Captcha pictures force you to look at the world the way an AI does
clivethompson.medium.com
clivethompson.medium.com
A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome.
Hilton.com is a big annoyance.
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.
I also hate sites that force you to do so... eg. twitter, where it decides it won't let you register without a phone number (making a new twitter account for a project), then won't allow you to use the phone number, because you already used it for your primary account.
The issue is that it may flag your account as more suspicious. After three days I had my account flagged. I couldn't view tweets or use the account in any way. On log in it would redirect me and ask for my phone number for "verification". Funny how they can verify something they never received. It took about ten days for support to correct but my account is active again and they still don't know my phone number.
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?
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."
If it says "select a sign" and I see there's also a sign far away in the distance only a few pixels in size, I select it because it is a sign. I think most people don't because I frequently get many tests after, because I'm not human enough for them.
My surprise if the sites that do those things turned out to be using humans for free labeling of images would be an exact, unsigned zero.
In all fairness, i usually do that.
The machine doesn't know the answer so it doesn't really matter. You need to emulate the crowd and also realize you are contributing to the crowd. So you can actually pollute it with wrong answers to delay the robot uprising. Or at least cripple it when they keep running into fire hydrants they didn't see.
They do, they just look different. At least that's how it is in France.
Missing link? In NZ, and presumably other countries, personal letterboxes in rural areas can be used to send too, which I'm guessing is the same as what you're referring to.
Honestly, as a driver, when I see a bicycle, I make sure to provide as much room around them as possible. When I see a motorcycle from behind, I have no idea what the thought processes of the rider will be and just continue on in a straight line and allow them to make a decision. A bicycle in my rearview mirror poses no threat as they cannot keep up. A motorcycle can easily overtake in way ordinary cars cannot (between lanes, etc). They are much more difficult to predict. (not even taking into consideration the tendancy of motorcycle drivers being less risk averse).
So, if you want to teach the AI that a bicycle and a motorcycle are the same thing, then yes, you might inadvertantly lead to an AI making the wrong decision leading to a death. I wouldn't necessarily blame you for picking the wrong image in a captcha, but I'd definitely blame the devs for not sanitizing user input.
I fully understand this isn't going to have any effect. Maybe if a million of us were doing it, it would. But it still makes me feel better.
I remember far worse...
It would just be simply people refusing to work on captchas more than a certain amount. Basically, if you make me hunt for bikes and there's more than 3 of them, then I'm not doing it. More akin to a deliberate labor slowdown than a DDoS, or even a strike.
I mentioned DDOS because every time you fail to satisfy captcha criteria website requests a new batch of captcha for you; in that way you would be constantly requesting a new captcha if you would be deliberately failing your current one or as you described imposing a "hunt limit" upon yourself.
That's a problem of literacy, but it is still their fault and their responsibility as owners of the site.
So if anyone has better solution so I can eliminate the G and is Wordpress happy, I'm all ears (or eyes reading in this case).
Requires the browser to complete a Proof of Work challange.
Not for verifying humanness, but against spam / dos attacks.
"Demo Friendly Captcha in action The form was unable to submit. Please contact the site administrator."
Demo Hell 101. Make sure the demo shows the product working.
Is that what this is actually doing though? Is it PoW for a mining operation, or just causing some electrons to be moved around to prove your not a bot? I didn't read too far into what the PoW actually is since their demo shat the bed.
The problem is spam networks have more computers and more power than your phone does so any proof that you can do, spammers can do 1000x faster. PoW can sort of work when your attack to defend against is a ddos situation where an attacker has to make far more requests than the average user, but most captchas try to defend against bots being able to use the site at all which PoW can not do.
;]
> IP reputation
my ISP has, it seems, all of their addresses in a blacklist. The ips are also dynamic.
For IP reputation, looking for IPs associated with proxies and also data center IPs though blacklisting all the big cloud providers will grab innocent users. EG: US military runs outbound proxies on azure.
This all for new traffic. Users that are known to be non fraudulent have a unique persistent cookie that allows them to bypass all the checks. So they could jump on a VPN and stuff would work.
Stuff we built for an online bank was even more advanced and looked at the incoming packets to detect proxies(tcp fingerprinting to determine OS). And we did shady stuff with fingerprinting internal networks with WebRTC. Our adversaries were 100 times better than simple carders running selenium scripts.
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, at which point it will:
- Give you longer captchas
- Fade images in slower, something whose purpose can only possible be to annoy you for daring to refuse to submit to google's profiling, since bots don't care about that
- Even falsely claim you failed captchas even if you get them right
Fuck that!
Humans just have to give up and hope that whatever was behind the captcha wasn't actually important.
Reminds me of a bug I found at (with) work last week: typing too quickly (sending auto-completion requests too quickly) locks up the entire page, nothing for it but to refresh. (It's intended to cancel previous requests since only the latest one is needed, but obviously not supposed to freeze.)
I think of this every time now
Do you have a source for this?
