66 comments

[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] thread
Has anyone had any luck getting ublock to work on Twitch? It's the only one undefeated for me right now.
You need to install Adguard Extra. I’m not sure why the extra technical blocking from that isn’t integrated into Adguard itself, but it works a treat on sites with aggressive adblock workarounds.
Thanks for a list of interesting websites!
Why the snark?
Unless you think AI==bad, it is an interesting list. Lots of cool new toys to play with lately.
AI is NOT a toy it is an Abomination.
I haven't had this much fun programming since I was a kid. The speed with which I'm able to pick up new concepts and execute my toy ideas and experiments is just crazy. The last year has been an absolute joy being able to cut through debugging new things and jump over brick walls.

It's not going anywhere and is only going to get better, learn to leverage it.

Are you actually learning the concepts though? I'm not trying to be inflammatory but a lot of people I see using LLM use them as a replacement for StackOverFlow. They aren't learning anything they just need it to spit out code that works.
Do you need to really learn if it works and ships?
[dead]
This isn't a commentary on AI, but specifically the idea that all you need to achieve is "it works". That's based on the fallacious premise that a human can reasonably bucket a program (especially one as complex as an end-user application) into "working" and "not working". You don't know it's "not working" until you know, which may in some cases be never.

As for AI specifically, robust testing is already difficult with human-curated logic. It's potentially more likely to miss failing cases, or non-binaries (e.g. performance, security), when testing genAI. More subjectively, your conjecture represents a mindset that is demotivating to people with certain flavors of creativity/passion. Also, overreliance on AI may blunt skills that may remain useful, and even important - i.e. it may exacerbate an expertise scarcity.

(this may make me sound more negative on AI that I am - remember that I'm commenting in the context of the post you're replying to)

(comment deleted)
Yes, absolutely. AI has been an amazing learning tool for me as I transitioned into gamedev working at a Unity studio. What used to take upwards of hours to research or debug can now be solved in minutes by asking AI about solutions, best practices, and feedback on code.

I am constantly using AI to learn more every day -- and learning at a faster rate than I was just pouring through the internet for those same answers.

Absolutely, and I get the sentiment.

I'm not just using it to generate code, but asking specific questions. Even really basic stuff like, write me a Fibonacci number generator in X language. Helps me understand the syntax immediately. I can start from a place of familiarity. A lot of times when picking up a new language, the hello world stuff is kind of drawn out. Give me a program in Rust that generates 50 random numbers and sort it from smallest to biggest. Give me the basic framework for a Flask app, etc etc.

Or, I have an app that scrapes a website. What is the best architecture to put this into a database to reduce scraping the same thing multiple times?

I use it like a project manager/software architect/tutor in that order I think.

It massively reduces the friction to just getting things going.

I know how to leverage it, I’m just eye-rollingly tired absolute bottom-barrel quality AI images, and AI generated content. Every time I see AI generated content, including header images and logos, it’s become a marker for “too lazy to put in effort, so why should I”.

I bought a midjourney subscription for a while, and had fun playing with it, for like, 2 weeks and then that was kind of it? Like, yep, you give it some text, you get some image. Ok. None of it brings me joy like actual art or photography does.

No snark intended but I think image generation is probably the least interesting thing AI is doing these days. It's a tutor in a box.
AutoComplete and Machine Learning are tools.

They are not the same as the Abomination parading as Intelligence called "AGI".

I really struggle to know what to say to people with this attitude other than "Ok, well, we will keep progressing while you pout about it. Come back when you're ready to be a big boy."

Who gives a shit about the terminology? It's crazy useful. Would you be happier if everyone called it "Poopy Dumb AI"? I doubt it.

Idk if it's just ludditism, or fear of replacement, or jealousy or what, but I just can't understand it.

(comment deleted)
Yeah, I actually forked the list to go through each site later and check most of them out. It honestly seems like a great way to discover new AI tools/websites since it looks like it'll be easy to spot the low-quality sites among the sea of actually-interesting/helpful ones blocked for no reason.
Obviously it is a list of AI sources that may be interesting - but I didn't contest that. I object to snark. Not to whether a person has an overall positive or negative view on AI.

Declining to be snarky often helps out everybody, and obviates the motivation to jump to defensiveness.

was excited for a second thinking this was a way to use ai in real time to block elements on a page based on user defined criteria
I was thinking the same thing when I read it.

That honestly sounds like a fantastic use of AI that doesn't hurt anyone.

