zappa: an AI powered mitmproxy · the singularity is nearer
Business, Finance & Industries · Apr 14, 2026
The author argues that once personal AI reaches roughly human-level alignment with individual users, attempts to escalate dark-pattern or manipulative interfaces will hit a practical ceiling because systems that can outwit those AIs would become too complex or unusable for ordinary humans, making anti-user design self-defeating and changing platform/business incentives.
zappa: an AI powered mitmproxy · the singularity is nearer
Science, Technology & Innovation · Apr 14, 2026
The text proposes replacing ad-blockers with user-aligned, agentic browser extensions that rewrite and act on sites using persistent per-site memory and shareable customizable prompts, creating a trust-centered browsing layer where prompt ecosystems and site-specific automation—not raw model access—drive product defensibility.
zappa: an AI powered mitmproxy · the singularity is nearer
Science, Technology & Innovation · Apr 14, 2026
Proposal for a network-layer ad-avoidance: a mitm proxy decrypts HTTPS, sends HTML/JS/CSS to an LLM to remove ads/popups and returns only the AI-rewritten page, with a prototype showing how cheap models could consume ad impressions and undermine ad-supported sites.
zappa: an AI powered mitmproxy · the singularity is nearer
Business, Finance & Industries · Apr 14, 2026
If inference becomes very cheap, personal AI assistants could filter or consume ads on users' behalf—replacing human eyeballs with machine intermediaries and undermining impression-based ad economics, potentially forcing a shift to user-aligned business models.