The problem isn’t that it didn’t. The problem is that anyone thought that it should have.

The important part is not building it, but convincing the world, alas.

Speaking as someone who suffers from both conditions, captchas are not a significantly worse problem for depressed people than for others—they’re impersonal, and while irritating, they set a fairly low bar for effort. Dealing with machines being machines is comparatively easy if you’re able to make the effort to fill out the join-up form at all.

Asking someone for something, on the other hand, is high-effort for many depressed people for a couple of reasons:

1. It requires you to feel worthy of help, because if you’re certain you’re going to be refused, why bother trying? Depression and low self-worth tend to go hand in hand.

2. It requires you to risk refusal. Even if the other person’s reason for refusing is neutral (“I no longer do that for anyone,” for example), it can feed back into the depression and make it worse. Since this can hurt one hell of a lot, you learn not to ask.

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It’s true that some people won’t be able to scrape together enough interest or effort to pass even the captcha, but this alternative is much worse.

The issue with the group network version is that a few large corporations would end up taking it over. Again.

Yeah, but you have to ask someone to do you a favour. That can be a major psychological barrier, especially for people with social phobia or depression (no joke).

On this planet, it seems that there is nothing so stupid that you won’t find someone doing it, alas.

If we’re really lucky, those replacements might even become competition for the original products outside the EU, and drive the data vultures out of business.

(Something has to go right in this timeline eventually, right?)

Many countries don’t use a lot of electricity, especially those where the grids are spotty or in poor repair, or the overall population is small. Even without the AI garbage, I’d expect large tech-sector companies to use more energy than many countries.

(In other words, the headline for this was really poorly chosen. “Microsoft and Google pour more electricity into AI than 100+ countries use” might have gotten a bit closer to the actuall point, if it’s actually true.)

. . . instead of just doing it by scraping Wikipedia articles. Examples of that have been showing up on Amazon for years.

Cookies have non-infringing uses, like identifying you to Lemmy’s Web interface so that you can post from your account with the settings you’ve chosen for it. Problem is, even sites where they have a proper purpose don’t set them at the appropriate time (as part of the login process, or when you first add something to your shopping cart for ecommerce sites).

Ad tracking has absolutely no uses that benefit the user, unless they’re the type of weirdo who actually clicks on ads voluntarily, which I’d guess is less than 1% of the population. Those people can use the opt-in toggle if they want.

The zero-effort method of pointing a camera and mic at the screen as it’s being played back should be sufficient if they can’t do it another way. Given the tape’s age, the resolution is unlikely to be high enough to lose significant details that way.

One key term to search for is “digital signage”. Since they’re built to stay on 24/7 for years, you’ll probably need to buy another one, which offsets the higher price to an extent. If you can make do with a smaller panel, a large monitor with HDMI input is another option.

You can also sometimes find a shop that’s selling off someone’s warehouse remainder of older dumb panel consumer TVs, although that’s getting much rarer as the number of new-in-box units decreases.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Provided it’s an analog clock.

If you’re going to do that, at least ask for something useful. Y’know, like “Destroy all advertising firms.”

bash: sudo: command not found

After all, we don’t know that he has it installed, especially if he’s running a really old distro.

Reviewing it (I haven’t needed to touch the setup in a good year or more), it’s basically a replacement to make other code think the browser acceptability check returned true, since feeding in a fake User-Agent stopped being sufficient to pass the check a couple of years ago. One-liner, and not written by me, but I seriously hate the fact that it pushes browser monopoly.

I usually don’t even turn on the TV until the teeny display on the player is showing “MENU”. Achieves the same thing without requiring me to get up.

I would be more impressed if Discourse worked in my browser without using an extension to inject code changes. It also tries to forbid browsers it doesn’t recognize, regardless of their ability to run its code. Plus it doesn’t downgrade gracefully—you should be able to view public information in full without Javascript (I don’t expect any ability to log in or manipulate content, but reading things should work, and Discourse seems to break scrolling somehow). Not impressed. Granted, I’m not sure what I would choose if I were setting up a Web forum today, since mobile is now such a Big Thing and I don’t use it, but Discourse fails at things I consider basic.

This is likely to be C&D’d as well if it ever reaches the point where it does anything useful (remember, reddit doesn’t need grounds that would hold up in court to send a C&D).

The sun will freeze over before Google would give them an API.

“There’s one born every minute.”