A kernel.org maintainer shows AI scrapers now burn more server power than every real developer combined.
What the article says
- A Linux kernel infrastructure maintainer breaks down why git.kernel.org is drowning in AI crawler traffic.
- Bots ignore the sane option of cloning the repo and instead request every possible rendered commit page across hundreds of forks, generating billions of pointless URLs.
- Blocking by user agent, then IP, then whole network ranges all worked briefly until crawlers switched to armies of residential devices, often smart TVs and phones running hidden proxy apps.
- Proof of work checks like Anubis helped for months, but bots have gotten fast enough to solve them too.
- Legitimate human traffic is now only about two percent of all requests, and the team is quietly stripping features to shrink the number of pages bots can hit.
What HN is saying
- Commenters agree proof of work is losing the arms race, since dedicated hardware solves the puzzles far faster than an ordinary phone or laptop ever could.
- Several site owners share their own war stories, from cgit instances hit by relentless bots to a gaming site whose online counter turned out to be almost entirely fake traffic.
- One popular idea is deliberately forking and tweaking the challenge code so mass scrapers, which are tuned to the standard version, keep failing silently.
- A few people counter that proof of work still meaningfully cuts scraper volume even if it is not perfect, and that giving up on it just means more bots get through.
- One commenter recalls an Anthropic job interview where adding robots.txt compliance to a crawler exercise seemed to end their chances, which others found darkly funny given the industry's behavior.
California just quietly decided Linux users don't need to prove their age to use a computer.
What the article says
- California passed a law requiring operating systems to collect users' ages starting in 2027, but lawmakers just voted unanimously to exempt open source systems.
- Anything distributed under licenses like GPL, MIT, BSD or Apache is now excluded, which covers Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch and the BSD family.
- Package manager tools like apt and pacman are also carved out, so libraries and dependencies aren't caught up in the rule.
- Lawmakers also fixed a drafting error that had accidentally classified every device owner in the state as a child.
- Windows, macOS, iOS and Android are still fully covered and must start collecting age data at setup from January 2027.
What HN is saying
- Plenty of commenters are cheering, joking that this could finally be the push that gets more people onto Linux.
- The sharpest pushback is that this quietly bans Linux from big social platforms, since those sites can't get an age signal from an exempt operating system and may simply block it.
- One widely read comment describes testifying against a similar bill in another state, saying lawmakers buried key amendments until the last minute to dodge scrutiny.
- Several people argue the whole framework is badly designed and that real privacy protections would have done more good than an age check built into the operating system.
- A few note the law is vaguer than the headline suggests. It exempts a description of open licensing, not a fixed list of named licenses.
Omarchy quietly put every app on your desktop one Docker command away from root access.
What the article says
- A researcher found that Omarchy's default setup put regular users in the Docker group, and that group can talk to the root owned Docker daemon.
- Any process in your session, including a browser, editor, or AI coding agent, could ask Docker to mount your whole filesystem and read protected files like the password store.
- The docs described this as running Docker without root, which is misleading since it actually handed out root level access by another route.
- The maintainers patched it fast, but only new installs get the fix automatically, older systems need to update to version four point zero point one themselves.
- The writer recommends switching to Podman, which runs containers without a root daemon at all.
What HN is saying
- Plenty of commenters shrug this off, saying putting your user in the Docker group is a well known tradeoff plenty of distros and guides already make.
- Others push back hard, saying shipping that as an unexplained default is very different from a user choosing the risk themselves.
- A recurring worry is that Omarchy and similar hyped, AI assisted distros lower the bar for care and competence in building an operating system.
- One popular tangent argues Linux desktops lack real sandboxing altogether, so this bug is just one symptom of a much bigger structural gap.
- Several people note Podman has solved this rootless problem for years and ask why any modern distro still defaults to Docker.
A 1990s game guide writer hand picked every word so the right margin lined up perfectly, no software involved.
What the article says
- A blog post explores why monospace text is so hard to line up neatly, since spaces cannot be split evenly like they can in regular typesetting.
- It points to a Super Metroid walkthrough from the late nineties as an extreme example. The author wrote thousands of words with every single line ending flush on the right edge.
- The trick was not a script or formatting tool. The writer simply chose synonyms and reworded sentences by hand until each line fit exactly.
- The post frames this as a quiet, obsessive kind of craft, the same instinct that makes someone endlessly tweak a button label so it fits a tight interface.
What HN is saying
- Plenty of commenters admit to doing a smaller version of this themselves, reworking code comments or commit messages so they align nicely in a fixed width font.
- A side conversation breaks out about widows and orphans, the old typesetting terms for stray lines, with someone noting German has much blunter names for the same idea.
- People swap stories of extreme cases, including a paper that secretly encodes a computer program in its wording, and a student once accused of plagiarism for hand justifying an essay.
- One sharp aside compares this manual word tuning to how AI text watermarking works, choosing wording to hide a hidden signal rather than a straight margin.
- A tangent debates whether justified text is even worth the effort, with several people saying ragged edges are simply easier to read.
An engineering leader argues AI mandates from panicked executives are wrecking morale faster than they boost output.
What the article says
- A veteran engineering manager says leaders obsess over AI tools while ignoring the culture those tools operate inside.
- Telling staff they are replaceable by AI destroys the trust people need to actually work well together.
- Bad communication and structure get worse under AI, not better, because AI just amplifies whatever is already there.
- AI adoption sticks when it grows from engineers using it and sharing what works, not when it is forced from the top.
- He argues companies should keep hiring engineers rather than cutting headcount and betting on AI to cover the gap.
What HN is saying
- Commenters broadly agree culture comes down to fair pay, predictable priorities, and management that does not create pointless busywork.
- Several say the article states the obvious and doubt any executive causing a bad culture will read a blog post and change.
- A recurring theme is that AI just amplifies whatever culture already exists, good teams get better and dysfunctional ones get worse faster.
- One sharp pushback says plenty of companies thrive despite terrible culture if they have market lock in or funding to burn.
- A few readers found the piece repetitive or oddly written and suspected it was written or heavily assisted by AI itself.