People do pay taxes in the US? I paid almost nothing in Texas, thats why it looked like a shithole. No budget for anything. In Europe I love to pay taxes, because I see where it's going to
Federal taxes are payable by all US citizens regardless of location.
State taxes… I can't say I know even a single thing about how it works when you leave the USA. I hear news, but I don't live in the US, nor do I want to.
Other common issues - crosswalks and fire hydrants are common questions too, and crosswalks are not called that in most of the world and fire hydrants look pretty different depending on country.
> and crosswalks are not called that in most of the world
As an Australian, I'd never call them that, but I know what the American word means.
In fact, the average Australian has a pretty good understanding of Americanisms, even if they've never been to the US, due to lifelong consumption of US TV shows, films, and other cultural exports.
Yes, the reCAPTCHA widget is localized[1], but that doesn't automatically mean every term is localized properly.
But the underlying point of the article stands. This is similar to the mythical statement that some park ranger once stated "it's very hard to design a trash can that no bears can use, but that every human can."
reCAPTCHA, like CloudFlare, benefits the wider population of the internet to the extent that everybody can use them, but there are edge cases where some outlier users get locked out of necessary internet infrastructure because they can't grok the ask, can't correctly identify the options, or because their computer / IP is being abused by bots so they are in the splash damage range of the bot checkers.
Strange example. It is clear which ones are taxi's: The ones with liveries on the side that are all the same color. That is what it is like in most countries.
please don't be petty. you don't own the replies to your comment. you are not the only one who can keep the discussion going. others may continue to discuss as they like, and you will have your chance to add your comments in time. removing your comment after people replied to it is disruptive and is not welcome.
Even as someone who lived a long time in the US, I've failed a bunch of these on unclear definitions.
When you say "stoplights", is that just the lights themselves, or also the poles that support them? Is a tile that contains 1/3 of a bike wheel "bicycle" or "not bicycle"? Is a coach also considered a bus?
The problem with recaptcha style systems is that once the underlying model is trained, you are basically playing family feud - you aren't trying to provide a correct answer, as much as you are trying to match the "survey says..." majority opinion
At this point I assume the captcha puzzle isn’t the actual check, just a distraction while they fingerprint your browser and behaviour to try to identify if you are more likely a human or not. Just my thoughts, I have absolutely no proof that’s the case, but I don’t believe labeling traffic light is still valuable, we are way, way past that
As far as I understand it, it's fingerprinting + IP reputation + cross-site IP rate limiting + raising the cost of a request by an order of magnitude because of the LLM call.
The last ingredient is what we forget about. $0.001 or whatever might not seem like much, but there's a difference between "a million requests a day costs you $5 in AWS bandwidth" and "a million requests a day costs you $1000 in VLLMs, $500 in premium bandwidth from residential proxies, + constant toil to update your scraper to keep up with what Google is doing."
Correction: they only prove exposure to American media/culture... I could solve captcha and understand most of it from having seen a dozen or so American shows and movies over my teenage years... Even before I ever travelled to America.
It proves that you are familiar enough with American culture, which could be a problem for some, theoretically, I guess. I don't get upset about that just like I don't get upset about the fact that we all have to know English.
But that's not the real issue with CAPTCHAs or with a lot of other checks that companies do.
E.g., Apple does ID checks when you create a developer account. I would love to see the statistics, but anecdotally the overwhelming share of failed checks followed by "piss off we're not talking to you any longer" occurs with non-US IDs or types of IDs that are less common in the US.
Access to global infrastructures is very biased, I believe, and getting more biased. It's not always the US's fault though. The world is fracturing.
The concept that you can distinguish one kind of entity (a human) from another kind of entity of similar intelligence, if they can both send and receive the same data, was always a myth.
Captchas worked well enough for a while, if you weren't visually impaired (or worse, deafblind), spoke English, could read (Latin) characters, and so on and so on, but they were always a hack. The hack is now failing.
The only sure-fire way to check for humanity is to ask somebody who tested it in-person, likely an ID-issuing government.
Major Internet companies are still American-centrist, after all, many of them are American platforms and concerns (if not only concerns) American interests.
Google for example, they provide CAPTCHA to train their own AIs. Since Google mainly operate in the US, it make sense for them to optimize for Americans.
Another example is Cloudflare's CAPTCHA page, which is created based on measurements of American/first-world networks. But if your connection is "sub-optimal" (a.k.a, not first-world enough), it is possible that you don't even get the chance to load the verification scripts before the server cuts the connection and force a page reload, forming an infinite dead loop.
