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“I want to do unpaid image classification”
- montroser 8y agoI always like to mix in some false positives when completing Google's captchas. I identify yellow cars as school buses, occluded street signs as storefronts, valleys as rivers... They still let you in, up to a point. It probably just makes their algorithms stronger in the end, like how when you randomly kick over Boston Dynamics' robot dogs, they eventually get better at balancing than if you had just let them be. But I like to think I'm sticking it to them.
- mmcwilliams 8y agoI would absolutely use an alternative to reCaptcha that requires users perform small tagging and classification problems for open datasets. A “freeCaptcha”, if you will.
- sirn 8y agoIn that case, can’t a bot use the freeCaptcha dataset to train their Captcha solver?
- everdrive 8y agoA lot of these disagree with my assessment, and it's not clear why. Should I click every square which has some pixels of the object? Apparently not? Apparently I'm supposed to click the squares which contain only the bulk of the object. Sometime it seems if the object in question is also in the background, I'm not meant to click that one? And sometimes I am. I hate these these things.
- xsmasher 8y agoWhat constitutes a "road sign"? Do they mean traffic-related signs only, or also street markers, or billboards as well?
- interfixus 8y agoHN seems to be doing just fine without really being in that particular arms race. And out in the real world, captchas way too often - not always, but way too often - signal content not actually worth following.
- jfengel 8y ago"Why are we, the users, not allowed to have access to the fruits of the labor that we are forced to provide for free?" Well... you are being given access to a resource, aren't you? I mean, you're being shown the reCAPTCHA because you asked for something. You could have paid for it by letting them track you, but you decided it wasn't worth that. So the backup price is doing some work for them. But you're not doing it for free. You're doing it because you want whatever it is that's being guarded by the reCAPTCHA in the first place. Maybe that price is too high for you, but you were the one coming in with a request in the first place. You do the thing and you get "paid" immediately.
- simongr3dal 8y agoMost of the time there are no paid alternatives and sometimes there aren't even any other free alternatives. Many times a reCAPTCHA is required even for a paid service e.g. signing in to Humble Bundle or other digital stores.
- vokep 7y agoBut reCAPTCHA isn't some sort of microtransaction replacement for tracking, its just a thing to check if you're a person. I'm a person. Don't make me do work to prove it.
- OrgNet 7y agoEven Microsoft uses Google's captchas (at https://earth.minecraft.net/ https://earth.minecraft.net/)...