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Comment by nullify88 | Hacker News Reader

We do apply the same measure, adblocking. Except since companies base their businesses on ads theres a cat and mouse game at play to ensure you pay them with your attention. I'm reminded of the scene in "Airplane" where the captain is fighting off sales people in the airport. I feel the same way about the Internet.

My earliest memory of adblocking is the VHS recorder or player skipping commercials similar today to SponsorBlock and other autoskipping methods.

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I've noticed that I got Pavolved and whenever I hear things like "But first" or "This is where I'd like to tell you about" I immediately rush to the keyboard, expecting a sponsor segment I should skip.

During baseball games I've come to get annoyed when I hear the announcer stop talking and take a breath, about to change their tone of voice from conversational to formal so they can launch into one of the micro ad reads between pitches or at-bats.

It's the one type of ad/sponsor I can never block or mute, it's just too short/sudden. It's a 5-10 second read. Muting the tv for a whole 3-minute commercial break doesn't bother me.

Ads have become integrated into everything.

It's not new. Probably one of the most infamous examples, is why red and white are associated with Santa Claus. That's because they are Coca-Cola's corporate colors, and they heavily advertised and gave away a lot of swag, back at the beginning of last century. If you look at older depictions of Saint Nick, he's usually wearing some green.

I get sick of ads designed to look like copy, and presented inline in stories. That's going to get a lot worse, as LLMs are probably excellent at customising marketing drivel to fit into legit content.

Brand-building is important [to corporations]. Things like what words TV presenters and actors use can be manipulated to reinforce a corporate glossary.

Whenever you see a couple of actors enjoying a beer in a TV show, you'll notice the bottle labels are usually turned away from the camera. If you can see the label, it was generally paid.

I used to work for a famous camera company. I would often see actors using our cameras, but with the name blacked out (sometimes, you could see the electrical tape).

Some German publishers used to to that for books too, apparently. I've heard at least of cases of it happening to Terry Pratchet and Iain Banks (possibly because they wrote SF/F, which as we all know is not real literature).

https://gmkeros.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/terry-pratchett-and...

"But not in dreams, no sirree".

I gave up on audio books because of the unstoppable audible plug at the end of the book. If there are ads the content has to be really compelling.

Maybe its possible to feed everything in to a model that can identify the situation or context in audio or video and block a section out because its an ad. We would not be short of training material. Latency would have to be low enough to be attractive to users.

Radio shows and ballgames have been doing that for literally decades. I'm not sure why anyone needs to be bothered by it. Frankly, the better announcers don't "change their tone," they just read the ad blurb conversationally and move on.

Everyone knows it's the cost of doing business that when you tune in a ballgame, a couple of times the announcing crew will be like "oh by the way, here's this thing, check it out if you want because the manufacturer swears it's great!" In this dystopian age, that's like the oldest, most quaint form of advertising out there.

Also „Have you ever”.

Sponsorblock took care of that for me

I don't know, I'm just afraid of sponsorblock accidentally skipping a part of the video I'm interested in

It doesn't have to auto-skip, it can e.g. just mark the different types of segments for you to make the call to skip or not. You can also still manually seek to any part of a video (even with auto-skipping enabled).

Thus far it has always been right for me, but you can tweak the settings to offer you a manual skip if you prefer to lean into it more slowly.

In the UK the TV would show moving black and white stripes in the corner of the screen before a commercial break. If you were recording the programme, you could pause the recording during the adverts.

I don't know if there were VCRs capable of pausing automatically, based on the symbol.

Some examples — you can see one in the thumbnail for the first video in this playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGD2tjST16V9W8pWMM4bJ...

Viewers thought of them as that, and in popular culture that is what cue dots are remembered as today, especially by the Map Men, but technically that is not what cue dots were.

They were a way for the network to cue the regions for when to insert their regional content. It was not necessarily advertisements. And for programmes that were already regional, there was no need for cues from the network for when to run advertisements.

With digital playout, such things became no longer in-band.

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