[HN Gopher] Why Captcha Pictures Are So Unbearably Depressing
___________________________________________________________________
Why Captcha Pictures Are So Unbearably Depressing
Author : _Microft
Score : 133 points
Date : 2021-08-07 19:56 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (clivethompson.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (clivethompson.medium.com)
| pkulak wrote:
| I'd say it's because the North America, car-dominated, strip-
| mall-and-stroad landscape is depressing as hell. Open a map and
| drop yourself somewhere in Europe. I just did, and I feel like
| identifying crosswalks in a photo like this wouldn't be
| depressing at all:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/31AgNvs.png
| mkl wrote:
| I didn't understand "stroad" so I looked it up:
|
| > "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?
| judge2020 wrote:
| The different words for pavement became separate categories
| as the culture started to demand an easier way to add context
| to what you're saying. English is very efficient in that
| context is often assumed or hidden in the different meanings
| of the words.
| mediocregopher wrote:
| For 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.
| andrepd wrote:
| 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, 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!
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Oh yes. There's nothing like doing 3 noisy slow fade captchas
| correctly only to be failed for unknown reasons and asked to
| do even more. It's like it's wondering how much free work it
| can get out of users before they get mad and give up.
| Swizec wrote:
| A robot would never give up.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I bet the robots know _exactly_ how many failures before
| they need to cycle IPs /cookies/accounts and when the
| time comes I bet they know how to do it quickly and at
| low cost.
|
| Humans just have to give up and hope that whatever was
| behind the captcha wasn't actually important.
| random_upvoter wrote:
| So I'm member of a a religious (yogic) organisation and we have
| our own little chanting on Saturdays. When Covid broke out this
| obviously became impossible so we decided to have our meetings
| on Zoom instead. Now we have one woman in our group with some
| intellectual disability, a wonderful, sweet woman with the
| kindest heart in the world. Being 100% computer illiterate, she
| still decided to buy a tablet so she could follow the meetings
| on Zoom from her home. It fell to me to explain to her the
| whole process of opening a mail (she didn't know what an inbox
| was), clicking the Zoom link, clicking yes etc.. every little
| detail I had to explain repeatedly. It was a challenge but we
| slodged through the whole thing and she stayed positive and
| courageous throughout.
|
| 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"
| Zababa wrote:
| Being asked by a machine to prove that you are human is
| sometimes really humiliating, especially if you fail the
| captcha a few times in a row.
| kop316 wrote:
| > Being asked by a machine to prove that you are human is
| sometimes really humiliating
|
| 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."
| Banana699 wrote:
| It's actually a sign of bad ergonomics and disrespect for
| your time and effort. There are already sites that know
| you're human by your mouse/touch behaviour. Only if js is
| blocked do they need to resort to those ridiculous multi-
| level games they make you play.
|
| 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.
| kop316 wrote:
| > Only if js is blocked do they need to resort to those
| ridiculous multi-level games they make you play.
|
| In all fairness, i usually do that.
| xdennis wrote:
| I find it infuriating because it pits me against other
| people without explaining what the rules are.
|
| 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.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| It's really hard to know sometimes which frames humans
| generally classify as 'bicycle' or 'traffic light'. The
| bottom third of a tire? The supporting pole of an extra set
| of signals in the background? I sometimes have no idea whose
| intelligence I'm supposed to emulate.
| vmception wrote:
| I've heard that before and I don't really understand how
| people have so much trouble with this. But I guess knowing
| the rules helps me with this:
|
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I understand why websites need to use captcha. I do not
| understand why websites that have user accounts cannot offer
| the option of 2FA TOTP, or even SMS login to avoid captcha.
|
| Hilton.com is a big annoyance.
| JoeOfTexas wrote:
| SMS is expensive.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| TOTP is free, and can simply be made an option to avoid
| CAPTCHA.
| netr0ute wrote:
| It's less expensive than losing customers due to a bad
| UX.
| jcims wrote:
| But more measurable.
| xdennis wrote:
| It's amazing that they still charge for something smaller
| than an average packet.
