UBlockOrigin and UBlacklist AI Blocklist | Hacker News Reader

UBlockOrigin and UBlacklist AI Blocklist

github.com

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It is an unusual list. Along with a list an AI websites it also blocks a handful of instagram, X and Pinterest profiles. It also blocks a number of specific products on Amazon, such as a colouring book that presumably was generated with AI.

This kind of reminds me Steam where indie devs need to exclaim loudly that they are not using AI, otherwise they face backlash. Meanwhile a significant percentage of devs are using GenAI for better tab completion, better search or generating tests. All things that do not impact the end user experience negatively.

I think AI as a tool versus AI as a product are different. Even in coding you can see it with tab completion/agents v vibe coding. It's a spectrum and people are trying to find their personal divider on it. Additionally there are those out there that decry anything involving AI as heresy. (no thinking machines!)

> Additionally there are those out there that decry anything involving AI as heresy. (no thinking machines!)

I don’t think anyone decrying the current crop of “AI” is against “thinking machines”. We’re not there yet, LLMs don’t think, despite the marketing.

This is exactly the sort of refusal to comprehend so that you can get in an "um, ackshually" that the op is talking about. He's quoting a line from a book as a metaphor for a concept the book illustrates well.

This guy gets it.

You see someone who you think has missed a larger point, and all you can muster as a reply is a vague jab and unexplained reference? Do you not see the irony? Your whole comment is an “um, ackshually”, the very thing you are decrying.

I didn’t enjoy Dune, by the way. No shade on those who did, of course, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish it.

If you think there’s something there, explain your point. Make an argument. Maybe I have misunderstood something and will correct my thinking, or maybe you have misunderstood and will correct yours. But as it is, I don’t see your comment as providing any value to the discussion. It’s the equivalent of a hit and run, meant to insult the other person while remaining uncommitted enough to shield yourself from criticism.

Yes, latexr managed to somehow sidestep the point entirely and make a pedantic correction. I notice this a lot in these discussions.

The point is AI has lots of useful applications, even though there's also lots of detestable ones.

True. It's more like 'no creative machines' or 'no entry level middle class job machines'.

And they don’t reason. They do prompt smoothing.

LLMs don't think, and planes don't fly.

LLMs think in the same way submarines swim.

So... they do think? Or what is your position? Submarines obviously do swim, otherwise they'd either float or sink.

It's an old saying. The ability for submarines to move through water has nothing to do with swimming, and AIs ability to do generate content has nothing to do with thinking.

Uh, kind of the opposite :D

The quote (from Dijkstra) is that asking whether machines think is as uninteresting as asking whether submarines swim. He's not saying machines don't think, he's saying it's a pointless thing to argue about - an opinion about whether AIs think is an opinion about word usage, not about AIs.

Yes, submarines swim just like how people sail the breaststroke.

Are you hitting tab because it’s what you were about to type, or did it “generate” something you don’t understand? Seems a personalized distinguisher to me.

Given the political comments in what's supposed to be a filter, and how everything is prefaced with "shit" like "Pinterest shit," I bet the author had a personal political disagreement with those accounts.

The list is also too specific to be useful in some cases, like, is it really important to you that you add 12 entries for specific Amazon products, like: ` duckduckgo.com,bing.com##a[href*="amazon.com/Rabbit-Coloring-Book-Rabbits-Lovers/dp/B0CV43GKGZ"]:upward(li):remove()`?

It's bizarre that the list was even posted here. Why would anybody feel the need to share their own, personal blocklist with HN?

Even if GenAI is helpful it's okay to morally reject using it. There are plenty of things that give you an advantage in your career but are morally wrong. Complaints include putting people out of jobs, causing a financial bubble, filling GitHub and the internet in general with AI slop, using tons of energy, increasing dram and GPU prices.

And it's not even that apparent how much GenAI improves overall development speed, beyond making toy apps. Hallucinations, bugs, misreading your intentions, getting stuck in loops, wasting your time debugging and testing and it still doesn't help with the actual hard problems of devwork. Even the examples you mention can be fallible.

On top of all that is AI even profitable? It might be fine now but what happens when it's priced to reflect its actual costs? Anecdotally it already feels like models are being quantised and dumbed down - I find them objectively less useful and I'm hitting usage limits quicker than before. Once the free ride is over, only rich people from rich countries will have access to them and of course only big tech companies control the models. It could be peer pressure but many people genuinely object to AI universally. You can't get the useful parts without the rest of it.

Indie game devs aren't really facing any real backslash.

A smart loud minority is screaming a lot but actual paying customers don't care as long as the game is not trash.