If you are especially unlucky, you might even get denied entirely after solving captchas for several minutes.
I mentioned before, but once I got present with hCAPTCHA asking me to select 電車 (lit. electric train, but since all trains in big cities in Japan are electric train, 'train' in English also usually got translated as 電車). There's a picture of diesel train in the choice. Do I select it? idk.
Lately I have been presented with reCAPTCHA asking me to select トラック (lit. truck). Half of the choices are firetruck. Do I choose them? Because in Japanese (and probably most other languages too), we don't considered firetruck as 'truck'.
And the complaint that is more common: parking meter. I have literally never saw one, as it doesn't exist where I live. How do you expect me to chose the correct answers with noisy images?
It seems that they have them in many countries, but they are often underground rather than the pillar type used in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_hydrant
These are standpipes [0] which can be used to move water to parts of the the building from that external fitting. They may contain some static water or be completely dry (like a dry riser [1]) but they are not a source of water like a hydrant is.
The cultural gap is annoying with captcha's, even if you keep your preferred browser language set to English.
It’s pervasive across the entire internet.. we’re all expected to suddenly relearn the names of everything we’ve ever learned in our life because the US has decided the rest of the world is wrong and should learn their distorted version of English or just not take part in the “world wide” web.
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"
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 minutes thinking about this from the safe distance of an asynchronous discussion after the fact, the best I can come up with is this:
When you join a Zoom meeting, your tablet makes a call to Zoom over the Internet. But Zoom doesn't know for sure that the call is coming from an actual person trying to join the meeting. Have you ever gotten a phone call from a stranger, only to find out that the call is actually from a computer playing a recording, trying to sell you something? But if you assumed all calls from strangers were like that, you might also miss important calls from real people. It's kind of like that for Zoom as well. There are all sorts of nasty programs out there on the Internet, trying to make calls to Zoom. They might be trying to snoop on people's meetings, bombard people with advertisements, or just overload Zoom. Zoom needs to keep those programs out, so it can focus on serving people like you that are actually attending meetings. Now, when you get a call from a computer, you can tell pretty easily that it's a computer, because so far, computers aren't very good at having a conversation with a person. But Zoom is a computer program, and it's not smart enough to tell whether you're a real person without asking you to do something annoying like clicking all of the tiles with traffic lights.
> I came close to saying "dear Kristine, throw this tablet in the garbage, none of this is going to make you happier"
What actually happened? Did she make it into the meeting? Do you know if she continued to use the tablet for other things? I hope so. I know the Internet can be frustrating, but I think it would have been a mistake to conclude that it wouldn't make her any happier. After all, it has helped us stay connected through the pandemic, right? I hope she got to participate in that.
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.
But now the pandemic has happened, being online is more important than ever, and there's probably no going back. I find it unacceptable to leave some people behind. I know that pessimism and cynicism about the Internet are fashionable these days. But we're still here, discussing things online. If we're not willing to throw that away ourselves, then maybe we need to give those people more of a chance to decide for themselves if it's worthwhile.
My interest is on what you see as actions related to that. We're a community mostly on the building the web side, bearing at least some responsibility of what "being online" means today.
Your describing them as left behind makes me think you see the current web as the way forward, but I don't know if it's a fair assumption on your position.
Arguably I see their lack of using online tools up to this point as a failure of those tools to provide enough value for the hassle, and the issues would be less to bring this people along than to come up with ways to bridge their world and ours.
We often talk of digital litteracy as if it was an unavoidable skill, but I kind think it's like positing that Amazonia tribes have to learn english. It could be better for them, but we could also have adaptation layers that make it work for them even if they stay in their culture and lifestyle.
Speaking of adaptation layers, my own expertise is in accessibility for blind people. There's some debate in the online blind community about the merits of devices and user interfaces designed specifically for blind people, versus retrofitting a screen reader onto a mainstream GUI. Given the prevalence of proprietary walled gardens, the staggering complexity of even the open web, and the need for blind people to participate in mainstream society, it's inevitable that we have to rely on the latter to some extent. But that doesn't mean that blind people have to live with only the level of accessibility and usability that mainstream platform companies choose to provide, ad least as long as one mainstream platform is open enough to allow for third-party adaptations.
So maybe there's also a need for alternative UIs for people who, for whatever reason, aren't familiar with the conventions of the mainstream Internet, such as email inboxes. It would be important, though, to make sure such attempts at alternative UIs don't come off as condescending (like, say, Microsoft Bob).
Edit: OK, in hindsight, my explanation was incomplete. I should have added something like: The general idea is that Zoom is asking you to do something that a computer program can't reliably do. Unfortunately, as computers get better at performing simple tasks that used to require human intelligence, it becomes more challenging for a computer to determine that you're a person and not another computer. That's why it has gotten to the point of asking you to click on the tiles with traffic lights.
https://www.mainstreetmaterials.com/lighting-and-electrical/...