| leesalminen wrote:
| A bot can trivially generate TOTP tokens from a shared
| secret and receive/process incoming SMS to extract the
| code.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Then use the fact that I am a paying customer of Hilton's
| for years to mark my account as a human. I have the
| Hilton credit card, I am a Diamond member, what else do
| they want?
|
| 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.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I really hate giving my phone number to any service,
| especially since i might need a second account there, or
| they might sell my data (or get hacked).
|
| 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.
| Cycl0ps wrote:
| Coincidentally I just made my first Twitter account. I
| can't remember the exact boxes you need to click but
| there is a way to sign up without giving out your phone
| number.
|
| 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.
| OJFord wrote:
| I don't understand why they need it when they've already
| accepted and verified a login request, just need captcha to
| finish it off? (i.e. you don't get the captcha with bad
| creds)
|
| 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?
| dylan604 wrote:
| My favorite is finding errors on their side. I was tasked
| with finding the parking meters, and being told I was missing
| one. The "one" was an image of a mailbox, not a parking
| meter. Selecting the mailbox allowed it to say I was a human
| zarzavat wrote:
| The reason this happens is that captchas are not localized.
| Most countries don't have mail boxes, only US, Canada,
| Australia, NZ have them so people from outside those
| countries may not think to distinguish mailboxes from
| parking meters and will just click every square that
| matches their mental model of a parking meter (a pole with
| something on top or a big box)
| Zababa wrote:
| > Most countries don't have mail boxes (only US, Canada,
| Australia, NZ)
|
| They do, they just look different. At least that's how it
| is in France.
| kenny11 wrote:
| I think I got that exact same one, and had the exact same
| problem with it. Maybe reasoning that it was confusing the
| mailbox for a parking meter was how I proved that I was a
| human to it.
| dunnevens wrote:
| Sometimes I end up failing them deliberately. I can't boycott
| them because they're often in the way of important sites. So
| my small, practically invisible protest is to never click
| more than 3 times. If you want me to pick out all the
| bicycles, you better have 3 or less. I'm only clicking 3.
|
| 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.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| True civil disobedience would be clicking the non-bikes.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Back when captchas were about optical character
| recognition, it was obvious which words came from actual
| books. Plenty of people would input offensive words
| instead of the correct answer. I hope it had an effect
| but it probably didn't.
| mrkramer wrote:
| So you want us to DDoS the captcha networks? Hmm is that
| even legal? But it would be somewhat cool if millions of
| people starting failing captcha on purpose it would be
| something like decentralized volunteer mass ddos attack.
| dunnevens wrote:
| Wouldn't be a DDoS. At least, I don't think it would.
|
| 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.
| mrkramer wrote:
| How do you know how many bikes are out there in total?
| And what is a purpose of a deliberate labor slowdown if
| you are going to get more captcha work if you do not
| finish your current one.
|
| I mentioned DDOS because every time you fail to satisfy
| the captcha website requests a new batch of captcha for
| you; in that way you would be constantly requesting new
| captcha if you would be deliberately failing current one
| or as you described imposing a "hunt limit" upon
| yourself.
| smichel17 wrote:
| Additionally, ReCAPTCHA is worse than a metal detector, since
| in addition to being an inconvenience, it's performing unpaid
| labor for Google. It's more like a bouncer at the door, who
| won't let you in unless you grease his palm first. Just filthy
| corruption, plain and simple.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| How is it corruption? The website's owners consciously choose
| to use said bouncer who has agreed to accept compensation in
| the form of making the website's visitors solve captcha.
| agent327 wrote:
| And let's not forget the subtle dread that comes with getting
| it wrong. Does that tiny edge of the traffic light that sticks
| into the next box make that box count as a traffic light as
| well? Oh no, I get another one - I must have gotten it wrong
| and now the computers think I'm one of them!
| dylan604 wrote:
| I hate captchas with a passion, yet I was recently forced to
| deploy it on website due to direct instructions from the credit
| card processor. The system was being used to roll through
| credit cards script-o-matically, and they mandated captchas to
| be deployed on threat of closing our account if not.