You're right it's about paying customers. No one is going to waste time campaigning against a $1.99 squid game knockoff on Steam if it uses AI (many are just Unity assets flips already).

The backlash I've seen is against large studies leaving AI slop in 60+ dollar games. Sure, it might just be some background textures or items at the moment, but the reasoning is that if studies know they can get away with it, quality decline is inevitable. I tend to agree. AI tooling is useful but it can't be at the expense of the product quality.

Devs also shouldn't be using GenAI, it's inherently anti-worker and IMHO also anti-human. But I guess that's an unpopular opinion around here.

If a "C+++" was created that was so efficient that it would allow teams to be smaller and achieve the same work faster, would that be anti-worker?

If an IDE had powerful, effective hotkeys and shortcuts and refactoring tools that allowed devs to be faster and more efficient, would that be anti-worker?

Was C+++ built by extensively mining other people's work, possibly creating an economic bubble, putting thousands out of work, creating spikes in energy demand, raising the price of electronic components and inflating the price of downstream products, abusing people's privacy,… hmm. Was it?

Yes (especially drawing from the invention of the numbers 0 and 1), yes (i.e. dotcom bubble), yes (probably people who were writing COBOL up until then), yes (please shut down all your devices), yes, yes.

What part of c++ is inefficient? I can write that pretty quickly without having some cloud service hallucinate stuff.

And no, a faster way to write or refactor code is not anti-worker. Corporations gobbling up tax payer money to build power hungry datacenters so billionaires can replace workers is.

I never said C++ was inefficient, you don't have to prove anything. It's a hypothetical, try use your imagination.

> Corporations gobbling up tax payer money to build power hungry datacenters so billionaires can replace workers is.

Which part of this is important? If there was no taxpayer funding, would it be okay? If it was low power-consumption, would it be okay?

I just want to understand what the precise issue is.

Who could've predicted that the alarmist luddite viewpoint would be unpopular on the technology forum?

technology forum? the last hacker left this dump for lobsters 5 years ago

now it's full of SBF and scam altman wannabes

I don't know why people say this. I look on the front page and it's just interesting articles and blog posts on a variety of differing subjects. You must be either actively seeking out stuff you don't like and wasting your time actively hating it or just imagining it.

You shouldn't be using a wheel, it's inherently anti-worker.

what about cars? they are anti-horses… can we use cars/buses/trains… or nah?

Yes, it is an unpopular opinion around here, but pretty much in the tech world.

I think this is because most of the users/praisers of GenAI can only see it as a tool to improve productivity (see sibling comment). And yes, end of 2025, it's becoming harder to argue that GenAI is not a productivity booster across many industries.

The vast majority of people in tech are totally missing the question of morality. Missing it, or ignoring it, or hiding it.

I agree. The goal of AI is to reduce payroll costs. It has nothing to do with IDEs or writing code or making "art". It's meant to allow the owning class to pay the working class less, nothing more. What it *can* do is irrelevant in the face of what it is for.

If workers (i.e. me) choose to use it without it being imposed on them, is that a morally bad thing in your worldview?

I was trying to use an obscure CLI tool the other day. Almost no documentation and one wrong argument and I would brick an expensive embedded device.

Somehow Google gave me the right arguments in its AI generated answer to my search, and it worked.

I first tried every forum post I could find, but nobody seemed to be doing exactly what I was attempting to do.

I think this is a clear and moral win for AI. I am not in a position to hire embedded development consultants for personal DIY projects.

You've pretty much described the "what it is for" for a large percentage of industrial inventions. Clearly, however, the world would be worse off without many of them.

would the world be worse off if facebook and google had never existed?

I doubt it

The fact that there exist things created in the pursuit of money that are of questionable benefit to society... does not, in ANY way, negate the fact that there are MANY things created via the same motivation that are a benefit to society.

would the world be worse off if instead of google it had been blooglie or hooli that succeeded?

i don't know

I think the backlash comes from all the "AI-driven" layoffs that absolutely impact the end users negatively.

Surprisingly neurotic files full of strange comments and odd blocking choices[1]. Feels very much like the pet project of a few wannabe activist teenagers in a Discord chatroom with too much time on their hands.

[1] Numerous individual pages on places like digital storefronts and social media sites appear in the blocklist. Do the people behind this think they can create a list of every single AI-adjacent thing on the entire internet?

99% of the "main" list entries would be made redundant by simply blocking all .ai domains.

> Surprisingly neurotic files full of strange comments

1. Have you looked at block lists before?

2. Do you have a specific example of what in these blocklists is strange/neurotic? I swear I've skimmed all of them a few times now and although I won't be using them, I'm struggling to understand what's odd about them.

Why did the original get flagged?

