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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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

Yup, and I suspect that even if OP is honest in this respect, if proof-of-work gets established as a normal practice for web pages, it's going to be used this way.

But just taking this as-is, what is the environmental impact likely to be when multiplied up by the number of users? Proof of work is a bad idea.

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.

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

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

Yes, all these kind of bot checks are essentially malware.

The "benefit of someone else" in this scenario is the site operator not having their website down or their hosting bills unsustainable because of misbehaving (which are 99% of current) web scrapers from AI companies.

The README itselfs admit that this is an nuclear option. https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

You can flag malicious websites. You can even email HN moderators about them

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