|
| 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).
| andrepd wrote:
| There are captcha providers besides google, such as hcaptcha,
| or even rolling your own solution (a la old vbulletin forums)
| dylan604 wrote:
| sorry. meant better than captcha like solutions. i know
| there are others, but it's still click here until we
| believe you're not a bot.
| TobTobXX wrote:
| https://friendlycaptcha.com/
|
| Requires the browser to complete a Proof of Work
| challange.
|
| Not for verifying humanness, but against spam / dos
| attacks.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Oops. I broke it. I tried their demo, and got this as a
| response:
|
| "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.
| ursugardaddy wrote:
| hcaptcha is the worst, I moved things off cloudflare
| because I got tired of failing it's crappy boats bullshit
| judge2020 wrote:
| The issue with this is that you won't have a scapegoat if
| people do continue to roll through credit cards. With
| ReCaptcha, you just say "all of these attempts had verified
| captchas" and the CC processor is unlikely to personally
| blame you/the company for the activity since ReCaptcha is
| widespread. With a custom solution or other captchas, they
| can just block you due to insufficient protections when
| they see you have higher fraud rates than merchants
| utilizing ReCaptcha.
| lamontcg wrote:
| You're forced to prove your human to an algorithm that trains a
| robot. It is a very boring dystopia.
|
| As an aside, I enjoyed the use of the word "anomie" in the
| article.
|
| Now I'm going to put on some sovietwave...
| jjoonathan wrote:
| But metal detectors don't block your way for 20 seconds and
| they don't ever put you into an eternal loop of scanning again
| and again until you just give up and decide to live without.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| They do delay customers by 20 seconds, because if we're
| carrying metal then we've got to be inspected by security.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Capchas hold you up 20 seconds every single time, whereas
| metal detectors usually don't alarm at all.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Wasted time is still >20 seconds every time you encounter
| a metal detector, unless you really don't ever carry or
| wear metal. Bonus points if you regrettably have a bag
| that needs to be searched.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Something melancholy about them is the loss of the idealism of
| "User Agent" as a scriptable machine which can act on your
| behalf on the innocent and collaborative proto-internet.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I also mourn the loss of User Agents. Why can't they just let
| bots browse?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| There's also the indignity of doing unpaid work for Google.
| We're not their fucking slaves.
| ink_13 wrote:
| Well, the pictures all seem to be pretty obviously taken from
| Street View, which explains the weird angles.
|
| 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.
| MrManatee wrote:
| This is making me wonder if the experience is _intentionally_ so
| bleak.
|
| 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.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| 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.
| jsrcout wrote:
| Google for: friction ux
| mdeck_ wrote:
| Here I was expecting a deep analysis and explanation of why the
| engineering and businesses at play behind Captchas leads to such
| depressing images... instead I simply found a litany of the ways
| in which the images are depressing. Not quite as interesting.
|
| I'm reminded of Artistotle's 4 kinds of causes--or, here, you
| might say 4 kinds of "whys"
| paulpauper wrote:
| way, why same thing lol
| jshmrsn wrote:
| The photos just look like normal unedited photos of reality. And
| I suspect that's the issue. We are becoming accustomed to
| Instagram style photos depicting a perfect life style with highly
| exposed and saturated color grading. A raw photo of a street on
| an overcast day is "depressing" only by relative comparison.
| mrkramer wrote:
| As far as I understood the problem with Captcha was and is that
| it is too American not in a bad sense but culturally. People
| coming and using the Internet from developing countries might not
| be able to solve Captcha because their culture is different.
|
| 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.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| It's not even necessarily the culture, it's occasionally bit me
| as a native English speaker but not of American English. It's a
| very minor annoyance on par with "colour" versus "color" when
| writing CSS but occasionally the automotive ones throw me off.
| For example, it took a captcha for me to know the central
| reservation is called the meridian over the Atlantic.
|
| I imagine it's awful for people with English as a second
| language.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >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.
