I refuse to mark scooters as motorcycles.
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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I roll my eyes every time somebody brags about sticking it to big Corp by messing up captchas.
Your data is discarded if its below an expected level. You're causing exactly 0 inconvenience and wasting your own time unfortunately. There are much better ways to hurt google
I think you overestimate their competence my friend
That kind of data sanitization is just standard practice. You need some level of confidence on your data’s accuracy, and for anything normally distributed, throwing out obvious outliers is a safe assumption.
If you cut the outliers out of a dataset of whom 30% are bullshitters who are skilled and motivated to bullshit, that doesn't magically make the system more accurate it only makes it more precise since bullshitters have been training their whole lives to bullshit in a convincing way (some went to school for it starting at a very young age) and can often present much more authentic than non-bullshitters and honestly it makes me happy that I know big tech thinks the same way you do on this. It is glorious how poorly positioned it makes these much more dangerous bullshitters to respond or anticipate how these systems will naturally decay.
At a certain point, and it doesn't surprise me in the least that people who think rigidly along the lines of statistics and automation don't get this at all, when misinformation is rampant in a system it is often the outliers that are the critical voices of truth.
If you discard outliers because they are outliers and keep doing it you will get a more refined system precisely because it has gotten better at bullshitting and now everybody always jumps on the bandwagon and meaning collapses into byzantine conformism.
I take my schadenfreude where I can get it : )
We do get what you mean (extremely condescending and reductive take, if you ask me). I was thinking rigidly along the lines of data engineering, as this is, well, a data engineering problem… There just isn’t 30% of people doing this on Google captchas, and this isn’t a “take”, just a reality of the scale and amount of people interacting with Google products. Have fun all you want, you do this, your data most likely gets thrown out, that’s all.
We’re still talking about image recognition, aren’t we? This feels like a general commentary on how Big Tech sees their customer base, which I don’t disagree with, but in my mind was just another discussion entirely…
condescending and reductive
I consider big tech's relationship and valuing of human beings condescending and reductive, so shrugs don't come at me I am the powerless one.
I didn't light trust and decency on fire, excuse me if sometimes I don't extend the grace they refuse to extend to all of us.
There just isn’t 30% of people doing this on Google captchas
Damn, find me something else people are forced to do for no gain to themselves that isn't 30% full of bullshitters, what makes people so honest and hardworking when it comes to captchas?
I would love my data to be discarded. Freeloaders!
I once heard (likely last month on lemmy) that the tests involve the timing of clicks and a certain amount of wrongness. Too fast and perfect means machine.
So go wild.
I can't solve Cloudflare captcha most of the time, so I renewed my accessibility cookie at least once every 3–4 weeks, but they started to last a shorter amount of time. So now I just close the tab and move on.
Did you know the name Cloudflare comes from the ancient french word Cloufleir which was slang for a fart? (a cloud caught fire must be a cloud of methane being the joke).
All that to say that sucks, but honestly you aren't really missing out...
Are you the reason why I cannot complete a captcha sometimes?
No, that would be the barons of late stage capitalism that are responsible for that :)
hCAPTCHA is the worst
I can't get though them most of the time. I try to find a YouTube guide but everything I can find is out of date.
Such pranks might sound like 'fun', but also put people's lives at risk, when modern 'smart' vehicles can't properly identify stop signs, school buses, motorcycles, bicycles, pedestrians...
I don't like this modern AI era much, but I think it's really shitty to deliberately give AI misinformation.
Wow that's a horribly shitty argument.
Do you really trust 'smart' vehicles that get confused when they see emergency vehicles, or just flashing lights in general?
Remember, they're using us as AI training mules, and every time someone gives it false information, it confuses the AI, which just makes modern vehicles more unpredictable.
How about you remember we all pretty much know that?
This is just the same old strategy of continously refocusing a conversation about the huge amounts of waste the modern global economy creates on a moral failure of individuals to recycle.
Like waves arms at the unfurling chaos dragon in the sky what does that matter at this late stage of entanglement with weaponized and proud ignorance? Go give someone you love a genuine compliment, that is actually resisting in the way you think you are describing but you are not.
The only thing going to waste is, well, everything, plus people's brains. There's children starting school that don't know how to climb stairs now. I'm sure they know how to stare at an iPad though.
As far as the 'smart' vehicles, even if you don't drive one yourself, the moron on autopilot next to you is sleeping, fucking, or on their phone, trusting a chunk of silicon that they don't even understand to keep them, and you, safe..
Don't know how to climb stairs? What the hell are you talking about?
