• 0 Posts
  • 34 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 10th, 2023

help-circle









  • The original captchas were to help computers read scanned books for OCR. It was a neat solution that had value where it prevented abuse on websites and helped open up knowledge to people.

    Now captchas aren’t needed because of cookies and fingerprinting and tech companies know if you’re malicious or not. They kept it going because it’s so valuable to tech companies.






  • You’re right they were not paid money, but they arguably were provided more goods for their services starting in the 15th century. In western Europe.

    Eastern and Western Europe behaved very differently when it came to serfdom. Serfdom, as you described it, began to decline starting in western Europe in the 15th century and was pretty much gone by the 17th century. Meanwhile Eastern Europe started a rise in serfdom as you described it in the 16th century.

    Serfs started to get better conditions thanks to the bubonic plague and increasing workers power over lords. In western Europe they were paid a higher share of the crop as a result. They still had a bad life overall, but it got ever so slightly better.

    The whole notion that they had 150 days off isn’t even necessarily accurate either because record keeping is so bad from those eras on time worked. It’s not enough data to provide an accurate assessment of working hours.