| LandR wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| mrkramer wrote:
| My solution was all about solving cultural problem of captcha
| as well as security by that I mean automated bots exploiting
| and solving captcha en masse. Ofc the service would guarantee
| you privacy I don't need to keep the video footage of you or
| the mic footage I would delete it immediately when the
| captcha task is solved.
|
| You would need to trust the service the same like people are
| trusting logless VPN providers with their sensitive internet
| traffic logs.
| LandR wrote:
| It's not the security or trust that is even the issue.
|
| 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.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Then how we should solve captcha problem? Captcha should
| be easy to do for humans, easy to verify but hard to
| solve for bots. It should be humane and happy. How to do
| it?
| mkl wrote:
| It's easy for a bot to provide a pre-recorded or
| generated video of someone waving, and pronouncing a
| sentence is much harder for many humans than for bots. I
| don't think having to prove you're human will ever be a
| happy experience.
| impendia wrote:
| Some of the captcha photos remind me of Studio Ghibli's animation
| films, in a positive way. The films linger on random objects in
| landscapes, from a variety of perspectives, for longer than feels
| "natural". Something about the effect is mesmerizing.
|
| 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.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| I wish my life was so utterly without other problems that I could
| get _this_ worked up about something so minor and meaningless.
| gdulli wrote:
| You just did.
| paulpauper wrote:
| yet it went viral, so apparently a lot of ppl find it
| interesting, and the traffic probably is an incentive for him
| to keep writing similar articles about seemingly mundane
| things. There is a huge online audience for mundane
| observations, as opposed to the always-on news cycle.
| jcims wrote:
| Probably for the same reasons that one of the predominant
| tones on Twitter is howling despair about, in the larger
| view, trifling things
| [deleted]
| leephillips wrote:
| I was considering dropping one of my VPS hosts, and when they
| started putting captchas in the way of logging in, that was the
| final straw that convinced me. It has also affected my decisions
| whether to sign up for or use other services. I wonder if web-
| based businesses consider the lost revenue resulting from
| annoying their customers or prospective customers this way?
| teebs wrote:
| Will we ever run out of CAPTCHAs that computer vision can't
| solve? When reCAPTCHA was started, it used difficult-to-read
| letters to digitize books, but that's long gone at this point. It
| seems like Google's been feeding us all pictures of street
| features to identify for years. Someday adversarial models will
| catch up and be able to pass these CAPTCHAs (or maybe all
| CAPTCHAs) right? What then?
| pyuser583 wrote:
| I've always wanted to do humorous/depressing captchas.
|
| "Select all the images of public executions."
|
| "Select all the images of disgraced politicians."
|
| "Select all the images convicted war criminals."
| ljm wrote:
| > Looking at these leaden vistas of America
|
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Or a 'vette. Can't forget the canary yellow corvettes.
| walrus01 wrote:
| If you want to see a lot of captchas, try browsing with Firefox
| mobile with ublock origin installed. It's sad how many people
| design for 100% chrome. To the point that being a stock Firefox
| user agent that doesn't receive all ads shows up as if you're a
| bot scraping the site.
| mixedCase wrote:
| I'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'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.
| hathawsh wrote:
| IMHO the author is saying that these pictures represent one way
| that we humans have surrendered a piece of our lives to a
| soulless process and machine. Any human with any photography
| skills would take lively pictures of interesting things, but
| these pictures have no life and tell no story. What's mildly
| depressing about this is that we're missing an opportunity to
| connect more and see more of life.
|
| 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.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| How many times have you gotten locked out by a 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.
| dinkleberg wrote:
| Did you read the article? Your argument has nothing to do
| with the point of the article nor OPs comment.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Sure did. Turns out my experiences inform my emotions on
| the matter. Who'd have thought?
