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Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent

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Re: Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent

#41

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 i…

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...

Re: Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent

#42
post #33
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

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.

Re: Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent

#45
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.

Re: Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

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

Re: Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent

#48
post #32

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'al…

Except this hasn't happened with electricity, cars, washing machines, smartphones, smart watches, Bluetooth headphones, ...

Not all technology is bad

Re: Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent

#49
post #32

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'al…

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.

Re: Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent

#50
post #32

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'al…

And this is how it'll look like: https://vimeo.com/166807261
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