Captcha bonus level: try solving one of these from a public VPN.
This is a great and wise insight !
Also, i'm assuming, maybe wrongfully so, that Google would make accessible CAPTCHAs harder to pass, with the logic that sound-based CAPTCHAs are much easier to break for a bot.
All in all, reCAPTCHA (and other modern CAPTCHAs like hCaptcha) are a usability/accessibility disaster. It should be a crime to enable that on a service to restrict access to your peers.
Audio reCAPTCHA is super easy. Significantly easier than the visual one.
How is that an excuse? It's like having a café that only lets people wearing t-shirts in. Are you wearing a sweatshirt? "Well i'm sure you can download a t-shirt for free from your cupboard or one of your friends" /s.
It's a fundamental principle of interoperability ("strict about what you offer, lax about what you accept") that an online service should try to serve anyone, whether they have this or that technology or not enabled. In the case of the web, anyone with HTML parsing technology should be able to browse it... minus some stuff that actually doesn't work without additional technology.
> Audio reCAPTCHA is super easy.
I wouldn't know, it never let me through. I have to say, as a sighted person, the only times i've tried audio CAPTCHA were when Google wouldn't let me through using visual CAPTCHA (infinite CAPTCHA loop). Not even once have i been able to pass it.
I guess once you're on Google's no-pass list, whether you fill the CAPTCHA via audio or video doesn't matter, they're just not letting you through? I find it worrying that some people accept to have a private corporation strip-search their guests on the way to the doorbell/mailbox.
Literally everything is a choice of "If you refuse to use X, you will not get Y."
Most of my web browsers, including my phone's web browser, have JavaScript turned off. I can't use reCAPTCHA on the browser I'm using right now. It's not a big deal, and it's not something morally wrong. A piece of technology doesn't work if you're not using pieces of technology that operate with it. This is expected behavior.
If you like larry page and his friends, say so clearly, but please dont shame people based on accessibility that is not there.
The frustrating thing is that this happens even on devices/browsers with fewer privacy measures enabled, like just using a fresh firefox temporary container or private mode (so no browsing history or existing cookies maybe?) with no script blocking is ‘suspicious’ enough that accessibility to the blind is disabled with no recourse.
So yeah, it’s accessible (when they feel like it).
And we dont even have to go down the deaf-blind road. I have excellent hearing, but have failed at solving audio captchas in the past. Also, please remember that there might also be a language barrier. Give an english audio captcha to a german housewive, and learn how discrimination works.
You have probably never been stuck in a loop where it just wont stop throwing captcha at you.
As an aside, I enjoyed the use of the word "anomie" in the article.
Now I'm going to put on some sovietwave...
I was fine with Google's captchas when they were designed to help translate scanned printed material into searchable text (providing a social good). I'm not fine with providing free labor for their self driving car project.
The problem, of course, is that the dataset is exclusive to Google, so while it may benefit society it's not creating a public good. But that's also true for text OCR.
Which will be available any day now, probably as early as 2018 if experts on the field can be believed. Some would even go so far as state that by 2025 private car ownership will be a thing of the past.
> that is not a social good?
Hype, empty promises and constantly moving deadlines. If this goes on we will have commercial fusion reactors before self driving has any positive impact outside of heavily supervised trials.
It's worse than that - if I prove I'm human by choosing pictures the machine doesn't agree with it won't let me in.
I recently found that using IE made for exponentially more tests. Out of pique, I tried doing the opposite of what was requested; for instance, if it wanted me to click on fire hydrants until there were no more, I clicked on pictures without fire hydrants until every square had one.
But it never got tired, or decided it was wrong about what fire hydrants are, or deduced the rule I was following.
It won't even let me differ on, say, 1/4 of them.
This is EXACTLY what a Robot would say...
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 :(
We can both look at the same image and have two different opinions about it. An AI simply boils it down to a confidence rating and if they're confident enough that an overpass IS a bridge, then your opinion does not matter to them.
My interpretation of overpass is that it can be a bridge but is not always a bridge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpass
However, I would totally accept your point of view if you said an overpass is also a bridge.
Indignity, that's it! I was never able to explain to myself the visceral hate I feel when I encounter captcha. I knew it could not be explained by the little work it requires, I knew there had to be more, I just couldn't put my finger on it. Indignity, and maybe the feeling of being used.
I have to admit, When I encounter captcha, I leave that page and never come back. I stopped using Pocket where I had hundreds of articles because of that. And when I encounter captcha on an especially bad day, I spend a few minutes clicking on incorrect images in an attempt to mess up their data.
Before I want to buy something there login. To prove that it is me owning the account I receive an email with a code I have to type in. Especially when I am on a mobile phone.
After that, when frigging ever I want to checkoutmy cartI am forcedto do these captcha again prove that I am a human.
I just stopped buying from them. Even if I like the cause.
What cause is that? To make IGN more money? Because everything else is only marketing by now.
