Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does

If you're not in the US, all the time.

Just searching for documentation on not so well known libraries/errors will often trigger it for me, and I'm talking like 5-10 manual (read: typed by myself into a browser) searches will trigger a Captcha on Google.

Google positions that it suspects suspicious activity from my IP, but hard to guess how they classify this, as it's a stock browser with ublock* that I use every day.

reCaptcha and basically everything Google touches is awful to use outside of the US in my opinion. And I'm still not sure how their full window modal for Google Search Accepting Privacy hasn't been hit by a huge fine by the EU yet, since you absolutely cannot use Google without either blocking the model or going in and agreeing to "something" (you are allowed to turn off several options, but Google will send cookies and instructs you to set your browser to refuse cookies if you don't want them), which I'm positive is really not what GDPR was about at all.

This is part of why I'm against what a lot of US based tech companies do with the Web...they're happy to take money and personal information (forcibly) from non-US persons, but will not give them the same courtesies.

* Of course, maybe that does it...

Certainly you get much harder and noisier recaptchas if the model has a higher prior prediction of your bot-ness. Try browsing around from sketchy Tor exit nodes or some proxies from the free proxy lists on the internet for a bit.

> If you're not in the US, all the time.

I'm not in the US, never seen it.

It's for this very reason I'm so happy to see something like this article on HN, and I'm so happy to see your comment too.

I think I know exactly where you're coming from -- I was exactly the same way when I was younger. I was 100% extremely logical, and my emotional awareness was... exceedingly underdeveloped.

Long story short, I got into different artistic pursuits where I was forced to develop my emotional awareness of these things, multi-hour classes with other artists where all we'd do would be to analyze these types of things.

And after a long period of great frustration, all of a sudden, it's like the world went from black and white into color. There was emotional resonance everywhere where I hadn't seen it before. It was like I was finally speaking a language a lot of other people seemed to just be born with. And social interactions got a lot... easier.

I also realized that my emotional surroundings had always affected my mood etc., I just had never been able to pay attention to how. So while I was consciously blind to it, I was still subconsciously 100% affected.

So there's absolutely nothing "wrong" with the author's psyche... but nothing's "wrong" with yours either, you just haven't had the practice/opportunity to develop this side of things. You're not dissociating from reality... but at the same time there absolutely is a reality that you haven't developed skills to see. And it absolutely has nothing to do with age or country.

If it's a skill you want to develop, there's no single answer. The general idea of "emotional intelligence education" is one approach, fields like art history, film criticism, literature and poetry are others. Even activities like yoga and meditation can help since emotional awareness is both mental and bodily. Ultimately the more you expose yourself to things combined with seeing how other people respond to the same things and finding little pieces in common with them, it'll eventually start to "click".

So I'm member of a a religious (yogic) organisation and we have our own little chanting on Saturdays. When Covid broke out this obviously became impossible so we decided to have our meetings on Zoom instead. Now we have one woman in our group with some intellectual disability, a wonderful, sweet woman with the kindest heart in the world. Being 100% computer illiterate, she still decided to buy a tablet so she could follow the meetings on Zoom from her home. It fell to me to explain to her the whole process of opening a mail (she didn't know what an inbox was), clicking the Zoom link, clicking yes etc.. every little detail I had to explain repeatedly. It was a challenge but we slodged through the whole thing and she stayed positive and courageous throughout.

Imagine how mortified I was when we reached the last steps and I had to explain to her 'and NOW.. after all that... you have to click on all the tiles with traffic lights'.

She looked at me and asked with childlike innocence and wonder "but WHY do I have to click all the tiles that contain a traffic light?"

I could not reasonably answer that question but I came close to saying "dear Kristine, throw this tablet in the garbage, none of this is going to make you happier"