15 years ago doesn't make it fact today.

It's about perception and feelings. If anime cat girls have sexual connotations (for a large enough group), that's the way it is. That critique didn't come out of thin air, and its age is hardly relevant. The association has been established. If you use a symbol that has a certain association, you shouldn't be surprised if people react to that association when they encounter that symbol.

There's nothing wrong with "subjective", by the way. You seem to think it discredits something (can't say what exactly), but this topic is subjective. It's not about logic (as if anything outside maths ever is).

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

#949

Post by svgmaker » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 5:23 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #662

ChrisRR wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both. I don't want any random pictures of young girls popping up while I'm browsing the web, and why would adults insert pictures of young girls into their project in the first place?

What a strange comment to make about a cartoon character. Also, the anime reference is very much intentional at this point; while the source code is open so anyone can change it, the author sells a version for the boring serious types where you can easily change the logo without recompiling the source yourself. Adding the additional bottleneck of having to sync a custom fork or paying out to placate the "serious" peo…

https://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/106344979

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

#950

Post by overfeed » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 9:01 PM UTC

cakealert wrote: post #932

overfeed wrote: post #923

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With privacy preserving cryptography the tokens are standalone and have no ties to the identity that spawned them. I suspect there will be different levels of attestations from the anonymous ("this is an adult"), to semi-anonymous ("this person was born in 20YY and resides in administrative region XYZ") to the compete record ("This is John Quincy Smith III born on YYYY-MM-DD with ID doc number ABC123"). Somewhere i…

The latter attestation will be completely useless for privacy.

100% agree, but it will be necessary for any non-repudiation use cases, like signing contracts remotely. There is no one size fits all approach for online identity management.