Well put. I would add that it's even more humiliating that you have to "prove" it to a machine, who has no clue what it even means to be human.
How do you feel about Apple's face scanner?
https://github.com/rene-tobner/unity
Egovernment and identity management @ world-wide-wished-for-things.org ?
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.
You have to play a game of guessing what other people will guess, and yeah, if you aren't from the US that's a huge handicap, if you aren't neurotypical that's a huge handicap, if you have bad luck that day that's a huge handicap. Google doesn't give a shit, the people who put the captcha in place don't give a shit, you just have to deal with the little Kafka nightmare they dump you in and hope it doesn't lock you out of something critical.
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."
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, until I gave up because it still hadn't let me pass. I'm pretty sure that my error rate was very low, if not zero.
I'm guessing those times when I've been unable to get past a Captcha were due to the IP address I was connecting from, but it's pretty abusive of a site to tell someone it will let them in if they solve a simple test correctly, and then repeatedly show a new version of the test, never letting them in and never telling them no either. Cloudflare and Google have been bad for this.
Perhaps if I ever run some really popular site I shall: 'select all pubs', 'arrange the squares in order of social class', 'type the word that describes an ordered collection of people waiting for something'.
Different language & currency support is fairly common, and where not present it's usually because other markets aren't deliberately served. I18n/l10n ought to extend to captcha too.
We've all seen services launched by American companies, with American employees, American VC money, that only work within the US, and are only offered in English. We've also all seen how these companies get criticized by people around the world that the service doesn't work in their country and their language. From the American perspective it seems like the rest of the world feels they are automatically entitled to services created here. Even if the stated plan is to eventually roll out to the rest of the world.
This behavior is stunningly obvious when a Chinese or Indian company launches an interesting new product or service for a domestic audience. In those cases, it's hard to find people upset that the service only works domestically or doesn't work in their language. This is because those people aren't falling into the logical fallacy of "American = English = International language = International product".
As a good faith question - if you were an American, how would you create a site or service for a domestic audience without insulting the rest of the world?
p.s. This is a side question non related to this article specifically - obviously google is an international product.
First I would say that I don't think I've been, or particularly seen others, be offended by sites that are clearly targeted at a US/North American audience while still being more widely accessible. Usually I am happy that being an English speaker gets me access to a wider set of things on the internet than would otherwise be specifically targeted for where I live. I'd say this is fairly true up until the scale of a company with international presence and operations.
Yes there is going to be some vocal minority who behave in an entitled manner and loudly complain that something didn't meet their personal expectations, but this is a small minority and not representative of the wider English-using-international audience.
If a site is open and upfront about what they are doing then I wouldn't have any issue. Examples might be using geolocation to restrict access or just having some note making clear that 'this service is for X, use it elsewhere at your own risk'.
A good example of this is the range of approaches different sites have taken to GDPR compliance (or that awful cookie law compliance!) following its implementation by the EU and the non-EU countries that have adopted it.
Some non-EU sites (possibly based in the US but also plenty of others elsewhere) have used geolocation to restrict access from the EU, others have implemented those consent banners, others have done nothing. However I don't think it is reasonable to blame a company doing any of these, ultimately we are benefitting from the protections the new law provides - if we don't like the wider implications of that then we need to take that up with our lawmakers, not a foreign company located somewhere with their own set of data protection laws.
The change for me occurs when a company is an international entity. I realise this is a bit of a grey line as to what defines this, but hopefully we'd all agree that FAANG meets this definition. When you're actively engaged with international markets and generating significant revenue in countries around the world I think it is a reasonable expectation that you either: a) make services culturally and linguistically localised; or b) more carefully target a service to some specific regions.
TLDR - at a small scale, if you are open & clear about your intentions I don't think you need to worry about 'insulting the rest of the world' - if you get significant traction in another country you should probably open a dialogue with that user base to understand their views.
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're just pictures from the street! Just how? How does a person come up with a whole emotional essay for this?
I am failing to understand the author to the degree I feel like there's something wrong with this person's psyche or something is wrong with mine. Am I having a stroke and words are no longer making sense? Am I too young, or am I too old at 26 to "get it"? Is it because I live in a third world country and lack perspective or have "too much" of it? Is this homework for an English class and it's just trying to talk about literally anything for a given arbitrary word count? I almost feel like I'm dissociating from reality by an article talking about a freaking captcha.
I don't mean "try again," I mean the neverending cycle of "try again" that completely prohibits you from going about a particular piece of business.
My guess: you are US-informed enough, neurotypical enough, good enough at guessing constraints to fix underdetermined prompts, and use proxies little enough that capchas have never been more than an annoyance for you. Please understand that your experience is not universal.
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".
The way that the author describes the captcha images reminds me of the idea of "liminal space" - a concept that relates to a certain kind of eerie sensation but is perhaps most familiar to people in the form of art that seeks to evoke this sensation and makes normally familiar things like shopping malls and schools instead look eerie. Often simply photographing such places without any people in the pictures does the trick. I do see the eerieness in the captcha pictures but again, for it to really affect me I would have to focus on them for much longer than I actually do. The author, for whatever reason, has become particularly interested in captcha images, but until I read this article at least, I was not.
