A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it's not somewhere I feel welcome.

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"

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.

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.

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).

Captcha bonus level: try solving one of these from a public VPN.

This is a great and wise insight !

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.

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!

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’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.

The cultural gap is annoying with captcha's, even if you keep your preferred browser language set to English.

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standpipe_(firefighting)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_riser

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

If you are especially unlucky, you might even get denied entirely after solving captchas for several minutes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's a problem of literacy, but it is still their fault and their responsibility as owners of the site.

You have probably never been stuck in a loop where it just wont stop throwing captcha at you.

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.

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.

Hilton.com is a big annoyance.

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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).

;]

> 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.

Requires the browser to complete a Proof of Work challange.

Not for verifying humanness, but against spam / dos attacks.

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.

"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.

As an aside, I enjoyed the use of the word "anomie" in the article.

Now I'm going to put on some sovietwave...

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.

https://github.com/rene-tobner/unity

Egovernment and identity management @ world-wide-wished-for-things.org ?

How do you feel about Apple's face scanner?

This is EXACTLY what a Robot would say...

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.

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.

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.

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 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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

[1] https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1216616

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.

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 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.

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…

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.

Condescension, with no concrete feedback to improve.

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

I feel this about so many different things. Anyone know if German has a word to describe this feeling?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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!"

I don't know if that's what they're doing, but it would be a clever way to do data augmentation.

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?)