Why CAPTCHA Pictures Are So Unbearably Depressing (medium.com) 115
Clive Thompson: I hate doing Google's CAPTCHAs. 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. I also don't like being forced to donate free labor to AI companies to help train their visual-recognition systems.
But a while ago, while numbly clicking on grainy images of fire hydrants, I was struck by another reason: The images are deeply, overwhelmingly depressing.
CAPTCHA images are never joyful vistas of human activity, full of Whitmanesque vigor. No, they're blurry, anonymous landscapes that possess a positively Soviet anomie. I think I've figured it out, and so now I present -- The Six Reasons CAPTCHA Pictures Make You Feel Like Crap:
1. They're devoid of humans.
2. The angles are all wrong.
3. They're voyeuristic.
4. They look like crime-scene footage.
5. The grids on the photos are an alien's-eye view of the world.
6. There's very little nature.
CAPTCHA images are never joyful vistas of human activity, full of Whitmanesque vigor. No, they're blurry, anonymous landscapes that possess a positively Soviet anomie. I think I've figured it out, and so now I present -- The Six Reasons CAPTCHA Pictures Make You Feel Like Crap:
1. They're devoid of humans.
2. The angles are all wrong.
3. They're voyeuristic.
4. They look like crime-scene footage.
5. The grids on the photos are an alien's-eye view of the world.
6. There's very little nature.
Just imagine it's a horror version. (Score:4, Funny)
Traffic is depressing (Score:5, Insightful)
The fundamental reason these pictures are depressing is because our streets are depressing. They're the most unnatural part of our cities, not only devoid of plants and wildlife but so dangerous that unprotected humans can only be there for brief intervals while traffic is interrupted for their safety.
Re:Traffic is depressing (Score:4, Interesting)
Not always. I mean, yeah, being stuck in traffic is certainly depressing, but being a part of smoothly interacting traffic is a wonder to behold... we've conceived of a method employing the mass transport of people and goods in which safety is predicated upon everyman's instinct for self preservation.
Genius, really.
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Good point. It's pretty incredible that we've been able to scale our population up to this point. Roads are an important part of that, and not a small achievement.
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I'm curious how you think wildlife can be integrated into our streets. Plants? Around here they spend an ungodly amount maintaining the shrubs and flowers on the roadside and medians. But wildlife? What's your plan for this?
Road kill.
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Free Cat!
https://www.funny-games.biz/im... [funny-games.biz]
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Moose. They can defend themselves.
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I'm not saying that wildlife should be integrated into our roads. To the contrary, I'm saying that wildlife can't be integrated into our roads, and that's the problem. One of the things that makes cities unpleasant is that they are incredibly unnatural, and roads and traffic are the most unnatural feature of all.
Re: Traffic is depressing (Score:3)
I can think of much more depressing places. Like really bad ghettos or areal bombed cities.
The only thing 'depressing' is when this crap pops up unexpectedly, and I could've sworn I clicked all the right pictures yet it still bitches that the entries are incorrect.
Re:Traffic is depressing (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, just what I was about to say. You beat me to it! :) Part of the reasons I left Canada was because the city & townscapes, the wide, endless roads with so little of beauty to see were, quite frankly, depressing. Everywhere either is or looks like a parking lot & I don't like the look of parking lots. They built the entire infrastructure around the motor car rather than around people. It's just not a nice place to be.
I'm back in the old world now, which was planned & built long before the motor car was invented. Towns & cities were built around people back then & there's a dire shortage of parking spaces & it's difficult & expensive to take your car into town. That means there's more safe spaces to walk, hang out, meet people, go to cafés & bars, downtown cinemas, etc., etc.. Oh, & the public spaces are beautiful & welcoming rather than depressing areas of concrete filled with drunks, addicts, the homeless, & people with mental health issues.
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Oh, & the public spaces are beautiful & welcoming rather than depressing areas of concrete filled with drunks, addicts, the homeless, & people with mental health issues.
What then have you done with the Irish?
I kid, I kid. They're not all homeless.
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What then have you done with the Irish?
I kid, I kid. They're not all homeless.
I'll treat your comment with the contempt it deserves.
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I'll treat your comment with the contempt it deserves.
