this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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This is very exciting. Here is the APK I downloaded. And the associated discussion.

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It even already seems to support stylus input which is very exciting seeing as there has been talk of porting RNote to Android.

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[–] k0e3@lemmy.ca 29 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I can't read the discussion because some damn Canadian neko waifu thinks I'm a bot.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 21 points 1 month ago (3 children)

It does that for all clients

You just need to wait for the proof of work to complete

[–] sxan@midwest.social 8 points 1 month ago (7 children)

You just need to wait for the proof of work to complete

I will never find the irony in this anything other than pathetic.

The one legitimate grievance against Bitcoin and other POW cryptocurrencies - the wasteful burning of energy to do throw-away calculations simply to prove the work has been done... the environmental cost of distributed scale meaningless CPU cycle waste purely for the purpose of wasting CPU cycles, has been so eagerly grasped by people who are largely doing it to foil another energy wasteful infotech invention.

It really is astonishing.

[–] Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

either you have the service with anubis or you have no service at all

unlike pyramid coins, anubis serves a purpose

[–] sxan@midwest.social 6 points 1 month ago (4 children)

It still uses Proof-of-Work, in which the coal being burned is only to prove that you burned the coal.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Everything uses energy

Do you have any measurements on power usage? It seems very minor.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 1 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Everything computer does use power. The issue is the same very valid criticism of (most) crypto currencies: the design objectives are only to use power. That's the very definition of "proof of work." You usually don't care what the work is, only that it was done. An appropriate metaphor is: for "reasons", I want to know that you moved a pile of rocks from one place to another, and back again. I have some way of proving this - a video camera watching you, a proof of a factorization that I can easily verify, something - and in return, I give you something: monopoly money, or access to a web site. But moving the rocks is literally just a way I can be certain that you've burned a number of calories.

I don't even care if you go get a ~~GPU~~ tractor and move the rocks with that. You've still burned the calories, by burning oil. The rocks being moved has no value, except that I've rewarded you for burning the calories.

That's proof of work. Whether the reward is fake internet points, some invented digital currency, or access to web content, you're still being rewarded for making your CPU burn calories to calculate a result that has no intrinsic informational value in itself.

The cost is at scale. For a single person, say it's a fraction of a watt. Negligible. But for scrapers, all of those fractions add up to real electricity bill impacts. However - and this is the crux - it's always at scale, even without scrapers, because every visitor is contributing to the PoW total, global cost of that one website's use of this software. The cost isn't being noticeable by individuals, but it is being incurred; it's unavoidable, by design.

If there's no cost in the aggregate of 10,000 individual browsers performing this PoW, then it's not going to cost scrapers, either. The cost has to be significant enough to deter bots; and if it's enough to be too expensive for bots, it's equally significant for the global aggregate; it's just spread out across a lot of people.

But the electricity is still being used, and heat is still being generated, and it's yet another straw on the environmental camel's back.

It's intentionally wasteful, and a such, it's a terrible design.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 month ago

It doesn't need to be anywhere near as resource intensive as a crypto currency since it isn't used for security. The goal is not to stop bots altogether. The goal is to slow down the crawlers enough so that the server hosting the service doesn't get pegged. The bots went from being respectful of server operators to hitting pages millions of times a second. This is made much worse by the fact that git hosting services like Forgejo have many links many of which trigger the server to do computations. The idea behind Arubis is that a user really only has to do the PoW once since they aren't browsing to millions of pages. On a crawler it will try to do tons of proofs of work which will bog down the crawling rate. PoW also has the advantage of requiring the server to hold minimal state. If you try to enforce a time delay that means that the server has to track all of that.

It is also important to realize that Anubis is a act of desperation. Many projects do not want to implement it but they had no choice since their servers were getting wrecked by bots. The only other option would be Cloudflare which is much worse.

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[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

The point is to make it too expensive for them, so they leave you alone (or, ideally, totally die but that's a long way off). They're making a choice to harvest data on your site. Make them choose not to. It saves energy in the long run.

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[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Do you have a better way? It is way more private than anything else I've seen.

From a energy usage perspective it also isn't bad. Spiking the CPU for a few seconds is minor especially compared to other tasks.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 1 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Yeah, tarpits. Or, even just intentionally fractionally lagging the connection, or putting a delay on the response to some mime types. Delays don't consume nearly as much processing as PoW. Personally, I like tar pits that trickle out content like a really slow server. Hidden URLs that users are not likely to click on. These are about the least energy-demanding solutions that have a chance of fooling bots; a true, no-response tarpit would use less energy, but is easily detected by bots and terminated.

Proof of work is just a terrible idea, once you've accepted that PoW is bad for the environment, which it demonstrably is.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

None of those things work well is the problem. It doesn't stop the bots from hammering you site. Crawlers will just timeout and move on.

