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.

Not all technology is bad

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

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.

It would be very easy to deliver ads via electricity. The utility could require you watch an ad before using more

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.)

That does not sound very easy to me. That sounds barely possible.

Lots of poor people have in residence electricity boxes that require prepayment for usage. In the olden days you put a coin in to turn on the power, but nowadays they have apps and digital payment solutions!

They might already have ads in those apps...

I guess I'm out of touch, because I've never heard of anything like this. I've had my power turned off for non-payment before, but I had to talk to someone at the utility to get it switched back on.

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

Even if you could, electricity is a utility with laws against disconnecting it in certain circumstances, even for nonpayment, and the internet isn't. So unless someone is going to make the argument that neural implants are utilities, ads injected into them seems like a pretty fair bet unless there is legislation not only making it illegal to do so, but making it illegal to make an implant even capable of receiving or displaying one. At least with that even if they repealed the law you'd be safe if you already had the implant.

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.

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?

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/arti...

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.

This is pure opinion, but I view that as the result of things like PE firms, activist investors, etc. who basically make the case "People respect $BRAND and think we're worth spending 30% more than the cheapest competitor. But what if we kept our prices exactly where they are, keep our advertising focused on how our tradition of quality is our whole reason for existing, but we shift production of our product/service to the same cheapest-possible way the cheap competitors do? At first this was a big gamble, as theoretically customers will notice when their car or their toaster starts falling apart in 4 years, instead of the 10 or 15 years the old one lasted, but this "Moneyballization" of most brands has been so pervasive across the whole marketplace that customers now can't choose "the brand that didn't do that" because ALL the brands did that (or were bought by a brand that does do that). So it's become a completely risk-free strategy.

Then it broke, maybe I should have bought the warranty?

I bought a simpler model without wifi this time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)

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.

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

I just sent you an email.

"Our" agents?

> 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.

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

On the other hand, this "problem" only affects vibe coders who weren't writing any code themselves anyway, so I say let them suffer.

And yeah, there's also facades.

The code discipline and patterns they encourage are so bad that they had to wrap PhpUnit into their own version of the unit test framework named Pest, because PhpUnit intentionally discourages those patterns natively.

>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.

Most people like you who don't care about code quality and want to "just build" another B2B SaaS unmaintainable pile of spaghetti are now purely relying on AI and not writing any code themselves anymore, so why use PHP at all instead of JS like all the other vibe coders?

Because there is nothing remotely close to Laravel for JS. I don't want to think about auth, job queues, mailing, cache layers, auditing etc. I want an opinionated default from my framework that is thoroughly documented and part of the AI training corpus. Laravel gives that to me.

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.

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...

[1] https://pointieststick.com/2024/08/28/asking-for-donations-i...

While I don't remember seeing the notification, I think a yearly (!) system notification doesn't exactly qualify as pestering.

If you're the same shevy-xyz I've seen in programming subs many years ago, you weren't censored. You were outright unpleasant and condescending to people...

I really don't think he's hurting for funds.

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.

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.

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 nor care about the number of minutes. "Ten years" would've been fine, and more convincing.

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.

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.

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.

There are plenty of ways to promote your product. Injecting ads into agents and PR's is not the way to do it.

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.

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.

> Not like that!

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 wish others learnt the "boring" way of managing your own servers, setting things up as they should, deploy processes and what not, but realistically, some people just want to run one command/click a button and have it updated, and probably that's for the better too. This Laravel Cloud thing are for those, not for people who want to/know how to run their own servers.

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.

Thats going to make any LLM agent change from "cool, we can deploy this anywhere" to "it only works on this one specific paid service thats overkill and more expensive for basically everyone" - its deceptive more than anything.

Not okay.