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Comment by boothby | Hacker News Reader

When the early adopters start pushing neural implants they'll be ad-free. Not long after your boss insists that everybody needs neural implants for the sake of productivity, they'll be ad-supported but moneyed developers will be able to opt out. The terms of the ad-free service will continue shifting, so nothing is ever really ad-free for long, and ads for better neural implants are promotions not ads right? But y'all are working on neural implants because if you don't, somebody else will, aren't you

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You'll never see a neural interface ad. You'll just have always been a Pepsi drinker. It's right there in all your favorite childhood memories, after all.

We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia.

And this is how it'll look like: https://vimeo.com/166807261

I love and hate that movie.

There’s a black mirror episode about this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)

I think this was the plot of a Black Mirror episode?

When I started playing Shadowrun in the 90s, I thought neural implants were cool and I wanted to get one. Around the time Google started buying up ad companies, I realized that the hardware in my head would never be mine. But yes, I think Black Mirror has done an excellent job with these topics.

In the '90s I was ready to jack in. More computers, and getting me closer to them? Awesome.

By the 20-teens I was repulsed by the idea and kinda hated computers.

Today if you put a magic button in front of me that'd permanently un-invent the Internet, good odds I'd press it.

This was a throwaway line in the 1995 novel The Diamond Age. The thug knew a guy who had a spinal implant(?) which got hacked and now the guy saw ads across the bottom of his vision for life.

Yep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)

Oh, I love that show! So many brilliant, disruptive ideas

Futurama too (The Eye-Phone, or something).

It's the plot of many a dystopian scifi story.

Correct, but they stylized it as "eyePhone" (from MomCorp, the all powerful, caring conglomerate), and that episode is the origin of the famous "Shut up and take my money!" meme.

Neuralink and OpenAI were started months apart in the same tiny building. Draw your own conclusions.

The real problem here is capitalism. The system needs consumers to spend more and more. A system where nobody profits from you consuming more of something wouldn't have this particular failure mode

I don't know why you're being downvoted.

So, lately I've been trying to decouple AI from Capitalism, and it's starting to explain a lot of things, like:

* excessive hype

* doing layoffs, and scapegoating AI

* pushing AI into everything (Copilot)

* etc.

Blink twice to Accept the Terms and Conditions.

Of course.

Except this hasn't happened with electricity, cars, washing machines, smartphones, smart watches, Bluetooth headphones, ...

Not all technology is bad

It has absolutely happened with those things.

Cars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sceLsLkQf7A

Fridges: https://fortune.com/2025/09/19/samsung-family-hub-refrigerat...

I'm not aware of a smart watch doing first-party ads yet.

I didn't list fridges because I've seen ads there, but these seem to have gone away in newer models (people don't like ads)

My washing machine's app (LG) has ads, recipes, rewards programs, etc.

I think the main thing preventing it on the device itself is they haven't thus far needed a large screen to show them on.

Recipes? For washing clothes?

Yes. LG has a wide line of appliances, so the app has a recipes section.

When we first got our LG TV (a fairly cheap 43" LCD with mediocre brightness and WebOS) you could get an app to be the remote control. It was a convenient option when the remote fell under the couch.

They discontinued it for some elaborate "ThinQ" app which was designed to support a huge universe of different devices, and it was no longer something my parents could use.

I miss when phones had IR blasters; it was fun that I could control my old NAD 7100 reciever, which predated consumer smartphones by a good decade plus.

The existence of a single crappy car does not mean all cars are crappy

If only it was just a single crappy car.

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/arti...

Sure.

But the existence of a single crappy car establishes very definitively that a crappy car can and does exist.

Do you think Samsung's the only company that's gonna play with ads on their smart fridges?

It's not a good reason to be skeptical about cars as a technology (and by analogy brain computer interfaces)

I think it's pretty solid evidence profit-driven orgs will shove ads anywhere they can, regardless of how good that is for users.

True, but you can't affort the none crappy one eventually. Basically everything in modern society trends towards either cheap, but shitty, or excellent, but insanely expensive.

