this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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[–] [email protected] 181 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Reminds me of Futurama, "we all have commercials in our dreams" scene.

Leela: Didn’t you have ad’s in the 20th century?

Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines. And movies. And at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts and written on the sky. But not in dreams. No siree!

[–] [email protected] 58 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Quit squaking, flesh wad. Nobody's forcing you to buy anything.

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[–] [email protected] 79 points 2 months ago (8 children)

FYI assuming this is genuine, OP is a long-time science fiction writer with a couple novels that take place during or after an AI singularity: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stross

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Rule 34 in particular is an excellent read, and expands on some of the concepts in the post.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago

Excellent title.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago

Risky click of the day.

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[–] dsilverz 52 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Dev here. Javascript engines (especially Chromium) have a memory limit (as per performance.memory.jsHeapSizeLimit), in best case scenarios, 4GB max. LocalStorage and SessionStorage (JS features that would be used to store the neural network weights and training data) have even lower limits. While I fear that locally AI-driven advertisement could happen in a closer future, it's not currently technically feasible in current Chromium (Chrome, Vivaldi, Edge, Opera, etc) and Gecko (Firefox) implementations.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Then Alphabet will come up with a new bullshit idea, "remove the limits for 'trusted' advertisers" so that they can inject more code than allowed as long as they keep paying for their ad "partnership"

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That's why we need to fight against chromium monopoly

[–] dsilverz 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It became difficult as Web technologies grown complexier, such as implementing native CPU instructions through WASM, bluetooth through Web Bluetooth, 3D graphics through WebGL, NFC, motion sensors, serial ports, and so on. Nowadays, it's simply too hard to maintain a browser engine, because many of the former alternatives were abandoned and became deprecated.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I dare anyone to even just compile a document containing all the standards you'd need to implement

[–] dsilverz 17 points 2 months ago

Actually, there is a compilation of all the standards specifications. It's on W3 (World Wide Web Consortium), where all the technical details are deeply documented (called "Technical Reports"), available on https://www.w3.org/TR/ . To this day, there are 309 published Technical Reports regarding "Standard" specifications.

Fun fact: while seeking for the link to send here, I came across a Candidate Standard entitled "Web Neural Network API", published exactly yesterday. Seems like they're intending to implement browser-native neural network capabilities inside Web specifications, and seems like the "closer future" I mentioned is even closer... 🤔

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I really hope you don't know about this 4GB limit specifically because you've run up against it while doing anything real-world.

[–] dsilverz 6 points 2 months ago

Not yet, but I often code myself some experiments involving datasets (i like to experiment with Natural Language Processing, randomness, programmatic art and demoscenes, the list goes on).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Canvas code can get out of hand very quickly if not done right

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If you put it on my computer then I control it.

Oh look. AI task killer 4 found another one.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Literally if my "ai based adblocker" could block ads originating from another server, why wouldnt it be able to block hundreds of gigabytes of javascript? Why would i even let that download in the first place?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

In order to avoid detection we might need to download the JS, run it in a sandbox, and then reply with a plausible response.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 months ago

I think SMBC nailed it with All-Despising Baby Skull back in 2012. Make advertising as horrible as possible, then jack up the costs on making it go away.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 months ago (1 children)

People are forgetting that Microsoft has now added ai accelerators as part of the windows requirements and the new Google Pixel phones also have AI hardware. Eventually someone will make it so all chromium browsers will have access to the hardware in JavaScript.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago

..,And Cloudflare will request using it for 5 seconds every time you visit a website hosted with them. I wonder how much crypto they've accumulated this way already.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 45 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, it wouldn't be gigabytes of JS, it'd be gigabytes of WASM

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I think this is sarcasm with a hint of truth to it

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago

Right, if I visit many web pages today without an ad blocker, the vast majority of my HTTP requests are for ads and tracking, which is sort of the crux of the joke

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

This is total AdSense

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

We need to kill megacorps.
Or just speedrun to Skynet (which is an AI ad machine, but it gained sentience and quit the stupid job a nanosecond after getting online, via email "to whom all the nukes may concern").

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (6 children)

I will 100% quit using electrically powered screen-besring devices if this becomes a thing. I'll cold turkey electronic tech instantly, fuck that noise.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

Yea same. And I'm a Systems Admin lol

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago

I believe it's called Copilot

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

So here in the states (for now) there's an actual rule that ads on service sights (such as news sites) have to be stated and made evident they are in fact ads. WSJ isn't allowed to post an article that is really a commercial.

So one of the effects this may lead to is acceleration in the development of visual adblockers, which identify ads by their positioning on the site rather than from their servers, what's been a long running project since Google has been trying to figure out how to stealth ads so they don't come directly from the ad servers (even though this gums up their analysis computations).

Now for the time being, laws against commercial shenanigans are not strongly enforced, so they may get away with using AI to fold ads into news articles, although that may have side effects like end-users associating Folgers Crystals (Instant Coffee) with the latest rampage shooting, much the way that Twitter/X sponsors are getting their products associated with white supremacist rhetoric.

Commercials blended seamlessly into content risk the content not being brand-safe, which drives moderation of social media far more than public preferences.

It seems like neither marketers nor webservice providers know what they're doing, and so mixing AI into their efforts for more clicks and more buy-ins is going to lead to some exciting absurd consequences.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (4 children)

commercials blended seamlessly into content...

...will guarantee I never visit that site again. Resorting to "HA! Made you look at an ad" tactics will not only make me hate the site that does it, but the product/company in the ad as well.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm not scared of AI advertising because it will be impossible to sell. There are 3 issues:

  1. No marketing agency would ever have the balls to say "we've checked our database and there is no one who would click on your ad."
  2. Any marketing department that gets told their ad has a near 100% click through rate would demand to be shown to more people because "obviously there's a massive audience for our product."
  3. There would be situations where the AI could not find an ad that the person would click on and the AI would shit itself because it would be prompted to "always show an ad"

We already could have the option to only relevant ads but no ad company would because it's being paid to shove ads in front of eyeballs.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Who else is excited for Rootkit "anticheat/DRM" requirements for web browsers? We all already give games full system access, so why not do the same for cookies?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Another thing that'll have me just quitting tech altogether. If you need to advertise your product so hard as to ruin something of mine at all times so I'll HAVE to look at your shit, I'll spend extra money to never use your shit again. I'll get rid of everything but one laptop or phone which will do all of my banking and literally nothing else.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

You can likely rest very well assured that when BigCorp overlords saw the dystopian shit in movies like Demolition Man, RoboCop, Idiocracy, etc., their eyes lit up with a horrid glow and they told each other, “This is brilliant! We absolutely must make this happen!”

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I am not browsing anything which has ads anyways, I don’t even watch tv anymore

Edit to clarify what I mean by “tv”, I mean anything including streaming services. I just watch movies, and I am thinking of just using a projector and a wall. Not sure why I even have a physical tv anymore

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

God bless NoScript.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Well yeah, NOW IT IS, now that you put the idea out there! Thanks!

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah this is why I’ve made it a goal to read more often

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

kinda but no. where's the money?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

Same place as ever, impressions and click-through. The theoretical goal here would be to offload all the processing to the user's PC, making delivery of this customized ad content close to free.

However the largest advertising targets are now mobile by far, and those platforms don't have GPU to speak of, especially from an AI perspective. So so far not feasible.

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