Prove you're human by winning a claw machine

(feralui.vercel.app)

48 points | by speckx 2 days ago

15 comments

  • pinkmuffinere 1 hour ago
    Is there reason to believe this is a good discriminator of human vs AI? I didn't see any about page, or statistic, or anything like that, but maybe I'm just missing it?

    edit: The page links to [1], but [1] has none of the information I'm really looking for -- why should somebody use this tool?

    [1] https://github.com/mortspace/playcaptcha

    • Shank 1 hour ago
      Of course not. It is clearly a fun toy.
  • brtkwr 48 minutes ago
    Claude Opus 4.8 one-shotted it... I think we should gear these systems towards making the cost of abuse expensive as they will be able to get around these things more and more easily.
    • arbol 8 minutes ago
      It's just a concept, not a real test.

      Captcha are already expensive at scale due to escalating checks when abuse is detected. You have to orchestrate and pay for residential proxies, containers with different fingerprints, different behavioural data, clean IP rep, emulate device performance to avoid revealing youre running on a server... A 1-shot doesn't scale against this.

    • ikari_pl 33 minutes ago
      So, a paywall is the simple solution
  • groestl 10 minutes ago
    I can prove I'm human by losing a claw machine.
  • codelong888 5 minutes ago
    lol this is actually fun. in this era of ai, knowing who's real human and who's ai is so underrated
  • bschwindHN 1 hour ago
    The thing to grab is always on the front layer. Seems like an AI could be pretty easily trained to defeat this.

    Also when you move the claw left and right, it "leans" in the wrong direction.

    • ozim 5 minutes ago
      You don’t need to train it just ask current state of model.
    • eks391 1 hour ago
      Yup. I could guess what needs to be grabbed without reading the prompt because it was always the front-most object. It also has the largest grab area; some of the plushies can't even be grabbed.

      Fun idea though

    • m00dy 1 hour ago
      I can bypass this captcha just by using gemma4
  • BLKNSLVR 2 hours ago
    It's nothing like a claw machine. It picked up the toys twice in two tries.

    A human would be incredibly suspicious of this.

    • hurtigioll 1 hour ago
      the real CAPTCHA would be having a "this is not realistic" button that only humans would press
    • marssaxman 41 minutes ago
      My exact thought: this is nothing like a real claw machine.
  • mcyc 1 hour ago
    Lichess has a checkmate captcha that I think is cute.

    It requires you to solve a mate-in-one puzzle to, e.g., post on the forums.

    (Sorry, don't have a better link, there wasn't any non-technical I could find about it).

    https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/q19wgq/til_lichess_d...

    • tjoff 1 hour ago
      Because computers turned out to be so bad at chess? :)
      • jaggederest 57 minutes ago
        Reverse captcha: only robots can reprove one of the Euler problems on the fly? Statistically speaking we can round the people who can into the outlier group, right?
  • mohsen1 49 minutes ago
    Codex with Browser Use (Codex 5.3 Spark) was able to solve this with a simple prompt

    https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/0b80b07b-d88f-414...

  • spaqin 1 hour ago
    I'm tired of constantly having to prove I'm a human. Especially if it's trying to be lighthearted and fun on the surface, it just reminds me how Internet has fallen.
    • nomel 1 hour ago
      > it just reminds me how Internet has fallen.

      phpboard added captchas back in 2004.

    • vasco 1 hour ago
      I prove I'm a human by giving up trying to use the website. A machine would just relentlessly keep trying. You should try it.
  • TZubiri 2 hours ago
    >npm install playcaptcha

    Imagine you get pwned for trying this out in your home project and the APT escalates to your company repos and infects your company assets, and then the post mortem comes in and you have to explain this is what infected the company it stack

    • Terr_ 25 minutes ago
      > npm install

      Coworkers on project: "Containers? Not running things as root? Hah, you're overengineering things: Just follow the readme where it says to install the daemons and run the code directly. It works fine. Then we can show how we're using AI!"

      (Yeah, I know it's hard to be perfectly secure, but still...)

    • GuestFAUniverse 1 hour ago
      npm install randomgotcha
  • sevenzero 51 minutes ago
    I really like this! Also the other things you can find on the website. Cool stuff! Makes me want to get better at Frontend shenanigans.
  • Mistletoe 2 hours ago
    I wish all captchas were like this. A lot more fun!
  • shevy-java 1 hour ago
    What makes me human?

    If it is DNA then why would I need a claw machine? (Note that this defnition on DNA, which in itself is mega-odd since DNA differs, would mean that via synthetic biology one could yield humans - according to such a definition. But this does not have to be correct, so the definition would be flawed.)

    If it is not DNA, how else to prove it?

    • latexr 7 minutes ago
      A CAPTCHA is not concerned with your biology or philosophy, only with if you’re an automated request.
  • doctor_radium 2 hours ago
    Time and time again, I prove that I'm human by giving this crap the finger and then visiting some other site. It's calling out a false positive and then exercising good taste.