It's a joke, son. Take that very fluffy stick out of your very fluffy ass and laugh a little. You might live longer.
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The XKCD Captcha is more anxious inducing... (Score:5, Interesting)
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/m... [xkcd.com]
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Left or right click?
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+---+---+---+---+
| 2 | | 1 | |
+---+---+---+---+
| X | X | 3 | |
+---+---+---+---+
| 3 | X | | X |
+---+---+---+---+
| | 1 | | 1 |
+---+---+---+---+
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Yep, that's the solution. In fact, it's the only solution. It's Randall, of course it's consistent and solvable.
be honest (Score:3)
> Part of it is the sheer hassle of repeatedly identifying objects... don't like being forced to donate free labor to AI companies to help train their visual-recognition systems
There it is, no one likes bullshit human tricks.
Who the fuck is clive thompson? (Score:3)
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Who the fuck is clive thompson?
Another boring nobody with nothing to say. If you think that the biggest problem with CAPTCHAs is that they are "depressing" then you really are a clueless idiot.
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Ever Thought You Might Need Professional Help (Score:3, Insightful)
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If you want to see fragility at its peak check out /r/infertility, they are so fucking unstable maybe there's a reason they can't have kids.
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Some captchas are too philisophical (Score:2)
LOLest moment I had recently: https://kottke.org/plus/misc/i... [kottke.org]
The whole purpose of google's captchas are... (Score:3)
.
Anything else seems to be a distraction from this, i.e., google's goal.
.
google provides a "free" verification service to the site that gathers data for google tracking. What you do not know is what data about you does the site need to turn over to google? It is a win-win for google, a win for the sites involved, and a loss for the users. But this is google, seemingly abusing users. What else is new? google wants to track you. Your life. Period. Full stop.
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still better than being asked (Score:2)
to identify all the pictures with a penis. /s
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Gimme a Road! (Score:3)
Speak for yourself. I find photos of modern infrastructure pleasant.
Language settings ignored (Score:5, Interesting)
The captcha's instructions will all be in Japanese, with no way to change it.
The browser sends an Accept-Language header with every request, but they chose the language based on your geographical location, not on what you actually configured.
So you are left with a bunch of street images, and don't know if you're supposed to select the traffic lights, cars, trucks, pedestrians, etc.
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Try the kanji lookup addon 10Ten or Simple Translate for general use, you'll at least be able to tell what it's asking you for.
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This is basically how it goes.
"Click all the lights."
"Done."
"Fuck you. Do it again."
"Excuse me?"
"Fuck you, faggot. Do another one."
"Why?"
"Because fuck you, that's why you fucking cunt, piece of shit! Do it again!"
"Fine! Why is it fading so slow?"
"Because FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE PIECE OF SHIT!"
"I've clicked this fifteen times!"
"And you made one mistake! Fuck you! Do it again!"
"It was fire hydrants! I know what a fire hydrant looks like!"
"Too bad, start over!"
"I'm doing the audio captcha instead."
"Too m
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There's strange logic there that thinks if you do it quickly, you can't be a human, and so deserve ANOTHER ONE to solve.
I've just learned to pause three seconds before clicking the last image, and that seems to work.
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The website equivalent of being accused of aimbotting, no I just have years of practice CLICKING ON SHIT
Depression (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't notice the "depressing" CAPTCHAs because at the time of doing them, I am annoyed.
If you are physically incapable of controlling your brain, fine. Many people need meds to help. Others may have suffered some trauma. That's also very understandable.
Otherwise, stop fucking dwelling on everything.
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Otherwise, stop fucking dwelling on everything.
But that doesn't sell ads, or Coke, or iDevices, or votes, or politicians.
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Depressing doesn't mean that something causes depression, merely that it tends to lower your mood.
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And I really question what it means to "lower your mood". It seems America especially has some obsession with having to be happy all the time and anything that isn't "lowers the mood". Everything has to be "amazing", or some other exaggerated rating. Most things are just good meh, or bad meh.
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Too many rats in the cage and the Skinner based food pellet dispensers are set too stingy.
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When I deal with this shit (Score:2)
..I can't help but feel I am aiding and abetting in Skynet's eventual takeover of the planet.
