There are many claims the list author makes without any source code at all, though a lot of buzzwords. The reddit r/pihole moderator pulled the post: https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/kh5dit/the_quantum_... . The thread was more entertaining before the list author deleted every downvoted comment they made.
[0] is perhaps even more concerning - apparently it bears a striking resemblance to Steven Black's (slightly more reputable) list[1] [edit: plus a few hundred thousand other rules of questionable sourcing].
> > We were testing an AI that could show some basic emotions about internet content, and turns out it was very precise at getting “annoyed” by ads and “unsolicited” third party connections…
Holy shit that's such bullshit.
They are basically claiming they invented a artificial general intelligence, with feelings, that happens to feel the same way about ads as us. It's basically sentient instead of publishing research papers, they turned it into an ad blocker.
Even if it's not morally wrong, it makes you look like an idiot who doesn't understand the technology you are selling. In the worst case it might even be used as evidence that your work is a fraud.
There is no benefit; To the lay person, It would sound just as impressive to say "We trained a machine learning model to detect ads and spyware" and that wouldn't immediately set off alarm bells with people familiar with the current state of machine learning.
Second: Talking about fraud, the evidence linked above is pretty strong.
Their alleged AI is somehow detecting test domains that authors of other lists as "ads or spyware". Test domains that aren't linked anywhere on the internet.
In one "smoking gun" example, the test domain doesn't even have a DNS entry. The alleged AI can't even load the domain to scan it.
No, more is not usually better. Especially with a garbage ""AI-generated"" (not) list with untrustworthy maintainers like this one. It's better to add a low number of lists with trusted maintainers, who actively curate their lists and respond to false positives. That means no "mega-list" abominations like oisd.nl.
Hm, well I've got to work out how to get off that list! Thanks for giving me the heads up.
EDIT: I'm not sure quite how to deal with being put on ad lists. Sure, people can upload any file to our host so it's plausible that someone, at some point, has uploaded an advert. Someone could also redirect to an advert domain and we'd have no way to really deal with that unless it was reported. Ideas are welcome for solutions.
This is an excellent merged blocklist, with public whitelist (oisd is fully closed, no insight in what is whitelisted and why, also causing more false positives..)
That could still be considered an advertisement of his existence and writing skills.
If the goal is purely informational, why is the author's name attached?
The site also advertises the CMS it runs on.
That's my point, by a reasonable standard, ANY site that exists is an advertisement for something or other, thus a rule saying "no linking to advertisements" is worse than useless.
This must be the mindset it takes to work in the ad tech industry.
Ads are sort of like porn. There are lots of things you certainly know serve no other purpose than to advertise something and you can block them outright. Native advertising is certainly difficult though.
I think there would be exceptions, like test sites, personal experiments etc. that could make it on to the internet without seeking attention, but any content designed for consumption is attention-seeking.
Maybe. Attention can also be granted without it have been called there. There are also websites not designed for consumption.
If every website is advertising, then surely most of human discourse and activity would also be considered advertising. What's even the purpose of the word?
You're not going to convince me that everything is an ad, and I probably won't convince you either. I'm not interested in playing any further semantic word games. I'll read any replies you make if you choose to, but I have nothing more to offer in this thread.
For me the problem is that you hide URL's that I can click on and have no idea where I end up. So I block all url-shorteners as a principle on my pi-hole.
HN post for that list here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25512273