When the early adopters start pushing neural implants they'll be ad-free. Not long after your boss insists that everybody needs neural implants for the sake of productivity, they'll be ad-supported but moneyed developers will be able to opt out. The terms of the ad-free service will continue shifting, so nothing is ever really ad-free for long, and ads for better neural implants are promotions not ads right? But y'all are working on neural implants because if you don't, somebody else will, aren't you
You'll never see a neural interface ad. You'll just have always been a Pepsi drinker. It's right there in all your favorite childhood memories, after all.
When I started playing Shadowrun in the 90s, I thought neural implants were cool and I wanted to get one. Around the time Google started buying up ad companies, I realized that the hardware in my head would never be mine. But yes, I think Black Mirror has done an excellent job with these topics.
This was a throwaway line in the 1995 novel The Diamond Age. The thug knew a guy who had a spinal implant(?) which got hacked and now the guy saw ads across the bottom of his vision for life.
Correct, but they stylized it as "eyePhone" (from MomCorp, the all powerful, caring conglomerate), and that episode is the origin of the famous "Shut up and take my money!" meme.
The real problem here is capitalism. The system needs consumers to spend more and more. A system where nobody profits from you consuming more of something wouldn't have this particular failure mode
When we first got our LG TV (a fairly cheap 43" LCD with mediocre brightness and WebOS) you could get an app to be the remote control. It was a convenient option when the remote fell under the couch.
They discontinued it for some elaborate "ThinQ" app which was designed to support a huge universe of different devices, and it was no longer something my parents could use.
I miss when phones had IR blasters; it was fun that I could control my old NAD 7100 reciever, which predated consumer smartphones by a good decade plus.
True, but you can't affort the none crappy one eventually. Basically everything in modern society trends towards either cheap, but shitty, or excellent, but insanely expensive.
Our problem is that the used to be a huge middle segment, where you'd pay extra, but you got better quality. That middle segment has more or less disappeared, because it requires a fair bit of volume to be sustainable. Initially we, as in society, got lured in by cheaper prices, and reasonable quality, supported by savings in running super markets vs. a butcher, efficiency gains or subsidizes, maybe in the form of an ad here or there. Once we started expecting lower prices, quality started to go down, but restarting the "pay a little more, for better quality" segment isn't easy.
Electricity I don't know how you could deliver ads through, but if someone could think of a way I bet they would. If everyone knew Morris code I bet they would make the lights flicker in Morris code for a discount.
Modern cars with connected infotainment systems are always trying to upsell you
Washing machines I dont know of anything at the moment, but I wouldnt count it out.
Smartphones/watches? Aren't those just ad delivery mechanisms? Not to mention tracking? Its a core foundation of modern ad technology
Headphones are not thank god, I hope it stays that way
Modern cars gather a truly shocking amount of data about their "users", which is then sold to all and sundry, including those wishing to sell you products.
Taylor's response to a similar thread on Reddit[1]:
Hey all! Kinda surprised this has "taken off" haha
It has nothing to do with raising money. It has everything to do with the fact that based on the data we have, there is a large increase in the number of people trying Laravel who haven't coded before or are getting deeper into web development for the first time. That is a good thing!
The previous guidelines would have potentially directed them to configure Nginx or FrankenPHP manually, and while that is certainly possible for experienced devs, it's not the path to success for someone new to the framework.
We want them to be able to get their projects online as smoothly as possible, so that hopefully they become a long-lasting member of our awesome community.
It is no secret that PHP has a "pipeline problem". If you look at the year-over-year data from GitHub, PHP developers only grew 5%, JavaScript + TypeScript grew almost 90%. We have to get more people into our community and enjoying what's possible here. Previously, learning PHP from scratch was a barrier, now, thanks to AI, it's not. This is a unique opportunity to dramatically expand who can bring their ideas to life using Laravel.
In fact, I already have friends in "real life" who are building Laravel apps. They have never coded before.
Does that mean Laravel is going to just cater to "vibe coders"? Absolutely not. We're still building deeply technical features and content for experienced devs who are operating at high scale. But, it is existentially important to the health of the ecosystem and PHP itself that we do a good job getting people up and running on Laravel. They aren't going to know as much as you guys - even Forge can be overwhelming to them. Cloud gives them a simple on-ramp to production that doesn't require much technical knowledge. This is there to facilitate that.
That being said, we've moved this guideline to a "deployment" guideline folder so it's easy to disable or modify or remove to have your own deployment recommendations built right into your Boost install. And, of course, Boost itself is not included with Laravel by default.
