substation13 on Hacker News

Ask HN: Are the days of CAPTCHAs coming to an end?

With various new models hitting human-level performance on certain tasks, are the days of protecting a website with CAPTCHAs numbered?

What will this new world look like?

When storing and sharing structured data, engineers typically encode it in an intermediate structure like JSON, YAML, XML, TOML, etc...

Often, these are often not a good fit for the problem at hand.

However, no one seems to be writing parsers for their own custom formats. If you did, it would certainly get a few strange looks in code review!

But why is this? Why is working with JSON etc. still so much easier than writing quick parsers?

Why haven't common parsing techniques been streamlined to the point where this is the easiest path?

With various new models hitting human-level performance on certain tasks, are the days of protecting a website with CAPTCHAs numbered?

What will this new world look like?

When storing and sharing structured data, engineers typically encode it in an intermediate structure like JSON, YAML, XML, TOML, etc...

Often, these are often not a good fit for the problem at hand.

However, no one seems to be writing parsers for their own custom formats. If you did, it would certainly get a few strange looks in code review!

But why is this? Why is working with JSON etc. still so much easier than writing quick parsers?

Why haven't common parsing techniques been streamlined to the point where this is the easiest path?