Useful San Francisco and Bay Area History Resources

sfmemory.org

40 points·karaokeyoga··9 comments

I strongly encourage the curious to browse through : foundsf.org

It has a wealth of 19th and early 20th century history about San Francisco including some really fascinating tidbits like the buried statues of Sutro.

Love the “captcha” on that site

> Spam Control: What's the SF in SFMemory stand for?

Some people/bots might guess Science Fiction. Or other things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF

I've often wondered about the effectiveness of simple custom things like "what's the sum of these two numbers?"

Maybe couple it with some server-side rotating variable names... Dunno.

Honestly those kinds of simple captchas probably aren't all that useful, or won't be useful for very much longer, as people start trying to use ChatGPT to answer them.

I'm not even sure that chat GPT is really the answer to these kind of captchas. I figured people would probably do a little bit of custom programming to quickly answer the question and then perform the action.

But if everybody writes their own custom challenge, now that's a lot of targets. Whereas right now we've already trained the AI to identify all the stoplights, and that kind of captcha is ubiquitous. They just have to solve it once and then a whole bunch of websites are vulnerable.

And most websites aren't actually that high value, for example mine. Is anybody going to spend the time reverse engineering a simple captcha just so they can post comments to my blog that no one reads? :)

But if I used something off the shelf that they already have a solution for, then sure they would.

If it beats the vast majority of botters it’s useful

But for how much longer? That's my point.

step 1: ask LLM to crack captcha

step 2: ask LLM to build better captcha

step 3: oh shit, skynet?

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