To let you know who wears the pants in the relationship :)

Businesses that scrape websites for a living hire people in third-world countries to solve captchas 24/7 to keep the scraping bots running.

So when I successfully solve a captcha, that doesn't make me 100% trusted not-a-scraping-bot. Instead it's an input into a statistical model, along with all the other identifying information they can hoover up, and that statistical model may still say no.

I use multiple profiles with Firefox to sandbox cookies etc. My profiles are based on activity. HN, Facebook, and infrequently used sites…sometimes I use Linkedin but I dont want it following me around the web.

I would prefer the web was different, but it is not.

Maybe the performance of the puzzle also has some undeclared side channels.