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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

How soon until we see AI-powered adblockers that filter the output of any signal to remove anything that it perceives as an ad?

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mythtv is still pretty great fwiw.

Auto flagging ads is pretty good, but even don't bother, just using kodi as a front end with the plugin and skipping forward 3 minutes when an ad comes on does most of the job. (sometimes you do another 30 seconds or 1 minute and you get really good at it).

Start watching your program 10-20 minutes late and no ads.

Live sport is the only place I see tv ads at all nowadays - hence the crush and cram maybe?

Everything you do to avoid ads, from blocking your ears, to ripping out magazine pages, running myth or equivalent, pi hole and similar adblockers must be made explicitly completely legal on the grounds of self-defence and proper care of your family. Regardless of the legality it's kind of your ethical duty.

Hey, do you have a good way to communicate this to normies?

I haven't had any luck explaining to my wife that advertisements are basically a sort of cancerous meme designed to deliver misinformation and manipulate you into wasting your money on products that focus more on self-promotion than quality or value. I just sound like a jerk and she somehow takes it as a personal attack

Some people will see the world differently than you do, no matter what you say. You'll learn to live with it.

I sometimes have trouble explaining this to others without coming off as a jerk as well.

I think the thing to do is to focus on yourself rather than the person you're talking to: instead of saying to someone that ads are "designed to manipulate you", say that they're "designed to manipulate, and I know that I'm not always strong enough to resist being swayed to want to buy something I don't actually want or need".

Frame it as ads making you, personally, feel manipulated. Don't try to proselytize and tell people that they're being manipulated, because no one likes to be told that they're gullible and weak. So focus on how ads affect you, not on how you believe they affect the person you're trying to convince. Because even if you're right about how it affects them -- and you probably are -- it doesn't feel good to be told that.

The really nasty side of advertising is the collateral damage of mental health issues, eg death by the torture of annorexia is just one. I find it's usually pretty easy to get some kind of agreement on that even if we agree we are not suceptible at the moment and how making the audience of the ads feel inadequate (so we spend money on something to feel better) is the point. Perfume advertised by perfet movie stars and models who are better and happier than you. It doesn't have to be a conspiracy, as a society we've thrown every ad strategy against the wall and selected for the ones that work and this one works so we use it, don't know or care it harms a vulnerable 12 year old. Ad exec doing lines off the boardroom table may not even be smart enough to abuse your children deliberately but _can_ copy this other thing that worked. "No fat women in coke ads." Needn't be a malicious agency or "obesity vendor" policy for it to actually be put into effect and be happening. (It could be policy too, who would trust them not to be vile?)

So that's the obvious end and you can see pretty easily how it exists all the way up the spectrum from the extremely serious effects through to the utterly "well thats 30 seconds I'm never getting back" level of trivial.

The advertising industry has no regard for you or your family's or your community's mental health. None. This is clear to me and you can form your own view. Given I believe that, we have to run defence. And you do, I do, everyone does. "Kids, that is fake, that isn't real." If you never had a discussion like that with younger humans, be they your kids, extended family, friends or randoms then, I kind of wonder why not? How much defence should we be playing against it all? As much as we can is my answer. It's wrong not to make some kind of effort.

Where are you drawing the line for the health and welfare of your family?

Depending on how the particular crowd, I sometimes describe it in D&D terms. I know that I took WIS as a dump stat, so why would I put myself in a position where I need to make a WIS saving throw against their CHA?

Cause there's a lot of bards here, and with 'pretty songs' it's easy to make yourself sound amazing...... Until the song wears off.

I've been a lot happier since completely removing mainstream news from my life, and everything I use has adblocking. I don't see any ads on my devices.

It's already too late for her. Better to focus on educating the next generation, honestly.

Tell her that ads are designed to make people buy stuff, and this causes overconsumption which is bad for the planet.

This is very hard and I wish I had a good answer, but all I can do is commiserate, really.

Most of the time when I try to float the idea that advertising is making someone sad so that they make purchases, that person tells me about the Great Products they discovered through instagram.

100% agree about the cancerous meme thing but you also need to be tactful, read the room, and let people have their fun. We'll all be dead soon anyway.

I was trying to figure out how to run the mythtv commercial flagging code w/o running an entire mythtv-backend. It doesn't look particularly straight-forward, if I recall correctly, because mythtv wants to store the cutlist in a database table.

We had expert systems in VCRs 20+ years ago that did that. They just sensed the black frames that occur during the fade-in/out between the commercials and the content.

Dust off my old response to "augmented reality": subtractive reality.

I originally thought of it as "subtracting out annoying people" but "subtracting out ads" is much more compelling.

