TehWorld

Pihole. Doesn’t solve everything, but I’m currently blocking ads from just over a half million domains.

They didn’t have the framework knowledge before to automate the thing. It’s exactly where I was before AI. I knew that I could work more efficiently, but spending months learning Python was a lot slower than the 45 minutes, every other week I save by having a script do something for me. I don’t save enough budget to actually afford the time and effort to find a programmer, tell them what I need and then pay them to write it for me. Took 20 minutes worth of tweaking with the free tier of Claude and it was done to a “good enough” standard to save the time.

Because money. It cost tax dollars to roll a truck to these sites every time a switch needs to be thrown. I heard that an air raid siren went off not too long ago because some kids figured out that they were controlled by DMTF tones on an unencrypted radio frequency.

The little advertisers aren’t the scary ones. It’s Meta, Alphabet and Amazon that are scary and absolutely do fingerprint in this way. That said, the scale of these systems really does roll right past the individual user, unless someone really cares about YOU, but unless you’re doing something wrong, they don’t really give a shit. CSAM, illicit substances, amd more could probably be pretty easily rooted out by these systems, but that wouldn’t make-line-go-up so it doesn’t happen.

We ALL hope so.