I think the problem is, I feel like most ads are so empty,hollow & fraudful on the internet...
I am okay with ads, if they aren't all the above.
But I don't know what the Algorithm overlord serves me as an Ad, so I use Ublock Origin.
I actually think ads should probably be changed from paid promotion to actually use that money on such a good level of ad that even if you release it as a standalone video for example, people would want to watch it.
And I think people are doing it, I still listen to this Splendor Song Chalta rahe because of how great the music of this ad is.
But Most ads are of frauds trying to sell you a get rich quick scheme etc. (atleast I feel like every ad wants to sell me a course?), and I don't want to be the fraud's shitty course's next victim, I hate such course sellers so much that I kind of want to punch them through the video just thinking how the whole economy of ads is generally revolving around these frauds..., and how they make money is by scamming innocent individuals.
All of this while building a privacy nightmare, a dystopia.
No thanks. I am going to keep ads off of any of my services to a higher level of degree though I do imagine that most people don't donate shit & I don't even think that in businesses, the real money are in normal clients because they require free tier and way too much hassle for like 10$?, but rather business clients (B2B).
Though I also feel this moral obligation to open source whatever I build.. but then businesses can simply self host it, maybe I should probably only release it as fair source?
IDK, the whole system boils down to money, I can be only so good a person as the constraint of money requires me to. If money is low, morality has a higher probability of being ignored... , IDK, there is too much competition, sometimes unworthy,sometimes not, but still too much competition on a lot of ideas and they have not much differences so they try to do ads...
Why would you spend any amount of time at all on a website that you’ve observed to serve known fraud ads for more than a week or two (and hasn’t sacked their advertising provider)?
If you actually lived your life like this you wouldn’t be on any website other than Wikipedia. Surely you don’t _actually_ live your life like this despite your tone that suggests it would be crazy to live your life any other way?
My way to circumvent most of this: I am using Safari with AdBlock Pro and AdBlock and see zero ads when browsing the web.
I spend more time on YouTube than I care to admit, so I got a Premium subscription, bought an extension called UnTrap for YouTube to hide most recommendations and turned off all YouTube history etc.
I regularly visit BlueSky, Hacker News and YouTube, but not X, TikTok, Instagram or Facebook.
The hardest thing is to not use Amazon, but I am working on it.
You are using the inferior way to block ads, which will continue to degrade as advertisers take advantage of Google killing synchronous blocking of web requests with Manifest v2.
I'm like the parent, on Safari – apparently also using an "inferior" way to block ads that, somehow, inexplicably, works 100% of the time and has never let an ad slip through. Is it supposed to be inferior because it's brittle and requires constant work on the side of the developer? Is it blocking too much and I'm just not aware of it? Is there some new ad tech that it's not prepared for, and can't adapt to, and will fail in the near future?
I finally went back to firefox, recently. I needed to update some of the flag defaults to turn on tab changing with mouse scroll and similar, but they are unlikely to break things like ublock any time soon.
I was a frequent profiles user under chrome, and still don't like firefoxes UI there, but just made a bookmark to the profile launching screen.
You all still use the web? I've been transpiling video game frame data into shader, geometry, lighting, color gradient data, and an agent system that mix-n-matches styles.
I got into software modding game engines, though. Never cared much for web apps, SaaS. Never much saw the use in paid software since it's just geometry. We made a lot of dumb busy work out of SWE with web apps.
DRY? Yes, let's not repeat ourselves still bothering with lame day jobs that obfuscate it's just physical statistics in a machine of known constraints.
Am really excited about the rest of the world flipping the US off, nVidia full-steam ahead on autonomously organizing distributed systems. Propping up SWEs props up a dangerous delusion.
Yes. This is visible on news sites. The title and lede are rewritten as clickbait. The actual story may not be so bad. On some sites, the title on the home page may not match the article. Yesterday there was "(something happened) in Red State" on Fox News on the home page, but the actual article begins "(something happened) in Florida".
Is there anyway to fully disable youtube shorts/reels/whatever that mess is called ...? I quite like youtube long form content but have found myself occasionally in short form rabbit holes (which are both very addicting and extremely unsatisfying and which motivated me to delete instagram to escape when i realized how much a time and emotion suck they are)
Turning off youtube watch history stops the shorts tab from working. And you can use a userscript to swap the "shorts" word to "watch" in the url to convert all shorts to normal videos.
For example:
// ==UserScript==
// @name Redirect YouTube Shorts to Regular Videos (Mobile-Friendly)
// @namespace https://example.com/
// @version 1.4
// @description Redirects YouTube Shorts URLs to regular video URLs on mobile
// @author YourName
// @match *://*.youtube.com/*
// @run-at document-end
// @grant none
// ==/UserScript==
//Written by GPT-4o Mini
(function () {
'use strict';
// Function to redirect Shorts to regular video URLs
function redirect() {
if (location.pathname.startsWith("/shorts")) {
const videoId = location.pathname.split("/")[2];
const newUrl = "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=" + videoId;
window.location.replace(newUrl);
}
}
// Observe changes to the DOM and check for navigation
const observer = new MutationObserver(() => {
redirect();
});
// Start observing the body for changes
observer.observe(document.body, { childList: true, subtree: true });
// Initial check in case a Shorts URL is loaded directly
redirect();
})();
I’m hopeful browsers with LLM support are the future of ad blocking for users. This enables robust and sophisticated control by users of their experience.
I will never understand this. My ex bought tons of extensions to do stuff with Safari that other browsers do for free. He paid for a PiP extention for some websites, password managers, Tomagachi pets... dozens of trinket apps that would be depreciated in 2 or 3 major updates. I'm continually wowed by Mac users that insist on paying for a native solution to a problem that doesn't exist in any other ecosystem.
iOS/MacOS users are more predisposed to shell some bucks because of their walled garden upbringing.
Devs would usually prioritize iOS releases (early on, when no React Native nor Expo was as common place) only due to this fact that iOS users where much more likely to spend money than Android ones.
This might have equalized since the early days but i bet some of it still stands
Untrap is amazing. On top of that, things like removing all apps from my home screen and turning of almost all notifications has improved my focus and my life a lot.
I have been groaning about income inequality a lot but it is amazing how much of this can be explained by it. People do not have the disposable income to spend on services so you make people pay with attention. Give them the carrot for free so they don't notice. On top of that, the product is free so there is no expectation of support for the end user. You're getting it for free so what are you complaining about?
