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This is a losing race with neural nets. CAPTCHAs are running into the same problem that Yosemite park rangers report with "bear proof" trash cans and storage lockers: "There is considerable overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being asked by a machine to prove that you are human is sometimes really humiliating, especially if you fail the captcha a few times in a row.
I understand why websites need to use captcha. I do not understand why websites that have user accounts cannot offer the option of 2FA TOTP, or even SMS login to avoid captcha. Hilton.com is a big annoyance.
I mean, maybe I can see/accept an argument for that. But when I have a recent order? When I'm logging in from the link you just emailed me?
> Part of it is the sheer hassle of repeatedly identifying objects — traffic lights, staircases, palm trees and buses — just so I can finish a web search. Does Google ask you to complete a CAPTCHA to run a web search? I've never experienced that - is that a thing?
I wish my life was so utterly without other problems that I could get this worked up about something so minor and meaningless.
> Part of it is the sheer hassle of repeatedly identifying objects — traffic lights, staircases, palm trees and buses — just so I can finish a web search. Does Google ask you to complete a CAPTCHA to run a web search? I've never experienced that - is that a thing?
> Google’s CAPTCHA images are frequently grainy and badly focused. This is likely because, as Vox points out, Google has gone through most of the easy visual-recognition training cases, where the pictures were clear and sharp. Now they’re stuck with the hard stuff, which tend to be pictures of terrible quality. While this is true, I think some of the artifacts in the accompanying example are added by Google as a sort…
For me a part of the melancholy feeling comes from the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human, and then the frustration at this stupid world we've created which requires me to do so which immediately follows the indignity. A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome.
But metal detectors don't block your way for 20 seconds and they don't ever put you into an eternal loop of scanning again and again until you just give up and decide to live without.
For me this effect is significantly compounded by not being from the US / North America. This has come up on HN before (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226805 ) but it still strikes me as so odd that you need quite a bit of USA cultural / vernacular knowledge to navigate the internet anywhere in the world (or at least English speaking sites?). What a strange view into another country to see each day!
For me a part of the melancholy feeling comes from the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human, and then the frustration at this stupid world we've created which requires me to do so which immediately follows the indignity. A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome.
Being asked by a machine to prove that you are human is sometimes really humiliating, especially if you fail the captcha a few times in a row.
In a quite a few instances, I find it flattering, because it implies "we haven't sucked enough data on you already to know if you are a human, so we need to be sure."
