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  • They Live is such a good metaphor for so much of the modern world. Once you see it, cannot unsee.
  • Oh the irony: "They Live", a movie famously about alienation and dehumanization, and you let AI do all the coding.
    by deng
  • 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.

  • Cool idea!the font weight should be extra/heavy, and not true black, dark gray.
  • Back in the late 90s I stood up a webserver in my office that returned fake banner ads for 404's. I used the in-house DNS server to vector "*.doubleclick.net" over to it.

    We'd get amusing banner ads for things like cocaine-based nasal spray, renting pigs, and other vaguely off-color things in place of real ads. It was very, very amusing. I didn't tell anybody I was doing it and got some real laughs when people submitted helldesk tickets asking about the ads.

    It got the axe when a technician printed some Mapquest directions that included off-color ads and left them laying around at a Customer site.

    Aside: The fake ads came from a website called "Bannertown", (if memory serves). I believe it's long-since defunct. I'd love to find the ads today. They were very amusing.

  • Replacing ads reminds me of the eye tap AR stuff by Steve Mann

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44406552

  • 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.
  • Misread the title to mean that They Live inspired the concept of adblocking in general. Which would have been an interesting coincidence, since it did inspire one of the early Mozilla logos. [0]

    [0] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-hi...

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