There was a Black Mirror episode which included that. It started off simple: a mother subtracting a scary dog from the view of her young daughter.

What could possibly go wrong?

It sounds interesting on a psychological/developmental level too, children are routinely taught to ignore certain thoughts, concepts or emotions. Looks like technology could offer increased level of granularity and control. Scary times.

Aah, the old Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses from Hitchhikers Guide.

Several TV models already incorporate that feature. If your device is supported, your remote should have a button conforming to the IEC 60417-5009 standard to activate it.

For those that didn't get the joke (like myself), the IEC 60417-5009 standard describes the power button icon shape, with a line partially within a broken circle.

that method is particularly painful now that we're in the era of the booting-TV.

I'm thinking of Carl Sagan's book _Contact_, in which one of the characters became a billionaire by developing "Adnix" (removed ads), "Preachnix" (removed televangelists) and "Jivenix" (removed politicians) technologies.

Then some guys at Bell Labs developed "Unix" and... oh dear.

How soon will content makers make their content look like ads to force these algorithms to fail?

That's already happened ... just look at how many youtube channels have integrated a "and now let's briefly talk about my sponsors" segment in the middle.

Now all Youtube needs is to give the content creator the ability to disable the fast forward / skip 10 second buttons at specified portions of the video (in return for a fee of course).

They could try that, but browser extensions like Enhancer for YouTube will fix it.

Also, you can just download the video with youtube-dl and watch it that way.

That's exactly what they do with their "Shorts" section. They completely take away play controls from the user.

Is there any way to add the controls back?

I'd definitely like to disable the looping at the very least.

This is how ads were in the beginning of television, the characters in the snow would talk about the product.

And how ads on radio have been since forever.

And to be honest, I mind those a lot less. In fact, on old shows they're an interesting historical look into a society. To the point that they're included as bonus features.

Like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGDgnp7-uck

("Is that a PS Vita" in the middle of a dramatic, slow-paced show)

30 Rock executed this type of hamfisted product placement to great comedic effect, ending with a fourth wall break and "...can we have our money now?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d36wUmJGzvA

That's why we have SponsorBlock: https://sponsor.ajay.app/ It even has an API that youtube-dlp uses to automatically trim out sponsored sections from downloaded videos!

It's definitely useful - especially for yt-dlp - but I eventually had to turn it off due to the clipping being a bit wayward[1]. Often got videos where it'd clip 15-20s before the sponsor and 30s after which leads to horrible glitchy cuts. Or sometimes it would only cut out the middle 2m of a sponsor segment leading to, again, horrible glitchy cuts but with sponsorship. etc.etc.

[1] This may be because I was downloading things reasonably quickly after they went up - waiting a day or two might have got better results?

It probably is only cutting on the keyframes.

There's a flag to tell it to reencode up to and after the cuts, which would probably help a lot.

Yep - https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/FAQ

>Video files cannot be cut at exact timestamps without re-encoding. yt-dlp does not re-encode the video by default, even when cutting is required. You can use --force-keyframes-at-cuts to force re-encoding; however, this process is slow - there is no way around this.

I'd probably rather just tell it to mark the sponsor segments as chapters and then skip them manually. I think it marks them by default.

Excellent, I shall try this out, thanks

Not to mention all the youtube videos that are just ads. My 11yo wanted to watch some saxophone videos to help him learn to play – next thing I know, he’s watching a saxophone unboxing video with a reviewer gushing over the saxophone he bought from Amazon.

The main reasons for those are better negotiated pay, and because on youtube that's the only way an uploader can attach specific ads to a video.

What’s worse is when there is no clear distinction between the ad part and the actual content.

Either via product placement, or the ad section starts inconspicuously and gradually morphs into a full featured endorsement

I don't mind those if it's a good piece about the sponsor and I like the content.

If it's a 10:01 waffle piece with a huge sponsor segment before you get to the good stuff, I won't watch it.

Let's Game It Out is a great example of how to do the sponsor piece. I want to watch him take the piss out of the sponsor as much as the game.

At some point, they have to disclose they are an ad or the FTC can come after them. That's why Youtubers disclose it, and why Facebook goes through a ton of work to create a human, but not machine, readable "Advertisement" disclaimer.

We've had the ability for DVRs to automatically detect and skip ads for at least a decade now. Dish is the most prominent company that tried it, and immediately got sued by TV networks and had to remove the functionality.

My TiVo has a commercial skip button. It doesn’t work everywhere, but for a show that’s been in your queue for a few days it usually does. Apparently it uses AI to detect where others have fastfowarded or used the 30 second skip button and figures it out. It’s pretty nice for those times when I actually want to record something that has ads in it (which is rare).

What happens when you watch Fight Club?

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