Notices by bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471 (bdf2121cc3334b35b6ecda66e471@mastodon.social)

@lxo A quick google points to https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1242.pdf which itself references multiple different attempts, but each falling short in some respect.

@lxo it's mostly pipe dreams on crypto forums by people who... don't build software.

@lxo but people have been talking about making PoW systems that do some useful scientific work since Bitcoin in 2009, and in that time nobody's actually built it. I don't think that's for lack of effort.

@lxo what I consider to be much more viable is an offline verifier for people without JavaScript in the browser. Provide a form with a difficulty and an input box, and allow people to run some CLI tool or such to produce an output that can be pasted into the form.

The fact that crawlers don't do proof-of-work right now isn't really the point of PoW and can potentially be patched relatively quickly anyway.

@lxo except in practice, it has reduced traffic to the affected services and made them more available to most humans. Otherwise, the humans in question wouldn't be using them.

Even if the bots are programmed to solve these problems, the point is to make redundant, repeated visits prohibitively expensive, which matters when the LLM bots are performing thousands of times the visits that human actors are.

@lxo if the point is to not make the service available to humans, but to make neural networks do useful work, then what you should be using is... a neural network.

@lxo @home no, not all NP-complete problems are like that.

You give me a map, and tell me to solve the traveling salesman problem, and I give you a result. How do you verify the result I give you _really is_ the shortest possible path, and not a lie?

@lxo besides, if the work keeps the service available to humans while removing the cost of bots, then the work _is useful._

@lxo because the expensive-to-compute result needs to be easy to verify.

If the correctness of the result isn't knowable by the server without doing all the work again, then it fails as a proof-of-work verification.

That's the reason one-way cryptographic functions are used, and not work such as, say, protein folding.

@killyourfm not the sentence I meant, I meant the, "my newspaper threw an exception" sentence.

I think the web has gotten a _little_ too complicated.

@killyourfm mhmm, on mobile. Still, it's quite the sentence, don't you think?

@killyourfm I would love to read it, but my newspaper keeps throwing a client-side exception.

What a time to be alive 😐

@kde@floss.social @kde@lemmy.kde.social Yearly donator. I will donate more to KDE than I would pay for proprietary software, always, because the result is just that much better.

@Varyag @NaClKnight This was my experience too. When From's PvP isn't forced on me, I never choose it.

I'll start taking it seriously when they do. No, tweaking numbers in a spreadsheet doesn't count.