You're in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. It's crawling toward you. You reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?
this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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I assume this some kind of philosophical metaphor but as someone who isn’t into random acts of animal cruelty i have to ask for the answer.
Why not help?
It's a quote from the movie Blade Runner. It's meant to produce involuntary emotional responses in humans, to tell them apart from robots.
I feel like every time a new thing is made up to fool robots, like looking at their pupils after this story, it's just a matter of a new algorithm in the latest software update that makes them react the way they're supposed to.
Yeah, but you tell different types of stories. The robot knows it’s supposed to respond emotionally, but doesn’t know in what direction.
If I'm not helping, I imagine there must be some unmentioned factor, such as someone pointing a gun at me and telling me to do that otherwise bad things would happen to me. Or I was slipped some drug that forced me to be a sadist. Without any other factor, I don't imagine myself doing that at all in the first place.
Edit: Also, the tortoise lies on its back, not lays
100% robot.
What's a tortoise?
A land turtle.
Or a shield frog depending on your language.
Shield toad rather. Frosch vs. Kröte
Oh, I thought a toad and frog were synonymous in English
They’re generally treated as different animals, but toads are actually a subset of frogs. All toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads.
I've never seen a turtle, but I understand what you mean.
MRAP lizard
It shocks me how many people haven't seen the movie
Did you buy a present for the person you love? Within cells interlinked.
Cells. Cells within cells. Within cells. Interlinked.
Seems complicated when modern technology can just use a checkbox to know of you are a robot or not. It shows the book was written in the seventies.
Current multimodal models can pass those with ease iirc
... because I am examining the underside of the tortoise, to try and make out any significant details... because I am utterly befuddled as to how a tortoise came to be in the middle of a vast desert... and because I want to know where the hell I am.
Presumably, I am in the American Southwest, but if I can possibly specify the species of tortoise, I may be able to discern whether I am in the Mojave, Sonora, or Colorado desert.
Because I'm so frigging hot, I'm so frigging thirsty, I'm so hungry, that I think I'm hallucinating the turtle. I've been trudging through a desert way and now a turtle pops up in the desert out of nowhere. Is the turtle even real, can I not distinguish reality anymore ... would eating it help quench my thirst and anger? Is it wrong to feel no emotion?
I don't think the test itself is designed to measure emotional response so much as the emotional nuance and the 35 ms latency delay glitch in the Nexus-5 models when dealing with it.
Some captchas use AI generated images which have been categorized using AI to have me verify I’m human. What are we doing here, guys?
Giving feedback to AI image generators?
Literally yes, captchas trained older image recognition models.
[x] I am a robot
[x] I am a meat popsicle.
"We're charging our battery. And now we're full of energy."
We are the robots, we are the robots.
WHAT A NICE UNICODE CHARSCTER YOU USED!
Can you imagine when it's normal for robots to have significant spending power, and become a target for advertisers? They'll need another robot to go "well this ad is targeted at robots so I need to make sure to not show it to any of those pesky humans"
What a really interesting insight. Here are some more topics that you might find interesting:
The Turing test is most specifically highlighted in movies like Blade Runner or Ex Machina where it's a noire with a lone robot in a room being tested. In reality the future is more like Westworld where there are so many robots that can pass a basic Turing test that people are constantly engaged in more intense Turing tests at all times.
English isn't my first language, so I get grammatical errors. Now, when I type in my own language, I still get grammatical errors because I've been away for so long from my home country. That should assuage any accusations that I'm a bot.
However, someone did mention that I sounded like an anime character before. I think it's because I made an analysis that sounded too academic, like being dispassionate and analytical. I spent too much time in academia for my own good before. Well, that is better than sounding like middle managers, which people pointed out that AI sounds awfully like one.
The T in CAPTCHA stands for Turing test!
I think my first post here someone asked me to tell them about baking lasagnas, maybe because of the way I type. Is it also sort of an insult to imply someone is a bot?