Don't you think they do, though? I mean... not even recognizing the dry humor and hyperbole with which this article was written and taking it literally?
Or maybe it is me having the stroke.
I still slip into viewing the world in “comfortable” black and white logic with clear cause and effect when stressed, often without realising. I lose my humanity and enjoyment of life in the process.
I absolutely agree with being consciously blind, but subconsciously 100% unaffected by our surroundings. It felt (and often feels) like everyone is experiencing the world so very differently and yet they’re so often happier! The people I thought had no clue about how the world works… it turns out that often these people understood so much more than I at the time.
We seem so poor at teaching children how to live, how to manage emotions, and ultimately what it is to be human - in the west at least. Too busy spinning the daily hamster wheel to show our children what exists outside of it. Perhaps this is just my experience though.
Thank you for putting this into words so succinctly. It helps.
* I agree with Kermode’s view of film being an “empathy machine”, as he calls it. Spending an hour and a half of your time viewing the world through someone else’s eyes really can change a person and enhance one’s empathy for our fellow humans. Ultimately, as you say, the world takes on colours that you never imagined could even exist. For me, at least.
Are you implying the GP's emotional awareness is "exceedingly underdeveloped" and that they'll grow out of it?
> you just haven't had the practice/opportunity to develop this side of things
> there absolutely is a reality that you haven't developed skills to see
Yes, it does seem like that's what you're saying. What kind of condescending bullshit is this? If they don't feel the same way you and author do then they're "underdeveloped"?
Not feeling the same way as other people about something is not some kind of disorder to overcome. This is the meaning of the phrase "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." People have varying preferences. Some like sports, some like this sport or another over that one. Some prefer music. Some don't get anything out of music. And all this is because of how they feel in relation to whatever subject and has nothing at all to do with a lack of development.
I intended the word "underdeveloped" not as a value judgment, just a practical sense -- in the same way my own baseball skills are underdeveloped i.e. nonexistent. If you replace it with "less developed" that might be clearer. I meant it just in the context of the goal of someone trying to understand and relate to the article.
My main point being that it's not something you're born with or not, but that you can choose to develop. That the potential is there. But you're under no obligation to, it absolutely is a choice/preference.
> My main point being that it's not something you're born with or not, but that you can choose to develop. That the potential is there. But you're under no obligation to, it absolutely is a choice/preference.
Yeah sorry, no, that doesn't fly. Just because someone doesn't feel the same way you do about something does not mean they are lacking some skill or another. Your response is just more dismissive condescension. Maybe keep working on that development of yours.
Then again, perhaps anytime two people experience a subjective matter differently, they try to grade each other's ability to experience that matter on an objective scale, with their ability to experience it set at the origin. From the parent commenter's perspective, the article and your response are both emotionally hypersensitive, and from your perspective the parent commenter is "emotionally underdeveloped".
What this all comes down to is that applying an objective scale to a subjective matter doesn't yield anything useful; it only highlights the relative differences of the participants. I've always wondered if it's human nature, or cultural imbuement, to inject competitiveness into something that cannot be competed over. It's obvious that you each see this subjective matter differently. How can either of you possibly think that your subjective viewpoint is correct, without also acknowledging that the other's viewpoint must also be correct to them?
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 or defeat, there is no virtue in negativity or pessimism nor is the world a better place for people being triggered by a bunch of boring pictures. Just don't look at the damn things if they bore you, I never do - I just click the link for the audio version.
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.
Consider the possibility that someone might indeed not get depressed from looking at a couple of street photographs for a minute. That having to fill a CAPTCHA can in itself be so annoying that the content of the images becomes irrelevant. Or that someone who (in their words) lives “in a third world country” might have bigger concerns which render banal pictures as truly innocuous in their mind.
Use your emotional awareness. Empathy is about opening yourself to the feelings and reality of another, not about extrapolating your own emotions into them.
if we're oblivous to even the smallest things (boring pictures) that negatively impact us, we hinder ourselves to making the world better. And that's not something we want, everything is shit already.
Oh and this whole "Just don't" dissmissal... Check your privilege, man, and develop some damn empathy.
Soft healers make smelly wounds [1]:
British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, v47 n2 p200-209 2019
Genuine happiness is impossible without authentic concern for and corresponding behaviour towards the well-being of others. Such an incorporation of others into the self refers to a "democratic self" and the related regard for the common good. The author argues that the honesty of professionals who work in or for an educational or vocational setting is vital for the good of the individual and the common good. By introducing "democratic selves", recent advancements in Dialogical Self Theory (DST) point to an inclusion of the common good. However, given the importance of virtues for one's own and the common good, the theory and its applications are in need of integrating virtues *and in particular honesty.*
Also, drop the "privilege" stuff, this is not twitter.
also you probably meant tumblr, not twitter.
