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

clivethompson.medium.com

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

#221

Post by scrollaway »

jlokier wrote: post #219
scrollaway wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all the legitimate criticism of Captchas, this is really a made up one. It doesn't matter. You can get some stuff wrong and still pass, and you can skip/retry if the picture is not clear too. Captchas aren't a "score 100 percent at this minigame" thing, they're more of a "loosely follow these instructions while I watch your cursor and analyze your results to figure out if you're a human or a selenium instance."

Maybe you can get some stuff wrong and still pass. But if someone has been stuck for 20 minutes on this game, through 30 different screens of it, and not passed yet, you can surely understand why they may think the reason is they are getting some edge-case stuff "wrong" and the machine is very picky, so they have to figure out the secret rules needed to pass. I did try once for 20 minutes to see if tenacity would win…

The fact you'd get stuck for any length of time on it sounds like one of those "legitimate criticisms" i was talking about, that has nothing to do with whether a wheel counts as a car.

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

#222

Post by jquery »

the_third_wave wrote: post #144
crazygringo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 awarene…

> you just haven't had the practice/opportunity to develop this side of things That is one way of saying that he simply has not allowed trivial concepts like a bunch of boring pictures to affect his mood. Another way of saying this would be "that sounds good, I wish I were not so affected by these things but alas, I am" or "lucky you, maybe I can find a way to avoid these mind traps". There is no strength in weakness…

You missed the point of the comment. It was saying it does affect his mood, he just doesn’t have the EQ to realize it consciously. And to be honest, and someone who finally started getting in touch with his emotions by branching out my hobbies and interests… I see exactly where both comments are coming from.

Saying it doesn’t affect his mood is like a kid who claims they don’t suffer from sugar crashes, or people who claim their diet and mood are unrelated. Conscious awareness of mood is not necessary for it to affect behavior.

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

#223

Post by travoc »

Kaze404 wrote: post #189
lotsofpulp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then use the fact that I am a paying customer of Hilton’s for years to mark my account as a human. I have the Hilton credit card, I am a Diamond member, what else do they want? I know why they force me though, I use content blockers on macOS and iOS to block tracking and ads, but that is not a good reason.

Can you share those content blockers? I recently acquired my first iOS device and have been suffering through the ads.

AdGuard is where it’s at on iOS.

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

#224

Post by stephen_g »

johnsolo1701 wrote: post #160
Zababa wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say exactly the same thing. Some things are really confusion when you're not from the US. I think it's a problem with internet in general, as many people speaks english and thus people from the USA think everyone is from here.

Just to share the American perspective, it feels like this: Many people speak English, and thus it is difficult/impossible for people from outside the US to discern the difference between domestic and international services. (Not saying Google is a domestic service obviously.) Through historical chance, we don't have the luxury and benefits of a native language like many of you reading this right now.

That is one reason I very strongly believe that US-only top level domains like .edu, .gov and .mil should be phased out and replaced with *.us TLDs. Then, US based colleges would be under .edu.us, just like e.g. Australian ones are under edu.au, and US-specific businesses could use .com.us domains to indicate this.

But that seems quite tangential to the point that recapcha, being deployed internationally, should be much more effectively culturally internationalised! Just having a language isn’t enough - there are big cultural differences between Spain and Mexico despite both speaking Spanish, and Brazil and Portugal despite both speaking Portuguese, for instance.

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

#225

Post by easton »

mediocregopher wrote: post #7

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.

John Mulaney has a good bit about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQbjdaHIZ_k

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

#226

Post by jquery »

iratewizard wrote: post #168
chrismcb wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to understand this comment. But it seems to me it boils down to "spend time to learn how to be depressed by the world around you." That doesn't seem like a skill the average person should want or need. There is something with with society if you have to spend time of hours of practice to get "emotional intelligence" from common place items that have no inherent meaning.

Depression isn't the only emotion you feel when you stop being disconnected from the world. You may come out of it with a greater appreciation for nature, art, literature, etc. You may even have more pride in your work as you become capable of developing a design language and incorporating it into what you build.

I am surprised at the downvotes on your comment. It seems so obviously correct that I can only surmise certain things about HNs demographic. Oh well, it’s not like men in tech are famous for our high emotional intelligence.

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

#227

Post by travoc »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #67
mediocregopher wrote: post #7

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.

There's also the indignity of doing unpaid work for Google. We're not their fucking slaves.

It’s ok. I get my money back by watching hundreds of hours of YouTube while blocking every single ad.

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

#228

Post by stephen_g »

rickboyce wrote: post #3

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!

Yeah, this annoys me so much. Some just grate (we don’t have ‘crosswalks’ here, we have ‘pedestrian crossings’) but for some things I literally just don’t really know what they look like in the US and have to just guess!

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

#229

Post by makeitdouble »

mwcampbell wrote: post #216
random_upvoter wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> Being 100% computer illiterate I wonder how much of that was due to the impairment itself, and how much was due to people underestimating her or not being willing to work with her to get her online. > I could not reasonably answer that question I can appreciate that it would have been challenging to come up with an explanation on the spot, while trying to talk her through joining the meeting. Having spent several m…

Not OP obviously, but I’ve seen superficially similar cases. It is hard to put in words, but some people just wouldn’t need to be online/on smartphones if it wasn’t for the pandemic, and they wouldn’t have any specific issue in their day to day life.

Perhaps drawing a parallel with social networks could help: when such a huge portion of the population is on facebook properties, it could look crazy to not have a facebook account. Perhaps there wasn’t enough help to explain how it works ? But we understand not dealing with facebook has upsides, and while it creates hurdles, they can be worked around. We wouldn’t push someone to go on facebook if they had no need to.

Obviously we are talking about exceptional cases, but if they were happy as they were, it could be worth keeping it that way if they don’t have an appetite for changing.

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

#230

Post by paulpauper »

chrisseaton wrote: post #5

> 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?

tor is great if you don't mind 99% of websites not working on it
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