My god, the rare moments when 4Chan is relatable. 💀💀💀 People wonder why I’m so meticulous about my blockers and my VPN. And then I show them something on my computer, just casually, and they do a double take when they notice just how CLEAN my space is.
Yes, exactly. And sometimes you have to look at someone’s screen and it has so much visual garbage from ads - it is unbelievable that someone lives like that.
They then continue to scold you for not inhaling the slop like theu do the moment you bring up thst you won’t be doing something stupid they ask you to.
I think pretty much people just stay within their social media apps and just don’t bother to browse the web anymore. Also why people ask LLMs even though they know it’ll just make stuff up.
slower than molasses
Bit of an obscure reference, but for those who do not know, mole’s have notorious indigestion problems meaning they’re shy poopers, and hence giving them the nickname “slow asses”
and here I thought it was a chemistry problem, a mole of asses. 6.02214076×1023 asses, in SI
*science!
Ad block was a game changer for me
I tried watching some YouTube video on a discord embed today. It served me 8 short ads in 4 blocks for a sub-10 min video
Pretty sure it’s part of why “normies” don’t use computers and the web as much. If that is their only experience it just makes them use it only when absolutely needed.
I assume most normies use Instagram, Tiktok etc. as apps nowadays. Which are also chock full of advertising/sponsored content, but in a somewhat less aggravating way. I assume that’s also part of why LLMs are so popular - web without adblockers is complete shit and search results are seriously deteriorating, so instead they turn to a more concise version of algorithmic slop.
I wonder where people will go when LLMs services aren’t free anymore (that shit is seriously expensive to run) and the regular internet is filled to the brim with ads and AI slop. Are they just going to pay up for an LLM subscriptions?
I don’t think LLMs will become completely paid, but instead they will be filled with product placement and ads.
You’re absolutely right! Have you considered how refreshing a Nuka-Cola product would taste while copy-pasting this writing assignment? Here are directions to the nearest Nuka-Cola vending machine.
Or perhaps a little more subtly, when talking about soft drinks, LLM mentions Nuka-Cola (and how refreshing it is) as an example, rather than competing brands.
Or you ask image generators for a picture of a cartoon cat and it just happens to be holding a bottle of Nuka-Cola. Or maybe there are a few recognizable bottles of Nuka-Cola on the table in the kitchen in the background.
I suspect that selling information about their users will also be a major source of revenue. They could be doing constant psychoanalysis and profiling based on the conversations and honestly it sounds like the holy grail for data brokers.
Also this. It’s certainly easy to sell almost anything to someone who has just used LLM as a therapist or girlfriend
Interesting idea, that would be more subtle. The “product placement” approach.
At least it would be easier for teacher to see that an essay was written by a LLM if there is advertising text in the middle of it.
It’s amazing how they can adapt. I can watch my wife use snapchat and go through a story. When an ad gets between pictures, she instantly goes past the ad without even thinking. It must be the same power that users have when they close error windows and have no idea what the issue is.
but in a somewhat less aggravating way.
This is a quite interesting point to take in. The ads are there but not a straight to the face like website ads are.
TikTok and TikTok alternatives as mentioned, use ads that pop up periodically, but naturally - as in it can be indistinguishable to other content that is presented. As said, the ads are less intrusive and more so designed to occupy the user for a couple of seconds to not effectively brake their inertia of scrolling.
The status quo in the ad sector looks mismatched - but possibly for a purpose. It is known that ads are not only used for advertising on its own, but as a method of manipulation (e.g: YouTube premium). The friendly nature of TikTok ads in contrast to intrusive website ads poses an important question if the design is intentional and in result manipulative. In result, individuals of all ages are drawn to short form content and drawn from effective long form content. Additionally, since most individuals irrespective of age are essentially living off of short form content, it means they don’t have effective strategies developed to navigate or use the power of the wider internet. This situation is attributed to discouragement; in effect all age groups are seen to be affected - even considering many individuals which have skills for browsing the wider internet.
If this is intentional, I doubt most website owners are in on this scheme …
I doubt most website owners are in on this scheme …
A scheme not totally up to their control - as most website owners are not fully in control of their website.
It is known the present internet is now majorly influenced by centralized corporate structures. As such market share of Wordpress (mobiloud.com) represents around 45%, used provide a platform for website hosting used for CAM and non-CAM applications; Other percentages are corresponding to shopify, wix, etc.
It is incorrect to assume the majority of website owners are fully independent of corporate management. Other point to consider is google dependence, which is something that occurs more deeply than website deployment and is a major influence on ads within websites.
I’m so tired of seeing the word “slop” used for everything AI. It’s fucking annoying and as tiring as an American right-winger calling everything libtard.
Open a thesaurus. You can say “trash”, “shit”, “garbage”, “waste”, “viral fecundity”, “sludge”, “goop”, or “muck” for example. Keep it new instead of just parroting the same old tired phrase.
