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As it is, Grokipedia is not a threat to Wikipedia because relative to Wikipedia, almost nobody is using it.

Additionally, an encyclopedia reader likely cares about accuracy significantly more than average.


I remember when Fox News was considered irrelevant compared to mainstream news outlets. Don’t underestimate the reach of billionaires with an ideological agenda.


> Don’t underestimate the reach of billionaires with an ideological agenda.

Or the audience's need to have their wrong opinions validated.


Fox News has been the #1 rated cable news network for over two decades. They've had more viewers than CNN and MSNBC for most of their existence. Calling them anything other than "mainstream" is just supporting their propaganda. They've always branded themselves as the scrappy outsider because it plays well with their audience, not because it reflects reality.


Yes, and I’m talking about the time before that, when experts doubted whether Fox could survive. (I’m old.)


> Fox News has been the #1 rated cable news network for over two decades.

Yeah, but cable news only displaced local and broadcast TV news as the main news source after 9/11, and already by 2010 had itself been displaced by online media. There was only a very brief moment in history where "the #1 rated cable news network" was really an indicator of being a mainstream news source.


> As it is, Grokipedia is not a threat to Wikipedia because relative to Wikipedia, almost nobody is using it.

For now. With a little collusion, and a lot of money, it can be pushed as the front page of the internet.

What are you going to do if Google and Bing are convinced to rank its bullshit over Wikipedia?

Most people don't change the defaults.


> For now. With a little collusion, and a lot of money, it can be pushed as the front page of the internet.

I know it has come up near the front of at least one of my Kagi searches, because it's now on my blocklist.


Yup, same for DuckDuckGo.


It would arguably be a benefit to Wikipedia to be pulled from Google search results, since Google prominence is the root of a huge fraction of all the misbehavior on the site.


If nobody ever finds the website, there will be no misbehavior. Genius.


Obviously, people would continue to go to "Wikipedia", and the encyclopedia itself wouldn't be hidden from Google, but Wikipedia pages on arbitrary subjects wouldn't be at the top of search rankings simply by dint of being Wikipedia pages.


It's likelier it'd be forgotten in a couple months. I imagine they already have observed a substantial decrease in traffic due to AI chatbots and Google's AI summaries.


Security through obscurity!


Nah. Wikipedia is popular because it is the #1 search result for a lot of stuff. Most of people going there just want to look up something for a homework assignment, online argument, or whatever. If Grokipedia has an error rate 5%, compared to 1% for Wikipedia, it's probably still fine.

If Wikipedia traffic shrinks down just to the true "encyclopedia reader" crowd, they will be in trouble, because I suspect that's less than 10% of their current donations. And Grokipedia is already starting to crop up in search results.


Wikipedia has an endowment big enough to sustain the site's basic maintenance, essentially forever. If donations disappeared then they would have to severely cut spending, however, I don't think it would be an existential threat.


>Note: Google must be set as your default search engine for this feature to appear.


Seems like a fairly nice way to approach this (as long as it can also be disabled in the options). Heck, might as well have reverse image search context options for all the search engines that support something like it.


Looks like Google will also be limiting each developer's number of apps and installations unless you pay them $25. https://developer.android.com/developer-verification/guides/...


That's how it's always costed


Yes, it's the same price as a Google Play Console developer account, but this is for access to the new Android Developer Console.


Funny to say this when the article literally says "nothing wrong with mascots!"

Out of curiosity, what did you read as hostility?


Oh I totally reacted to the title. The last few times Anubis has been the topic there's always comments about "cringy" mascot and putting that front and center in the title just made me believe that anime catgirls was meant as an insult.


Honestly I am okay with anime catgirls since I just find it funny but still it would be cool to see linux related stuff. Imagine mr tux penguin gif of him racing in like supertuxcart for the linux website.

sourcehut also uses anubis but they have removed the anime catgirl thing with their own logo, I think disroot also does that I am not sure though


Sourcehut uses go-away, not Anubis.


https://sourcehut.org/blog/2025-04-15-you-cannot-have-our-us...

> As you may have noticed, SourceHut has deployed Anubis to parts of our services to protect ourselves from aggressive LLM crawlers.

Its nice that sourcehut themselves have talked about it on their own blog but I had discovered this through the anubis website themselves showcases or soemthing like that iirc.


