Elon Musk originally said this in an interview somewhere but it stuck with me: "The organizational inefficiencies and structure will manifest themselves in the end product." We can probably gleam many insights about the people who made the app (how it works, how big the bundle is, how fast/slow etc.). I haven't used the app so I can't make any judgements about the organization behind it.
Nice rephrasing of Conway’s law :)
Its from memory of some old interview. Think he was talking about some aspect of a design flaw in his cars.
This is going to be one of the best parts of the new AI-ridden world: humans gradually getting locked out of and giving up on online services because the bots are more patient and more skilled at proving their humanness than humans are. Twitter’s new captchas are also pretty insane, though not quite this bad last I ran into them.
Inverse captcha: Fill out the tax form for the country from the connecting IP. If you can do it, you're an AI.
Unfortunately Australian tax forms take me a few minutes and are 90% prefilled by the app.
This is Arkose MatchKey. Hopefully, they will one day fix the UI covering the images. https://www.arkoselabs.com/arkose-matchkey/
I just tried some of these and their normal thread level challenges are actually quite nice on their page. The hard ones chosen by HBO are just crazy though.
Serious question: who has a decent plan to create proof-of-human systems that are not only CAPTCHA based? We will soon need this, and I feel government will gladly present a solution: provide your ID when you connect to the Internet, and we will guarantee you are a human. Who's actually working on this and has released papers I can study? Because all this AI nonsense will only accelerate us towards this total control…
I'm not really sure why anyone cares about bots. They've been part of the internet at least since search engines were invented. I guess spam is an issue currently, but if bots become advanced enough to avoid heuristics, by making insightful and useful comments, they are probably better than most human users. Proof of work captchas like mcaptcha can stop, or at least make very expensive, (d)dos attacks.
Bots aren’t random, someone is running them for a reason. The problem isn’t the “insightful and useful comments”, it’ll be the ones which sound like that to any non-expert but are designed to sell products or push political outcomes. Historically the tell for things like that were things like copy-and-paste messages, poor grammar or spelling, etc. which LLMs are great at avoiding.
I experienced the HBO Max captchas just a few days ago. Everyone did since they launched a new app and made everyone switch to that and re-login. Some of the solutions are clearly just wrong. I have a PhD in Computer Science and if I am failing multiple basic addition problems, I assure you that it isn't me, the answers are wrong. I had to do the same audio puzzles and got the first audio puzzle wrong too, and I even…
I didn’t have to relogin on my nvidia shield. Downloaded new app and it launched right to my profile selector.
They don’t want aggregator apps to log in without paying. Appletv will show me new shows on multiple platforms all on one screen. HBO doesn’t want people doing this without paying. It’s stupid and anti-user.
>HBO doesn’t want people doing this without paying. But why (from their perspective)? They don't make their money from metadata, they make it from content. Every piece of real monkey-making content is going to get a torrent regardless of if it's protected behind a captcha.
The Netflix interface is so bad that I've been wondering if they made it bad on purpose. Over a decade ago when DVDs in red envelopes were the standard they had a table view of all their content and you could sort and filter it to your heart's desire. When they got rid of this, I used their API to build a CLI tool that just listed shows ordered by how much Netflix thought I'd like it. All of this was vastly superior to the current Netflix interface. However, I sometimes would decide that I had watched everything on Netflix and turn it off or even unsubscribe for a few months. Now it's really hard to find out if you have exhausted Netflix. It's easy to spend a lot of time just scrolling though the GUI hoping you'll find something and sometimes you do. Sometimes you find something where it's surprising that it didn't suggest it in the first place. I wonder if this is all by design because they try to increase quantity of engagement and not quality and value gained from the engagement.
Edit: I have some sympathy for this. Engagement is much harder to measure than customer satisfaction. They are looking for the keys under the light because they cannot see anywhere else.
Time's a flat circle. We've reinvented cable and have it delivered via the internet. The quality of the content has fallen off now that folks have been roped into the platforms and everything's getting bundled back up so you have to subsidize garbage just to watch a show or two you like per platform.
You know one service which has never stopped being reliable, easily available, high quality, and free to use? Piracy.
You know all those websites use captchas too, right?
The HBO MAX (aka just MAX now) in PS4 is just a disaster. Can't play videos anymore, as it gets stuck on a infinite loop in the intro of every movie. It the remaining time is displayed as a negative integer, and for some reason the system just thinks the move is done and resets it to the beginning. Seems like a bug that some very basic QA testing should have caught it. The new rollout seems like a total clown show, a…
Gruber discussed the Apple TV mess they made, sounds like they repackaged a previous failed attempt without fixing it.
Serious question: who has a decent plan to create proof-of-human systems that are not only CAPTCHA based? We will soon need this, and I feel government will gladly present a solution: provide your ID when you connect to the Internet, and we will guarantee you are a human. Who's actually working on this and has released papers I can study? Because all this AI nonsense will only accelerate us towards this total control…
I'm not really sure why anyone cares about bots. They've been part of the internet at least since search engines were invented. I guess spam is an issue currently, but if bots become advanced enough to avoid heuristics, by making insightful and useful comments, they are probably better than most human users. Proof of work captchas like mcaptcha can stop, or at least make very expensive, (d)dos attacks.
> I'm not really sure why anyone cares about bots. They've been part of the internet at least since search engines were invented.
It's all fun and games until foreign agencies are controlling who wins in your elections through misinformation and propaganda.