Honest question - why something like that doesn't exist yet?
Because detecting AI content is not yet a solved problem. And it might never be, because such a thing would be wonderful to train against while making the next big AI.
The question directly above is about using AI as to enhance the content-blocking technology, not about using blocking technology to target AI content.
There's no performant way to do so, even with browser-friendly model optimizations.
It probably exists, but not very well known, or is too expensive to use. For example, I wrote a SpamAssassin extension that adds some score to messages based on whether LLM thinks it is a spam email. It worsk very well, but it's a bit pricey when it comes to API costs. Maybe if I switch it from GPT3.5 to Claude Haiku it will make more sense.

I think we still need to see prices of LLM tokens go significantly down and performance increase before such web filtering solutions make sense. The Claude Haiku is a big step int he right direction, but the price is still high for this kind of high-volume usage.

Yeah, way too broad and uninformed. Seems to indiscriminately block anything `.ai` and on a quick read I immediately noticed deeplearning.ai (Andrew Ng's super famous course) is on the list.
I was inspecting the list and I thought it was kinda funny that there are a few absolutely random URLs to single AI images like: artstation.com/artwork/KOJ80W, it doesn't even have a like, I wonder why it was worth blocking that one in particular.
Is this just against AI-generated content in general, or against sites that use AI-generated content and do not disclose that they are doing so?
I'd say more "AI in general" (especially when you get to the nuclear list and it just walls off DeviantArt).
It appears to just be anti-ai without any discernment whatsoever.
This list kind of seems to miss the mark... I want to block sites that use bad ChatGPT content to do SEO drowning out real content or otherwise uses AI in an abusive way. I wouldn't want to block sites that just talk about AI, or are AI demos (where nobody is being tricked or spammed).
Ironically, the only way to catch that stuff at scale or in an automated fashion, is with AI.
Yeah, there are actually so many useful sites being blocked if you actually look at the list. Artbreeder is a great example.

Other examples of useful sites on the list: Huggingface, Civit.ai, DeviantArt, PromptHero, AIDungeon, Midjourney, Stability.ai's company website, and even Canva.

This just seems like a list for the "I don't want to see anything about AI ever" mindset, rather than, as you said, a list for directly fighting the misuse of AI.

To be fair, every AI community that allegedly attempts to exclude the latter ends up failing badly, so the former is really the only option.

I trust no claims of "actually useful AI" after being burned so many times.

I don't care whether its useful so much as if they are being annoying/misleading about it.

Take for example https://thisanimedoesnotexist.ai/ (chosen randomly from the list). Is it useful? No (or at least not to me. I suppose there probably exists some audience for this sort of thing). However its not pretending to be something its not, so its also not problematic. Nobody goes to that website thinking they are getting hand drawn anime only to be baited & switched.

most people want to never hear about AI again, it's everywhere in their face all of the time. Technologists and grifters are so dominant in the field and have zero ethics, people just don't want to deal with anything adjacent.
I'm not sure about "most" people (I think most people are just now learning that e.g. ChatGPT & Windows Copilot even exist), but those people who don't want to see anything about AI ever absolutely do exist and this list is probably great for them -- and it's also great for all those communities in which those same people would probably be distracting or otherwise cause problems in. Seems like a win-win list to have.
Meh, ChatGPT has had plenty of news coverage and people were talking a lot about it. Traditional news are filled with stories about AI this and AI that. Even stuff that isn't AI now includes AI somehow just to jump on the hype train.

I've got a normie friend who's already in full doomsday mode about AI and quoting stupid stuff people in the news say about "this wouldn't have been possible without AI" and we're all losing our jobs. People talked about AI a lot and the topic has become boring.

Plus what GP said about grifters and people with zero ethics. I wouldn't mind blending out most of the AI news except maybe actual research progress (and I don't mean better LLMs). It's just a buzzword that I've come to associate with low quality by now. Every stupid thing is with AI now, every Launch HN is something with AI. I'm personally bored by this

(comment deleted)
At first I assumed this would finally blocked auto-generated garbage SEO spam results. But it seems to just list a bunch of AI art generators and other pretty useful content.

This seems more like a whitelist tbh.

Blocking any .ai domain seems completely off the mark. I thought this would be sites which have obviously AI generated content.
These are a bunch of neo-Luddites. AI is just a tool, and isn't much different than photoshop. They're afraid of applied mathematics.

From their blocklist source:

> Going NUCLEAR!!! (sites that have a lot of AI "art"/heavily support AI "art", but also have some authentic artwork;)

This is so ignorant of how these tools are actually being employed.

I'm actually fine with them removing themselves from the community. The fewer complaints we'll hear.

This, however (also from their blocklist source), is concerning:

> Gross nudify sites/deepfakes/porn (why isn't this illegal?!?!)

While I think generating porn of people is weird and potentially abusive, these people seeking to constrain thought and free speech are outright scary. Far scarier than any imagined breasts or penises.

