ok but what's the anime 'checking if you're not a bot' gatekeeper? asking for a friend...

Anubis.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=anubis

Have you not been on the internet much lately? As the sibling comment pointed out, it’s Anubis, which shows up on a lot of websites of FOSS devs (and which has been discussed endlessly on HN).

The site is a personal blog. There's no expectation, explicit or implicit, that it be "professional".