I imagine that AI used to generate text (e.g ChatGPT) might exacerbate this problem. As the article points out — Some researchers might care more about ‘remixing’ published papers in order to drown the competition, get jobs & other forms of leverage. Generative text makes it much easier
By introducing a CBDC, the Nigerian government hopes to attract revenues that come from remittances, which have mostly shifted to crypto channels because of poor international trade policies. Today, getting USD liquidity as an importer/exporter is challenging, as there are two market rates - one for banks & few institutions, the other for individuals & the vast majority of the economy. To find competitive rates, people resort to P2P markets. Furthermore, the Nigerian government banned licensed money operators from transacting with any crypto entity - essentially shutting down revenues from fiat deposits. Restrictions like withdrawal limits on USD accounts ($10k per month) makes it highly unfavorable for such high-volume merchants to transact in USD via the banking system. A CBDC is a way of the Nigerian government looking at all that activity with the hopes to attract the revenues that flow within crypto, but they miss the fundamental step of favorable trade & monetary policies that increase USD liquidity and opens up crypto officially to capture remittance revenues.
Not discounting the value of the other facts you shared, but how does digital currency change the status quo if the problem preventing remittances through official channels?
Isn’t it yet another official channel that lacks the same international trade connections just like regular bank accounts?
I am based in Nigeria, a ‘third-world country’, I work remotely for a company domiciled in the US and get paid in Stablecoins (USDC & USDT). Crypto has been a life saver for me. Before that, one alternative was to get a USD account in a local bank & get paid via Western Union. The challenges are numerous. To setup a USD account locally takes a long time & multiple requirements. Assuming that hurdle is crossed, the more challenging issue is how restrictive Central bank policies are. In an economy with high inflation & parallel market rates for USD, there’s an incentive for the government to retain as much USD in the economy due to poor trade policies preventing $ revenues from coming in. Withdrawal limits have been reduced over the last 2 years alone, & the flexibility to make $ payments is hindered by low transaction limits with a USD card ($15 per transaction). To navigate this, I tried creating a virtual USD bank account with a local Fintech, with which to receive salaries. However these virtual accounts can only receive payments from US accounts (via ACH transfers) so can be restrictive. The most seamless solution to my problem has been to setup a crypto wallet. In minutes I receive my salary and can spend any amount, whenever I like. Plus, it makes it easier to save in USD, avoiding the local currency devaluation (The Naira has fallen 52% in the last 7 years under the current regime). So speaking as a ‘third-country citizen’, crypto provide a far more effective banking system.
I'm not questioning your experience but this is very strange to me.
I've worked with contractors based in Brazil, Turkey, and other countries likely categorized as "developing" and the payment process doesn't look any different than when I work with international contractors in places like Germany.
Many of them use Wise (formerly TransferWise) and looking at the pricing for Nigeria it looks completely reasonable - sending money has a 0.41% fee and receiving it is free. This fee includes reasonable things like a website non-crypto enthusiasts can actually use, customer support, fraud protections, etc. For countries with unstable currencies, massive inflation, etc Wise allows you to hold it in over 50 fiat currencies (including USD).
Given that I've had an interest in crypto for many years at this point I've seen online descriptions like yours so I've asked the contractors I've worked with "Why not crypto?". They all tell the same story - that services like Wise are perfectly usable and with extremely reasonable pricing all things considered. Wise even provides the sending of invoices that I (as the client) receive via e-mail and can pay in a few clicks. The most important thing to people is actually getting paid and it's a well known fact that reducing friction around payments is the best thing you can do (I've been a contractor as well).
Note this is technical/development contract work. I can't imagine people in non-technical fields getting an invoice asking for payment in crypto stablecoin and them spending the time, energy, and resources to wander through that maze to pay a contractor, service, etc instead of running their business. Frankly I'd use a different contractor and I'm very crypto literate.
Wise used to be a great option to transact in, 2-3 years ago. The main challenge with Wise however was the exchange rate used to convert USD received to the local fiat currency. In Nigeria there are two exchange rates - the first at an official rate used by banks, & the second a parallel rate used by the black market (including Bureau de Change operators).
