Hacker News: nanobuilds

New comment by nanobuilds in "I ran a 5-day experiment to see how fast Google reshapes your ad profile"

nanobuilds — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:35:10 +0000

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.

New comment by nanobuilds in "I ran a 5-day experiment to see how fast Google reshapes your ad profile"

nanobuilds — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 15:16:26 +0000

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.

New comment by nanobuilds in "I ran a 5-day experiment to see how fast Google reshapes your ad profile"

nanobuilds — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:07:03 +0000

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.

I ran a 5-day experiment to see how fast Google reshapes your ad profile

nanobuilds — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:05:21 +0000

Article URL: https://nanobuilds.substack.com/p/how-fast-can-you-reshape-what-google

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47477679

Points: 13

# Comments: 6

New comment by nanobuilds in "I ran a 5-day experiment to see how fast Google reshapes your ad profile"

nanobuilds — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:02:03 +0000

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

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

I ran a 5-day experiment to see how fast Google reshapes your ad profile

nanobuilds — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:00:51 +0000

Article URL: https://nanobuilds.substack.com/p/how-fast-can-you-reshape-what-google

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47439616

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by nanobuilds in "Lazycut: A simple terminal video trimmer using FFmpeg"

nanobuilds — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 02:40:43 +0000

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.

New comment by nanobuilds in "Show HN: Claude Code skills that build complete Godot games"

nanobuilds — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 02:30:10 +0000

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

New comment by nanobuilds in "Show HN: Claude Code skills that build complete Godot games"

nanobuilds — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 02:07:35 +0000

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.

New comment by nanobuilds in "The “small web” is bigger than you might think"

nanobuilds — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 02:00:25 +0000

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?

New comment by nanobuilds in "LLMs can be exhausting"

nanobuilds — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 02:15:17 +0000

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.

New comment by nanobuilds in "The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product"

nanobuilds — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 02:02:14 +0000

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.

New comment by nanobuilds in "Grandparents are glued to their phones [video]"

nanobuilds — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 01:47:37 +0000

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.

New comment by nanobuilds in "Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act: Dangerous backdoor surveillance risks remain"

nanobuilds — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 01:34:24 +0000

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.

New comment by nanobuilds in "AI-written code will be dead by 2036"

nanobuilds — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 02:12:37 +0000

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.

New comment by nanobuilds in "Physicists developing a quantum computer that’s entirely open source"

nanobuilds — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 01:50:52 +0000

Okay so not a weekend project.

New comment by nanobuilds in "Offline 23 Hours a Day"

nanobuilds — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 01:37:17 +0000

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?

New comment by nanobuilds in "Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns"

nanobuilds — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 01:18:21 +0000

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.

New comment by nanobuilds in "Hacking an old Kindle to display bus arrival times"

nanobuilds — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 04:08:49 +0000

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

New comment by nanobuilds in "I'm helping my dog vibe code games"

nanobuilds — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 04:00:49 +0000

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