nanobuilds

The data comes straight from Google's Ad Center (myadcenter.google.com). Google shows you the interest categories and brands they've assigned to your profile. I automated scraping that page daily for each account during the experiment.

MirrorMask actually does exactly what you're describing. It scrapes your Ad Center profile before and after each session and shows you the diff. You can watch interests appear and disappear over time. The dashboard tracks your profile changes across sessions.

The work machine differences are interesting. Google uses OS, browser language, and the language of content you consume as profiling signals, not just searches. If your work browsing is mostly English-language sites, Google may be slotting those accounts into a different market entirely. Same IP, but different OS telemetry, different default browser settings, different behavioral fingerprint.

Would be interesting to check myadcenter.google.com on each machine to see how different the profiles actually are.

Three fresh Google accounts on different US residential proxies. Two browsed with specific personas (fisherman, fitness). The third did nothing for five days.

Google was more aggressive than I expected. 17 new ad interests from a single session. By Day 1 it was already removing interests and replacing them. Not adding to your profile. Rewriting it. The control didn't move once in five days.

I built a Mac app (MirrorMask) that does this against your real profiles. Happy to answer questions about the experiment or methodology.

Three fresh Google accounts on different US residential proxies. Two browsed with specific personas (fisherman, fitness). The third did nothing for five days.

Google was more aggressive than I expected. 17 new ad interests from a single session. By Day 1 it was already removing interests and replacing them. Not adding to your profile. Rewriting it. The control didn't move once in five days.

I built a Mac app (MirrorMask) that does this against your real profiles. Happy to answer questions about the methodology.

It's interesting how terminal apps are increasing in popularity after decades of desktop and web apps. I wonder if it's the talk to the chat AI that's making people more used to asking a prompt screen or if it's the simplicity and lack of bloat.

Was expecting a higher jump for plumbers. Cashiers were already suffering with the self-checkouts for years.

AI tools are great but ultimately it's about taste and intent (and fun for games) that will hopefully lead to quality floating to the top.

The experience of the internet would be so much more interesting if the search engines unearthed rare blogs or writing from small creators and bloggers that thought things through or shared original ideas.

It did seem we had that for a while and now everything funnels back to a handful of big platforms.

Maybe as AI swallows the data of the entire web, it would start to look for these small sites, small creators, and rare personal content to keep itself interesting and we'll see more of them?

Your human context also needs compacting at some point. After hours of working with an LLM, your prompts tend to become less detailed, you tend to trust the LLM more, and it's easier to go down a solution that is not necessarily the best one. It becomes more of a brute forcing LLM assisted "solve this issue flow". What's funny is that it sometimes feels that the LLM itself is exhausted as well as the human and then the context compacting makes it even worse.

It's like with regular non-llm assisted coding. Sometimes you gotta sleep on it and make a new /plan with a fresh direction.

One can hope that vibecoded apps will eventually be vibe-maintained with agents trained specifically for the kind of novel and weird bugs ai-coding tends to bring up. These tools will hopefully also get better at identifying security risks created but previous generations of ai models. 6 months is a long time in the life of a vibe coded app.

The mobile is much than TV because of the enforcement loop and algorithm turning that attention into scams, ai generated slop, and harmful content that is more and more difficult to identify. With tv I suppose you can change the channel, with reels, the next 20 reels might continue to show you similar things or follow folks on other platforms as well.

If you're upset about this bill:

- Call your MP (find yours at ourcommons.ca). - Back organisations that fight back (OpenMedia and CCLA have killed surveillance bills in the past - Submit written opposition.

The Cannabis Act angle is interesting.. extends full computer search-and-seizure powers to cannabis enforcement.

This is interesting and the world models predicting the next frame is huge. I'm also wondering on how this would be applicable to neurological proceesses, thoughts etc.

If thoughts become quantifiable and measurable enough would similar models be able to predict the next one? Wondering what the impact of that would be.

Okay so not a weekend project.

You might not see this for a while, but that sounds nice!

Do you use tools to download everything you need for offline viewing or just notes?

The long term goal might indeed be unrecognizable designs. Perhaps augmented reality contact lens. It will take a long time but people tend to slowly get used to giving more and more of their privacy away. Mojo Vision made a prototype of this. It's more the display but you can imagine the camera being somewhere else and streaming to the lens in an unobstructed way.

wonder if small amorphous silicon photovoltaic cells glued around the kindle would provide enough power to not charge every 5 days

Nice project.

This makes me think I should make my plants vibe code games or tools to optimize their well being! Maybe bio-electrical fluctuations --> vibe coded humdifying tools and games

Yea it's not easy to build a Stripe competitor although we need some.

I'm sure those savings will be passed down to passengers!

Same. Some good music too.

in case someone else is looking for this.. openai-codex/gpt-5.3-codex is working okay for now but eventually i'd like to switch to a self hosted one somewhere.

It can always forward you things to your real email for you to action them. So as a layer doing the boring work of sorting things, researching, and keeping track of changes, but execution, public actions, real-life stuff can still be confirmed by the human (through telegram for example).

There are some good uses if managed properly but people tend to trust ais more and more these days.

Remove the job.. but have one super skilled coordinator managing and teaching agents the last 10% (or doing the 10% of the job)

Good tips! thx and good luck with the project!

The spirit and goal is respectable. How we get there, convincing people to join a new web and making it easy and attractive to replace 30 year old infra is something else.

I'm wondering if there are technical solutions to counter this extreme surveillance. I know there are some articles of clothing that kind of mess with some cameras but there must be some other technical ways to mess with the data or make it less usable (and hence avoid physical destruction of property)

Imagine if regular TV with age warnings in the beginning of programs made you fax your ID to the channel headquarters before you could watch PG13+ or whatever movie. This is obviously a privacy nightmare and a suboptimal solution.

A good solution that respects privacy and helps reduce the exposure to harmful content at a young age is not very obvious though (but common sense and parental guidance seems to be the first step)

Good lesson! Can be tempting to fix the problems up the chain especially if the problem might happen again in the future. It depends on how much time, attention, and number of steps up the chain. Sometimes a work around keeps you moving forward but you miss some interesting (rare? learnings).

Haven't followed e-ink display for a while but $2000 for the display is surprising! Assumed these e-ink displays were much cheaper these days.. and I thought we were closer to color ones as well. Great project though!