Google and Cloudflare need to fuck off. Google trying to farm out work in an extortive way so they can profit is low behavior. The OCR captchas were not too bad, but this click on the vehicles crap just really pisses me off for some reason.
Re: When I deal with this shit (Score:2)
Just yesterday, I saw an image on a website of tractors layed out in panes, like the Google captcha system, and immediately I said out loud "oh no, not THIS shit again!". A couple seconds later, I realised that I was simply viewing an ad for a store that sells tractors and I felt much relief.
There's a reason... (Score:5, Insightful)
> They're devoid of humans.
- Visual machine learning tech is good enough that the concept of what a person looks like is a solved problem. Google, etc. doesn't need to train their models on what a person looks like anymore.
> The angles are all wrong.
They're the perfect angle if you're taking the photo from the top of a car, which is where these were taken.
> They're voyeuristic.
By this logic, every shot of a city street is voyeuristic. How many people have you accidentally photographed taking selfies on the sidewalk?
> They look like crime-scene footage.
You watch too much television.
> The grids on the photos are an alien's-eye view of the world.
Or, they're a convenient tool for the learning model to determine quadrants of an image.
> There's very little nature.
There's no roads in nature, and no reason for a self driving car to go there. Self driving cars are boons for the big city, and suburbs, and exurbs, and industrial sites, not a national park.
Soviet anomie (Score:2)
Mislabeling (Score:2)
The worst ones (Score:4, Interesting)
The worst ones ask for things that are badly sliced between squares and there's like 10% of the answer in a square but you're not sure if it's supposed to count or not.
Re:The worst ones (Score:4, Informative)
Also, WTF is a "cross-walk?"
The whole thing needs to support locales
And why can't us robots participate? Its discriminatory! I demand a recount!
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Also, British fire hydrants are rectagular slabs of iron in the road or pavement that you would walk or drive over without noticing. The ones in the Captcha images look nothing like that.
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Yes fire hydrants "stick out" everywhere, in Canada too. In residential neighbourhoods they're even sticking out of people's front lawn (every X houses or so, depends on the location).
But no they don't stick out of the pavement, that's where cars go. ;)
You might know them as zebra crossings (Score:2)
Also, WTF is a "cross-walk?"
It's an area near an intersection, marked with painted stripes, where zebras are supposed to cross the road. Some of them have call buttons on one side with a signal on the opposite side so pelicans can use them as well.
And why can't us robots participate? Its discriminatory! I demand a recount!
Robots have a tendency to submit queries fast enough to overwhelm the server's capacity and to fill a space with excessive off-topic promotional messages.
ReCaptcha - Google Street View (Score:2)
The photos are low-res copies from Google Street View and public photos. I'd suspect they are intentionally low quality to stop bot traffic from easily figuring them out - Humans are smart, we can deduce low res images - machine vision may not be as good at it.
hCaptcha is the worst out of all of them "Click a picture of a truck - What kind of truck? Semi? Moving Van? Passenger? All of them are trucks, not all of them are correct to hCaptcha - or "Click on all the pictures of bikes" - well, if you didnt kn
What? (Score:2)
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If you Google from a Tor Node, you will get them.
Also, if you Google from a computer on the NHS network - one of the world's largest employers, has I think a single public IP address for everyone, then you get them a lot.
Leave the site. (Score:4, Insightful)
Half the time, if a captcha like that appears - I just stop using the site. I can't be bothered with it. Not worth the time or misery.
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Its the lack of humans AKA liminal spaces (Score:2)
Real reason is thinking (Score:3)
Real reason why you get depressed is because you don't instantly know the answer and you are forced to think. Thinking consumes energy and makes us feel bad so we would avoid thinking, so we would save energy.
Annoying, but neccessary (Score:3, Interesting)
However, I recently had to implement it for a client. The script kiddies have gotten very good lately submitting bogus info that looks real, but isn't. Real names, properly formatted address, phone numbers and email addresses. Even other non-standard, required form fields like description, color, make, model, etc. Stuff you'd think you could weed out on your own. This particular example, you had to go through 5 different screens (forms, selections, details, etc) prior to getting to checkout. Then you enter your payment info.
