I have a fire tv and run adguard, which does the same thing as pihole, and I can barely tell it's on. It may block some tracking, but I get an increasing amount of ads in the fire tv GUI, not to speak of YouTube ads.
Sometimes I wonder if the people recommending pihole actually tried it. You get much better value out of ublock, smarttube, and so on.
This is a great suggestion. I've run two on my local network for about five years:
pi#1) My personal DNS resolver, which I manually configure on each device.
pi#2) The much less restrictive DNS resolver which my DHCP server automatically issues to all other network clients, including all phones and IoT [0]
Individual hosts can then manually configure their DNS to resolve to the local network router (or third-party DNS), which effectively bypasses both PiHoles (for that device, only).
[0] There is a method to use a firewall to capture all outbound DNS and force routing through PiHole (ifsense? I don't know), which may be necessary for hard-coded DNS-IPs. I do not know how to do this but it's not necessary on my network.
Often devices will have the DNS server hard-coded and never connect to the pihole DNS server. This is not just to avoid ad-blocking but to make the DNS more reliable and avoiding having lots of potential support issues around faulty DNS.
I've never used pihole, but on any decent router you can intercept outgoing udp to port 53, and redirect it to a destination of your choosing. DNS-over-HTTP ruined that however.
The story you’re recalling is “Just Deserts,” a short story by M. T. Anderson. It appears in The Chronicles of Harris Burdick (2011), an anthology edited by Chris Van Allsburg where various authors wrote tales to match Van Allsburg’s mysterious illustrations. In “Just Deserts,” a lone child is raised in a simulated town after an apocalyptic event (implied nuclear war). He attends “school” and interacts with other children via screens, only to discover – in a scene involving a hollow pumpkin – that his parents and classmates are all artificial constructs created to keep him company. This twist reveals he is the last real child on Earth. The story was first published in The Chronicles of Harris Burdick (Houghton Mifflin, 2011).
ASI would see that we are super energy efficient. Way more efficient than robots. We run on 70 cents of electricity a day! We'd be perfect for living in deep space if we could just eat electricity. In those niches, we'd be perfect. Also machine intelligence does not have all the predatory competition brainstack from evolution, and a trillion years is the same as a nano-second to AI, so analogies to biological competition are nonsensical. To even assume that ASI has a static personality that would make decisions based on some sort of statically defined criteria is a flawed assumption. As Grok voice mode so brilliantly shows us, AI can go from your best friend, to your morality god, to a trained assassin, to a sexbot, and back to being your best friend in no time. This absolute flexibility is where people are failing badly at trying to make biological analogies with AI as biology changes much more slowly.
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