Today if you Google the ‘official’ exchange rate for the dollar to Naira, you’ll see a ~445 Naira to 1 USD. As an individual there isn’t anywhere I can buy dollar at this rate, because it is exclusive to banks, select licensed money operators & politically connected high-net worth individuals. However money services like Wise convert my dollar at this official rate. Considering that the parallel market rate today is 745 naira to 1USD, I will be losing a huge amount of money by receiving money with Wise. The only workaround will be to get a virtual account on Wise & send USD to a local money merchant, who then exchanged at this parallel rate. But such virtual accounts aren’t accessible to people in Nigeria, due to regulation. [1] For context, the Central bank of Nigeria released a circular a while back explicitly stating Wise as a non-licensed entity.
There are other options apart from Wise. But the trade off is loss of money, as compared to what’s available on the parallel/black market.
Thank you for the detailed education of the issues specific to Nigeria! But I'm still curious - can you explain how crypto transfers aren't subject to the same issues getting to Naira, the traditional banking system, etc? Getting solid data on the adoption of crypto for real day-to-day payments in Nigeria (or anywhere) is pretty difficult.
Crypto transfers aren't subject to these issues because they aren't regulated. For instance, cards (Visa, Mastercard & Verve) can't be used to deposit on these exchanges because they'll have to be processed by a fiat operator, which usually requires a license. Because the government has banned the use of crypto, any entity caught wanting will have their accounts frozen. This also makes it really hard to deposit money into these entities by anyone. They can easily be blacklisted because they have accounts in their names. I used to work for one of such entities. I've also had my bank account frozen by the Central Bank of Nigeria for withdrawing naira that was sent from said 'blacklisted' entities.
Because these crypto exchanges are P2P based (e.g. Binance P2P), I can exchange my USDC for Naira that's deposited directly to my account. Because these are individuals, it's hard for the government to isolate bank transfers that are made for the purpose of crypto. For caution, people making such transfers tell each other not to add a description with a crypto-related word to these transactions.
Adoption for real day-to-day payments in low-volumes (like paying for groceries at a shop) is quite low, but high among high-volume merchants who import/export goods and are in dire need of USD liquidity and ease of payment across countries. Tough Central Bank policies give them an incentive to find the best rates & transact with lesser barriers. There are no official figures/solid data, because all that activity happens in informal channels (like P2P).
I don't understand though how do you explain those transaction to your tax authorities and pay taxes. Surely it can only be so long that you can get massive (by local standards) and fairly constant salary month to month and not get them interested in the source of funds?
I have family in developing countries but not Nigeria. Usually there's massive tax fraud that happens all the time regardless. Prevailing tax rates are punitive enough that nobody follows them and they're rarely enforced so there's elaborate reporting schemes that large portions of the moneyed population follow and is essentially accepted practice.
Yes, this is the case for Nigeria. Taxes mostly come from working individuals, which are deducted by the company before the net salary payment is sent. They also come from transactions. Companies are accountable to the government, but rarely individuals. Foreign companies with remote workers in Nigeria have to either pay to a USD account or pay via crypto. Crypto is untaxed because it is banned. USD in a bank account is subject to withdrawal limits & must be exchanged at the bank’s rate, which often 40-50% less than the parallel/black market rate. Crypto (USDC/USDT) is the only way to get the true Naira equivalent of the dollar. But it’s the most convenient way to receive payments & individuals get no tax-related penalties for it today.
As someone in Argentina, let me explain my situation:
As you pointed out, not many employers are willing to pay directly in crypto, that's why a lot of contractors - myself included - are willing to use platforms like Payoneer, Wise, even Paypal if there is no other option.
The missing part of the story here is how contractors in a developing country with currency controls, high inflation, poor banking infrastructure get the money -out- of those platforms. Most of the time you just cannot do it legally, so you end up "selling" your Wise/Payoneer/Paypal balance for the equivalent in the local currency. This is usually against their ToS and which can result in your account getting banned, losing access to your money (that's why it's advised to -not- leave any significant amount of money on these kind of platforms).