An ad for Pampers shown to a family with a toddler; an ad for Tidy Cats shown to a cat owner; an ad for Reese’s shown to someone who exhibits poor impulse control; an ad for McDonald’s shown to someone who works two jobs and doesn’t have time to cook food for themselves; an ad for a gambling app shown to someone using a gambling app.
Does the client know they lack disposable income? This is just as much an exercise about fleecing a client out of their adspend by giving shoddy metrics on your end.
In the ancient times there was an ISP selling Internet access where the catch is, you dial up via their program, and this program would have an always-on-top window showing ads...
Then again, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube started "You pay for it with your attention (and your data)" and only later have they implemented payment for being ad-free, although with Zuck's properties, the EU forced it.
Perhaps interesting anecdata - I have a close friend who has a great career, plenty of assets and income, etc., but doesn't pay to remove ads in their streaming services. Thus, together we watch unskippable ads on a brilliant 70" OLED TV while resting on plush leather sofa in their beautiful loft, haha.
Nothing to do with income equality, organizations will show whatever ads they can get away with. I paid Microsoft thousands of dollars for my Microsoft laptop. The hardware and form factor are admittedly pretty fantastic. But in spite of this, Microsoft is still determined to try (and fail) to show me ads.
Money alone wouldn't fix this, as a Web where every page has a paywall wouldn't be much better either. Which in turn would concentrate most of the Web in a few services just as it is today and enshittyfication would bring the ads back sooner or later, even if you pay for the service.
> bring the ads back sooner or later, even if you pay for the service.
This has already happened for subscription TV services. Your previously ad-free subscription now has ads, but you can get rid of them again by upgrading! It’s fucking gross. It’s also of course just going to work, and become the new normal.
One thing I've noticed is that Reddit is very, very aggressive about how it implements its telemetry.
Not only is the endpoint that it uses for collecting events randomized each time you load a page, but it also happens that every event collector URL is a valid API endpoint that is used for other things. You can't block any of them with regular ad blocking tools unless you're okay with blocking the corresponding API endpoint. And given that the website itself uses the API, this can be difficult.
I don't see ads on reddit. Where are they? I use pi hole and ad nauseam extension. Everything is default. I also have RES I think, but I'm not even sure what that does anymore, I've just had it for a decade.
The funny thing is that we fought so hard against pop-ups throughout the 90's and 2000's only to re-implement pop-ups in javascript as soon as we could.
I have always wondered what the web would be like if we added the scripting language later and only solidified CSS and HTML for the first 15 years or so.
I wonder if things would actually be better overall. I’m not going to argue that having a scripting language for the web was a mistake, it definitely isn’t on the whole, but I think having it come at a more mature point for the web might have helped stave off a lot of really bad decisions
Doesn't always work (sometimes it kills the website functionality), and I have no clue what it's actually doing (I'm not a coder)... but usually it gets rid of hover-overs.
At least, generally, they no longer open hundreds of windows above or below the current window, which may or may not have browser control bars, may ‘warn’ on exit etc etc
If a page wants to cover itself in noise and dialogues, sure it’s annoying but it’s not quite on the same level as back then.
> we fought so hard against pop-ups throughout the 90's and 2000's only to re-implement pop-ups in javascript as soon as we could
A group of people who thought that web users should not be abused may have won the first pop-up battle, but the businesses that made money from intrusive advertisements clearly won the war.
In hindsight maybe it wasn't a such a great idea for web users to switch en masse to a browser made by an advertising company.
The endgame is a probably a war between web sites that are endless mazes of advertising and user agents that try to navigate the maze and extract the non-advertising content.
Google began as a search engine with a popup blocker extension for a competitor's browser. Now they're a display ad company with a browser that includes a built in popup blocker extension blocker.
Well, there are really only three things that form the aggregate of the world we see today.
There are accidents of history, money, and ideology.
These things fit squarely in the money category. The advertising industry was subsumed by adtech during that time, which was driven by government grant and fiat debt-based financing. Advertising fraud has never been harder to account for, and the justified use of analytics for that purpose has driven surveillance capitalism with governments being the customer.
Money printing is the role of the state, so technically if you remove all indirections its state apparatus which makes sense that an individual wouldn't be able to fight against it.
At least these popups are restricted to the page. It's one thing for a website to decide to block my use of it for some asinine reason. It's quite another for it to block my use of everything else on my computer.
For balance, I clicked the link and (after a moment of my browser imposing my will) the video started playing. Opera + Ghostery is quite a pleasant experience, at least when compared to mobile browsing (at the other end of the spectrum).
It's also been a long while since clicking "Manage cookie preferences" shows "Opt-out..." pre-checked and "Confirm choices" button, unlike the "Reject all" button also being shown these days. Then unchecking "Opt out..." dynamically shows a "Allow all" button.
Half the comments here are just pointing out that ad blockers exist, which is missing the point.
The damage of an advertising-based internet economy is not limited to just "seeing ads." The entire content and structure of the internet is warped around this economy. Search engines, SEO, content discovery mechanisms, types and variety of content... all could have been different and better.
Interesting you say "seeing ads", because lately when I am volunteering with legally blind population as their "tech-mate", I can't explain them why technology isn't doing what they want it to do. It's a million times worse when we put ourselves into their shoes.... My strategy has changed from helping them learn technology, to helping them avoid how to use technology. One of the person I help, who is legally blind but can see font size 50+, asked me to teach him how to search for lyrics of songs so that he can play his guitar. I tried to teach him, but it was pointless because of how the websites were full of ads. I did install an ad blocker which helped a bit but in the end, I gave up and now I just print out lyrics for him.
step 1: install & use Firefox
step 2: install and use adblockers (multiple)(I got ublock origin, adblock plus, noscript, privacy badger, privacy possum)(nothing gets through!!)
step 3: install "Open in Reader View" addon (not affiliated in any way). With this, when I DDG-search for something, especially lyrics or something for which I am interested in only the text, I right-click and "open in reader view" so it does exactly that.
step 4: set the Reader View (F9) in FF, to the font size, color, etc.
and the your 'friend' will Google for: Metallica enter sandman lyrics, and just right-click and pick the "Open in reader view", and presto! new tab with just the lyrics
EDIT: tip: tell your 'friend' to search for Band Song_title AZLyrics (not affiliated) so the first hit will be from "AZLyrics.com" which will have a standard format (I always search for ".... azlyrics" instead of just "..lyrics")
I don’t think we fully fathom how much everything on the Internet has degraded. And we and our children have degraded with it. Like frogs boiling alive in a pot, we never noticed it because of how gradually they increased the temperature.
