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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

I’d love for this to be a browser plugin. I don’t stay logged into google or let them set cookies, and some days I think that instead of doing machine learning in house, they just farm it out to people like me by holdings random sites hostage.

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Actually you're helping to classify their datasets for ML purposes, so in a sense you're tilling their farm for them (while also helping ensure the site you're on has less spam than it would otherwise).

Then this sort of software makes it recursive.. it's teaching itself...

I usually make small mistakes identifying things, intentionally.

What's the point? If it's to "stick it to the man!", it won't have any effect because they are probably using multiple ratings from different users to classify things (in average people will be right).

And it will now be, on average, a hair less right, or less confident, or maybe just less confident in sildur’s classifications.

Either way I think being a bit adversarial towards this kind of stuff is a healthy, albeit small, protest.

reCAPTCHA was literally a system to have humans digitize books. Once that was finished, yes it helped with Google Maps machine learning.

Just last week I basically ranted about how likely I was to just stop using sites now with reCAPTCHAs, after spending like four different attempts at identifying cars in pictures. Would love this browser plugin.

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