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They Live (1988) inspired Adblocker

277 points by tokenburner

by bloke_zero

0 subcomment

I wish I could upvote this 10 times! I love the film - blew my mind when I saw it on cable just after it came out.

by riedel

1 subcomments

Replacing ads reminds me of the eye tap AR stuff by Steve Mann
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44406552

by dostick

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by robot-wrangler

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Watch it if you haven't already. I accidentally landed in the middle of it while doing some illicit late night channel surfing when I was a kid.. this left quite an impression.
I think it was a healthy formative influence for me and primed me for rejecting fads / peer pressure, distrusting authority, etc. Probably also helped me to resist the more unhealthy aspects of a religious time/place, and I was even doing light reading on Cartesian skepticism a few years later, which got me into math. Didn't figure out the name of the movie until years later when it was a big meme.
This is not advice but I definitely advise you to show your small children this movie before they are old enough to think it's corny. They may have a schizophrenic episode or descend into solipsism sure, but they may also get scared as hell by monsters and learn some mental judo, and thank you for it later.

by khafra

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Should be able to use the local LLM to generate a short "They Live" style phrase based on the content of the ad.

by akkartik

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I never found the Matrix very impressive, because I'd been inoculated by this movie.

by throwaway2037

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For any one not familiar with this cult classic film from the 1980s, you can view the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeB3vdxF_jM
In short, aliens have invaded earth, but wear a special skin to appear human. To average people, they appear and sound identical to real humans. The lead character discovers that special sunglasses can show the aliens without their human-like skin. (They look a bit like the aliens from "Mars Attacks".) When wearing the sunglasses, most outdoor adverts are replaced with bland single-party-state-style propaganda encouraging people to consume, work hard, and follow the rules.
I can honestly say that the trailer does no justice for the film. It is much better than the trailer. When I saw first saw this, I was genuinedly spooked. One half of the film is good fun 1980s alien invasion beat 'em up, and the other half is a thoughtful commentary on the age of consumerism.

by tlhunter

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My personal tagline, "I came here to kick ass, build web applications, and chew bubble gum. And I'm all out of gum." came from this movie.

by minisini

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I LOVE for someone to make a version of this for Apple Vision Pro. In fact I would put down $500.

by deng

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Oh the irony: "They Live", a movie famously about alienation and dehumanization, and you let AI do all the coding.

by specproc

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by anthk

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by xnx

2 subcomments

An idea probably as old as ad blockers themselves. Here's one from 8 years ago: https://imgur.com/i-wear-sunglasses-night-uF4fy42

by iririririr

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on the same line, but less pop meme replacements
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/artificial-cl...
it replaces terms used to exalt Artificial Intelligence to what they really mean, and some tongue in cheek jokes against things that are used to pass billionaires/tech as friendly (e.g. replacing bill gates with his actual name)