Post Your Best Stickman

[jandrew]

 

When people mention eyedropper pens ...

 

(and before you ask "Where's the stickman?" ... who do you think took the picture?)

[alexwi]

On 7/24/2021 at 4:18 PM, jandrew said:

who do you think took the picture?

You ought to change your user name to "stickman."

 

Beautiful image, btw.

 

Alex

 

[alexwi]

Darn recaptchas are getting harder and harder!

 

[Frank C]

1 hour ago, alexwi said:

Darn recaptchas are getting harder and harder!

 

So true!

[A Smug Dill]

1 hour ago, alexwi said:

Darn recaptchas are getting harder and harder!

 

Bwahahaha! Excellent!

[jandrew]

For the thread entitled: "Sniping at other pen people who don't share your taste in pens (or nibs or inks or paper or ... )"

 

[A Smug Dill]

9 minutes ago, jandrew said:

For the thread entitled: "Sniping at other pen people

 

👍 Hehe, it crossed my mind to draw that topic in a similar vein, but it didn't end up between the crosshairs.

[inkstainedruth]

3 hours ago, alexwi said:

Darn recaptchas are getting harder and harder!

 

One of the "recaptchas" I've routinely had to deal with (on one of the sites where you post reports about spam phone calls) in which it ROUTINELY wants me to click on the photos of what are clearly NOT parking meters as BEING parking meters....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[A Smug Dill]

Notebook strategy

[mhguda]

7 hours ago, inkstainedruth said:

One of the "recaptchas" I've routinely had to deal with (on one of the sites where you post reports about spam phone calls) in which it ROUTINELY wants me to click on the photos of what are clearly NOT parking meters as BEING parking meters....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

How does being able to recognize a parking meter you human?

[txomsy]

Specially if the decision of what is a parking meter is initially made by a machine and you are expected to match its diagnosis.

 

Oh well...

 

[Detman101]

14 hours ago, alexwi said:

Darn recaptchas are getting harder and harder!

 

Ahahahahhhaaa
LOVE IT!!!
🤣

[inkstainedruth]

@mhgudaand @txomsyJust proof that the robots aren't going to take over the world anytime soon, I guess.... 

But given the lousy IT on most company websites -- and even more so on their chat window bots -- it's going to take even longer for that to happen (there was one last week who thought my name was "Get me a person"....   Of course on the website I was on earlier today, I wasn't sure that the live person was that much better than the bot had been.... 

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[alexwi]

On 7/26/2021 at 11:49 PM, inkstainedruth said:

One of the "recaptchas" I've routinely had to deal with (on one of the sites where you post reports about spam phone calls) in which it ROUTINELY wants me to click on the photos of what are clearly NOT parking meters as BEING parking meters....

Those seemingly random images we get to see when ordering stuff or logging into some web sites are anything but random. Well, the images are random but their genre is anything but.

 

Google used them to train their maps' functionality to locate house numbers (most of my recaptchas about 3 years ago were about house numbers). And before that, they offered a "free" service called goog-411 - which was extremely useful - to train their voice recognition algorithms to transcribe voicemails and scrape valuable (and profitable) information from conversations people have while using google voice for their calls. They're masters at exploiting the crowd for their own, somewhat downright sinister, benefit (I got a book recommendation from some website only a day after that book, which I had never heard of, was mentioned in a google voice call I was a party of).

 

Lately, all the recaptchas I've been seeing have to do with street features (traffic lights, buses, bicycles, trains), so my very educated guess is that they're using it for self-driving cars. I haven't seen parking meters yet, but they're obviously related to driving as well.

 

Read more at https://www.techradar.com/news/captcha-if-you-can-how-youve-been-training-ai-for-years-without-realising-it

 

Alex

[LizEF]

8 hours ago, alexwi said:

Those seemingly random images...

Thank you for that very interesting and informative (though not at all surprising) bit of information!

[Detman101]

8 hours ago, alexwi said:

Those seemingly random images we get to see when ordering stuff or logging into some web sites are anything but random. Well, the images are random but their genre is anything but.

 

Google used them to train their maps' functionality to locate house numbers (most of my recaptchas about 3 years ago were about house numbers). And before that, they offered a "free" service called goog-411 - which was extremely useful - to train their voice recognition algorithms to transcribe voicemails and scrape valuable (and profitable) information from conversations people have while using google voice for their calls. They're masters at exploiting the crowd for their own, somewhat downright sinister, benefit (I got a book recommendation from some website only a day after that book, which I had never heard of, was mentioned in a google voice call I was a party of).