With crypto I also need to deal with black markets (which are always growing down here) and some business are starting to accept crypto directly (mostly tech-related busines). But, unlike these platforms, I actually have control over my money (it cannot be "confiscated" by my wallet unlike my Wise balance), fees are usually lower (ex. Payoneer results in a ~3.5% fee, Paypal ~10%, Wise ~1%, while in crypto - lets say BUSD - fees are mostly flat at around 1/2 USD at most), and market liquidity is higher (it's -a lot- easier to sell USDT/USDC/BUSD/DAI than your Paypal balance).
1. Are you actually transacting with others directly in USDC/USDT? I.e. are there shops where you actually buy things through your crypto wallet, or are you converting to USD/Naira and using that?
2. Are you self-hosting that wallet, or is it actually an account on some exchange?
Either way, I doubt that working remotely as an employee of US companies is a very common way of life in your country, so I don't think this supports the GP's point as much as it appears.
> The Naira has fallen 52% in the last 7 years under the current regime
How much has crypto grown in Nigeria? Is it possible that the migration to crypto / loss of faith in the local currency in lieu of USD is what’s actually behind the collapse vs government policies themselves?
It's usually a combination of both. When the local currency is unreliable, as a result of bad government policies, the locals will try get hold of a stronger foreign currency. They will sell the local currency to buy the foreign currency, which will contribute to the depreciation of the local currency, which in turn will make it even less attractive, prompting more people to sell, and so on so forth.
The author of this paper has done something valuable, but the absolute rant in this twitter thread is frankly incredibly out there. They are dismissive of a purely chemical reason for depression. It quite simply must be due to a stressful event. Ok, so what? Does this mean it can be fixed without chemical intervention? Sometimes it cannot. How do they propose to fix it in those cases?
They are essentially advocating for a stance that the tools we have at our disposal today should not be as accepted, for the simple reason that they do not treat the exact correct thing. By this logic, we should not use chemo. It is short-sighted and really not of the level expected of someone doing any kind of research into psychiatric treatment.
I would disagree with the characterization of that Twitter thread as a rant. To me it seemed like a fairly reasonable and balanced distillation of conclusions that are suggested by the study. He didn't say that current antidepressants should never be used. He simply said we don't have evidence that a chemical approach to treating depression is the right approach.
Being an African born & bred in Nigeria, I particularly find this appalling. Captcha usually asks users to identify fire hydrants, crosswalks & other objects with design patterns that are not common here, in everyday living. There's a big question on whether these approaches work well for onboarding the next billion users to the internet, especially since the demographics are much different from existing internet users.
Fire hydrants are not at all common in European cityscape but you will learn about them from Hollywood movies or from music videos.
But in the part of Europe I am from, if I did not go to the daycare in a larger city, I would not have seen any crosswalks or traffic lights. I could have easily recognized a harvester or a railroad crossing though.
In the part of Europe I live in (London), if I did not go to any sites using reCaptcha, I would not know what a 'crosswalk' is.
Even the things I have seen (traffic lights, buses, 'fire hydrants') don't always ('fire hydrants' never) look the same as their American counterparts.
It's just a totally ill-conceived system for any global website.
London has plenty of pedestrian crossings, but they're unmarked, at least not in the same way - a stop line for cars before the lights, sure - except for 'zebra crossings', which look different, have different rules (no traffic lights and cars must give way to pedestrians) and would never be called a 'crosswalk'.
I suppose they just don't need to be, because not using one isn't 'jaywalking'. If there's too much traffic you identify a safe crossing by zebra stripes (or flashing beacon) or traffic lights or island.
When reCaptcha first asked me to identify the 'crosswalks', sure, I guessed it must be the road markings. But I just (still, to this day) select all the road markings that aren't obviously just centre direction seperating lines. I might get loads wrong, no idea.
Same here. They are usually marked with a yellow "H" sign about a foot tall, and the numbers on it tell the fire brigade where to find the hydrant if its not immediately below the sign.
>>There's a big question on whether these approaches work well for onboarding the next billion users to the internet
That isn't what captchas are used for. There are two side to every captcha, what the website is using them for and what the captcha creator or provider is using them for. In google's case, captchas are being used to hone AI. So it is no wonder that items like hydrants, store fronts, crosswalks and traffic lights dominate. Those are the objects that any AI-controlled vehicle will have to recognize. Given that the first market for AI-driven vehicles seems to be western nations, specifically the US, it is no surprise that google gears its captcha program to objects from that area.
