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!
Quit squaking, flesh wad. Nobody's forcing you to buy anything.
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
Yup, you can find him on Mastodon now: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/112274383742505743
Rule 34 in particular is an excellent read, and expands on some of the concepts in the post.
Excellent title.
Risky click of the day.
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.
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"
That's why we need to fight against chromium monopoly
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.
I dare anyone to even just compile a document containing all the standards you'd need to implement
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... 🤔
I really hope you don't know about this 4GB limit specifically because you've run up against it while doing anything real-world.
Canvas code can get out of hand very quickly if not done right
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).
If you put it on my computer then I control it.
Oh look. AI task killer 4 found another one.
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?
In order to avoid detection we might need to download the JS, run it in a sandbox, and then reply with a plausible response.
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.
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.
..,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.
this is total nonsense
Yeah, it wouldn't be gigabytes of JS, it'd be gigabytes of WASM
I think this is sarcasm with a hint of truth to it
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
This is total AdSense
Ofc, it's moneysense.
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").
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.
Yea same. And I'm a Systems Admin lol
I believe it's called Copilot
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.
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.
I'm not scared of AI advertising because it will be impossible to sell. There are 3 issues:
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.
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?
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.
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!”
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
Doubt it.
Well yeah, NOW IT IS, now that you put the idea out there! Thanks!
kinda but no. where's the money?
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.
Yeah this is why I’ve made it a goal to read more often
God bless NoScript.
Be sure to follow the rule before you head out.
Rule: You must post before you leave.