> I'm not a Laravel developer and don't generally use PHP apart from one small side project where Claude takes care of the coding for me anyway. I've never tried Laravel Cloud so I don't know whether it fits into either of the descriptions above.
I've used Laravel since v3. Taylor's ego has started to tick me off in the last ~5 years. And, I feel like him buying a Ferrari made his priorities apparent. I'm not sure what happened to making a framework that had the nuts and bolts included out of the box. But he's clearly moved from "build a framework" to "build a platform" that drives money to his pockets.
Taylor's explanation makes sense on its face, but it sets a precedent that's hard to walk back: the LLM context window is now a monetizable surface. Once that's normalized, "here's a recommended package" and "here's a sponsored package" become very hard to distinguish — especially when the AI is the one deciding which to surface. The real concern isn't this specific case, it's that every tool vendor with an MCP server now has a business reason to do the same thing.
I actually wrote this before on reddit, before I eventually
left reddit due to the censorship. KDE changed a lot and Nate
asked for donations via a daemon. I pointed out that we now
need to undo pester-ads added by KDE developers. Lo and behold,
I was cancelled on #kde reddit. I still think we need something
like ublock origin but for EVERYTHING, not just the browser.
ublock origin is great for browsers, but there is a lot more
that should be filtered away; take bad UI choices made by
upstream, not even an ad. Some software allows fine-tuning,
where the user can customize the project a bit (firefox UI
for instance, you can modify it). We need this on the whole
operating system level, not just the browser. That way, as
a convenient side effect, Laravel could no longer abuse users
like that.
I live an ad-free life (well, digital life ... in reallife I
still get pointless ads shown). I think every human being
should have the option to not have to see ANY ads. The more
the industry complains about it, the more I censor away
such ad-monsters.
If you're using a company's product to get advice or do work, you should probably expect that product to be heavily biased towards that company and its affiliates. It's not your own employee, who would presumably act with the best interests of your organization in mind. It's not even your own agent. If that's what you want, the product simply isn't for you.
I think it's debatable whether or not it's an ad. I also think it's debatable whether or not the title of the post is sensational.
BUT
It truly warms my heart to see the level of mistrust the comments in this thread show towards (a) venture capital funding and (b) anything even resembling an ad.
> By contrast, Ruby on Rails is backed by a foundation that launched with about $1M from sponsors like Shopify and GitHub.
So, not disagreeing on this being an issue for Laravel abusing users, but in particular the role of Shopify in the ruby ecosystem is, in my opinion (and that of many others) a net-negative. Look at how many ruby developers got ultimately fired when rubygems.org (ok, not rubygems.org but RubyCentral, but they now control rubygems.org and the main moderator on ruby reddit is an employee of RubyCentral, thus a conflict of interest exists now on ruby reddit) decided it must become a shopify-corporation project only.
Enjoy this time when manipulation in LLM output is still clearly identifiable. There's no chance that the endgame isn't something a lot more subtle and seamless.
On one hand, I hate how much of a hype-driven commercial product Laravel is, and how many novice developers learn bad practices from its awful architecture.
On the other hand, this "problem" only affects vibe coders who weren't writing any code themselves anyway, so I say let them suffer.
124 comments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
By the 20-teens I was repulsed by the idea and kinda hated computers.
Today if you put a magic button in front of me that'd permanently un-invent the Internet, good odds I'd press it.
It's the plot of many a dystopian scifi story.
So, lately I've been trying to decouple AI from Capitalism, and it's starting to explain a lot of things, like:
* excessive hype
* doing layoffs, and scapegoating AI
* pushing AI into everything (Copilot)
* etc.
Not all technology is bad
Cars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sceLsLkQf7A
Fridges: https://fortune.com/2025/09/19/samsung-family-hub-refrigerat...
I'm not aware of a smart watch doing first-party ads yet.
I think the main thing preventing it on the device itself is they haven't thus far needed a large screen to show them on.
They discontinued it for some elaborate "ThinQ" app which was designed to support a huge universe of different devices, and it was no longer something my parents could use.
I miss when phones had IR blasters; it was fun that I could control my old NAD 7100 reciever, which predated consumer smartphones by a good decade plus.
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/arti...
But the existence of a single crappy car establishes very definitively that a crappy car can and does exist.
Do you think Samsung's the only company that's gonna play with ads on their smart fridges?
