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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

That's what makes Black Mirror so compelling. It's not flights of fancy with things like FTL traveling through space. It's taking slight twists to the darker side of where our tech leaders are taking us. At least someone is thinking these things through to the end even if our teach leaders are only thinking through to the $$$$. Too bad these stories are never enough to slow things down and used as "oooh, let's not let our tech come to that".

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Yeah a lot like older sci Fi works I think we won't take the warnings. Glad we aren't completely blind to it tho. Remind me of the "1984 was not a manual" memes

The meme about the Torment Nexus continues to be worryingly relevant in the modern world.

OH that's the fantasy that people like watching that show under! I hate that show's premise because reality is depressing enough, my mind easily conjures up shit going wrong, and (as an adult) I don't need a TV show giving me more nightmare fuel. Plus, that one episode where we all wear glasses that let you delete people by not seeing them seems like a instruction manual to tech giants working on AR glasses. Apple airpod noise cancellation already does this for audio, Apple Vision or Meta glasses doing that for visual pollution seems not that far behind. It would be nice to walk around the neighborhood and not see any billboards. Not seeing people that wrote wrong things on Twitter seems like it's just a GitHub repo away.

Maybe one could hack it to block out adverts? There would be a sudden impulse towards "moral conscience" meaning the feature had to be removed.

Creating a World without adverts might be a route to utopia.

You're absolutely right! let me get back to you after these messages from Coca cola!

I'm not an absolutist. How would you find out about new products in a world without advertising? There are ads I could do without, sure, but some do perform a useful function.

Information and adverts are different.

I feel HN is probably not conducive to an extended conversation about where the line lies. But, ...

I'd loved to have an extended database of well structured factual information about products.

Meta would never block ads. If anything, they would detect things like billboards and have the AR system replace them with ads bought through Meta's ad system. But blocking them completely so the user has an ad free life experience? Never.

Meta wouldn't just not block ads, they'd use the eye tracking system in the apple goggles to charge advertisers for time you spent actually looking at the ads, and then also the ad countdown timer would only count down while you were actually watching the ad. Look away from the ad and the ad stops playing! (See? No black mirror necessary for my brain to dredge out some dystopian ass shit)

That actually does happen in Black Mirror, in the episode Fifteen Million Merits. There's a sort of deafening siren that goes off if the characters look away from the ad without paying to skip it.

> (See? No black mirror necessary for my brain to dredge out some dystopian ass shit)

oops. you poor poor fella. haven't we pretty much gotten to the point that if you've thought about it, someone else has also already thought it and released it? at least, that's my core belief in any thing clever I think I might have just thought.

I'm not saying it in a "look at me I'm so smaht" sort of way, I'm saying that as an explanation as to why I don't want to watch black mirror

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