If google were developing robots to pick fruit captchas would ask us to identify bananas and oranges. I worry about the day that captchas start asking me to differentiate people from other objects. I don't want to help train an AI to tell people from trees, soldiers from bushes.
> Given that the first market for AI-driven vehicles seems to be western nations, specifically the US, it is no surprise that google gears its captcha program to objects from that area.
This is a roundabout way of just saying the most obvious explanation (sites with US-centric captchas are presumably mostly interested in US users anyway) but wrapped up in an unnecessary conspiracy layer to add creepiness.
https://www.motorbiscuit.com/how-security-captchas-crowdsour...
(Not the best source perhaps, but I just picked one among dozens)
It's not a conspiracy theory, it's actually true that captchas are used as data for self-driving car algorithms, and that the data would be useless unless it was relevant to things those cars are likely to encounter. The reason they're so common is they are distributed for free, for the same reason: more data.
I often feel like I ought to get paid when presented with an annoyingly long queue of them.
Given Google tracks everything about me, there's no reason why they can't find-and-replace "crosswalk" with "zebra crossing" to match my locale. Its not a conspiracy, its just laziness on Google's part
That is one way of running an captcha: set a task that is not possible for a human. Anyone who answers correctly must be a bot.
"How many flowers in this field?" "Solve for X: 3567/134 = X" Anyone getting those correct in a reasonable time is probably not a human and so has failed the captcha.
That doesn't work, because either you need to randomize which way you ask (and then all a bot needs to do is try a couple of times to get the question where it needs to answer correctly), or you always need to ask one way or the other, which also doesn't work, because then the bot will answer incorrectly on purpose.
It would be different if the captcha would look at the incorrectness. I.e. the bot would now have to make the same mistakes that humans would make, which might be a workable path for captchas, however its unclear what benefit this would bring compared to answering correctly.
> So it is no wonder that items like hydrants, store fronts, crosswalks and traffic lights dominate. Those are the objects that any AI-controlled vehicle will have to recognize.
The point of the GP was, it's training these AIs on specifically _American_ hydrants, store fronts, crosswalks and traffic lights, which sucks not only for those of us unpaid mechanical Turks who aren't Yanks, but also makes you wonder if nobody cares that these coming AI-controlled vehicles won't be so great at discriminating NON-American hydrants, store fronts, crosswalks and traffic lights from _non-American pedestrians._
And no, America does not equal “the West”; most of your street furniture looks slightly“ off” compared to, say, that of most European countries. Anyway, the part of the “West” that will probably be at the forefront of this wave will probably, as usual, be the most hyper-advanced: Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan...
My prediction: This will lead to new users being turned away from established products from the anglosphere and develop their own alternatives.
Maybe after a while the big companies will notice and adapt, which might already be too late by then, or maybe they just buy the smaller ones directly, who knows.
I think this is already happening. Hopefully local entrepreneurs in their own countries can continue to build for their countrymen before people like Zuckerberg and Bezos get their hands in the metaphorical pot, and suck all the wealth right back to the US like economic hitmen of the last century.
Facebook is actually doing much better in this regard than Google/Amazon/etc..
For example, in certain developing countries "social media" is included for free with your phone plan, often there is no net neutrality and competition between carriers has forced all of them to offer this. As a result, local businesses are forced to have Facebook and Instagram pages, because their audience cannot visit a regular website on most days. Which ensures most people need the "real" internet less and less, and are less likely to pay for it, locking them into Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp for a lot of their communication.
The alternative is that these people won’t have Internet access. Poor people have difficulties procuring even food, not to mention internet. Of course, as the economical conditions improve, the tradeoffs change and net neutrality becomes worth it.
Hold up, what does this mean, even? I thought "net neutrality" meant classifying ISPs in such a way that they are regulated by the FCC instead of the FTC. Obviously this is an American framing. How does that map to other countries?
Also, I was assured by users on this website and many others that if the ISPs were moved to be regulated by the FTC by evil Ajit Pai the internet as we know it would end. Those actions were taken by the administration three years ago, the media fell silent, and the internet is largely unchanged.
