ReCAPTCHA: 819M hours of wasted human time and billions in Google profits | Hacker News Reader

ReCAPTCHA: 819M hours of wasted human time and billions in Google profits

boingboing.net

76 pointshubraumhugo19 comments

Wonder how much of that was wasted by poor Firefox users.

If Google knows that much about me how come it can't tell that I know barely any German and still serves me ads in German whenever I connect from German ip?

A while ago, our office switched ISPs, and we got IP from a block that was previously registered in Spain.

Even though RIPE records were correct from day one (we're in the Netherlands), some databases somewhere took a full year to update. All that time, almost all ads were in Spanish.

It can fetch everything about you if it wanted to.

Fingerprinting every request likely costs them compute money, so they phone it in with an IP check for the humdrum stuff.

google knows, it's just the advertisers that use their services don't care enough to filter audience by language (or think it's not worth it, sometimes images are enough to entice customers...).

It really depends. After going on a month-long trip, Google was serving me ads in German, as well as offering Google Photos printing expecting a German address with the price in Euros, all despite us never entering Germany, let alone staying there long enough for it to assume permanent residence. This continued for about 6 months after.

Google shopping manages to show my local shops translated into a language I can't read just because by IPv6 registration is wrong.

Google doesn't choose which ads you see. Google says "These are the attributes of someone who deserves to see an ad" and companies bid on that ad space. That means that if the adult diaper company is ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that you want their diapers, you will see nothing but adult diaper ads.

Supposedly Google has some internal processes to try and punish you if you buy ad spots that don't convert or cause bounces or something, but I find it hard to believe google would give up money from stupid businesses like that.

This just moves my question. Why would a company choose to advertise any product in German to a person who doesn't know German? Why they don't optimize their marketing budget if Google provides them with information to do that?

Or given the average life expectancy of a human; 1,300 lifetimes wasted.

Most of all, this is free AI classification time

At this point I don't think the free human labor is even worth anything. Object recognition has gotten good enough that humans providing input in the form of a 4x4 grid for vague categories like "cars" (are trucks cars?) isn't going to make the system any better.

In the beggining, we were doing text recognition. We trained OCR by transcripting unclear scanned text.

If there is a "captcha", the only time I dont cut and run, is if I, will get paid through interacting with the site, grinning and hateing it. Vile, beyond vile attempt to force this obesience on people, litteral cowtowing before the robot, lest we be inhuman.....

add cookie banners to this

"people in the ziggurats exert control on people"

Tell me more about this quotation

The first image that came to my mind was the $1 bill. There is what looks like a pyramid which has an eye in a pyramid for a cusp * I stupidly googled the topic. The quotation wasnt found, but the concept exists. * https://www.worldhistory.org/ziggurat/ <<In the Uruk Period, the high priest was also the ruler of the city whose authority came directly from the patron god that watched over it. Scholar Marc van de Mieroop writes: At the top of the Uruk society stood a man whose powers derived from his role in the temple. Hence, scholars often call him a "priest-king." At the bottom of the social ladder of the temple dependents were the people involved in production, both agricultural and otherwise.>>

nope, wrong answer

not yet

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