Yes, your link from four months ago says they deployed Anubis. Now actually go to sourcehut yourself and you'll see it uses go-away, not Anubis. Or read the footnote at the bottom of your link (in fact, linked from the very sentence you quoted) that says they were looking at go-away at the time.


https://sourcehut.org/blog/2025-05-29-whats-cooking-q2/

> A few weeks after this blog post, I moved us from Anubis to go-away, which is more configurable and allows us to reduce the user impact of Anubis (e.g. by offering challenges that don’t require JavaScript, or support text-mode browsers better). We have rolled this out on several services now, and unfortunately I think they’re going to remain necessary for a while yet – presumably until the bubble pops, I guess.


Oh sorry, Didn't know about the fact that you started using go away after anubis, my bad.

But if I remember correctly, when you were using anubis, you had changed the logo of the anime catgirl to something related to sourcehut/ its logo right?


In a different repository, though. I think it's understandable that someone would miss it.


Perhaps one justification for blocking ads is protecting users from personal information harvesting, tracking, and malware delivered through advertising networks. Aside from that, I can't think of a justification.

I actually think it would be good if there were filter lists that whitelisted ads that were not harmful to users in those ways, but that sounds difficult/impossible to fairly maintain, and I doubt anyone else wants it.


4chan doesn't store threads for very long, hence the plethora of third-party archive sites. I doubt they are still storing any useful data from back then.


From the linked article:

>To test in Firefox with the new behavior, set layout.css.h1-in-section-ua-styles.enabled to false in about:config.


There is a 2020 video with a Minecraft developer talking about this testing infrastructure: https://youtu.be/vXaWOJTCYNg


According to this article, Arc requires an account and sends Google's Firebase the hostname of every page you visit along with your user ID. Does this make Arc the least private web browser currently being used?


I trashed Arc immediately after install when I found out having an account was mandatory. That seemed so silly, like toothbrushes-requiring-wifi absurd. How much moreso now.


Truly. I was looking for a privacy respecting Chromium-based browser to use for Web MiniDisc (https://web.minidisc.wiki/) and came across some enthusiastic praise for Arc. I downloaded it and it immediately wanted me to create an account to even use it. How can that possibly respect my privacy? It went right in the trash.


What is also strange that I only found out about account after download. Like it was standard thing for the browser. (Sure there are optional accounts in others but login-walled browser?)


Another strange thing about the account... They have a little section under "Security" FAQ (lol) that says:

>"Why does Arc require an account to use?"

The answer is:

>"Here's a link to our forum that explains the rationale behind requiring an account to use Arc: Why do I need an account?"

That link goes to here: https://resources.arc.net/hc/en-us/articles/19401542261911-B...

Which... Doesn't explain why you need an account!


They want an easy path to onboard you into paying for stuff.


Windows is practically login-walled[0] at this point so I imagine people are slowly getting to expect it.

[0] witness the magic incantations needed https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/install-windows-11-witho...


Hilariously (in the absurd way), this affects my girlfriend, who prefers and uses the Microsoft account feature AND onedrive exactly how Microsoft would hope she would, and STILL gets fucked by their stupidity.

Her laptop has a mediatek wifi card that doesn't have built in Windows drivers. Re-installing Windows requires you play the above game, so you can get into Windows, install the driver, and then immediately log into Microsoft.com.


This is so super annoying for shared lab computers


A while back they required login before download. That's when I noped out.


I had the same response when I downloaded Dart and discovered that a programming language thought it was acceptable to send telemetry.


In 2024 it is considered normal for an _operating_system_ to require an account, an information that is potentially passed around to any app running on it.


I had doubts already when submissions promoting the browser were added on hn while there was no way to see how it looks like or even test it out - for quite some time there was nothing but mail singup on their page.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35801529


I did the same. Requiring an account for a browser is immediately disqualifying. I don't care how many features it has.


Even Chrome wouldn't dare


I think OperaGX wins that award


I'm also left wondering: How broken would Arc be, if Firebase was to go down?


I guess it's relatively easy to test, add the Firebase domain to your host file and point it to 127.0.0.1 and try to use the browser.

Sometimes things like this handle connection failures better than "never-ending connection attempts", so you might want to try to add a throttle or something too for the traffic between the domain and the browser, might also trip it up.


When I downloaded it a few months ago and it required an account to even use it, my gut feeling was that I should just stick with Firefox.


They don't encrypt the data they send via Firebase?

I mean, even Google suggests doing this with sensitive data.


"Arc is the Chrome replacement I’ve been waiting for." [1]

> https://arc.net/

I guess now we know why they frame it that way.


Chrome does not require an account to use. And Chrome by default doesn't send sites you visit to Google, unless you turn on the "make searches and browsing better" feature or the "enhanced safe browsing" feature.

So the OP is right. Arc's privacy is worse than Chrome.


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