N.B., he is right on the Gen-X/Millenial border. So, we can now look retrospectively at a good chunk of his generation’s career. The tech industry we’ve built does, in fact, suck.
Although, Millenials seem to be pretty annoyed by all this, and aren’t really anywhere near retirement yet. So maybe we can figure out some way to apply the brakes.
That's such a copout quote. The people working on ads aren't the best minds, if they were they wouldn't be working on ads. We somehow bought into the lie that "maximize profit" has anything to do with intelligence. And that a bank account is a equivalent to an intelligence score.
No, the problem we find ourselves in is that we let ad companies buy the entire economy and infect it with anticompetitive behavior. The people working on Android aren't working on ads. Their work is being exploited by an ad company and twisted to serve ads.
I personally find my doctor infinitely more intelligent than any Google tech bro. I find the group of people making Little Kitty Big City infinitely more intelligent than some Facebook wanker.
Give every Internet user a domain name and routable IP for free with their Internet account.
That won't magically fix all the problems in an instant, but the core of everything wrong with the Internet starts with the Internet being separated into consumers and providers, instead of being a true peer2peer network.
Even in the olden days of the Internet when ISPs would give you free webspace with your Internet account, you still didn't get your own domain name, meaning all your Web presence would bust when you switched providers.
Alternatively, get Freenet, IPFS/IPNS or any of the other distributed alternatives working, but after 25 years of people trying, I kind of given up hope of it ever happening.
Step 1: remove Section 230 protection for algorithmically-elevated content.
If you're going to have attention-mining addiction-creating software funnel people into rabbit holes, then those rabbit holes need to be verified, safe-to-consume stuff. Watching 5 hours of 5 minute crafts is at worst, going to make someone spend too much money at Hobby Lobby. Certainly not good, but a workable issue. Watching 5 hours of white supremacist propaganda is how you get our current sociopolitical climate.
The irony of watching this 2017 TED video in 2025, and find out that my NoScript extension reports half a dozen of JS trackers and ads providers on this page - including Google, doubleclick.net, sail-personalize and sail-track.
Oh, and if you navigate to this page without NoScript, AdBlocker or a PiHole DNS you'll probably be presented with a cookie consent banner, a bunch of ads on the page and before watching the video, and your data being shared with at least half a dozen partners (a number that can increase dramatically if you visit the page of any news outlet instead of ted.com).
So yeah, I guess that the message of this video aged like fine wine.
also, the premise of the entire lore of shadow run, is corporations building armies and seeing they can get away with it and then just doubling down.
but back to reality... everyone would buy stock of the ad-dystopia and since now their retirement is tired to it they will just normalize and promote it. just like today.
I did read it, but the books I read when I was a teen still learning the world sit deeper in me than something I read in my 30s.
I don't think the last-name-is-the-company adapts well to the so-called "gig economy" where employment is structured as supposedly independent contractors, who in turn can be working for multiple organizations at the same time.
"Corporations building armies", etc. describes the Dutch East India Company pretty well, yes? As I get now into my 50s, that goal seems more and more an intrinsic part of limited-liability joint-stock companies.
No wonder the independent web is dead when even places like HN sound like this --everyone is referring to the same five websites, fb, twitter, etc. The few creators among us are stuck between google's bullshit and such retarded proudhonists that would like to see even more consumer-level content controlled by these monopolies.
One of the things that drives me absolutely bonkers is websites popping up an ad or some modal to enter my email or subscribe to something… While I am in the middle of scrolling or entering text / interacting with a form. It’s so jarring and frustrating and usually results in me moving on.
UX largely sucks and takes a backseat to the ad experience now.
Most input is text, most output is text, commands are text. Vast majority of programming languages can process and produce text out-of-the-box. There are countless utilities for processing text. You can store, load, split and join text easily. Send and receive it through most channels.
When everything is text, text files become libraries. Text editors become macro processors.
Hey, make an artificial intelligent entity significantly more capable than any individual human, then be surprised you have a goal misalignment with your superagent.
We gave AI legal personhood in the 1800s and we were doomed from there
I think I was annoyed at the generalization when the specific cause was obvious. Using the royal "we" seems like an egregious misappropriation of responsibility given many people specifically vote against unabated capitalism.
Something I believe but have no evidence for, and reality is continuing to, bafflingly, defy my expectations:
Ads are basically zero-sum in the sense that they mostly take customers that need something, and shift them to the brand that is advertised, instead of the one they would have heard of naturally (now, there is some element of ads actually increasing demand, but as people are quite cash-strapped or in debt nowadays, I guess it can only function up to some limit). Companies that advertise are engaging in an ever-increasing (more sophisticated, technical, and more expensive) competition to capture some allocation of this demand. Because we’re burning an increasing amount of money in a zero-sum competition, eventually the ecosystem must collapse under its own weight.
We can sort of see this, I think, in people becoming increasingly grumpy about how expensive everything is. But the system is very circuitous, so we misallocate blame all over the place.
Trying to regulate ads—I dunno, it seems hard to regulate without stepping on free-speech toes (US perspective, ymmv in other countries). I would rather regulate the collection of data, which doesn’t seem to be particularly protected in any sense other than that private entities can mostly just do whatever by default (it seems functionally similar to the sort of stuff that the 4’th amendment was intended to protect us against, except it is done by Facebook and Google so they get away with it) (but to be explicit, I think it is probably legal at the moment for companies to run vast surveillance networks, we need new laws).
He expected the end state of capitalism to be business owners just constantly fighting the markets to stay still. On the one hand, they'd be constantly trying to figure out how to make sure they were paying bottom prices for goods and services on which they relied, and on the other they'd constantly be fighting to try and sell in a saturated market. Eventually, collapse would ensue.
This was one of the foundations for his thinking.
He couldn't have predicted information technology, or ad tech, but the premise seems to hold up.
Of course, where he ended up was workers owning the means of production and every business basically being a "lifestyle business", with no need - or ability - to scale. This, as you know, became corrupted into government ownership, central planning of the economy, and all the other nightmares of a non-free market.
The ideal state - and I think this is where Marx would have wanted it - is that you might not have had a gazillion milk brands all screaming for attention (and the consumer ultimately paying for that, as it being priced into the amount they pay), but there being a free market of worked-owned businesses.
Because when you're the sole owner and provider of goods, advertisement loses all meaning.
I grew up in the Soviet Union. There was one type of milk on the shelf, it was called "Milk", and I don't remember the label saying anything else.
Compare with "HORIZON ORGANIC DHA Omega-3 Supports the Brain Health organic Whole Milk" dressed in bright red and contrasting yellow, with typography that begs "please look at me, I'm the better option".
