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Or require every fresh "unique" visitor to run some JS that takes X seconds to compute.

It's not nice for visitors using a very old smartphone, but it's arguably less-exclusionary than some of the tests and third-party gatekeepers that exist now.

In many cases we don't actually care about telling if someone is truly a human alone, as much as ensuring that they aren't a throwaway sockpuppet of a larger automated system that doesn't care about good behavior because a replacement is so easy to make.



that takes X seconds to compute.

Those who have the computing resources to do commercial scraping will easily get past that.

In contrast, there are still many questions which a human can easily answer, but even the best LLMs currently can't.


It doesn't have to be bulletproof, it just has to create a cost that doesn't scale economically for them.


Computing power is cheap, and getting cheaper for the big guys. Real humans are not.


>there are still many questions which a human can easily answer, but even the best LLMs currently can't.

I am genuinely curious: what is an example of such a question, if it's for a person you don't know (i.e. where you cannot rely on inside knowledge)?



I just tried these with ChatGPT (4o) and it got both of them right. That's not to say that you won't be able to find something that still works but I think that particular hole is closing fast.


Yeah, any text based question with a text based answer eventually ends up getting posted on a forum for an AI model to scrape.


IIRC that's basically already part of what Cloudflare Turnstile does




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