Also, twitter, not tumblr. I've never been to tumblr and I try to avoid twitter but from what I've seen of the place it is full of keyboard-side vicars full of holier-than-thou attitude which they're wont to express in 140 characters or less.
We are talking about reCAPTCHA, a tool that is used to prevent botting the websites that people sometimes have no choice but to use.
I’ve become more and more disconnected from user base as time has passed. I think I’ve been stuck at around 2k total karma for years now. I know I used to have more points several years ago. Paying no mind to the points is a good idea. Might be an even better idea to mourn and grieve the HN I used to enjoy, instead of fooling around with its rancid corpse…
If it's a specific case of ignorance is bliss then I agree, remain ignorant. Otherwise, it's good to know things that cause problems so you can fix them.
Condescension, with no concrete feedback to improve.
I don’t think that was emotional intelligence, I think it was bias, rumination, and catastrophizing. Also a lack of perspective. I still feel bad sometimes, but… about things which other people also recognize as serious problems. Which has been a boon for social outcomes too.
> 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're just pictures from the street! Just how? How does a person come up with a whole emotional essay for this?
> I am failing to understand the author to the degree I feel like there's something wrong with this person's psyche or something is wrong with mine. Am I having a stroke and words are no longer making sense? Am I too young, or am I too old at 26 to "get it"? Is it because I live in a third world country and lack perspective or have "too much" of it? Is this homework for an English class and it's just trying to talk about literally anything for a given arbitrary word count? I almost feel like I'm dissociating from reality by an article talking about a freaking captcha.
Double +1. And, thank you - you said it so much better than i ever could.
It's like anaphylaxis - a completely outsized and self-harmful reaction to a minor disturbance.
I’m primarily a software dev, but clients mostly value my skills in producing visually pleasing layouts and graphics. I’ve come to realise that good aesthetics are extremely valued by most. Even during the development process, nice looking layouts/design integrated early can immensely lift the team’s spirits.
I have observed though there a some people who seem to undervalue the need of aesthetics, are very quick to write it off as superficial, and may even have some very negative emotional responses to this “arty stuff”. I would chalk up much of the perceived divide between front-end and back-end developers stems from this negative emotional response.
And that's just the intro.
Skip to the end: "These pictures erode the soul."
I interpreted the authors choice of words more as an emotional critique of things like composition, colors, etc.
If I saw some poorly written code, and I happened to say, “this code destroys my soul” as a figure of speech. Most people would understand that I just have an intense distaste for the code, not I am not having an existential crisis.
From an artistic sense, if I analysed a single frame from the first scene of the Shining, I might use similar language to the author, even though objectively it is just a car on a road.
Now, if I were to take this piece literally, I would be concerned for the author's mental well being. If I were to record everything I see all day long, nearly every picture my eyes capture would be mostly lifeless. Does that make me subconsciously depressed? Um, no. Not in the least bit. I evaluate pictures based on their purpose before I assign any aesthetic value.
Still, the author has a point: the current state of CAPTCHAs is a missed opportunity for something with more life.
Fashionable urban types dress up to attend gallery showings at which a bored-looking hipster photographer is displaying his framed images of grainy, empty street scenes of nothing in particular taken from odd angles. Each photo of nothing is a deeply meaningful expression of nihilistic enlightenment or a tour-de-force denunciation of capitalism or materialism or whatever, and if you're sophisticated enough, you can buy one for $10,000.
Hilariously, these captcha images that are just random shots in random directions look just like deliberate dreary, sophisticated, urban expressions of nihilism. But only if you are accustomed to assuming that photos "mean" something, so a photo of nothing must be expressing something: nihilism.
But if you walked down the street and saw most of those scenes, you wouldn't think about it at all. Equivalent, meaningless scenes are around you most of the time, indoors and out. And if you don't unconsciously assume that an image is trying to say something, an image of nothing won't feel depressing at all.
I feel this about so many different things. Anyone know if German has a word to describe this feeling?
Until I got there I was going to suggest that it was because you were too used to the scenes depicted - I'm not sure about the author (NYT contributor suggests but I think doesn't necessitate that he's American) but I think many Europeans find the scenes depicted quite unfamiliar and not in a particularly pleasant/intriguing/exciting way. The way towns & cities (to a large extent I'd even argue it seems North America doesn't have towns in any recognisable way) are organised is just different, designed around cars and big infrastructure, car parks and 'box stores' over high streets, etc.
I might not independently go as far as (or at least not recognise it as) 'depressing', but they're certainly not particularly 'nice' or 'pleasing' images to me either.
At that point I just lost interest in trying to figure out what was even vaguely objectionable about the images. It was like someone was trying to imitate the humor of something like The Gallery of Regrettable Foods with perfectly reasonable restaurant dishes.
Nope. I know what Captcha photos are.
Photos from the Google Maps car driving around.
