Comment by stickfigure
11 hours ago
From a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49500040
Basically, the cost of an optimized solution is orders of magnitude lower than the cost of an in-browser solution. Anyone dedicated can easily afford to solve workloads higher than your users will tolerate.
You might stop casual scrapers, but you're not going to stop someone who cares. AI scraping companies care.
You're assuming that the part of Anubis that stops bots is the PoW. It's not.
That's not even the fundamental problem. Even if the payload runs optimally in the browser, the cost of CPU is so small that it's basically irrelevant.
If you waste your user's time with something that would take a full minute to run on a datacenter core, you're costing the scraper something like $0.000005: 360 W TDP on a 128-core EPYC 9754 * $0.10/kWh. In reality, it'll be substantially less than that, because CPUs don't use 0W at idle.
The only way this would make any sense is if there were many more scrapers than users and scrapers cared more about latency than real users, but that's the exact opposite of reality. The entire endeavor is so fundamentally misguided that it almost seems like a psyop.
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