Id dream of a raspberry pie plugin that has a mic & IR transmitter that just listens to ads or any semblance of it and just hits mute the moment the confidence interval goes beyond 90% based on the rise in ampltitude. False positives would be straining though, and finding the moment to un-mute is also a bit difficult perhaps. But given that all ads have their loudness dialed up to 11 in relation to the actual program, it might be easy enough to just listen to a large drop in amplitude across the frequency spectrum to hit un-mute. This can be completely off-the-grid with incidental updates if so desired.

Could even put some federated learning into the bag for a slight dystopian flavour - and that sweet VC allure - to also listen to people hitting mute & unmute as a semi-reliable labelling feature. Just sample the time window recording of the frequency spectrum and it may be good enough already.

It wouldn't be foolproof but just good enough I guess. I'd be willing to pay 200$ for a ad silencing IR transmitter with >90% recall.