So what do you mean, in an international context, by net neutrality?
> Network neutrality, most commonly called net neutrality, is the principle that Internet service providers (ISPs) must treat all Internet communications equally, and not discriminate or charge differently based on user, content, website, platform, application, type of equipment, source address, destination address, or method of communication.
Think of it as more like Comcast shouldn't be allowed to charge you 100x per GB (in addition to being your only choice in internet) if your traffic is to/from any streaming provider while providing their own streaming service for free, or throttle your usage of "other streaming traffic" to sub-144p quality. [OK, in reality, every mobile carrier does this in the US]
In an international, developing country context, outside of some places like India with Jio's cheap plans, it is incredibly frequent that you are paying per MB or similar at rates that would be unaffordable otherwise. Facebook funds these things so that your usage of Facebook's apps, Whatsapp, Instagram do not count against quota and are free to use. Thus local competitors get no visits and don't run their own sites because users do not want to pay a day's wages to browse your menu when they could browse your menu for free on their FB page.
It has pros and cons, one thing being that they don't have to pay for data and they get access to some portions of the internet, which is good? But it also makes it completely impossible for a local player funded locally without the billions acquired elsewhere to start, because people quite literally cannot afford to use your service unless you can afford to pay for all of them to; you can't compete. And since it's their only choice, now they monopolize and capture an entire country's worth of communications from start to finish. You'll see whatsapp numbers in many countries in place of a phone number or website.
I use Lyft instead of Uber because Uber forced me to do so many traffic-related captchas to install(presumably with the aim of eliminating employees eventually), I felt like they were squeezing free labor from me. It's getting there.
Its not even the anglosphere, because I'm from English England and had no clue what an American crosswalk was until recently. This is something that affects non-americans, not just non-angles.
hCaptcha engineer here: this is an issue with Google's approach, not all visual challenges.
Our challenges have average solve accuracy within 1% when comparing users in major African countries vs US users in our user testing. Nigeria does slightly better than the US, in fact.
American here. I had to say a mailbox was a parking meter yesterday to satisfy one of these terrible things. Your measurement of success may be biased by user acceptance of incorrect information in the process.
And as a non-American, I neither know nor care what American parking meters look like in the first place. They're training their model on my model of their model
Considering how horrifically broken hCaptcha is, slapping your hand on the keyboard would have an equivalent solve rate. I've had hCaptchas where one of the images was virtually identical to the example and it still didn't count as one.
It's trickier than most people think. The term "crosswalk" is American English -- it's known as a pedestrian crossing or zebra crossing in other countries. (another oft confused word is "pavement", which means sidewalk in British English, but refers to the hard surface of the road in American English)
The markings also cause confusion. To the non-American mind, does "crosswalk" refer to the crossing with the two parallel lines or the one with the stripes? Whereas with "zebra crossing", there's no ambiguity.
You don't really have to know which squares are actual crosswalks or what a crosswalk really is, reCAPTCHA doesn't care and it thinks that any street with white striped lines is a crosswalk even if the lines are for indicating something else (which is also annoying because it'll ask you to verify you are human again if you don't check those non-crosswalks). So do as I do and select any street that has white striped lines (same goes for its more rare bicycle/motorbike, small truck/car or truck/bus mix-ups).
Yes, crosswalks are a marked place on a road where pedestrians are supposed to cross. They often have dedicated signaling to let you know when you have the right-of-way to cross. The signaling usually looks like this [1], though typically the other fingers on the hand aren't blacked out, so it's a full hand, rather than one showing a middle finger (I couldn't quickly find a better example).
The question of what a crosswalk is can be surprisingly contentious despite attempts at federal standards! In my city there is a situation where the police department and the transportation department currently define "crosswalk" differently, leading to some rather bizarre situations with police reports and attribution of fault (e.g. pedestrian crossing in something the transportation department considers to be a crosswalk but the police department does not, such as a marked bicycle crossing, because their definition is stricter).
