There are other captcha alternatives like Turnstile, for example Private Captcha, Altcha etc. - they are owned by mostly “small” independent companies, they are not visual captchas (proof-of-work based) and very accesssible.
I remembered $30 from some comment I read, but didn't look for it later. If it was yours, thank you! (def. thank you for the Wallmart link! - would you like a credit in the blogpost like a quote?
>Excuse me, what do you mean there? The author happens to read HN too.
Read the rest of the comment. It's not suspect because it's referencing HN, it's suspect because of the way it's referencing HN. Specifically, its use of the phrase "the HN thread", even though it wasn't mentioned before. Maybe it's a editing gaff, but it's also consistent with how an LLM would write if presented with a list of sources.
Yep, this feels like a smoking gun. The others are circumstantial, maybe indicative, maybe not. While there’s a chance this is an editing gaff, its overwhelmingly likely to be LLM, ahem, “cruft”.
Have you seen Private Captcha? It's main point is privacy and GDPR compliance (while being self-hosted). It's a more modern PoW captcha without the limits of Altcha (mCaptcha is mostly out of equation at this point).
1. At it's core, it's a Proof-of-Work captcha, so compute load depends on the usage pattern. AI (LLMs) does get better at image/audio recognition, but compute task is the same anywhere, does not matter who "clicks" the checkbox.
2. Bots usually have such access patterns that cause compute task difficulty to become prohibitively high, requiring exponentially more CPU resources. This renders bots economically nonviable for submitting forms or scraping website.
