Yes, others have similarly observed that HN absolutely fawns over Asahi but the Asahi crew have somehow got it into their heads that HN readers are bigots that have it in for them. In that sense, the referrer block seems to at least make sense if you look at it the other way around, HN readers can instead spend their time supporting an effort that doesn’t paint them all with the same brush.
Let's say I block all Tor users for my website, because the level of abuse that Tor enables means an overwhelming amount of the malicious traffic I encounter comes from Tor. Am I painting all Tor users with the same brush here, or am I just min-maxing my time and energy trying to wrangle all the crap?
That phrase is usually referring to some sort of judgement or characterization, not a particular action. If a teacher makes the whole class stay late because a few were acting up, that's not painting with the same brush. If you think that all children are disruptive because a few acted up, that is.
Ok but in both the case of HN and TOR, you're making a judgement about the kind of people on there. There's nothing inherently wrong with traffic from a TOR router, it's the users on there. HN referrals are similarly not a problem per se.
Hm, I suppose that's a distinction that can be made. OTOH, I think someone posting
> In addition, we find that only a tiny fraction of HN comments (often less than 1%) actually engage with the substance of our articles, with the majority being off-topic, misinformative, repetitive, or otherwise of low quality, making the overall value of HN exposure overwhelmingly negative for our project.
You're doing both. The TOR users would probably not be happy, but if you don't want them you don't want them. Now do you want to ban TOR users (probably doing illegal stuff) or HN users (mostly just normie SWEs)?
I've been following Asahi closely because I think the new apple silicon is pretty neat, offering 2x, 4x, and even 8x the memory bandwidth of most x86-64 hardware. In particular the Mac Studio M2 max. I've been quite impressed that Asahi have moved so quickly, in particular the 3d support for OpenGL and progress on Vulkan. Doesn't hurt that apple does pretty good on inference, managing 5 tok/sec on even large 65B models that wouldn't fit on any normal video card.
I'm a long time HN reader and was quite disappointed in HN that an Asahi post had like 90% of the posts that were pretty bigoted, harmful, and targeted more than one of the Asahi team. I watched as this happened. Who cares if someone is gay, straight, bi, or trans? Who cares if a psuedo identify is young, old, male, female, feline, rabbit, or whale?
Weirdly I've not seen that tendency anywhere else on HN, can't recall any similar discussions about any other members of the tech community. Sadly I can see that to Asahi, HN looks like a bunch of bigoted intolerant folks, which hasn't been my experience.
It's the contributions that matter, sad that the discussion didn't reflect that.
Always interested in checking out new Linux distros but not interested in drama.