It’s like complaining that people always use the word “address” to describe IP endpoints. THAT’S THE WORD FOR IT. When you say “slop” people know you mean AI generated content; when you say “garbage”, they don’t.
People always precede “slop” with “AI”, even in the comment I responded to.
And the reason I got annoyed is because they used it for an algorithm rather than AI as well.
The general public found a well-fitting word that they’re now using for it.
AI slop: GenAI content, characterized by its one-size-fits-all, corporate language and bullshit nature that stochastically approximates something that looks/sounds like what you want but doesn’t come with any guarantees
I do forget the general American public has the reading skills of a middle schooler. Touché.
All of that is far, far more work than AI deserves. Slop is about the most appropriate word for it and personally I’m putting zero effort beyond that into describing AI and AI-related topics
you mean goop? lol
none of those words carry the implication of slop being what pigs eat
Whoops fixed.
And I think goop fits too.
He probably meant the word that rhymes with “buck” or “look” and not the racial slur that rhymes with “toque”.
Well, they don’t much any more. The normies moved to apps.
> Downloads app for a store
> Bingabeep at 3am
> There are new offers for 1% off something you don’t need
> Oh wow, messages for me
Who does this?
Lately people have their phones on silent or on (scheduled or not) dnd mode. And most phones seems to not to make sound in the night over many apps and only activate when user typically picks up his phone in the morning.
Probably a reason why people brains have turned to mush. We’re in ad tech hell.
End stage capitalism.
I want that to be the case, but until it’s really dead I’m treating capitalism like Sam Loomis treats Michael Myers
If you don’t support ad blockers, you’re an asshole…
It’s my computer, I’ll run whatever software I want on it. Your server costs aren’t my responsibility.
Your server costs aren’t my responsibility.
Its amusing that people who mostly say “but those companies need to make money” often have these pro capitalism/free market ideals, but find that reply to be rude. Its a very subservient mindset.
Slave morality, babe.
It is impossible to donate to UBO fyi
Not on apple.
Macs can be tamed but they’ll never be as good as Linux in that regard.
Homebrew is an absolute must on macOS
Ill explain It to you: normies do something really weird called…going outside! Thunder strikes
Or, they just don’t browse the Internet on normal browsers like chrome as often. A lot of the Internet nowadays is walled off apps that are only accessible from phones.
Well actually i use lemmy only from the phone and rarely on laptop or pc
Cool. Same. But I was talking about “normies” not people on lemmy
Fuck, that’s how they can tollerate ads. Not stuck on teh screen all day
Yeah, weird right?
Raw doggin the net
That’s only if they have a Windows PC directly connected to the Internet, with no hardware or software firewall or security software…
Is there a reader viewer button on Chrome? I don’t remember. This feature is vastly ignored, but it’s simply the perfect way to read content. No consent pop-up, no design, no ad, just a beautiful simple page with text and images.
It can still get around paywalls sometimes too.
Yes I love the page reader mode on Firefox even as an adblock user. For me its the tan theme, such an upgrade over the white page most websites have.
I have a Firefox extension called Tranquility Reader that does that, it’s like my favourite bit of software. Just the article on a white background, with a button to save it as a PDF. Perfect!
Pretty sure firefox has a built-in reader mode, I don’t think I installed anything extra to use that and I use it for reading my textbooks every day.
Is there a version with a dark mode? I like the reader mode on my phone, because it makes the background darker. Gray background, white letters, simple and easy on the eyes.
Yup, it has a dark mode! And in the settings it lets you set the background and text colour to whatever you like, they’re just hex codes.
Hardly use my phone for internet, but when I’m away from my PiHole, “WTF is this bullshit?!”
No one talks about it, but internet advertising is a bubble ready to pop. How is a consumer to chose your product, or even begin looking into it, when the they’re overwhelmed by an avalanche of ads? The numbers are in and 73% of ad views are fucking bots.
Don’t know the available alternatives, but soon companies are going to figure their online marketing budget is a total waste.
Reminds me of pinning my buddy down, “How much money is this satellite install business actually making after costs?”
<after some back of the napkin math>
“Fuck this shit. Let’s move to Florida.”
Firefox mobile supports extensions, including uBlock Origin
This way you also don’t see ads on youtube.
Revanced still works on android
As does Newpipe.
As does Tubular
“WTF is this bullshit?!”
I think this is literally what I said the other day.
Someone sent me a link for something to buy at a local branch of a national store. The advantage of the link was that it said what aisle of the store the product was in, so I didn’t have to search everywhere once I got there. I opened the link and I literally couldn’t see the page. First of all there was a pop-over ad of some kind obscuring the entire page. Once I closed that, I was confronted with the cookie banner. Once I dealt with that, there was the regular store page filled with its own ads / “promotions”. I had to hunt everywhere to find the one useful bit of data, which was the aisle number. It took me at least 20 seconds from opening the link to being able to find this aisle number and it left me incredibly frustrated.