Imagine how far down that slippery slope we'll slide if these people start to have their way.

Where were these people complaining about Beeple's Trump nudes? (I'm not trying to be political - I'm just stating that all of a sudden AI has people wanting to constrain free speech.)

The media narrative of "AI scary" is winning, and the politicians can and will use that to control us more.

Will some of these rules have false-positives that HNers won't want hidden from them in search results?

    google.com,duckduckgo.com,bing.com##div>a:has-text(/Stable Diffusion/i):upward(div):style(opacity:0!important)
    google.com,duckduckgo.com,bing.com##div>a:has-text(/AI Art/i):upward(div):style(opacity:0!important)
    google.com,duckduckgo.com,bing.com##div>a:has-text(/Generative AI/i):upward(div):style(opacity:0!important)
    google.com,duckduckgo.com,bing.com##div>a:has-text(/Ai/):upward(div):style(opacity:0!important)
    google.com,duckduckgo.com,bing.com##div>a:has-text(/AI/):upward(div):style(opacity:0!important)
    google.com,duckduckgo.com,bing.com##div>a:has-text(/Lora Model/i):upward(div):style(opacity:0!important)
    google.com,duckduckgo.com,bing.com##div>a:has-text(/diffusion/i):upward(div):style(opacity:0!important)
    google.com,duckduckgo.com,bing.com##div>a:has-text(/midjourney/i):upward(div):style(opacity:0!important)
    google.com,duckduckgo.com,bing.com##div>a:has-text(/niji/i):upward(div):style(opacity:0!important)
    google.com,duckduckgo.com,bing.com##div>a:has-text(/SDXL/i):upward(div):style(opacity:0!important)
    google.com,duckduckgo.com,bing.com##div>a:has-text(/ai generated/i):upward(div):style(opacity:0!important)
    google.com,duckduckgo.com,bing.com##div>a:has-text(/text image synthesis/i):upward(div):style(opacity:0!important)
    google.com,duckduckgo.com,bing.com##div>a:has-text(/aiart/i):upward(div):style(opacity:0!important)
    google.com,duckduckgo.com,bing.com##div>a:has-text(/AI illustration/i):upward(div):style(opacity:0!important)
Also, for true-positives for these rules, you might want not to hide them, since showing them can make a user aware of a site that needs a domain-based rule contributed to the ruleset.
What if some AI generated content is...good?
.... its not.
I have a few blogs where I post useful content with human written articles, but the images are AI generated. They make the article better and add visual context without me having to pay graphic designers for stuff i'll never make money on.
I'm really, really struggling to put myself in the frame of mind of a person who feels they need uBlock to block /r/MachineLearning.
This for sure feels like a rage block list. Some guy just starts sweating every time he sees something AI related. BLOCKED!! fumes
I can understand an artist that works for commission to draw a nice pidgeon searching for pidgeons on the net to use for reference. And then ends up sending a picture of something an AI thinks is a pidgeon but has horse eyes :-)
I wish there was a list lihe this to block AI-generated spam that wasn't evangelism against anything AI-related. This blocks a bunch of discussion subreddits for no real reason.
What about blocking chatgpt crawlers?! The other day I was asking ChatGPT about specific topic, it did answer me first with a generic answer, two out of the three citations were my personal website..
Thanks for a list of interesting websites!
> google.com,duckduckgo.com,bing.com##div>a:has-text(/AI/):upward(div):style(opacity:0!important)

this has to be a joke right?

I see the utility of this as removing AI image results from google images. Many artists need to search for real life photo reference in order to improve their drawing or painting skill. If you've never heard "photo reference" before, you may assume this is like tracing, but that is not the case. What you do is "study" a reference then paint on your canvas separately. This is to improve your ability to render particular subjects and materials.

Although AI generated art is fairly adept at rendering materials at the small scale, they often have issues of large scale consistency (e.g. clothing wrinkles turning into seams in an unrealistic way) or being inaccurate (e.g. a certain type of wild cat having ear tufts when it shouldn't). These are real examples that I have seen.

Needing to sift through AI art in order to find true photographs for reference is frustrating. A blocklist helps with that.

What did people do before Google Image search and the Internet existed? Let's block everything because a few entitled hobbyists no longer have a world revolving around them.
I assume you'd go to the library and find photo catalogues, but this is inconvenient and before my time. Nobody is suggesting everyone use this blocklist, but it's here for the hobbyists who want to use it.
What did Anguilla ever do to you?

For all the trash-talk about .ai domains, it's disappointing that the authors fail to clarify that .ai doesn't necessarily stand for "artificial intelligence".

Interesting note: ChatGPT (openai.com) is _not_ blocked in this list, although /r/OpenAI and /r/ChatGPT are.