Except that I can't even load the page to see the model name or whatever to see what specific device I should search for on Amazon. I guess I could just search the brand and wade through all the different listings.
I think that must be the point they're trying to make, yes
It also drives home that Anubis needs a time estimate for sites that don't use Anubis as a "can you run javascript" wall but as an actual proof of work mechanism that it purports to be its main mechanism
It shows a difficulty of "8" with "794 kilohashes per second", but what does that mean? I understand the 8 must be exponential (not literally that 8 hashes are expected to find 1 solution on average), but even as a power of 2, 2^8=256 I happen to know by heart, so thousands of hashes per second would then find an answer in a fraction of a second. Or if it's 8 bytes instead of bits, then you expect to find a solution after like 8 million hashes, which at ~800k is about ten seconds. There is no way to figure out how long the expected wait is even if you understand all the text on the page (which most people wouldn't) and know some shortcuts to do the mental math (how many people know small powers of 2 by heart)
The core problem isn't Proof-of-Work itself — it's difficulty calibration.
PoW for page protection (every page load) is fundamentally different
from PoW for form submission (one-time action). Anubis at difficulty 8
is asking browsers to find 8 leading zero bytes — that's billions of
hashes on average.
For form spam protection, a ~200ms solve time in a WebWorker is enough
to make bot operations uneconomical at scale (10,000 forms = 10,000
unique computations) while being invisible to humans. That's difficulty
2-3 depending on device.
For protecting every page view like Anubis does, the cost-benefit math
is different and much harder to get right, because you're taxing every
visitor on every request — not just on submit.
Yeah, it’s really starting to depress me how much text published to the web is written using an LLM now. Things that seem interesting at first glance become much less appealing when they have that telltale LLM quality to them, and I also start questioning whether they’re full of factual errors (“hallucinations”). I don’t know why I should spend my time reading something the author couldn’t even be bothered to spend time writing.
Indeed. I also had this weird feeling while reading through the article. It got hooked up in the beginning. And then at some point, my brain just noticed that it was LLM-generated. I wonder how this article was written. Did the author accidentally find about Voyager 1's tiny memory and its primitive tape technology while reading something else, or did he just ask LLMs to write something interesting that he could publish with a few prompts.
> I cannot buy an iPhone without creating an apple account
You can both buy and use an iPhone without creating an Apple account. You are limited to the built-in apps, but those built-in apps cover most common use-cases.
Most people wouldn't want to do this, of course. But you can.
I know the logic on what I’m about to say is not that tight, but…
For some reason, creating an account with Apple doesn’t feel like opening a can of worms like it does with Microsoft.
I know exactly what I’m getting when I open the one with Apple, and I have visibility into it from the settings of every device, feels secure and I never get emails or spam associated to it.
The Microsoft account is another story. It’s a black box, I don’t know what they are collecting, I know that even if it looks like a square today, it’ll be a hexagon tomorrow, and a triangle the next day. They’ll change the product name, merge with some other crap, etc. to access it, you’ll have to remember what the service was when you created it. Live? Hotmail? Outlook? Are they the same as my windows account? Who knows.
It’s just not trust worthy IME.
I don’t have an issue with creating an account, I have an issue not knowing why I need it or what I get from it.
Most common use cases are social media, messaging (WhatsApp, Messanger, Telegram, no one is using SMS anymore), ID apps, payment and banking apps.
You could skip social media, but without the others you would basically have to carry around a second phone or be severely handicapped just trying to live a normal life.
Beside all of that, the idea that a $1000 iPhone is usable without an account because you can SMS and check emails is laughable disingenuous.
But most countries other than the USA use meteorological definitions of the seasons starting on the 1st of December, March, June, and September.
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