It explains the weird... "depressing" angles and largely brutalist/barren perspectives.
They're the view of a camera on top of the car going through urban centers. Of course streets are going to look like streets and a camera above a car is going to give you weird angles as it drives around town taking pictures of the middle of the road.
Much ado about nothing if you ask me.
I whitelist domains for cookies and I am not signed in to a Google account. These two things really can make the web a frustrating experience. I’ve lost out on campsites from US national parks because a captcha popped up when I tried to add the reservation. By the time I passed the multiple tests, all the campsites were taken.
While this is true, I think some of the artifacts in the accompanying example are added by Google as a sort of adversarial attack on deep learning models trying to solve reCAPTCHA problems.
I've no evidence for it, but the noise in the bottom-left to top-right diagonal all have too much colour jitter to just be camera gain IMHO.
I don't know if that's what they're doing, but it would be a clever way to do data augmentation.
Guys, do you really think that in 2021, when ImageNet has been solved to hell and back even with unlabeled data, and CNNs/Transformers/MLP eat it for breakfast, and we are doing OCR from CLIP trained on unlabeled untranscribed images, Google really needs you to label images of big green US highway signs written in the standardized highway font with text containing names of highways and words like 'miles'?
"Oh yes, I can distinguish between 100 breeds of dogs and I know what every public figure in the world looks like and can edit images with the 'unreal engine' trick - but gosh, I just can't figure out where in this image a big green blob is! Only humans with a soul can possibly do that!"
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."
It reminds me of how nowadays when I do an incognito Google search on my phone, I need three taps just to accept the terms of service. Same with YouTube. Maybe this level of cumbersomeness is somehow legally required now, but I find it more likely that this is an attempt to subconsciously encourage people to not browse incognito—so that they can be tracked.
My understanding is that being logged in in your Google account often allows you to bypass captchas. If captchas are a miserable experience, this would have a similar effect of subconsciously discouraging incognito browsing.
(Does this still need saying?)
This touches on something else: are all the Google captchas, worldwide, based on photos taken within the US? I suspect they are, and cultural imperialism is at play: taxis in New York are yellow, therefore a yellow car must be a taxi. That kind of thing.
> "Stroad" is a word we coined in 2013 to explain those dangerous, multi-laned thoroughfares you encounter in nearly every city, town, and suburb in America. They're what happens when a street (a place where people interact with businesses and residences, and where wealth is produced) gets combined with a road (a high-speed route between productive places). -- https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/3/1/whats-a-stroad-...
That's pretty confusing, since in NZ the words "street" and "road" have identical meaning and are totally interchangeable. Is this distinction real in the US, or another thing Strong Towns have invented?
In my European world I think there's pretty much always an unambiguous difference between a street and a road, but "stroad" definitely evokes the places I've seen in sparser urban environments like in USA, South Africa and Australia.
Edit: after more pondering I think you can call the part of a street "the road" to distinguish the part where vehicles drive from the part where humans walk. E.g. "he ran out into the road" might apply where "it's a busy road" would sound wrong.
A relevant Strongtowns quip is a quote of the MUTCD entry for street: "see highway."
I’m reminded of Artistotle’s 4 kinds of causes—or, here, you might say 4 kinds of “whys”
I was surprised there was no mention of the palette or the quality of the photos: they're all pretty washed out and gray, fuzzy with no sharp edges, and at a low resolution, like they were taken by a decade-old smartphone.
It's more that its cropped from a much larger photo and the AI has detected that something is here but it isn't 100% on which thing it is out of a few possible candidates. The sharp stuff is already clearly identified.
“I can see how you might think that’s a boat but I assure you it’s a mailbox.” “COMPLY” “This hurts you more than it does me. click”
Does Google ask you to complete a CAPTCHA to run a web search? I've never experienced that - is that a thing?
Or just fire off a lot of searches pretty fast e.g. by launching a bunch of tabs to search for variations of a term.
about:config isn't a thing in my browser.
I settled on Yandex. The only problem sometimes is that results from "internationalized" sites are in Russian.
Basically, the more you appear like you might be trying to scrape Google results or otherwise abuse Google with an unreasonable quantity of requests, it'll ask you to prove you're human and not a bot.
You can try this yourself by Googling something suspicious, like common Google dorks. After a few variations of WordPress/phpAdmin Google dorks, you'll get a popup asking you to fill out a CAPTCHA to continue.
If you share your IP with lots of people (CGNAT, schools, large offices) then enough weird Googling can get the entire IP address stuck behind CAPTCHA's for a while. It usually clears after a few minutes, but I've seen it last for up to an hour when someone in the network was doing something they shouldn't have been doing.
What is a 'Google dork' and what are the common ones?
This is an example:
>intext:phpMyAdmin SQL Dump filetype:sql intext:INSERT INTO `admin` (`id`, `user`, `password`) VALUES
It'll find publicly accessible phpMyAdmin backups, so don't click any of the results if you want to stay in the legal side of things.