More to the original point, Bern banned some outdoor advertising last year (!). https://www.iamexpat.ch/expat-info/swiss-news/bern-approves-... says "SVP councillor Alexander Feuz was the most strident [opponent], calling the change a “step towards Stone Age communism.”"
DPRK has been described as ad block for your life, but even under communism to have a consumer economy a limited number of regulated ads can be useful so ppl know products exist, but not this brand combat to the death oversaturation.
I would say communism is the final degree of "government as provider" not of "government as regulator". The final degree of regulation could be any variety of authoritarianism.
Much better to have capitalism replace political tyranny with economic tyranny. Where survival depends on serving someone else's profit with the requirement their margin grows every year.
When markets control basic needs, capitalism becomes its own form of authoritarianism that forces everyone to self comply. But it's freedom because they voluntarily choose to not starve to death/be homeless.
He has also been running a podcast called "Pitchfork Economics" which I have found to be very enlightening on the state of this world. From an economics point of view, it explains the enshittification of many services we once enjoyed, the destruction of the middle class.
The past 40+ years of policy based on “reagonomics”/“trickle down economics”, neoclassical/neoliberal economicsc and psuedoscience from
the Chicago School of Economics (ie, Milton Friedman) represents the worst era of America.
It’s fine for you if you like it. The problem is that ubiquitous ads pollute the attention of those of us who don’t like it.
Would have been a much different (and better) world if the early web established micro-payments as a way of funding content and platforms. For example I’m happy to pay for YouTube premium to avoid the bloody ads, though I respect the preferences of those who enjoy the ads…
^
Exactly Ads are 100% fine I just want the option to pay to avoid them.
Like black mirror I think had an episode or some movie had it where you watch an ad instead of paying for a bus ticket and that’s totally fine, cuz right now there is no alternative to paying for a bus ticket.
Please don't claim victimhood (“censorship”) when your comments are flagged. The guidelines apply equally to everyone, and the flags on your comments are from good community members who have a track record of flagging responsibly, to help keep the discussions healthy.
HN’s purpose is to be a place for intellectual curiosity, not ideological battle or railing against things you find disagreeable.
I feel like these issues can be countered by a reasoning AI that runs locally and I can configure to operate in my best interest.
e.g, Filter out political posts on X. Fact check opinion videos on the fly.
I hope future computing devices will have neutal engine at the center, and CPU as secondary. And I should be able to teach it to take actions on my behalf.
Sadly, we can’t just trust everybody else not to try and pull one over us. (Fortunately, uBlock Origin still works and is fairly lightweight, and hopefully we won’t see native ads so indistinguishable from content that it can’t detect those for a while.)
Forests are full of animals that hunt animals, and animals that spend tons of energy evading animals hunting them.
Life is a complex patterning phenomenon that dissipates energy, and as far as we understand it has no goal. Why should we expect complex human living systems to behave fundamentally differently? Individual human beings have goals, but huge collective systems like economies have either no consciousness or a kind of vegetable consciousness similar to a slime mold moving toward nutrients.
I think the problem is, I feel like most ads are so empty,hollow & fraudful on the internet...
I am okay with ads, if they aren't all the above.
But I don't know what the Algorithm overlord serves me as an Ad, so I use Ublock Origin.
I actually think ads should probably be changed from paid promotion to actually use that money on such a good level of ad that even if you release it as a standalone video for example, people would want to watch it.
And I think people are doing it, I still listen to this Splendor Song Chalta rahe because of how great the music of this ad is.
But Most ads are of frauds trying to sell you a get rich quick scheme etc. (atleast I feel like every ad wants to sell me a course?), and I don't want to be the fraud's shitty course's next victim, I hate such course sellers so much that I kind of want to punch them through the video just thinking how the whole economy of ads is generally revolving around these frauds..., and how they make money is by scamming innocent individuals.
All of this while building a privacy nightmare, a dystopia.
No thanks. I am going to keep ads off of any of my services to a higher level of degree though I do imagine that most people don't donate shit & I don't even think that in businesses, the real money are in normal clients because they require free tier and way too much hassle for like 10$?, but rather business clients (B2B).
Though I also feel this moral obligation to open source whatever I build.. but then businesses can simply self host it, maybe I should probably only release it as fair source?
IDK, the whole system boils down to money, I can be only so good a person as the constraint of money requires me to. If money is low, morality has a higher probability of being ignored... , IDK, there is too much competition, sometimes unworthy,sometimes not, but still too much competition on a lot of ideas and they have not much differences so they try to do ads...
Why would you spend any amount of time at all on a website that you’ve observed to serve known fraud ads for more than a week or two (and hasn’t sacked their advertising provider)?
If you actually lived your life like this you wouldn’t be on any website other than Wikipedia. Surely you don’t _actually_ live your life like this despite your tone that suggests it would be crazy to live your life any other way?
Because its a monopoly?
Its name is youtube.
And For the record, I am already using ad blockers but on some very rare occasions on when I don't somehow, its absolutely nightmare
You aren’t reversing type 2 diabetes and erectile dysfunction by drinking warm salt water? /s
My way to circumvent most of this: I am using Safari with AdBlock Pro and AdBlock and see zero ads when browsing the web.
I spend more time on YouTube than I care to admit, so I got a Premium subscription, bought an extension called UnTrap for YouTube to hide most recommendations and turned off all YouTube history etc.
I regularly visit BlueSky, Hacker News and YouTube, but not X, TikTok, Instagram or Facebook.
The hardest thing is to not use Amazon, but I am working on it.
You are using the inferior way to block ads, which will continue to degrade as advertisers take advantage of Google killing synchronous blocking of web requests with Manifest v2.
https://ublockorigin.com/#manifest-v3-section
I'm like the parent, on Safari – apparently also using an "inferior" way to block ads that, somehow, inexplicably, works 100% of the time and has never let an ad slip through. Is it supposed to be inferior because it's brittle and requires constant work on the side of the developer? Is it blocking too much and I'm just not aware of it? Is there some new ad tech that it's not prepared for, and can't adapt to, and will fail in the near future?
9 replies →
Only for chrome.
I finally went back to firefox, recently. I needed to update some of the flag defaults to turn on tab changing with mouse scroll and similar, but they are unlikely to break things like ublock any time soon.
I was a frequent profiles user under chrome, and still don't like firefoxes UI there, but just made a bookmark to the profile launching screen.
It's good enough.