 

Lately, all the recaptchas I've been seeing have to do with street features (traffic lights, buses, bicycles, trains), so my very educated guess is that they're using it for self-driving cars. I haven't seen parking meters yet, but they're obviously related to driving as well.

 

Read more at https://www.techradar.com/news/captcha-if-you-can-how-youve-been-training-ai-for-years-without-realising-it

 

Alex

Yes indeed...glad to see someone else knew about their sinister veiled workings.

[A Smug Dill]

11 hours ago, alexwi said:

They're masters at exploiting the crowd for their own, somewhat downright sinister, benefit (I got a book recommendation from some website only a day after that book, which I had never heard of, was mentioned in a google voice call I was a party of).

2 hours ago, Detman101 said:

Yes indeed...glad to see someone else knew about their sinister veiled workings.

 

Sigh. What's sinister about it? Clandestine and underhanded, perhaps; but I don't think what Google is doing with the reCaptcha thing directly undermines your wellbeing or best interests.

 

Someone should be harnessing the brainpower of the collective that is so often ‘wasted’ in mundane or petty efforts that are diffuse or lacking in direction to achieve something; and since the individuals cannot organise themselves for some sort of consolidation, they are in no position to negotiate or bargain for something in return from whoever is successfully harnessing that energy. For what it's worth, reCaptcha as an IT service is actually delivering some value to the non-Google entities that elect to use it as part of their defensive IT security, and in that way supporting the services (in return for some sort of fee or consideration) that those entities provide to their online user bases at large, so one can't really argue that Google is giving absolutely nothing in return.

 

Lack of transparency, coupled with the end-user's lack of meaningful choice (i.e. pass the reCaptcha challenge, or be denied service, which to be fair is often not to what the end-user has any inherent entitlement, other than by the ‘goodwill’ of the ‘free’ service provider which has its own agenda), lack of direct control over developments, and lack of bargaining power… do not altogether automatically make the intentions of the party that holds all the cards sinister.

[inkstainedruth]

21 hours ago, alexwi said:

They're masters at exploiting the crowd for their own, somewhat downright sinister, benefit (I got a book recommendation from some website only a day after that book, which I had never heard of, was mentioned in a google voice call I was a party of).

A friend of mine was complaining several years ago that after booking a hotel room in some resort area, her FB feed was FLOODED with hotel ads for the same area.  And she said "I can't sleep in more than one hotel room at a time!" And when my husband was doing research online for a previous job (at the Naval Nuclear Labs) suddenly he was inundated with ads in his FB feed for, well, women's swimwear....  

The flip side of course is the school library somewhere a few years ago where their software preventing the kids from inadvertently find porn sites was ALSO blocking research int breast cancer treatments....

AI isn't going to take over the world anytime soon.  Last night I was trying to get a live person on a communications company's badly coded chat window and their bot thought my name was "NEITHER".  Of course, when I DID get a live person he was so useless he could just as *easily* have actually been another bot.... 

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[alexwi]

2 minutes ago, inkstainedruth said:

A friend of mine was complaining several years ago that after booking a hotel room in some resort area, her FB feed was FLOODED with hotel ads for the same area.  And she said "I can't sleep in more than one hotel room at a time!" And when my husband was doing research online for a previous job (at the Naval Nuclear Labs) suddenly he was inundated with ads in his FB feed for, well, women's swimwear....

My best story about FB adds (my wife's, really), happened years ago, when I got intrigued about what the feed of a twenty-something years old woman would look like in terms of ads. I also did this because I was annoyed at FB telling all my friends about my birthday and having to thank people for a ton of utterly meaningless and empty "happy birthday" notes.

 

So I went ahead and changed my gender and age (it was still possible to do it back then).

 

My feed didn't change radically.

 

Then, one day my wife and I were chatting about online privacy and I told her what I had done and she almost screamed that no wonder she was being BOMBARDED with ads for gay cruises, magazines, and what-not. She couldn't understand what the *$#($@#&* was wrong with Facebook!

 

Alex

[inkstainedruth]

Yeah, that's a hilarious story.  Although I'm sure at the time that your wife didn't think so....

My husband was telling the notary in the local AAA office that I really really REALLY hate marketing.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth