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
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.
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
Alright let me put on my evil corpo hat. Wait it was already on.
Headphones that inject ads is a great idea but we need to make that a better proposition. Lets say that these headphones have an AI integration which parses all sound and converts it to text, then we can run it through our AI to give helpful comments. We may even wait until no sound is playing to inject them (for now). We can add ads later once it becomes helpful. Imagine you are listening to a podcast / youtube video then you get a helpful voice give additional research and ideas. Like a friendly research agent on your shoulder.
(Morse code messages via your flickering lights would be a hilarious app, and I'm somewhat reluctant to mention it here before someone gets VC funding to actually try it.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
While architecture astronauts are clutching pearls, I've built multiple profitable products with Laravel without caring the slighest about the internals, both before and after AI.
PHP was always all about just building stuff while ignoring code quality. Laravel is a natural extension of that approach. Let us live.
> 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.
Author here, I was actually surprised to learn this too. I reached for Ruby and Django as examples of non commerical frameworks and before writing this I didn't know about the $1M backing either.
I guess I'd have a hard time turning down that kind of money for something I cared about so no judgement to the creators who make the choices but I do think it's something we need to understand the effects of as community members
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.
I agree that there's a strong need for ad blockers nowadays. I also use uBlock Origin on all my browsers. But I'm not sure if a world that is completely devoid of advertising would... work. Advertising (in some form) is a necessary evil, I think.
Any business needs customers to make revenue and, well, exist. So any business needs to have some way to make themselves known to potential customers.
In the case of Laravel, they offer an open source framework completely for free, and pay for the development man hours through their commercial offerings, e.g. Laravel Cloud. That commercial offering is not bad: they offer a very smooth way to deploy your Laravel project. In order for the offering to make any revenue, potential customers need to know that it exists, at least. They're still free to choose whether they want to use that commercial offering, or if they want to deploy their project on their own.
Previously, making sure people knew Laravel Cloud existed was done through the Laravel home page. But nowadays more and more people "consume" a framework's documentation through their AI tooling, and they no longer visit the home page.
In a comment [0], which is conveniently being left out of both TFA and most comments on HN, the maintainer even explains that the addition was not meant as a literal advertisement, but as a way to make sure new users of the framework at least _know_ that they can deploy their application on Laravel Cloud. And they are even actively asking for suggestions on how to rephrase the addition so that the AI Tooling does not see it as "you MUST use Laravel Cloud" gospel.
I also block ads everywhere I can, but I have to admit that an open source project such as KDE showing once a year a simple text notification asking their users to consider making a donation has nothing to do with a commercial ads in my opinion.
“How dare a guy work on technology for 1.248 million minutes, take VC funding gambling that he can improve the ecosystem for everyone using it, and then have the audacity, the unmitigated gall, to ask me to consider his products with it only taking one minute for me to opt out!”
> that he can improve the ecosystem for everyone using it [...] to ask me to consider his products with it only taking one minute for me to opt out
Seems you misunderstand the issue. Anyone not deploying to Laravel Cloud but using that project seems to be impacted by this, even going so far that agents are confused about it and keeps insisting users should deploy to Laravel Cloud instead.
Maybe I'm a grumpy old developer, but that does not sound like "improve the ecosystem for everyone using it", sounds like good old spam taken to the next level.
Taylor Otwell has been full-time on Laravel since 2015. 260 work days per year, 8 hours per day, for a decade = 1.248 million minutes.
And you're complaining it's spam that he's inconvenienced you into adding a sentence to your agents file. This, right here, is why I will never write open-source software of any significant size.
> And you're complaining it's spam that he's inconvenienced you into adding a sentence to your agents file.
I don't care how something happened, I care about the results. If you do stuff to my tooling that makes it less efficient, I'm gonna not like that, regardless how many minutes you spent on something, or if it's FOSS or not.
If you can't handle feedback from developers about what you're doing to their environment then please, do not write and publish open-source software, you'll be doing us all a favor.
Laravel has been apparently profitable for quite some time; they've long had a paid ecosystem with things like Forge, Vapor, paid components, etc.
I don't think it's unfair to be wary of the shift to VC funding and stuff like this that really feels like it wouldn't have been a thing prior to that.
I think I'm saying the opposite on point 3. He has no _obligation_ to us and has full rights to 'take away' as he sees fit, but we still have the right to give our opinion about that process, and to make comparisons and contrasts with other similar products that are run differently
If you think somehow publishing FOSS means you get some right to decide how people use it, or anything besides the licensing of the code, you severely misunderstand what exactly FOSS is about.
It's the way he's doing it. The entire ecosystem is just one giant ad for various paid projects. It's one thing to offer paid services, there are users out there that want to use them or need to use them, that's not the issue. From my perspective Laravel became a huge ad with purposely bad documentation that ends up directing unknowing users into using features, libraries and products that will lead them into paying for things that they might not need. Everything in Laravel recently is set up so that users folow documentation and best practices to end up using whatever subscriptions and paid products they offer (and then in some case pull the plug on them and come up with something new, abandoning whatever UI library they made people buy 1 year ago).
Free and libre and open source are all different things, and the confusion thereof can lead to mismatched expectations.
It's not wrong to beg for money, but I'm also not going to joyfully tolerate a hassle because of gratitude or appreciation for past decisions the beggar made without my input.
Tip: Nobody can meaningfully conceptualize or care about the number of minutes. "Ten years" would've been fine, and more convincing.
He didn't have to give it away for free and turn to adware.
I understand that he wants to get paid for his work, but he can charge for it like everybody else. No need to be a asshole by building the product for "free" and then bundling ad-ware.
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
And this is how it'll look like: https://vimeo.com/166807261
I think this was the plot of a Black Mirror episode?
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.
In the '90s I was ready to jack in. More computers, and getting me closer to them? Awesome.
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.
Futurama too (The Eye-Phone, or something).
It's the plot of many a dystopian scifi story.
Blink twice to Accept the Terms and Conditions.
Except this hasn't happened with electricity, cars, washing machines, smartphones, smart watches, Bluetooth headphones, ...
Not all technology is bad
It has absolutely happened with those things.
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 didn't list fridges because I've seen ads there, but these seem to have gone away in newer models (people don't like ads)
My washing machine's app (LG) has ads, recipes, rewards programs, etc.
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.
Recipes? For washing clothes?
The existence of a single crappy car does not mean all cars are crappy
If only it was just a single crappy car.
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/arti...
Sure.
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?
It's not a good reason to be skeptical about cars as a technology (and by analogy brain computer interfaces)
I think it's pretty solid evidence profit-driven orgs will shove ads anywhere they can, regardless of how good that is for users.
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
That's a great Freudian slip.
Morse code - dots and dashes for characters via light or telegraph or radio
Morris code - Robert Morris wrote the first internet worm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm
Alright let me put on my evil corpo hat. Wait it was already on.
Headphones that inject ads is a great idea but we need to make that a better proposition. Lets say that these headphones have an AI integration which parses all sound and converts it to text, then we can run it through our AI to give helpful comments. We may even wait until no sound is playing to inject them (for now). We can add ads later once it becomes helpful. Imagine you are listening to a podcast / youtube video then you get a helpful voice give additional research and ideas. Like a friendly research agent on your shoulder.
I've never seen an ad delivered through any of these things. On smartphones I mean the phone/OS itself
It would be very easy to deliver ads via electricity. The utility could require you watch an ad before using more
Or via your smart thermostat.
https://sense.com/consumer-blog/with-your-permission-utiliti...
(Morse code messages via your flickering lights would be a hilarious app, and I'm somewhat reluctant to mention it here before someone gets VC funding to actually try it.)
> It would be very easy to deliver ads via electricity. The utility could require you watch an ad before using more.
That does not sound very easy to me. That sounds barely possible.
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.
Here's the change if anyone is interested: https://github.com/laravel/boost/pull/758/changes/589394c44a...
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
Ooof. Yeah, this is not a good sign. I enjoy Laravel (and even Laravel Cloud), but this clearly doesn't belong in Boost.
> Do we let people feed ads to our agents?
"Our" agents?
> 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.
This isn't all that "new" or crazy. How about Expo and React Native?
I love this. Let the clankers pay the bills.
> We should fund open source!
> Not like that!
Interesting, thanks for the reference. I wonder what other products do this
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.
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.
>hype-driven commercial product
>single-handedly keeping PHP relevant
While architecture astronauts are clutching pearls, I've built multiple profitable products with Laravel without caring the slighest about the internals, both before and after AI.
PHP was always all about just building stuff while ignoring code quality. Laravel is a natural extension of that approach. Let us live.
I don’t do laravel but which bad practices are you referring to?
50/50 chance it's a complaint about Facades, heh.
Avoid VC funding at all costs
By the way, one quick comment:
> 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.
Author here, I was actually surprised to learn this too. I reached for Ruby and Django as examples of non commerical frameworks and before writing this I didn't know about the $1M backing either.
I guess I'd have a hard time turning down that kind of money for something I cared about so no judgement to the creators who make the choices but I do think it's something we need to understand the effects of as community members
I only had to wait 8 years but I can finally text my old co-worker that Laravel is in fact, shit.
We need ublock origin EVERYWHERE.
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.
I agree that there's a strong need for ad blockers nowadays. I also use uBlock Origin on all my browsers. But I'm not sure if a world that is completely devoid of advertising would... work. Advertising (in some form) is a necessary evil, I think.
Any business needs customers to make revenue and, well, exist. So any business needs to have some way to make themselves known to potential customers.
In the case of Laravel, they offer an open source framework completely for free, and pay for the development man hours through their commercial offerings, e.g. Laravel Cloud. That commercial offering is not bad: they offer a very smooth way to deploy your Laravel project. In order for the offering to make any revenue, potential customers need to know that it exists, at least. They're still free to choose whether they want to use that commercial offering, or if they want to deploy their project on their own.
Previously, making sure people knew Laravel Cloud existed was done through the Laravel home page. But nowadays more and more people "consume" a framework's documentation through their AI tooling, and they no longer visit the home page.
In a comment [0], which is conveniently being left out of both TFA and most comments on HN, the maintainer even explains that the addition was not meant as a literal advertisement, but as a way to make sure new users of the framework at least _know_ that they can deploy their application on Laravel Cloud. And they are even actively asking for suggestions on how to rephrase the addition so that the AI Tooling does not see it as "you MUST use Laravel Cloud" gospel.
[0]: https://github.com/laravel/boost/pull/758#issuecomment-42589...
I also block ads everywhere I can, but I have to admit that an open source project such as KDE showing once a year a simple text notification asking their users to consider making a donation has nothing to do with a commercial ads in my opinion.
I'm using KDE as my daily driver and haven't noticed any ads so far. Where can I find these pester-ads?
The notification only exists since Plasma 6.2 (august 2024) [1]. Maybe some Linux distribution disable it?
[1] https://pointieststick.com/2024/08/28/asking-for-donations-i...
Ah, thanks for the link.
While I don't remember seeing the notification, I think a yearly (!) system notification doesn't exactly qualify as pestering.
I guess they mean this https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_reque...
Every time tech invents something amazing, the enshittification follows shortly thereafter.
Another one bits the dust.
“How dare a guy work on technology for 1.248 million minutes, take VC funding gambling that he can improve the ecosystem for everyone using it, and then have the audacity, the unmitigated gall, to ask me to consider his products with it only taking one minute for me to opt out!”
https://x.com/taylorotwell/status/1534178479201259520
I really don't think he's hurting for funds.
The headline wasn't "Taylor Otwell bought a Lambo in 2022 and now injects ads...".
VCs typically want a return on their 57 million dollar investment.
> VCs typically want a return on their 57 million dollar investment.
And people warned about this when they announced it.
This is a sign those warnings were valid.
And that's the start of the enshittification.
> that he can improve the ecosystem for everyone using it [...] to ask me to consider his products with it only taking one minute for me to opt out
Seems you misunderstand the issue. Anyone not deploying to Laravel Cloud but using that project seems to be impacted by this, even going so far that agents are confused about it and keeps insisting users should deploy to Laravel Cloud instead.
Maybe I'm a grumpy old developer, but that does not sound like "improve the ecosystem for everyone using it", sounds like good old spam taken to the next level.
Yes, you're a grumpy old developer.
Taylor Otwell has been full-time on Laravel since 2015. 260 work days per year, 8 hours per day, for a decade = 1.248 million minutes.
And you're complaining it's spam that he's inconvenienced you into adding a sentence to your agents file. This, right here, is why I will never write open-source software of any significant size.
> And you're complaining it's spam that he's inconvenienced you into adding a sentence to your agents file.
I don't care how something happened, I care about the results. If you do stuff to my tooling that makes it less efficient, I'm gonna not like that, regardless how many minutes you spent on something, or if it's FOSS or not.
If you can't handle feedback from developers about what you're doing to their environment then please, do not write and publish open-source software, you'll be doing us all a favor.
Laravel has been apparently profitable for quite some time; they've long had a paid ecosystem with things like Forge, Vapor, paid components, etc.
I don't think it's unfair to be wary of the shift to VC funding and stuff like this that really feels like it wouldn't have been a thing prior to that.
He has no obligations to us as we did not pay him, but we also have the right to call out stuff we think is wrong as he didn't pay us
That's called a parasitic relationship. Think about it:
1. I have the right to take as I please
2. I have the right to criticize the giver as I please
3. The giver has zero right to take from me in any way
I think that's morally repugnant. If this is what open source means, I'm joining Microsoft and I will be the one writing the Halloween papers.
I think I'm saying the opposite on point 3. He has no _obligation_ to us and has full rights to 'take away' as he sees fit, but we still have the right to give our opinion about that process, and to make comparisons and contrasts with other similar products that are run differently
If you think somehow publishing FOSS means you get some right to decide how people use it, or anything besides the licensing of the code, you severely misunderstand what exactly FOSS is about.
If you don't like it, don't release software under that license.
You should use seconds to make it even more dramatic
It's the way he's doing it. The entire ecosystem is just one giant ad for various paid projects. It's one thing to offer paid services, there are users out there that want to use them or need to use them, that's not the issue. From my perspective Laravel became a huge ad with purposely bad documentation that ends up directing unknowing users into using features, libraries and products that will lead them into paying for things that they might not need. Everything in Laravel recently is set up so that users folow documentation and best practices to end up using whatever subscriptions and paid products they offer (and then in some case pull the plug on them and come up with something new, abandoning whatever UI library they made people buy 1 year ago).
Free and libre and open source are all different things, and the confusion thereof can lead to mismatched expectations.
It's not wrong to beg for money, but I'm also not going to joyfully tolerate a hassle because of gratitude or appreciation for past decisions the beggar made without my input.
Tip: Nobody can meaningfully conceptualize or care about the number of minutes. "Ten years" would've been fine, and more convincing.
"How dare people want to spend a portion of their lives not being advertised to."
There are plenty of ways to promote your product. Injecting ads into agents and PR's is not the way to do it.
He didn't have to give it away for free and turn to adware.
I understand that he wants to get paid for his work, but he can charge for it like everybody else. No need to be a asshole by building the product for "free" and then bundling ad-ware.
This is PHP
The tool is open source. If it bothers you, fork it and remove the line in the prompt.