1 reply →
How does Ublock origin compare to using Brave Browser + NextDNS (Pi-Hole in the cloud basically) tho?
Because I haven't seen a YouTube ad in a looong time and I don't pay for premium.
I just use this combo.
Please excuse my ignorance, but what is the superior way? Pi-Hole?
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You all still use the web? I've been transpiling video game frame data into shader, geometry, lighting, color gradient data, and an agent system that mix-n-matches styles.
I got into software modding game engines, though. Never cared much for web apps, SaaS. Never much saw the use in paid software since it's just geometry. We made a lot of dumb busy work out of SWE with web apps.
DRY? Yes, let's not repeat ourselves still bothering with lame day jobs that obfuscate it's just physical statistics in a machine of known constraints.
Am really excited about the rest of the world flipping the US off, nVidia full-steam ahead on autonomously organizing distributed systems. Propping up SWEs props up a dangerous delusion.
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You are not circumventing the most troubling aspect of all this, which is that the content itself is perverted by its monetization model.
Yes. This is visible on news sites. The title and lede are rewritten as clickbait. The actual story may not be so bad. On some sites, the title on the home page may not match the article. Yesterday there was "(something happened) in Red State" on Fox News on the home page, but the actual article begins "(something happened) in Florida".
Another tip for youtube is to use https://sponsor.ajay.app/ -- helps skip the ads that are increasingly embedded in the video itself.
The same author made another app that replaces click bait video titles with a cloud sourced video title. It also replaces cluck bait thumbnails.
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For some reason Albania gets no ads on YT. Route your YT packets over to Albania and done.
NextDNS works very well on iOS for everything else.
Is there anyway to fully disable youtube shorts/reels/whatever that mess is called ...? I quite like youtube long form content but have found myself occasionally in short form rabbit holes (which are both very addicting and extremely unsatisfying and which motivated me to delete instagram to escape when i realized how much a time and emotion suck they are)
Turning off youtube watch history stops the shorts tab from working. And you can use a userscript to swap the "shorts" word to "watch" in the url to convert all shorts to normal videos.
For example:
Idk if they work but several extensions on the chrome web store claim to hide/block shorts like https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hide-shorts/mnakeci...
https://github.com/Onsotumenh/YouTube-Cosmetic-Filters-for-u...
I did not realize that worked so well. I gave up on Safari a while ago. Will give it another shot with AdBlock Pro then. Is it with the free tier?
I just use ublock Origin with Firefox on Mac/Pc and Orion on iOS.
The annoyance list takes care of the cookie banners.
> I am using Safari with AdBlock Pro and AdBlock and see zero ads when browsing the web.
Safari's vestigial "never auto-play" setting has never worked, and still doesn't.
I’m hopeful browsers with LLM support are the future of ad blocking for users. This enables robust and sophisticated control by users of their experience.
I can’t let you do that Dave.
Perplexity strongly disagrees
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-br...
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> bought an extension called UnTrap for YouTube
I will never understand this. My ex bought tons of extensions to do stuff with Safari that other browsers do for free. He paid for a PiP extention for some websites, password managers, Tomagachi pets... dozens of trinket apps that would be depreciated in 2 or 3 major updates. I'm continually wowed by Mac users that insist on paying for a native solution to a problem that doesn't exist in any other ecosystem.
There is nothing wrong with paying for software. I say this as a professional software developer ;)
iOS/MacOS users are more predisposed to shell some bucks because of their walled garden upbringing.
Devs would usually prioritize iOS releases (early on, when no React Native nor Expo was as common place) only due to this fact that iOS users where much more likely to spend money than Android ones.
This might have equalized since the early days but i bet some of it still stands
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Isn't that like being wowed by people who pay to have their car oil changed, instead of doing it themselves?
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In a capitalist society, paying for software is good, actually.
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Checkout:
Enhancer For YouTube.
Sponsorblock.
Dearrow.
I can't use YouTube without them anymore. It's so horrible.
Untrap is amazing. On top of that, things like removing all apps from my home screen and turning of almost all notifications has improved my focus and my life a lot.
I have been groaning about income inequality a lot but it is amazing how much of this can be explained by it. People do not have the disposable income to spend on services so you make people pay with attention. Give them the carrot for free so they don't notice. On top of that, the product is free so there is no expectation of support for the end user. You're getting it for free so what are you complaining about?
People definitely have disposable income. They can, and are willing, to go into even non-trivial amounts of debt if you're good enough.
The goal is extracting your portion of it via social engineering and other mechanisms available to you.
What would be the point of showing an ad to someone without disposable income?
Some examples, with varying levels of predation:
An ad for Pampers shown to a family with a toddler; an ad for Tidy Cats shown to a cat owner; an ad for Reese’s shown to someone who exhibits poor impulse control; an ad for McDonald’s shown to someone who works two jobs and doesn’t have time to cook food for themselves; an ad for a gambling app shown to someone using a gambling app.
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They might not have enough disposable income to pay for software but enough to pay for whatever is on the ad.
More generally, if the service is free, you're the product, and you're being sold to someone else
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It would change the way they spend their nondisposable money.
Propaganda
Does the client know they lack disposable income? This is just as much an exercise about fleecing a client out of their adspend by giving shoddy metrics on your end.
In the ancient times there was an ISP selling Internet access where the catch is, you dial up via their program, and this program would have an always-on-top window showing ads...
Then again, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube started "You pay for it with your attention (and your data)" and only later have they implemented payment for being ad-free, although with Zuck's properties, the EU forced it.
It was called NetZero, although there may have been another one. I set it up for people all the time.
Perhaps interesting anecdata - I have a close friend who has a great career, plenty of assets and income, etc., but doesn't pay to remove ads in their streaming services. Thus, together we watch unskippable ads on a brilliant 70" OLED TV while resting on plush leather sofa in their beautiful loft, haha.
Nothing to do with income equality, organizations will show whatever ads they can get away with. I paid Microsoft thousands of dollars for my Microsoft laptop. The hardware and form factor are admittedly pretty fantastic. But in spite of this, Microsoft is still determined to try (and fail) to show me ads.
Money alone wouldn't fix this, as a Web where every page has a paywall wouldn't be much better either. Which in turn would concentrate most of the Web in a few services just as it is today and enshittyfication would bring the ads back sooner or later, even if you pay for the service.
> bring the ads back sooner or later, even if you pay for the service.
This has already happened for subscription TV services. Your previously ad-free subscription now has ads, but you can get rid of them again by upgrading! It’s fucking gross. It’s also of course just going to work, and become the new normal.