Googling "Google dork" or "Google hacking" should provide you with more examples. If you try modifying the query a few times, Google will make you fill out a captcha.
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...
I'm not in the US, never seen it.
1. The physical part. Sight, sound, etc.
2. The ideas.
Some kinds of reality are beautiful and meaningful all by itself. Flowers, healthy people, healthy animals, forests, natural landscapes, clouds, stuff like that.
Some kinds of reality are beautiful and meaningful only when you consider the ideas associated with them. Cars, streets, books, powerlines, stacks of money, feces, etc. And without the ideas they are quite ugly and nihilistic.
These AI pictures here are that second variety.
It makes you think. Or something.
Palm trees look kind of like street signs, and show up in places street signs also show up. To recognize street signs, an AI needs both examples of street signs, and examples of things that look like street signs, but aren't.
“Select all the images of public executions.”
“Select all the images of disgraced politicians.”
“Select all the images convicted war criminals.”
If you’re going to train models using our input, then you need to distribute the results as public good and make no profit from it.
When I finished Whisper of the Heart, I remembered thinking that Kondo had made the suburbs of Tokyo look beautiful. It seemed that he'd done so simply by depicting them, by showing them as worth looking at.
— God Emperor of Dune
Frank Herbert was a genius.
It shows that we live mostly in bits of fairly ugly industrial landscape.
Actually - if I was the AI trying to assimilate the humans I would start selling a google glasses type thing that allows you to skip captchas by automatically informing the captcha that a human is watching - watching through the AI's eyes.
Yea that’s depressing.
Then you are free to not use the service that you are not paying for.
If the causality was a property of the images, those questions would have definitive answers.
But our emotions are not transmitted to us by inanimate objects or images. They come from within our psyches. There is an element of choice to what we feel. If there wasn’t, we would be zombies, or machines, or vulnerable imbeciles who could be overcome by an enemy combatant who would need no gun, knife or club - just a picture of a traffic light.
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!
I was thinking how to solve this problem and I came to the conclusion that it is very hard to design puzzle for every country in the world so I decided to put them in cultures something like Civ game but then again the whole process of solving Captcha should be easy not exhausting and time consuming.
My solution was to use webcam if available and make people wave hand or some other gesture in order to verify that you are really human. You can detect webcam presence and webcam input very easily. Or if mic is present you can use mic and pronounce some sentence in order to verify that you are human. As well as webcam you can detect mic presence and mic input easily so Captcha can not be cheated by automated bots.
My solution is humane input as solution to the puzzle or to the task not observing pictures and writing down the text because every computer bot can do it just as good as humans or even better.
Captcha should be easy to do for humans, easy to verify but hard to solve for bots.
In my opinion depressing Captcha is not the problem the problem is that bots came to the point where they are as good as humans solving Captcha but some people struggle solving Captcha because they are not familiar with American culture or simply they do not know English.
This seems even worse to me. Wave at the camera to prove you are human... This is a whole other level of creepy above depressing captchas. I would not do this, ever.
You would need to trust the service the same like people are trusting logless VPN providers with their sensitive internet traffic logs.
Even if the footage was never recorded or deleted instantly after. Even if it was 100% anonymous and 100% guaranteed secure, it still feels like some creepy dystopian nightmare.
A system like this means we've catastrophically failed with technology. It's too dehumanizing. At this point, burn it all to the ground, we're done.
If webcam or mic is not detected and webcam recording or mic recording was given then obviously malicious actor is trying to cheat the captcha and submit fake recording/s.
Edit: You would be prompted with something like: "Wave your hand from left to right." And then video recorder would be presented to you and you would record yourself doing it and review the footage and submit it to the captcha task.
The same applies to mic and voice recording. For example you would be prompted with: Please say: "Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving." And then voice recorder would be presented to you and you would say it, review it and submit it in order to fulfill captcha task.
I'm betting on a physical recording device that a person has not on the ability or inability of bots or an AI to come up with a human video recording or a voice recording.
A bigger problem is that once you've given some random site permission to access your mic or camera, it can use that access for anything it wants.
And speaking of recordings you can always check metadata and see if it is genuine or fake(edited).
Metadata is trivial to modify, e.g. FFMpeg can do it, and it usually doesn't say anything about genuine-ness anyway. Besides, if you're generating your fake input in software, you'd just generate metadata to go with it.
Sorry, but there are so many holes in your idea that it seems completely unworkable. Even if new developments made it more feasible (new webcams and microphones that cryptographically sign their recordings? Still fakeable by the speakers and screen setup above. Depth-sensing cameras might be trickier.) people would rebel against allowing any and every site to access their webcam and microphone (and hence possibly spy on them).
I imagine it’s awful for people with English as a second language.
Exactly captcha is too much English oriented. I don't have anything against American English or British English but majority of people on the internet are not native English speakers anymore or are not familiar with all the words and variants/nuances of English.