I feel the Internet is no longer international anymore, especially after all the AI scrapers. Now days are the days of contraction and everyone is guarding their own boring little caves against what they've defined as "thievery/stealing", while putting very little effort into actual useful thing such as gaining market and user (a.k.a expansion). The CAPTCHA implements maybe a sickness of it.
They seem to test you're American. But really all they do is test whether Google or Cloudflare likes you. Until we have fully open CAPTCHAS (which we may never be able to have, it seems), or a genuinely diverse selection of them (which seems at least theoretically possible), we're just hitching our wagons to these companies' stars.
Some AI researcher blurted out in an interview that it's great that LLMs mostly speak US English, because the British one gonna die out soon thanks to that....
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 16.0 ms ] threadState taxes… I can't say I know even a single thing about how it works when you leave the USA. I hear news, but I don't live in the US, nor do I want to.
As an Australian, I'd never call them that, but I know what the American word means.
In fact, the average Australian has a pretty good understanding of Americanisms, even if they've never been to the US, due to lifelong consumption of US TV shows, films, and other cultural exports.
But the underlying point of the article stands. This is similar to the mythical statement that some park ranger once stated "it's very hard to design a trash can that no bears can use, but that every human can."
reCAPTCHA, like CloudFlare, benefits the wider population of the internet to the extent that everybody can use them, but there are edge cases where some outlier users get locked out of necessary internet infrastructure because they can't grok the ask, can't correctly identify the options, or because their computer / IP is being abused by bots so they are in the splash damage range of the bot checkers.
[1] https://github.com/google/recaptcha/issues/68
The internet by default assumes you are a US citizen..
> forcing US culture on everyone in the world
I think captchas are on very near to the bottom on the list of things that tries (knowingly or unknowingly) does this...
>The ones with liveries on the side that are all the same color.
Which is also not true for some countries...
When you say "stoplights", is that just the lights themselves, or also the poles that support them? Is a tile that contains 1/3 of a bike wheel "bicycle" or "not bicycle"? Is a coach also considered a bus?
They certainly could've been more clear about what they want.
As far as I understand it, it's fingerprinting + IP reputation + cross-site IP rate limiting + raising the cost of a request by an order of magnitude because of the LLM call.
The last ingredient is what we forget about. $0.001 or whatever might not seem like much, but there's a difference between "a million requests a day costs you $5 in AWS bandwidth" and "a million requests a day costs you $1000 in VLLMs, $500 in premium bandwidth from residential proxies, + constant toil to update your scraper to keep up with what Google is doing."
(Figures illustrative).
Taiwan, Colombia, Ecuador, Australia, and many European countries all have (not exclusively, but they do have) yellow taxis.
Maybe "Prove you're not English" is really their intention.
But that's not the real issue with CAPTCHAs or with a lot of other checks that companies do.
E.g., Apple does ID checks when you create a developer account. I would love to see the statistics, but anecdotally the overwhelming share of failed checks followed by "piss off we're not talking to you any longer" occurs with non-US IDs or types of IDs that are less common in the US.
Access to global infrastructures is very biased, I believe, and getting more biased. It's not always the US's fault though. The world is fracturing.
I'm fairly certain you'll be asked to throw one in instead of getting any change.
Captchas worked well enough for a while, if you weren't visually impaired (or worse, deafblind), spoke English, could read (Latin) characters, and so on and so on, but they were always a hack. The hack is now failing.
The only sure-fire way to check for humanity is to ask somebody who tested it in-person, likely an ID-issuing government.
Google for example, they provide CAPTCHA to train their own AIs. Since Google mainly operate in the US, it make sense for them to optimize for Americans.
Another example is Cloudflare's CAPTCHA page, which is created based on measurements of American/first-world networks. But if your connection is "sub-optimal" (a.k.a, not first-world enough), it is possible that you don't even get the chance to load the verification scripts before the server cuts the connection and force a page reload, forming an infinite dead loop.
I feel the Internet is no longer international anymore, especially after all the AI scrapers. Now days are the days of contraction and everyone is guarding their own boring little caves against what they've defined as "thievery/stealing", while putting very little effort into actual useful thing such as gaining market and user (a.k.a expansion). The CAPTCHA implements maybe a sickness of it.
"2 + 2 = ?"
Any IA will fail the first try. Most human will fail too, but some will pass and they're the only ones I care about.
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15785878
2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226805
CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35788139 - May 2023 (2 comments)
CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226805 - Nov 2020 (679 comments)
CAPTCHAs don’t prove you’re human – they prove you’re American - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15785878 - Nov 2017 (20 comments)