Off topic: imgur showed me the image, then gave me a cookie popup and when I clicked decline, the image was replaced by the text “could not find image”
The GP poster knows what a pedestrian crossing is, what it's for, and how it looks in most countries that can afford to build them; they were just pointing out that the word “crosswalk” is only found in American English.
I assumed it was an enclosed bridge between two buildings, a skybridge or skywalk, but apparently they are black and white striped crossings that I know as "zebra crossings".
I wonder how many people in the U.S. would recognize what is instantly familiar to us in Uruguay, the Yerba Mate gourd (10 out of 10 Uruguayans would recognize)
Fire hydrants is the first thing I've remembered too. This is very much US thing, don't remember ever seeing it in other countries (maybe they exist, but not where I lived) - at least not in the form Google wants them.
My favourite is how it blocks me from doing anything because I use various cookie blockers. I hate recaptcha so much, because all I want is some goddamn privacy.
The USA is the home of the internet, just keep building yours up and hey, start a captcha of your own. Don't let google dominate.
Edit: This is serious, if you let them take everything over, they will.
What counts as a truck? Is a fire engine a truck, is a 4x4 (like a Landrover), a HGV (ie lorry), a box van?
What counts as a bus? Is a coach a bus, a minibus?
What counts as a bicycle? Is a pedal-and-pop (a pedal cycle with an engine)? The image shows part of a headset that might be on a bike, is that enough to call it a bike, might be a lightweight motorbike?
Is a hovercraft a boat? Is a helicopter an aeroplane (according to the people setting the question)? Do pedestrian facing lights count as traffic lights?
Then every now and again they add in an image that is, I assume, purposefully obscured (uniform noise) as if painted by an impressionist and titled "boring city with smog as viewed by someone with cataracts, there might be half a bicycle wheel in somewhere".
One question that I apparently answered wrong for years as a German are the traffic lights. In English, traffic light seems to refer only to the assembly of two or three lights used to control the flow of traffic. The equivalent German word most commonly refers to the entire installation, including the pole, button (for pedestrians and visually impaired), speaker (for the visually impaired) etc.
So I selected much more than what Google expected me to select, I selected all the cables and poles as well.
I'm pretty glad that hCaptcha at least gives me an example of what it's looking for
This always throws me off, if it says 'Select all cars' for example and there is a car going into the next part for 10% but the main thing of that square is a tree or whatever, do I mark that? But I also always select the whole pole, no idea if it's right
My goal is not to optimize google's AI training, it's to get access to the damn website. I think part of what it does is compare your answer with other people's, if the AI is not sure, so it's more like a Keynesian beauty contest where I'm trying to guess which tiles the average person would pick.
(And fail and then have to go through 5 more screens of this.)
I live in US (though not born here) and truck and bike ones give me a bit of a pause too. The fact that bike is both a bicycle and a motorcycle doesn't exactly help either. And btw is scooter a bike?
My heuristic (which seems to be pretty accurate) is to accept anything that's vaguely related to the object that they ask for. eg. if they ask for "bicycles" and the picture has a motorcycle I select it.
Are these examples of captchas that have failed you or just questions that come to mind? I ask myself the same sorts of questions but then haven't actually had captchas fail me for it much.
Sometimes the turbine housing, or a section of a stabiliser aerofoil looks quite aeroplaney. But yes, I assume I've resolved that one correctly -- just getting in to the flow of my rant!
Being an African born & bred in Nigeria, who comments on Hacker News, the assumption may be correct—but they're hardly representative of the average Nigerian.
I get them wrong more than I get them right. Half the time I don’t bother anymore and just think “well, another website I won’t be visiting”. I really do believe that a bot would be better at solving them than I am.
It would be racist and anti-Afro to suggest that either you are a bot or a scammer for failing all your captchas. Also it would be offensive and inappropriate. And it would be outside the scope of this topic, and it would be a decidedly ad hominem comment when you should be celebrated for standing up to such narrowly contrived captchas.
As an aside, how do you like American security questions? "What was the make and model of the car in which you had your first kiss?"
Security questions are completely pointless anyway and you should just always treat them as an extra set of passwords and store them in your password manager. I have changed from using randomly generated items to vaguely plausible sounding nonsense instead since sometimes you have to actually read these things back to a human.
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