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's for this very reason I'm so happy to see something like
| this article on HN, and I'm so happy to see your comment too.
|
| 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".
| guerrilla wrote:
| > I was exactly the same way when I was younger. > my
| emotional awareness was... exceedingly underdeveloped.
|
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Sorry, that's not what I meant but I can see how it could
| be interpreted that way. So let me rephrase.
|
| 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.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| JoeyJoJoJr wrote:
| I understood what you were saying and didn't interpret it
| as condescending.
| axguscbklp wrote:
| Just because mixedCase does not find captcha pictures to be
| depressing does not necessarily mean that mixedCase has
| problems with emotional intelligence. I have no major issues
| with emotional intelligence as far as I can tell and I also
| do not find captcha pictures to be depressing. Maybe I would
| if I looked at them for hours for some reason, but I do not,
| and certainly the idea of them being "unbearably" depressing
| strikes me as quite extreme. I understand the author's points
| about the lack of people, the strange angles and so on and I
| am sure that if for some reason I had to live in a strangely-
| angled reality full of roads and gray buildings and devoid of
| people, that I would find it unpleasant. But I do not have to
| live in such a reality - I barely even glance at any given
| captcha, then I click some parts of it and move on.
|
| The author describes captcha images as being similar to the
| idea of "liminal space" - which, roughly speaking, is a form
| of art that 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.
| postmeta wrote:
| however you guys come to terms with being forced to review
| your capitalist hellscape of franchise boxes, concrete and
| misdemeanor signage for your AI Overlords is on you, no EQ
| required, just submission to the reductionist chaos game~
| /jk
| honzzz wrote:
| >> does not necessarily mean that mixedCase has problems
| with emotional intelligence
|
| 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.
| tleilaxu wrote:
| I am going through this process at the moment... at 30. It
| started when I was younger with art film*, but was stinted
| for years by a bad relationship. The process started again
| with an amazing relationship (aren't wives wonderful?).
|
| 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.
| C19is20 wrote:
| > I'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'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.
| SiVal wrote:
| I think the difference is one of expectations. I get the strong
| impression that the author of the article is accustomed to
| images "meaning" something and being presented by photographers
| who are trying to "say" something.
|
| 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.
| zahrc wrote:
| They're depressing to me because they are a chore - I don't
| think much about them, just as I fail to see the beauty in
| washing up plates.
| kbutler wrote:
| I think this is a case of hyperawareness/catastrophizing - upon
| realizing the mindless interruption of CAPTCHAs, the authors
| have focused so intensely on the minor discomforts of
| monotonous, poorly composed, poorly shot pictures that the
| discomfort has grown through hyperbolic focus into a soul-
| destroying burden.
|
| It's like anaphylaxis - a completely outsized and self-harmful
| reaction to a minor disturbance.
| aimor wrote:
| 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 equally
| depressing.
| irrational wrote:
| > How does a person come up with a whole emotional essay for
| this?
|
| I feel this about so many different things. Anyone know if
| German has a word to describe this feeling?
| lgeorget wrote:
| I'm feeling the same, I can't make any sense out of the
| article, not even about the article's main _claim_ actually. I
| guess it's just a matter of differing sensibilities?
| wilde wrote:
| I'm amused whenever I get one image "wrong" and have to click it
| anyway.
|
| "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_ "
| rickboyce wrote:
| For me this effect is significantly compounded by not being from
| the US / North America. This has come up on HN before (e.g.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226805 ) but it still
| strikes me as so odd that you need quite a bit of USA cultural /
| vernacular knowledge to navigate the internet anywhere in the
| world (or at least English speaking sites?). What a strange view
| into another country to see each day!
| cpeterso wrote:
| Seems like CAPTCHAs shown to users outside the UA should show
| local road images because locals know best how to identify
| objects on their roads. Perhaps Google is prioritizing the
| autonomous vehicle market in the US for now.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| True, but the questions are still very poorly posed even if you
| are from the US. Does a corner of a wheel count as a car? Is
| the square box containing a traffic light a traffic light? What
| about the horizontal pole on which it is suspended? What about
| the vertical pole holding up the horizontal pole? If there is
| one in the distance, does that count?
|
| 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.
| scrollaway wrote:
| With all the legitimate criticism of Captchas, this is really
| a made up one. It doesn't matter. You can get some stuff
| wrong and still pass, and you can skip/retry if the picture
| is not clear too.