Edit: On a second look the list is kind of weird. I'd love to block AI stuff but the blocklist is far, far too broad.

Yeah I hoped it would blacklist all those spammy autogenerated SEO sites from search results, but it looks like a vendetta with anything AI or machine learning in general.

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39771742

Interesting that the previous post was flagged. You may or may not find the list useful, but flag? Did it hurt some sensitivities?

It's a so-called hot-button topic and unfortunately HN isn't quite the paragon of pragmatic technical discussion that it was in the past. C'est la vie.

This reminds me of the final scene in The Conversation, when Caul sits alone in his desconstructed apartment after being convinced he is being eavesdropped - a victim of his own paranoia.

The reactionary response against the new technology, even on HN, is pretty strong. If I ran an AI developer, I'd take it as a signal that I'm doing something right - people see how powerful our product is, and they care about it. Hate and love aren't too different; we'll have many dedicated users who will have forgotten.

  First they laugh at you
  Then they tell you it violates the orthodoxy
  Then they think they knew it all along

“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”

  -- Carl Sagan

Right, but I think AI is undeniably powerful and useful. It has good uses and bad uses, of course, but looking to block all AI will someday seem like blocking all JavaScript.

You are free to think whatever you like. That doesn't make you right (or wrong).

Nobody is looking to block "all AI". Some of us are opposed to either specific cases or the broad deployment of LLMs.

I think the OP is blocking 'all AI' in a broad context, which I think is a knee-jerk response to new technology.

> Some of us are opposed to either specific cases

I definitely support that.

> or the broad deployment of LLMs.

I'm not sure what that means, but I support regulation of LLMs in general. For example, an LLM should not be allowed to represent itself as human.

As PG would say, the best startups are for ideas which are hated, because you'll have no competition.

>the best startups are for ideas which are hated

yes and so are the worst, and the problem is 95% of ideas that sound stupid aren't stupid and genius, but just stupid. As Peter Thiel used to say, it's not enough to be a contrarian, that's easy, you need to be contrarian and correct.

Right, and let’s not forget that the VC game that YC plays in assumes that the vast majority of their ventures will fail.

It’s way more exploitative than it gets credit for, even those who criticize VC firms aren’t verbalizing the vastness of the scope of the issue:

Startup incubators prey on young and ambitious people’s willingness to have zero life outside of work in order to set 90% of them up to fail and make huge profits off of the 10% Airbnb-type success stories.

These VC firms have money but no talent or time of their own so they basically steal it from founders in exchange for a Hollywood or pro sports-style superstar pipe dream where most are statistically guaranteed to fail, and even those who succeed don’t keep the majority of the fruits of their labor.

These failed startup founders end up with skills that are supposedly transferable to future ventures or what have you, but I bet if someone actually tracked down a lot of these people they might find a lot of sob stories of early stage founders who ended up burning out of their early career and having the whole startup founder experience representing a net negative in their lives.

But that's plainly wrong. Anything you try to do with AI right now will have a ton of competition.

Or it’s inauthentic and people don’t want AI slop that anyone can generate.

If it can be generated with a prompt, it has infinite supply and finite demand. It’s literally worthless in all senses of the term.

What worries me is that it’s reducing the value of actual engineering work (or good quality art). It’s like car lemons. Their existence also reduces the value of the good quality work

> It’s literally worthless in all senses of the term.

I think that misunderstands the economics:

For a long time we've been able to generate mathematical solutions at a prompt, and yet those still have value - I still gain by having them. Email is free and ubiquitous, but still has value. Clean water, for example, is generally free and ubiquitous, but has enormous value; I'd die without it.

In the market, things are priced by their marginal value - the added value of the last one sold; your 10,000th glass of water is not as valuable as your 1st (if you have only 1). But price != value: 'price is what you pay, value is what you get'.

Clean water isn’t free? Utility bills increase year on year.

It's very cheap. If buying the next glass of water was life-and-death, how much would you pay? The current price reflects its abundance.

It’s worth it though my manager said I was an extra good little worker in my last review. (/s)

> it’s inauthentic

I have a hard time believing that a population deeply into social media, an ocean of inauthenticity - disinformation, influencers, bots, trolling, etc. - and who actively support people who advertise their inauthenticity with pride (such as certain politicians), suddenly care about authenticity.

They don't want AI messing up the 'authenticity' of their social media? lol

I mean a line was gonna show up at some point. Maybe for a lot of people AI was that line. Or AI pushed too hard too quickly making the line too apparent.

I think it's just fear of change and new things, and authenticity is one rationalization of it.

That said, I care very much about both authenticity and regulating AI.

I'm glad somebody arranged all these niche websites I had never heard about, in a list. Will be fun to visit them all sometime.

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