I hardly have a doctor (Who can afford that?) but I use the insurance website to search for nearby providers because coverage is most important to me. Then, I look at reviews of their offices on Google Maps before calling to see if they’re taking new patience for final selection.

It is effective at discouraging bots when looking at real world services today, but indeed you have found the primary downside. It does impose costs on users even if the costs are disproportionately placed on bots.

It saves no energy. In fact, it costs more energy at first, but the hope is that bots will turn their attention to something that isn’t so expensive as hitting your servers. The main goal is to get your service online so that you’re not burning all your own resources on fake users.

Your understanding is consistent with mine. It spends a small amount of effort (per user) that makes scaling too expensive (per bot-farm-entity). It also uses an adjustable difficulty that can vary depending on how sus a request appears to be.

It’s not a perfect solution by any means. It doesn’t protect user data. It doesn’t do anything to help with the energy problem. It merely makes it possible for someone to run their server without getting taken offline by automated systems.

It works by asking your system for a small computation before handling the request. It’s not too intrusive for normal users, but it drives up the costs for bot farms.

It might be a bubble, but bubbles can last a long time. Here are some famous quotes to illustrate the problem:

“Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent." – A. Gary Shilling, twice named Wall Street’s top economist.

“Far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections, or trying to anticipate corrections, than has been lost in corrections themselves.” – Peter Lynch, American investor, mutual fund manager, author and philanthropist.

We know evaluations are high. We know that AI has not delivered on its promises at least not yet. Investor confidence remains high, but for how long? Nobody knows.

Personally, I think any correction will swiftly bounce because the government will print money to make sure there’s a speedy recovery. We have seen a push to boosting the economy through intensive money printing instead of allowing valuations to crash properly. The Fed loves to kick the can down the road more than anything.

I don’t think it would be a good conversion. There would have to be some compromises. For example, does Dolby even have a concept of audio below the listener? That’s not truly 3-D like the new standard aims to be. I think some variants might have something like that.

I imagine that you’ll be able to convert to some extent, but of course capabilities for which there’s no direct mapping won’t translate perfectly. If there’s demand for that and the standard actually catches on, I’m sure there could be some sort of conversion.

Mine used to be: Tenant Cam 2

TIL GNU Affero General Public License is a flavor that closes loopholes that were used to extend open software without actually open sourcing your contributions.

In some countries, corporations and government are basically the same entity. Free countries distinguish between them in a meaningful sense.

This sounds to me more like they had a gripe with a WordPress plug-in and that was about the extent of the issue.

I think it has its place as a spam reduction measure as long as it’s used judiciously. The problem is that Reddit never properly handled the problem and didn’t have much incentive to implement a good solution.

I would really like to learn more about this reputation concept. This is the first I’ve heard of it here.

I’m not sure about dedicated communities but you can find me posting almost everywhere. Idiot comes to you.

I think the concern is overblown. The time it would take to try possible combinations would look very suspicious, at least at the ATMs which are embedded into actual banks in my area.

With that said, I pretend to press a few random keys whenever I use my debit card pin.

Definitely.

This sounds like so much fun! I don’t know of any such plugin existing, but I wish it would.

In what sense? It’s certainly a gathering place.

The equivalent of a pop-up asking you if you’re 18 or older.

Back in the day, I was 18 for like five years.