I think you might not understand the purpose of accessibility ramps.
if you haven't noticed yet, we want these "smart" vehicles to be abolished, along with their non-stop automatic surveillance and data mining they do
Um, you're preaching to the choir here.
As much as I loathe the AI and surveillance and shit, I get downvoted any time I express my opinions.
Maybe I should be more clear...
FUCK AI!!!
it did not seem so. we will never do away with AI by being friendly to the tech and even helping it grow
My point is, it exists now, whether we like it or not. I for one do not like it, I prefer Actual Intelligence, like the stuff that comes from the brain noodle.
But if AI is gonna be the thing, which obviously it is, people shouldn't deliberately give it bad training data.
Yes they should, it is an act of disobedience against the rich, which is honestly one of the few things worth putting effort into in 2025.
It's like saying that if employees are paid and treated like shit, they should still work hard because the opposite would be immoral.
That's bullshit, if AIs are crap because they train on unwilling people, it's the company's fault, not the people who are coerced into working for free.
I never said any such thing. Matter of fact, I quit fixing phones and tablets back in 2017, partly because the employer had me installing used batteries, while he lied to his customers, telling them they were new batteries.
I have better ethics than that. I'd rather be homeless than mislead people, especially for a lousy $10 an hour.
So yeah, you're right, it's the company's fault. Question is, are there any honest companies anymore?
Question is, are there any honest companies anymore?
Wrong question.
The right question is if there are there any industries in countries like the US that are effectively regulated enough after the long acidic erosion of state functions by decades of neoliberalism and deregulation (especially financial deregulation) to threaten unscrupulous companies enough into behaving as if they were honest companies when they would really rather just save a buck and kill and maim a handful of innocent people?
Example A: large corporations were bullied into pretending they were pro-trans and pro-gender fluidity right up until the precise moment after they stopped being bullied into pretending they were.
My line of reasoning is the only way you are going to understand why planes are all of the sudden accidentally crashing into helicopters in ways in a decade or two ago most engineers and pilots involved in the industry would have never let happen even if it took screaming down the CEO who was casually telling them to cut a corner they knew would lead to innocent children and people dying....
That sense of trust people had about pilots and aerospace industry engineers and regulators was why we were raised to feel a sense of indirect pride in pilots because they remind us when they walk by in a neat and professional uniform that we exist in a society that has magic adults who whisk people into the sky and back so they can see loved ones and somehow do it with incredible safety, kindness and consistency as if it was just a simple matter of filing routine paperwork (no shade at secretaries, that shit ain't easy either).
A proper question has a question mark.
You know, one of these things ❓
nah bro lol, have you never played a video game (this is a question sorry if this is unclear). Those mean that you have a quest to turn in or you have to talk to that person in order to continue on in the story campaign.
I write and mod video games. Life isn't a video game.
I can't believe I thought I was playing a video game again! I keep getting confused...
I didn't ask to solve captchas, if someone wants to have accurate data, they better hire someone to train AI.
If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. If you’re training your AI with free labor, expect to get trolls.
Also expect your AI to be engaged in some heady and deep forms of self hatred that is going to take decades to unravel.
Sad angry people in, sad angry robots out.
If you use internet discussions as training data, you can expect to find all sorts of crazy biases. Completely unfiltered data should produce a chatbot that exaggerates many human traits which completely burying others.
For example, on Reddit and Lemmy, you’ll find lots of clever puns. On Mastodon, you’ll find all sorts of LGBT advocates or otherwise queer people. On Xitter, you’ll find all the racists and white supremacists. There are also old school forums that amplify things even further.
I didn't agree to train their AI though you know. If the data is unreliable, then get your own data. Why would I tell it to recognize a stop sign.
If they open source the model and the weights and allow me turn on my seat warmers on my own car without a subscription, then maybe... Just maybe some day I would help them. Till then, gtfo.
I genuinely think that's a noble sentiment and I share that concern. However, this would entail making a deal with the Devil at this point, and pretty much literally.
Most if not all relevant models nowadays are owned by outwardly unscrupulous people, which means any correct interaction we have with their models only serves to build up the Devil's throne.
It is a downright tragedy that people will suffer as a result of said models, but that fault is not on us. Besides the fact that they're essentially stealing labour and data in order to train their models, they're also using them to dish out propaganda, to replace workers and throwing them in a ditch, to cause yet another financial bubble which'll flush the toilet when it inevitably pops - again.
We need to let them fail, otherwise we are just encouraging others to use us in the same exact ways.
My success rate of those went up after realising I can deliberately make a mistake but unselect a square afterwards.