Our problem is that the used to be a huge middle segment, where you'd pay extra, but you got better quality. That middle segment has more or less disappeared, because it requires a fair bit of volume to be sustainable. Initially we, as in society, got lured in by cheaper prices, and reasonable quality, supported by savings in running super markets vs. a butcher, efficiency gains or subsidizes, maybe in the form of an ad here or there. Once we started expecting lower prices, quality started to go down, but restarting the "pay a little more, for better quality" segment isn't easy.
Modern cars with connected infotainment systems are always trying to upsell you
Washing machines I dont know of anything at the moment, but I wouldnt count it out.
Smartphones/watches? Aren't those just ad delivery mechanisms? Not to mention tracking? Its a core foundation of modern ad technology
Headphones are not thank god, I hope it stays that way
Then it broke, maybe I should have bought the warranty?
I bought a simpler model without wifi this time.
For me it is not the right move, one thing is letting users know Laravel Cloud is an option and another one is removing any alternative from the text
Hey all! Kinda surprised this has "taken off" haha
It has nothing to do with raising money. It has everything to do with the fact that based on the data we have, there is a large increase in the number of people trying Laravel who haven't coded before or are getting deeper into web development for the first time. That is a good thing!
The previous guidelines would have potentially directed them to configure Nginx or FrankenPHP manually, and while that is certainly possible for experienced devs, it's not the path to success for someone new to the framework.
We want them to be able to get their projects online as smoothly as possible, so that hopefully they become a long-lasting member of our awesome community.
It is no secret that PHP has a "pipeline problem". If you look at the year-over-year data from GitHub, PHP developers only grew 5%, JavaScript + TypeScript grew almost 90%. We have to get more people into our community and enjoying what's possible here. Previously, learning PHP from scratch was a barrier, now, thanks to AI, it's not. This is a unique opportunity to dramatically expand who can bring their ideas to life using Laravel.
In fact, I already have friends in "real life" who are building Laravel apps. They have never coded before.
Does that mean Laravel is going to just cater to "vibe coders"? Absolutely not. We're still building deeply technical features and content for experienced devs who are operating at high scale. But, it is existentially important to the health of the ecosystem and PHP itself that we do a good job getting people up and running on Laravel. They aren't going to know as much as you guys - even Forge can be overwhelming to them. Cloud gives them a simple on-ramp to production that doesn't require much technical knowledge. This is there to facilitate that.
That being said, we've moved this guideline to a "deployment" guideline folder so it's easy to disable or modify or remove to have your own deployment recommendations built right into your Boost install. And, of course, Boost itself is not included with Laravel by default.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/laravel/comments/1sn70d7/laravel_ad...
> I'm not a Laravel developer and don't generally use PHP apart from one small side project where Claude takes care of the coding for me anyway. I've never tried Laravel Cloud so I don't know whether it fits into either of the descriptions above.
Not okay.
> Do we let people feed ads to our agents?
"Our" agents?
I actually wrote this before on reddit, before I eventually left reddit due to the censorship. KDE changed a lot and Nate asked for donations via a daemon. I pointed out that we now need to undo pester-ads added by KDE developers. Lo and behold, I was cancelled on #kde reddit. I still think we need something like ublock origin but for EVERYTHING, not just the browser. ublock origin is great for browsers, but there is a lot more that should be filtered away; take bad UI choices made by upstream, not even an ad. Some software allows fine-tuning, where the user can customize the project a bit (firefox UI for instance, you can modify it). We need this on the whole operating system level, not just the browser. That way, as a convenient side effect, Laravel could no longer abuse users like that.
I live an ad-free life (well, digital life ... in reallife I still get pointless ads shown). I think every human being should have the option to not have to see ANY ads. The more the industry complains about it, the more I censor away such ad-monsters.
BUT
It truly warms my heart to see the level of mistrust the comments in this thread show towards (a) venture capital funding and (b) anything even resembling an ad.
> By contrast, Ruby on Rails is backed by a foundation that launched with about $1M from sponsors like Shopify and GitHub.
So, not disagreeing on this being an issue for Laravel abusing users, but in particular the role of Shopify in the ruby ecosystem is, in my opinion (and that of many others) a net-negative. Look at how many ruby developers got ultimately fired when rubygems.org (ok, not rubygems.org but RubyCentral, but they now control rubygems.org and the main moderator on ruby reddit is an employee of RubyCentral, thus a conflict of interest exists now on ruby reddit) decided it must become a shopify-corporation project only.
> We should fund open source!
> Not like that!
On the other hand, this "problem" only affects vibe coders who weren't writing any code themselves anyway, so I say let them suffer.