I’ve been getting the truck one heaps lately, and constantly failing it. Fire engines, utes, Removalist vans, street sweepers, etc etc. How the hell am I supposed to know what some American programmer thinks a truck is?

It’s pervasive across the entire internet.. we’re all expected to suddenly relearn the names of everything we’ve ever learned in our life because the US has decided the rest of the world is wrong and should learn their distorted version of English or just not take part in the “world wide” web.

That's what concerns me about Apple's hashing + human verification scheme - what are the values of the humans? What do they consider a positive? Nude pictures of kids are ok in some cultures and not ok in others.

Related: in my country it's common for young kids (say under 6 or 7) to go to the beach naked. I always find it a bit disturbing that Americans consider it obscene, because it means they sexualise it...?

Yea totally. Little boys with genitals showing in public (eg urinating) is a common thing in many parts of asia for example. No one bats an eye at it.

Due to how often little boys dirty their clothes a lot of them, especially in poor neighborhoods, go naked. And yes, no one bats an eye.

電車 always trips me up when talking about trains in Japanese. It appears to me that for some Japanese every train (including Diesel powered ones) is 電車 at this point, while others do make the distinction. The Japanese Wikipedia page mentions this shift as well.

The cultural gap is annoying with captcha's, even if you keep your preferred browser language set to English.

...not to speak of "fire hydrants" which I cannot fathom what is the purpose of these damn things. Do people hydrate themselves using fire on the US?

These are large-diameter / high pressure connections to the local water main. Firetrucks carry water, of course, but it's limited. The hydrant allows them to attach a hose and pull in additional water.

It seems that they have them in many countries, but they are often underground rather than the pillar type used in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_hydrant

Thanks! I was being facetious because I actually looked what they were after a few captchas. Indeed, there are many of those in my country but they don't look at all like that, typically being attached to the walls of the buildings, or covered underground.

To be pedantic, and risking your country being different to what I've personally seen around the world, what you see attached to the wall of a building isn't a fire hydrant.

These are standpipes [0] which can be used to move water to parts of the the building from that external fitting. They may contain some static water or be completely dry (like a dry riser [1]) but they are not a source of water like a hydrant is.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standpipe_(firefighting)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_riser

It was an interesting question for me as well, because I never stopped to think of why I didn't see these in certain cities abroad and how they fight fires in those cities.

I do remember parking meters, but then I also remember Walkmans. Could be an issue for solving Captchas I guess.