Despite about 50 attempts of ip filtering, making forms harder, hard-coded shit to try and identify bogus accounts, etc. The hacker modified his scripts as fast as we could implement mitigations. In the end, it was only Google's reCaptcha that made it stop. Ridiculously annoying for the customers, but it worked.
Not smart enough to prove am not a robot (Score:1)
The #1 frustration of CAPTCHA is no t being smart enough to prove I'm not a robot!
In one sequence at a website I was prompted with:
- A single image CAPTCHA, select "Bicycles" which features a row of scooters and motorcycle (maybe a bike) alongside a roadway, possibly a portion of a bike chained to a railing in the background. FAILED
- A single image CAPTCHA, select "traffic lights" with a multi-lane roadway (3+3) with median, with two lights in one square in the direction of travel, one square w/turn light
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That is why I got me one of those fancy image recognition bots. Haven't had to bother with captchas since.
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Quick question, what browser do you use? It deliberately sabotages you if you use something other than Chrome.
If that gets you down so much... (Score:1)
Find a shrink and tinker with meds. I can think of no better way to improve your quality of life. You'll feel a LOT better and be able to do much more with your life.
That also goes for anyone reading this that finds themselves becoming easily angry at shit for no real reason, too m
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Captcha farm services exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Sorry to disagree, but - - (Score:2)
" I also don't like being forced to donate free labor to AI companies to help train their visual-recognition systems. "
Yes, it's annoying.
But the "free labor" you decry is really just a small innocuous tax you pay for:
- free search
- free image finding & download
- free translation
- free maps & services
- free all of those other services that Google puts up - free for the taking.
So, in return, they ask you to spend 15 seconds clicking a few pictures.
It is your chance to train the AI agents so they "get
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Captchas exist to prevent spam, who's to say that google doesn't use spambots to encourage people to use it? I wouldn't put it past a company that dropped "don't be evil" from its motto. Outbreak of snakes linked to travelling snakecatcher.
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So why do I have to do a Captcha to log into my Transport for London Account, which I am most definitely paying for?
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"So why do I have to do a Captcha to log into my Transport for London Account, which I am most definitely paying for?"
I have to do them to log-in to Amazon, combined with entering my password again by hand and a message to my phone but since I use a VPN, I kinda like it that way, they prefer losing a sale to getting my account compromised.
Shite article. (Score:2)
Seriously? Captcha images are "depressing"? And "Very little nature"? Before 4chan changed its captcha I saw more palm trees than a goddamn coconut husker!
The truth is hard to swallow, but its still truth (Score:2)
"CAPTCHA images are never joyful vistas of human activity, full of Whitmanesque vigor. No, they're blurry, anonymous landscapes that possess a positively Soviet anomie. "
Depressing because you just realized your life as (Score:2)
Not resizeable (Score:1)
In the dedicated Kobo ebook app on my computer (a thinly disguised stripped-down web browser), I am always asked to solve a CAPTCHA before purchasing a book. Now that is depressing. Typically I am doing this before bed time because I forgot that I just finished my last book and I need to start a new one immediately and I'm tired.
To top it off, I cannot re-size the CAPTCHA widget in this pseudo-browser and the images are very small. How the heck am I to tell the difference between a sailboat and bus at that
Hey Clive (Score:2)
Get a real job. You'll be less depressed.
PLUS they just don't work. (Score:1)
After six different sets I realize that I really didn't want to see whateverthefuck it was after all.
Re:Here's a really depressing one (Score:5, Funny)
Select the five lights
https://i.imgur.com/AOPfI0v.jp... [imgur.com]
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Tough one. I see four white ones, and two red ones. If I select the two red lights, I just need to select three white ones, right?
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"That episode" is 30 years old.
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And?
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TNG was airing 30 years ago, the episodes are 45 minutes long each, that episode is the 130-somethingth episode. Even with digital streaming being a thing that would be a lot of episodes to go through, and even if many episodes a day were aired in a random order there would be a less than 1% chance of seeing that particular episode if you watched it at that moment.
Time flies.
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Still and?
You don't have to have seen it at a particular point in time, you've had 30 years to run across it. Many people watch the whole series. There is a large overlap in /.'s demographic and TNG's.
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Sad thing is that if it was made today, the episode would have ended with the interrogator's head being cut off.