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One thing I've noticed is that Reddit is very, very aggressive about how it implements its telemetry.
Not only is the endpoint that it uses for collecting events randomized each time you load a page, but it also happens that every event collector URL is a valid API endpoint that is used for other things. You can't block any of them with regular ad blocking tools unless you're okay with blocking the corresponding API endpoint. And given that the website itself uses the API, this can be difficult.
It's evil and I hate it.
I don't see ads on reddit. Where are they? I use pi hole and ad nauseam extension. Everything is default. I also have RES I think, but I'm not even sure what that does anymore, I've just had it for a decade.
> It's evil and I hate it.
That sums post-IPO Reddit up rather well
I accepted cookies, watched an ad, dismissed a popup for a newsletter to watch a video about ads.
That really nails it.
The funny thing is that we fought so hard against pop-ups throughout the 90's and 2000's only to re-implement pop-ups in javascript as soon as we could.
I have always wondered what the web would be like if we added the scripting language later and only solidified CSS and HTML for the first 15 years or so.
I wonder if things would actually be better overall. I’m not going to argue that having a scripting language for the web was a mistake, it definitely isn’t on the whole, but I think having it come at a more mature point for the web might have helped stave off a lot of really bad decisions
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I use the following code (as a toolbar bookmarklette) for a quick button which disables all pop-overs/cookie requests:
Doesn't always work (sometimes it kills the website functionality), and I have no clue what it's actually doing (I'm not a coder)... but usually it gets rid of hover-overs.
At least, generally, they no longer open hundreds of windows above or below the current window, which may or may not have browser control bars, may ‘warn’ on exit etc etc
If a page wants to cover itself in noise and dialogues, sure it’s annoying but it’s not quite on the same level as back then.
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> we fought so hard against pop-ups throughout the 90's and 2000's only to re-implement pop-ups in javascript as soon as we could
A group of people who thought that web users should not be abused may have won the first pop-up battle, but the businesses that made money from intrusive advertisements clearly won the war.
In hindsight maybe it wasn't a such a great idea for web users to switch en masse to a browser made by an advertising company.
The endgame is a probably a war between web sites that are endless mazes of advertising and user agents that try to navigate the maze and extract the non-advertising content.
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Google began as a search engine with a popup blocker extension for a competitor's browser. Now they're a display ad company with a browser that includes a built in popup blocker extension blocker.
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Well, there are really only three things that form the aggregate of the world we see today.
There are accidents of history, money, and ideology.
These things fit squarely in the money category. The advertising industry was subsumed by adtech during that time, which was driven by government grant and fiat debt-based financing. Advertising fraud has never been harder to account for, and the justified use of analytics for that purpose has driven surveillance capitalism with governments being the customer.
Money printing is the role of the state, so technically if you remove all indirections its state apparatus which makes sense that an individual wouldn't be able to fight against it.
At least these popups are restricted to the page. It's one thing for a website to decide to block my use of it for some asinine reason. It's quite another for it to block my use of everything else on my computer.
I'm reminded of the videos about procrastination on youtube where people seem to never, ever, ever tire of comenting to say things like:
"I'm watching a video about procrastination... and I've got a test tomrrow! Lolol!"
Obviously your comment is the refined HN equivalent, but still.
For balance, I clicked the link and (after a moment of my browser imposing my will) the video started playing. Opera + Ghostery is quite a pleasant experience, at least when compared to mobile browsing (at the other end of the spectrum).
It's also been a long while since clicking "Manage cookie preferences" shows "Opt-out..." pre-checked and "Confirm choices" button, unlike the "Reject all" button also being shown these days. Then unchecking "Opt out..." dynamically shows a "Allow all" button.
You know it's gonna be good.
Same video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI
The one on TED.com appears to have been removed.
Half the comments here are just pointing out that ad blockers exist, which is missing the point.
The damage of an advertising-based internet economy is not limited to just "seeing ads." The entire content and structure of the internet is warped around this economy. Search engines, SEO, content discovery mechanisms, types and variety of content... all could have been different and better.
Interesting you say "seeing ads", because lately when I am volunteering with legally blind population as their "tech-mate", I can't explain them why technology isn't doing what they want it to do. It's a million times worse when we put ourselves into their shoes.... My strategy has changed from helping them learn technology, to helping them avoid how to use technology. One of the person I help, who is legally blind but can see font size 50+, asked me to teach him how to search for lyrics of songs so that he can play his guitar. I tried to teach him, but it was pointless because of how the websites were full of ads. I did install an ad blocker which helped a bit but in the end, I gave up and now I just print out lyrics for him.
Suggestion in case it helps:
and the your 'friend' will Google for: Metallica enter sandman lyrics, and just right-click and pick the "Open in reader view", and presto! new tab with just the lyrics
EDIT: tip: tell your 'friend' to search for Band Song_title AZLyrics (not affiliated) so the first hit will be from "AZLyrics.com" which will have a standard format (I always search for ".... azlyrics" instead of just "..lyrics")
So much this.
I don’t think we fully fathom how much everything on the Internet has degraded. And we and our children have degraded with it. Like frogs boiling alive in a pot, we never noticed it because of how gradually they increased the temperature.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff Hammerbacher
N.B., he is right on the Gen-X/Millenial border. So, we can now look retrospectively at a good chunk of his generation’s career. The tech industry we’ve built does, in fact, suck.
Although, Millenials seem to be pretty annoyed by all this, and aren’t really anywhere near retirement yet. So maybe we can figure out some way to apply the brakes.
That's such a copout quote. The people working on ads aren't the best minds, if they were they wouldn't be working on ads. We somehow bought into the lie that "maximize profit" has anything to do with intelligence. And that a bank account is a equivalent to an intelligence score.
No, the problem we find ourselves in is that we let ad companies buy the entire economy and infect it with anticompetitive behavior. The people working on Android aren't working on ads. Their work is being exploited by an ad company and twisted to serve ads.
I personally find my doctor infinitely more intelligent than any Google tech bro. I find the group of people making Little Kitty Big City infinitely more intelligent than some Facebook wanker.
But how are you going to change that?
You're right: it's probably fine then. My bad.
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Give every Internet user a domain name and routable IP for free with their Internet account.
That won't magically fix all the problems in an instant, but the core of everything wrong with the Internet starts with the Internet being separated into consumers and providers, instead of being a true peer2peer network.
Even in the olden days of the Internet when ISPs would give you free webspace with your Internet account, you still didn't get your own domain name, meaning all your Web presence would bust when you switched providers.