[–] solardirus@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Tarpits suck. Not worth the implementation or overhead. Instead the better strat is to pretend the server is down with a 503 code or that the url is onvalid with a 404 code so the bots stop clinging to your content.

Also we already have non-PoW captchas that dont require javascript. See: go-away for these implemwntations

[–] sxan@midwest.social 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

There is negligible server overhead for a tarpit. It can be merely a script that listens on a socket and never replies, or it can reply with markov-generated html with a few characters a second, taking minutes to load a full page. This has almost no overhead. Implementation is adding a link to your page headers and running the script. It's not exactly rocket science.

Which part of that is overhead, or difficult?

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[–] JadedBlueEyes@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I run a service that gets attacked by AI bots, and while PoW isn't the only way to do things, none of your suggestions work at all.

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[–] PumaStoleMyBluff@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It actually doesn't do that for all clients, according to the docs

It'll let you straight through if your user agent doesn't contain "Mozilla"

[–] Linearity@infosec.pub 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Whaaaat? Why only look for Mozilla?

All normal web browsers have Mozilla in the name so it’s kinda weird to only do it for that. Both chrome safari and FF start with Mozilla 5.0

[–] LunaChocken@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago

Because it's super common in web scrapers

[–] k0e3@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I did but it told me I'm a bot :(

Edit: Yay, it worked.

[–] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 22 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Doesn't KDE/Plasma (or Qt) have this for years?

[–] klangcola@reddthat.com 48 points 1 month ago

Yes, and a few KDE apps work great on Android.

But more FOSS is more better, so GTK on Android is great news for both Android users and GTK developers

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Yes, e.g. Krita has long been available for Android tablets.

darktable on Android would be awesome, I don't think there's currently any good FOSS raw development software for Android.

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[–] it_depends_man@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

We could have a neat little internet comment war about personal opinions on Qt...

But it's the weekend and I'd rather not.

[–] artyom@piefed.social 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] subarctictundra@lemmy.world 45 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Quite a substantial step towards being able to use Linux apps on Android phones.

[–] artyom@piefed.social 9 points 1 month ago

Ohhhh I see

[–] someacnt@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 month ago

Oh, are we getting Year of android desktop?!

[–] dil@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 month ago

So gimp on android?

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 3 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I tried using GTK with C, JavaScript and Rust and the experience was always terrible. The tools, the documentation... C is just sooooo old and GTK doesn't translate well to Rust. For me GTK is great for Window Manger level tools that need to be small, super fast and are fairly static (you don't add new features do settings app or clock widget that often). I definitely wouldn't do cross platform apps in it.

[–] illucidmind@programming.dev 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

First, what do you mean by "C is just so old"? That seems like a language problem, not a GTK problem. Tbh, when it comes to documentation, you're likely better off with C as the official GTK docs targets the C API (https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/).

Also, what do you mean by "it doesn't translate well to Rust"? Because, Rust, like other supported langs like Python, have bindings that are equally well-documented to an extent. I haven't used the Rust binding but I've used the Python binding extensively and there are references to all the APIs (https://lazka.github.io/pgi-docs/)—same with Rust (https://gtk-rs.org/gtk4-rs/).

Lastly, I can understand not using GTK for cross-platform apps, but not for the reasons you mentioned. While GTK's primary target is Linux, you can technically still make it cross-platform.

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

By "C is so old" I mean it lacks a lot of features modern languages have. Proper linting, code formatting, dependency management, version management, virtual environments, modules. Yes, you can solve some of it with docker but it's terrible compared with Rust for example.

By "it doesn't translate well to Rust" I mean that GObject doesn't translate well to Rust structs so you end up with weird structures split into multiple modules and terrible code overhead. Compared with modern UI frameworks it's just not ergonomic to work with.

Yes, I know GTK supports multiple platforms but if I want to develop for desktop and mobile I had way better experience using Tauri+Leptos. It's not just about having some bindings and some docs for it. It's about how much effort does it take to set it up and figure out how to implement specific functionality. Good docs, good tools good compiler and readable code for the framework help a lot.

[–] illucidmind@programming.dev 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Your statement about C is still mostly wrong. First, linting isn't typically a built-in feature for many languages; you mostly depend on external tools or IDEs (for C/C++, CLion and VSCode with specific extensions solve this). A similar occurrence is seen in formatting, where, except for a few languages like Rust and Go (with officially maintained formatters), you still have to depend on external tools or IDEs. For dependency management, it is well-known that C/C++ lacks an official package manager, but there are well-tested third-party package managers such as conan (https://conan.io/) and vcpkg (https://vcpkg.io/). Another benefit is the project-local support in both package managers (although it is more robust in Conan), which effectively addresses both the version management and virtual environment issues you raised. You don't always need virtual environments anyway (Rust doesn't use one either).