|
| 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."
| Zababa wrote:
| I was going to say exactly the same thing. Some things are
| really confusion when you're not from the US. I think it's a
| problem with internet in general, as many people speaks english
| and thus people from the USA think everyone is from here.
| OJFord wrote:
| I was going to vehemently agree and start ranting, but I see
| you've linked a submission that already has enough of me
| ranting! Ha. I'll only add that sometimes it annoys me so much
| I want to create my own 'Britcha' out of spite.
|
| 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'.
| jszymborski wrote:
| > Google's CAPTCHA images are frequently grainy and badly
| focused. This is likely because, as Vox points out, Google has
| gone through most of the easy visual-recognition training cases,
| where the pictures were clear and sharp. Now they're stuck with
| the hard stuff, which tend to be pictures of terrible quality.
|
| 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.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| It's not just that -- google wants its own models to be
| resilient in the face of noisy data. (You've probably see
| examples where a cat is classified as a mountain or something
| ridiculous due to the addition of precisely crafted noise.) The
| best way to achieve that resilience is to simply train the
| models with noisy data; part of the learning process will then
| be learning to ignore the noise.
| 8note wrote:
| You might also be able to get away with cheaper cameras
| aftbit wrote:
| Certainly you get much harder and noisier recaptchas if the
| model has a higher prior prediction of your bot-ness. Try
| browsing around from sketchy Tor exit nodes or some proxies
| from the free proxy lists on the internet for a bit.
| swayvil wrote:
| Reality has 2 components.
|
| 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.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Part of it is the sheer hassle of repeatedly identifying
| objects -- traffic lights, staircases, palm trees and buses --
| just so I can finish a web search.
|
| Does Google ask you to complete a CAPTCHA to run a web search?
| I've never experienced that - is that a thing?
| semperdark wrote:
| If Google doesn't trust your browser for whatever reason (eg.
| privacy-conscious browsing).
| [deleted]
| kenniskrag wrote:
| on tor browser it shows them always.
| [deleted]
| csydas wrote:
| If you're not in the US, all the time.
|
| 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...
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > If you're not in the US, all the time.
|
| I'm not in the US, never seen it.
| nullc wrote:
| It's a thing. Turn up privacy features in your browser
| (including the undocumented ones you need to go to about:config
| to adjust) and stay logged out of google and you'll get them.
|
| 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.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > including the undocumented ones you need to go to
| about:config to adjust
|
| about:config isn't a thing in my browser.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| If privacy was that important to me, I'd be using DuckDuckGo
| instead of Google.
| [deleted]
| sdiq wrote:
| Yes for me it is. I exclusively use a non chromium based
| browser with some extensions installed and always logged off
| Google.
| duped wrote:
| It happens to me all the time after I started using VPNs
| regularly.
| crazygringo wrote:
| If you're accessing via a VPN, not logged into a Google
| account, doing a bunch of searches quickly... absolutely.
|
| 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.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| If Google deems your request suspicious enough, yes.
|
| 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.
| xdennis wrote:
| You can get CAPTCHAs just by turning on a VPN. You don't need
| to do anything more "suspicious" than that.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > like common Google dorks
|
| What is a 'Google dork' and what are the common ones?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Google Dorks are search terms that can find vulnerable
| services, open directories, that kind of stuff. Stuff you
| shouldn't put publically on a web server that a search
| engine manages to find.
|
| 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.
| lordgrenville wrote:
| I get these pretty often on Firefox Focus (Android), not
| because of any unusual searches (as far as I can tell)! It did
| at least push me to switch the default search to DDG.
| benjaminpv wrote:
| Several people mentioned ways you can trigger it using
| 'nonstandard' (by Google's expectation) methods. In my case I
| hit it with just regular Chrome whenever I start doing a few
| searches that use more than basic keywords (so stuff that uses
| the prefixes like filetype: or parenthesis for logic)
| Animats wrote:
| They have to be taken from odd angles. Otherwise, they'd match
| the data sets used to train object recognizers.
|
| 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."
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