Alternatively, get Freenet, IPFS/IPNS or any of the other distributed alternatives working, but after 25 years of people trying, I kind of given up hope of it ever happening.
Couple choices:
1. Switch to cryptocurrency, let small-time criminals control the web.
2. Switch to micropayments, let criminal corporations control the web.
Step 1: remove Section 230 protection for algorithmically-elevated content.
If you're going to have attention-mining addiction-creating software funnel people into rabbit holes, then those rabbit holes need to be verified, safe-to-consume stuff. Watching 5 hours of 5 minute crafts is at worst, going to make someone spend too much money at Hobby Lobby. Certainly not good, but a workable issue. Watching 5 hours of white supremacist propaganda is how you get our current sociopolitical climate.
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"We're building a dystopia to make people click on ads"
Why not, "They're building a dystopia to make people click on ads"
I'm not building this dystopia
Are you
Related:
Zeynep Tufekci: We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15572578 - Oct 2017 (12 comments)
Is it possible to launch an offensive against advertising by spoofing humans that consume ads so numbers increase so dramatically they’re meaningless?
Check AdNauseam!
I don’t think so. Ads were still common and widespread back in the analog days when there was no such thing as a click through rate to measure.
No. If you know how to make prices move a certain direction, go become a billionaire.
Ban/block all ads always. Modern digital advertising cannot co-exist with privacy and without being abused for propaganda.
And if you resist, you are considered a scraper bot and are blocked from the site.
So basically Demolition Man reality.
x Idiocracy where society's smartest people are affected to penis enlargement duties.
“Now all restaurants are Taco Bell.”
(2017)
Nobody is excited about ads in 2025.
It's less exciting when you've been living in the dystopia for a few years.
That is wild — that this video is 8 years old. I didn't realize until I read your comment.
(2017)
No Javascript:
https://py.tedcdn.com/consus/projects/00/29/70/008/products/...
The irony of watching this 2017 TED video in 2025, and find out that my NoScript extension reports half a dozen of JS trackers and ads providers on this page - including Google, doubleclick.net, sail-personalize and sail-track.
Oh, and if you navigate to this page without NoScript, AdBlocker or a PiHole DNS you'll probably be presented with a cookie consent banner, a bunch of ads on the page and before watching the video, and your data being shared with at least half a dozen partners (a number that can increase dramatically if you visit the page of any news outlet instead of ted.com).
So yeah, I guess that the message of this video aged like fine wine.
I'm using Adblock Browser on Android. Works pretty well also with youtube.
Pohl and Kornbluth in 1952 wrote "The Space Merchants" - "a novel of the future when advertising agencies take over." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants
you will like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government
also, the premise of the entire lore of shadow run, is corporations building armies and seeing they can get away with it and then just doubling down.
but back to reality... everyone would buy stock of the ad-dystopia and since now their retirement is tired to it they will just normalize and promote it. just like today.
I did read it, but the books I read when I was a teen still learning the world sit deeper in me than something I read in my 30s.
I don't think the last-name-is-the-company adapts well to the so-called "gig economy" where employment is structured as supposedly independent contractors, who in turn can be working for multiple organizations at the same time.
"Corporations building armies", etc. describes the Dutch East India Company pretty well, yes? As I get now into my 50s, that goal seems more and more an intrinsic part of limited-liability joint-stock companies.
No wonder the independent web is dead when even places like HN sound like this --everyone is referring to the same five websites, fb, twitter, etc. The few creators among us are stuck between google's bullshit and such retarded proudhonists that would like to see even more consumer-level content controlled by these monopolies.
One of the things that drives me absolutely bonkers is websites popping up an ad or some modal to enter my email or subscribe to something… While I am in the middle of scrolling or entering text / interacting with a form. It’s so jarring and frustrating and usually results in me moving on.
UX largely sucks and takes a backseat to the ad experience now.
If everyone had a Solana wallet, and ads were natively integrated, you'd receive $0.10 for every one you watch.
Consumers right now only get monetized. They see zero return from their attention being taken away from them.
I am actively moving as many of my workflows as possible to the terminal. I've always loved automation, but now it has become a quest.
The terminal helps automation?
How?
Most input is text, most output is text, commands are text. Vast majority of programming languages can process and produce text out-of-the-box. There are countless utilities for processing text. You can store, load, split and join text easily. Send and receive it through most channels.
When everything is text, text files become libraries. Text editors become macro processors.
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The internet has ads?
thanks to uBlock origin and pihole I don't see any of them.
Back in the sticks we usta callit, um, a paperclip optimizer.
If you updated this to today it would be that we're building a dystopia just to enable a too long; didn't read and too hard; won't work society.
It's a funny little causal chain.
Everybody just wants a peaceful, prosperous life.
We serve a corporation, because the corporation promises that.
The corporation just wants advertising. That is, clicks.
So the universal desire for peace and prosperity is bringing about the clicky dystopia.
Hey, make an artificial intelligent entity significantly more capable than any individual human, then be surprised you have a goal misalignment with your superagent.
We gave AI legal personhood in the 1800s and we were doomed from there
The presenter confeses that uses Facebook. Disappointed.
Maybe it's for the family pictures?
"We're"? Unabated capitalism.
I suppose it means the "general we", as in society at large or at least a dominant section of, as opposed the "specific we".
I think I was annoyed at the generalization when the specific cause was obvious. Using the royal "we" seems like an egregious misappropriation of responsibility given many people specifically vote against unabated capitalism.
Am I right that the only truly systemic solution to the problem of ads is government regulation, with communism as its final degree?
Something I believe but have no evidence for, and reality is continuing to, bafflingly, defy my expectations:
Ads are basically zero-sum in the sense that they mostly take customers that need something, and shift them to the brand that is advertised, instead of the one they would have heard of naturally (now, there is some element of ads actually increasing demand, but as people are quite cash-strapped or in debt nowadays, I guess it can only function up to some limit). Companies that advertise are engaging in an ever-increasing (more sophisticated, technical, and more expensive) competition to capture some allocation of this demand. Because we’re burning an increasing amount of money in a zero-sum competition, eventually the ecosystem must collapse under its own weight.
We can sort of see this, I think, in people becoming increasingly grumpy about how expensive everything is. But the system is very circuitous, so we misallocate blame all over the place.
Trying to regulate ads—I dunno, it seems hard to regulate without stepping on free-speech toes (US perspective, ymmv in other countries). I would rather regulate the collection of data, which doesn’t seem to be particularly protected in any sense other than that private entities can mostly just do whatever by default (it seems functionally similar to the sort of stuff that the 4’th amendment was intended to protect us against, except it is done by Facebook and Google so they get away with it) (but to be explicit, I think it is probably legal at the moment for companies to run vast surveillance networks, we need new laws).