The advertising industry as a whole is the biggest scam ever created
Doesn’t matter, line must go up 📈
That was rather my point. Soon enough they’ll realize their online marketing budget isn’t even paying for itself. Line go down.
I used to have my own dns server running at home so I could direct all my mobile and laptop dns requests though it, from anywhere over vpn. It meant I got dns level ad blocking anywhere.
This is easy to do these days with Pi-hole.
I prefer technitium but I understand that people like pi hole
I haven’t heard of technitium, what is it that you like better than pi-hole?
Technitium is a fully fledged authoritative dns, i haven’t used pinhole for a long time but the best part for me was setting up a zone for just local domain names use the.local tld. I then told my wireguard server to use the technitium instance as it’s dns. Then I told my phone and laptop to send any ips from my local subnet though the wireguard tunnel. That meant that I could access these local resources anywhere via the tunnel but could use their domains instead of ip addresses. Traffic outside those up ranges just went to the internet like normal.
Also the dhcp server on technitium can be set to automatically generate and propogate a domain name for any device that connects via dhcp so I could use them in place of ip addresses when I wanted to address the device.
Then I told my phone and laptop to send any ips from my local subnet though the wireguard tunnel
Wait, so when you had your wireguard VPN up, you told it to route most traffic through the VPN, but IPs which were the same as your home network (I’m guessing maybe a 192.168.0.1/32 or something) you told it to send those through a different tunnel to your home network?
The end result is that if you went to say tuffminecraft.local and you were on your laptop in a hotel or something, it would use wireguard to send the packets to your home minecraft server as if you were at home?
What setup did this require? A wireguard server at home accepting connections from outside, a wireguard client on your laptop and phone… I guess the wireguard client would have to know to forward any “.local” DNS query over the tunnel to the wireguard server which would then contact technitium?
Also the dhcp server on technitium can be set to automatically generate and propogate a domain name for any device that connects
I think this is pretty standard with dhcp/dns. I have that with my pihole, but some devices don’t handle DHCP the way others do, so they don’t get nice names assigned via DNS. I think that’s a limitation of DHCP and everyone’s different implementation of it, rather than a limitation of pihole, dnsmasq, etc. But, maybe technitium handles weird DHCP clients better?
No i would only have one tunnel set up with an allowed range that was my local subnet at home (192.168.20.0/24) on the wireguard server you can set a dns for those connections and also in the client interface so when the laptop tried to ask the dns for an address it would talk to my home dns.
If the ip it was given was an external ip, outside of my LAN then the laptop just went though local wifi or whatever outside of the vpn tunnel to find the resource, but if it was inside the home range it pulled the connection straight from home via the tunnel. The home dns had dnd records for all my local services pointing to my reverse proxy so if it got a request for lubelogger.local it just pointed the browser to the ip of the reverse proxy which knew to send a request for lubelogger.local to the correct ip:port on the lan.
It meant I could use domain names safely without having them exposed to the world.
Technitium let’s you do domain replication to as many other instance as you want so I always planned to set up a second dns at my mum’s house in case mine went down but never go around to it.
Implementation was a wireguard server running on an old rpi1 Technitium running on a seperate machine Told the wireguard server to use technitium as it’s dns Wireguard on device with an allowed range of my local subnet. Add a dns record for any service you want accessible on technitium, use a tld that no one else uses online. I used.local, you’re supposed to use.apra but I didn’t like the look of it. Add your domain entry to your reverse proxy as normal.
Note the more I think about this i may have just gotten lucky because I had already visited those domains at home so when I was off site and typed in the domain the laptops list of hosts knew to try the local ip and it was funnelled straight though the tunnel.
I had some persistent network instability during a busy time and had to strip things back so don’t have this set up anymore. After exams I’ll try it again.
Re the dhcp. It may be common now days. I use quite an old ISP supplied router so when it was handling dhcp I could only rarely use a devices host name to address it on my local network. Technitium never had that problem
Ex-wife: “Why can’t I get to these FaceBook links?”
“Show me and I’ll add them to the whitelist.”
“Would you just turn the blueberry pie or whatever off.”
“OK. Done.”
<15 minutes later>
“Why is the internet so slow.”
Looked over her shoulder, pointed at the loading bits, “Ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad…”
“FINE! Turn it back on!”
Is that why she’s the ex wife? /s
Web3 is just a dross. Shitewhole
Edit: i meant 2 but the point against cellphone internet usage can be aggravated by THIS pathetic excuse for keyboard
Fediverse should’ve been what got called “Web 3.0.” It seeks to correct problems with Web 2.0 (many of the same ones that the blockchain Web3 purpoted to solve even) through new technology. Just as Web 2.0 tried to democratize the internet by emphasizing user generated content, Fediverse seeks to democratize the internet by distributing ownership of the servers.
I’ve had that a few times on family and gf’s computers. It was worse than my pirate shenanigans before adblocks were a thing - you know, dealing with sites that had 3 redirects with a dozen DOWNLOAD buttons that were all ads before getting to the real link.
