It's frustrating because they represent the actual drudgery of real life. It's not pretty, there's no beauty filter, there's no composition etc..
It shows that we live mostly in bits of fairly ugly industrial landscape.
Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does
231–240 of 375 posts
Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does
#232I've read the whole article, and I see so many comments agreeing or even adding detail to the post. Am I really in the minority if this kind of thing couldn't even cross my mind or feels like written by someone living in a parallel universe? A few poorly shot street photos are "unbearably depressing"? And there's even a detailed explanation breaking it down into points, each one feeling more alien than the last. They…
I also don't agree with the author during the first half of the article. If anything captcha photos have an overwhelmingly suburban feel, probably because (I assume) they're taken from Google's street view. The six points listed are all the same: they're photos taken from a car. While aesthetically that's dull, monochrome, and ordinary I can't call it depressing without calling every drive to the grocery store equall…
I live in a walkable part of a city and to be quite honest every time I go out into suburbs it’s kind of depressing. Local architecture shaped by tradition and climate is replaced by giant samey boxes. Everyone is isolated in a car, streets are largely empty of anything at a human scale. Greyness and concrete.
Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does
#233For 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.
>For me a part of the melancholy feeling comes from the indignity of being forced to prove I'm human
This is EXACTLY what a Robot would say...
Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does feel like a similar sort of thing to how fag packets are this horrible murky brown with bleak pictures in them in the UK.
fag is British slang cigarette, for any scandalised US folk reading this :-) (Does this still need saying?)
There’s always someone who is learning this for the first time!
Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does
#235For 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.
> the indignity
What's particularly degrading is when it asks you to do something like "select all the bridges" and you as a human see one that is clearly an overpass, not a bridge. You don't select it because it's not what you'd call a bridge. You're inhuman.
You're asked to select the motorcycles.. Here's a motorised scooter that looks a lot like a motorcycle. You thought that wasn't a motorcycle? Back to the training camps with you until you start to think like a human.
Now select all the mountains. Huh? That raised mound of grass doesn't look like a mountain to you? Guess again, inhuman scum.
At least with the "audio captcha" I feel like I might be contributing to some closed captions for another human :(
Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does
#236failed one of these recently because it asked me to click on "bicycles", but there were a lot of motorcycles, and I didn't click on those... so I failed
Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does
#237I wish my life was so utterly without other problems that I could get this worked up about something so minor and meaningless.
Well yeah exactly. It is petty and meaningless. They already accepted Google doing this stuff to them for a long time and now they complain over a storm in a tea cup. Goodness me.
When this drops off of the top of HN, they will continue to click Google reCAPTCHAs once again, reminding them who really runs the web and how we got here in the first place.
And it is all thanks to everyone for accepting Google and doing that all by themselves. Have a pat on the back for your participation folks!
Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
They do delay customers by 20 seconds, because if we’re carrying metal then we’ve got to be inspected by security.
Capchas hold you up 20 seconds every single time, whereas metal detectors usually don't alarm at all.
It takes me 20 seconds just to be sure I've accounted for any possible metal in my pockets.
Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be sort of okay with the general idea of proving I'm not a robot, you know what really rubs me the wrong way? It's how blatantly dishonest and disrespectful it is. Let me explain: google decides if you're human based on the data it has on you, such as your browsing profile and whether you're logged in to your Google account. Therefore it punishes you for trying to have privacy or refusing to use google services,…
> - Even falsely claim you failed captchas even if you get them right Do you have a source for this?
I experienced it few times too. With the slower and slower fading pictures. And the button submit that stays active but doesn't work.
Re: Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does
#240Captcha: prove you’re not a robot by teaching robots how to prove they’re not robots.