Marx actually had stuff to say here.
He expected the end state of capitalism to be business owners just constantly fighting the markets to stay still. On the one hand, they'd be constantly trying to figure out how to make sure they were paying bottom prices for goods and services on which they relied, and on the other they'd constantly be fighting to try and sell in a saturated market. Eventually, collapse would ensue.
This was one of the foundations for his thinking.
He couldn't have predicted information technology, or ad tech, but the premise seems to hold up.
Of course, where he ended up was workers owning the means of production and every business basically being a "lifestyle business", with no need - or ability - to scale. This, as you know, became corrupted into government ownership, central planning of the economy, and all the other nightmares of a non-free market.
The ideal state - and I think this is where Marx would have wanted it - is that you might not have had a gazillion milk brands all screaming for attention (and the consumer ultimately paying for that, as it being priced into the amount they pay), but there being a free market of worked-owned businesses.
Or let all browsers track users, sell the info, shows ads over web sites, and so on. While blocking on page ads.
The market for ads shown on web pages and user info tracked by pages will crash, so companies will have to find more direct ways to make money again.
Why would communism be the end of the spectrum?
I actually don’t understand the thinking process behind that inevitability.
Mind to elaborate?
Because when you're the sole owner and provider of goods, advertisement loses all meaning.
I grew up in the Soviet Union. There was one type of milk on the shelf, it was called "Milk", and I don't remember the label saying anything else.
Compare with "HORIZON ORGANIC DHA Omega-3 Supports the Brain Health organic Whole Milk" dressed in bright red and contrasting yellow, with typography that begs "please look at me, I'm the better option".
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You sound like a 20th-century cigarette company representative using the fear of communism to keep the US government from restricting cigarette ads.
Edit: Now, I don't know if an ad exec actually said it, but I can find examples like:
> (2015) "Smoking ban is slippery slope toward communism" - https://eu.statesmanjournal.com/story/opinion/readers/2015/0...
> (1948) "Rep Flannagan told the House of Representatives that tobacco will also help in stopping communism." - https://www.brasscheck.com/seldes/tobac6.html
> (2007) "Smoking bans are an act of Communist aggression. " https://www.mesabitribune.com/news/smoking-bans-are-acts-of-...
More to the original point, Bern banned some outdoor advertising last year (!). https://www.iamexpat.ch/expat-info/swiss-news/bern-approves-... says "SVP councillor Alexander Feuz was the most strident [opponent], calling the change a “step towards Stone Age communism.”"
Looks like São Paolo has a widespread advertising ban since 2006(!!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
Bern and São Paolo don't seem all that communist.
DPRK has been described as ad block for your life, but even under communism to have a consumer economy a limited number of regulated ads can be useful so ppl know products exist, but not this brand combat to the death oversaturation.
I would say communism is the final degree of "government as provider" not of "government as regulator". The final degree of regulation could be any variety of authoritarianism.
Much better to have capitalism replace political tyranny with economic tyranny. Where survival depends on serving someone else's profit with the requirement their margin grows every year.
When markets control basic needs, capitalism becomes its own form of authoritarianism that forces everyone to self comply. But it's freedom because they voluntarily choose to not starve to death/be homeless.
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lol if you think this is about clicking on ads
Blame corporate greed for this never ending cycle of (human/psychological/and physical) exploitation in the name of pRoFiT.
A companion presentation to the OP is "Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming" by Nick Haneaur in 2014 —- https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocr...
He has also been running a podcast called "Pitchfork Economics" which I have found to be very enlightening on the state of this world. From an economics point of view, it explains the enshittification of many services we once enjoyed, the destruction of the middle class.
The past 40+ years of policy based on “reagonomics”/“trickle down economics”, neoclassical/neoliberal economicsc and psuedoscience from the Chicago School of Economics (ie, Milton Friedman) represents the worst era of America.
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It’s fine for you if you like it. The problem is that ubiquitous ads pollute the attention of those of us who don’t like it.
Would have been a much different (and better) world if the early web established micro-payments as a way of funding content and platforms. For example I’m happy to pay for YouTube premium to avoid the bloody ads, though I respect the preferences of those who enjoy the ads…
^ Exactly Ads are 100% fine I just want the option to pay to avoid them. Like black mirror I think had an episode or some movie had it where you watch an ad instead of paying for a bus ticket and that’s totally fine, cuz right now there is no alternative to paying for a bus ticket.
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I don't. I like reviews, datasheets, product selection guides and catalogues.
Advertisements are at best nuissance.
“Your outie loves watching State Farm commercials.”
Matrix XVIII: Let's try it again, why is kryptonite not working this time? Halp
C'mon. You will need to grow up real fast. Learn to use the references, not just throw them around.
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Please don't claim victimhood (“censorship”) when your comments are flagged. The guidelines apply equally to everyone, and the flags on your comments are from good community members who have a track record of flagging responsibly, to help keep the discussions healthy.
HN’s purpose is to be a place for intellectual curiosity, not ideological battle or railing against things you find disagreeable.
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I feel like these issues can be countered by a reasoning AI that runs locally and I can configure to operate in my best interest.
e.g, Filter out political posts on X. Fact check opinion videos on the fly.
I hope future computing devices will have neutal engine at the center, and CPU as secondary. And I should be able to teach it to take actions on my behalf.
Seems like a good use of energy. Waste tons of energy sending ads to everyone, and waste even more energy defeating them with an energy-expensive LLM.
Sadly, we can’t just trust everybody else not to try and pull one over us. (Fortunately, uBlock Origin still works and is fairly lightweight, and hopefully we won’t see native ads so indistinguishable from content that it can’t detect those for a while.)
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But it will be ok. Ads already stimulate over-consumption and thereby destroy the climate/planet. With an AI acting against that perhaps it will stop.
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You just described pretty much all life.
Forests are full of animals that hunt animals, and animals that spend tons of energy evading animals hunting them.
Life is a complex patterning phenomenon that dissipates energy, and as far as we understand it has no goal. Why should we expect complex human living systems to behave fundamentally differently? Individual human beings have goals, but huge collective systems like economies have either no consciousness or a kind of vegetable consciousness similar to a slime mold moving toward nutrients.
energy is abundant.
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It absolutely is a good idea. User-controlled smart automated filtering of outside content is clearly the future. Not sure why you're being downvoted.