Not only unusable, it's an outright security risk. Even the purportedly less scammy ad networks like Google sell ads to scammers and malware developers.
You're right. My elderly mom has fallen victim, or nearly fallen victim at least, to tons of ads or sponsored spots served within Facebook, which are a bit harder to block. They can also outrun DNS-based block lists, probably because LLM's are allowing crooks to move faster and be more prolific.
I actually started making an LLM-powered browser extension that I thought could read the page and determine if it passed a smell test and block it if it didn't meet some strict criteria I'd set for her, but I didn't get very far before I became too concerned about prompt injection. Wanted to do the same on her e-mail, because gmail's built in filters sometimes let her down, but same concern. Prompt injection there may be trivial as well.
I used to read the games site Rock Paper Shotgun. At some point they decided they were going to block everyone who blocked ads. There were ways around it but the writing had gone downhill so I chose to stop reading it entirely. A few months later I saw they had issued an apology for serving malware through their ads.
I will never, ever, under any circumstances stop using an adblocker.
Its been a while since I've seen an ad on Youtube since I got premium, but I remember, at least for a while, every ad on there was a scam. At some point I think Google realized nobody would stop them, so they just started accepting anyone who wanted to advertise with them.
Bicentennial Man is one of my favourite films of his (also Robin Williams). There's an interesting subplot in there on right to repair which is very much relevant today. It also depicts a future 30 years away which might've seemed bleak when it was first conceived, but is in many ways more hopeful than what we actually got.
Until you have to work with stale GHAS tool configurations, remember whether a project uses rulesets or branch settings or find that comment you wrote on a PR (and then learn that the new PR "experience" fucking hides them above a certain threshold). Those are just the issues I encounter in a typical week.
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