I haven't used the Rust binding, so I don't have direct experience with this and may not fully understand the pain points. However, a glance at the docs shows the Rust binding and trait-based pattern still does the job effectively. I don't understand what you mean by "weird structures split into multiple modules", as you're just reusing built-in structs like you would use a class in the Python binding, for instance. So I don't see the problem.

Well, mobile support for GTK is currently experimental, so there's that.

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Of course linting and formatting is not part of the language. Of course you can install extensions in some IDE that will handle it. Conan looks great but I never saw a project using it and when I was asking C devs about dependency management no one mentioned it. I checked dozens of GTK projects looking for some decent template to copy and didn't find anything remotely "modern". All projects I see simply use meson/ninja, install deps on system level, don't provide any code formatting or linting guidelines. Most don't bother with any modules and just dump all source code into 100 files in src. And I'm talking about actively developed tools for Gnome, not some long forgotten ones. For me the big difference between languages like C and Rust is that every Rust project uses the same formatting, linting tools, uses modules and proper dependency management while most C projects don't. Because it's old. Because a lot of C devs learned programming when it wasn't a thing. Because a lot of C project started when those tools didn't exist. You can probably start a new C project in 'modern' way but when I was trying to do it there were no examples, no documentation and when I asked C devs I was told that "you just do it like always". In modern languages the default way is the "modern" way.

This is how you declare a new component in gtk-rs:

glib::wrapper! {
    pub struct MainMenu(ObjectSubclass<imp::MainMenu>)
        @extends gtk::PopoverMenu, gtk::Popover, gtk::Window, gtk::Widget,
        @implements gtk::Accessible, gtk::Buildable, gtk::ConstraintTarget, gtk::Native, gtk::ShortcutManager;
}

impl MainMenu {
    pub fn new() -> Self {
        Object::new(&[]).expect("Failed to create `MainMenu`.")
    }
}

#[glib::object_subclass]
impl ObjectSubclass for MainMenu {
    const NAME: &'static str = "MainMenu";
    type Type = super::MainMenu;
    type ParentType = gtk::PopoverMenu;

    fn class_init(klass: &mut Self::Class) {
        klass.bind_template();
    }

    fn instance_init(obj: &glib::subclass::InitializingObject<Self>) {
        obj.init_template();
    }
}

This is how you declare a new component in Leptos:

#[component]
fn App() -> impl IntoView {

    view! {
   <div>test</div>
    }
}

That's what I mean by "it's not ergonomic".

[–] illucidmind@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago

Well, for a modern approach to development in C, you may have to be creative and not rely on ready examples, but it's still doable. A lot of the C issues are at the "conventional" level and can be solved if you just do things a little bit differently (e.g. nothing stops you from modularising source/headers files even though C doesn’t enforce this at the language level).

I can understand the "ergonomics" you speak of in Rust but it's not very surprising in that aspect especially given that C faces same challenge (and is even more verbose). The GObject system seems to map well with languages that favour the OOP style (built-in classes, inheritance etc) like Python. So yeah, on that, I understand ;)

[–] subarctictundra@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I definitely recommend using Vala for Gtk as it was tailor made for it. It's built on top of the object system that Gtk uses so the API fits in to the language flawlessly, unlike Rust. It even has its own website for browsing the Gnome APIs https://valadoc.org/

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I read about Vala but a language that compiles to C seemed icky to me. I don't know, maybe it solves all the issues that C has. Maybe I will give it a try one day.

[–] subarctictundra@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I think the saving grace is that you never actually see the C (it's piped straight in to GCC), so it might as well not exist. C GObject code has a lot of boilerplate and I like to think that Vala is the programming language that GTK programmers are actually thinking in when they write their C. Vala is essentially a compression of the C code with less room for errors.

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 1 points 1 month ago

Interesting, I didn't realize Vala was designed specifically to help with GTK. It could be a skill issue but I found the entire ecosystem really hard to understand. It's like all documentation is written assuming you already know half of it. "Vala uses the GObject system". Yeah but I'm just deciding which language to use to learn GTK, I don't know what GObject is... Now that I understand it all better I would probably just use Vala and stick to GTK. Instead I switched to Tauri+Leptos+Thaw and it was a joy in comparison. Documentation was clear and I was just able to link my app to local framework code and debug whatever part I wanted. I was able to fix bugs in Tauri in first weeks of learning and I contributed quite a lot along the way.

[–] someacnt@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Tangent, but why did you ex lisp?

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 2 points 1 month ago

I did some Lisp programming long time ago but I don't touch it anymore.

[–] Mwa@thelemmy.club 3 points 1 month ago

less gooo!!

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