Our problem is that the used to be a huge middle segment, where you'd pay extra, but you got better quality. That middle segment has more or less disappeared, because it requires a fair bit of volume to be sustainable. Initially we, as in society, got lured in by cheaper prices, and reasonable quality, supported by savings in running super markets vs. a butcher, efficiency gains or subsidizes, maybe in the form of an ad here or there. Once we started expecting lower prices, quality started to go down, but restarting the "pay a little more, for better quality" segment isn't easy.

> huge middle segment, where you'd pay extra, but you got better quality. That middle segment has more or less disappeared

This is pure opinion, but I view that as the result of things like PE firms, activist investors, etc. who basically make the case "People respect $BRAND and think we're worth spending 30% more than the cheapest competitor. But what if we kept our prices exactly where they are, keep our advertising focused on how our tradition of quality is our whole reason for existing, but we shift production of our product/service to the same cheapest-possible way the cheap competitors do? At first this was a big gamble, as theoretically customers will notice when their car or their toaster starts falling apart in 4 years, instead of the 10 or 15 years the old one lasted, but this "Moneyballization" of most brands has been so pervasive across the whole marketplace that customers now can't choose "the brand that didn't do that" because ALL the brands did that (or were bought by a brand that does do that). So it's become a completely risk-free strategy.

Electricity I don't know how you could deliver ads through, but if someone could think of a way I bet they would. If everyone knew Morris code I bet they would make the lights flicker in Morris code for a discount.

Modern cars with connected infotainment systems are always trying to upsell you

Washing machines I dont know of anything at the moment, but I wouldnt count it out.

Smartphones/watches? Aren't those just ad delivery mechanisms? Not to mention tracking? Its a core foundation of modern ad technology

Headphones are not thank god, I hope it stays that way

Alright let me put on my evil corpo hat. Wait it was already on.

Headphones that inject ads is a great idea but we need to make that a better proposition. Lets say that these headphones have an AI integration which parses all sound and converts it to text, then we can run it through our AI to give helpful comments. We may even wait until no sound is playing to inject them (for now). We can add ads later once it becomes helpful. Imagine you are listening to a podcast / youtube video then you get a helpful voice give additional research and ideas. Like a friendly research agent on your shoulder.

Also more subtly, we can detect what music is playing and “slightly modify” the tunes of bands not part of a label owned by a Trusted Partner to sound worse.

> Electricity I don't know how you could deliver ads through

Even if you could, electricity is a utility with laws against disconnecting it in certain circumstances, even for nonpayment, and the internet isn't. So unless someone is going to make the argument that neural implants are utilities, ads injected into them seems like a pretty fair bet unless there is legislation not only making it illegal to do so, but making it illegal to make an implant even capable of receiving or displaying one. At least with that even if they repealed the law you'd be safe if you already had the implant.

That's a great Freudian slip.

Morse code - dots and dashes for characters via light or telegraph or radio

Morris code - Robert Morris wrote the first internet worm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm

I've never seen an ad delivered through any of these things. On smartphones I mean the phone/OS itself

It would be very easy to deliver ads via electricity. The utility could require you watch an ad before using more

Or via your smart thermostat.

https://sense.com/consumer-blog/with-your-permission-utiliti...

(Morse code messages via your flickering lights would be a hilarious app, and I'm somewhat reluctant to mention it here before someone gets VC funding to actually try it.)

> It would be very easy to deliver ads via electricity. The utility could require you watch an ad before using more.

That does not sound very easy to me. That sounds barely possible.

It's trivial

Lots of poor people have in residence electricity boxes that require prepayment for usage. In the olden days you put a coin in to turn on the power, but nowadays they have apps and digital payment solutions!

They might already have ads in those apps...

This is all news to me. It seems like it would be tough to prevent people from just using the power that's going to that box.

I guess I'm out of touch, because I've never heard of anything like this. I've had my power turned off for non-payment before, but I had to talk to someone at the utility to get it switched back on.

I don't think I've ever actually seen one. I only know about this style of electricity utility because it was a part of a Mr Bean episode once.

Modern cars gather a truly shocking amount of data about their "users", which is then sold to all and sundry, including those wishing to sell you products.

My LG dryer was using wifi to advertise an extended warranty for itself.

Then it broke, maybe I should have bought the warranty?

I bought a simpler model without wifi this time.

What are you talking about, in what way is this supposed to be an argument about ads? It sounds like your dryer broke

The "buy the extended warranty" thing is clearly an ad.

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