About Us

AdsAreBad is a passion project that was created because I got upset with the state of tech.

I have loved technology since I was a small boy. My dad taught me how to work Norton Commander, and play Dangerous Dave. I quickly got into programming, starting off with VBScript.

Lately I have found myself less and less inspired by my work. Every project is just meaningless buttons on faceless crud apps.

Then a while back, I went on holiday. Alone. With my laptop. With the goal of ricing my linux setup (I use Arch btw). I rediscovered my love. It was awesome. Spending hours every day just figuring stuff out. The only goal being learning and making my desktop look dope.

See, I actually love technology. I just really hate the tech industry. Everything is now just a flimsy wrapper around crappy spyware designed to steal your data and serve you ads. Usability has gone down the shitter. Every website now has about 13% screen real-estate left for content, the rest is banners and popups and newsletter signups and ads. The tech world is really fucking stupid right now. Everything sucks, so that rich assholes can get richer at the cost of literally everything and everyone else in the world.

But there's hope. There's still this small niche in the tech industry that fights for good software. That fights for end-users, normal people. This is largely the open source community and privacy advocacy groups.

I want to join the fight. So I created AdsAreBad. And here we are.

My ambitions are to create open source alternatives to simple bullshit apps like group date planners, time trackers, etc. These apps that would take a day to build, and would be 50x better than any of the commercial offerings out there, because they are simply focused on creating a good product. Not on anything else.

I also want to make it more approachable for our non-technical friends to use ad-blockers. I want the world to be aware of the evils of ads.

My philosophy of life

Humans exist. They have emotions and thoughts and dreams. They experience life. They do that for less than a hundred years and then they're gone forever. Maybe there's an afterlife, maybe dying is just taking off your VR headset in the higher reality. Who knows. But as far as we can tell, this is all there is. We are born, we live, we die. On a floating rock in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, for no real reason, with no purpose other than the one we give ourselves. We are given an opportunity to experience. For a fleeting moment. Just for experience sake. The only reasonable thing is to do, is to make the most of it. And as collective humanity, the best we can do is make sure that all of us can experience as much of what we would want as possible.

Companies also exist. They have no emotions and thoughts and dreams. They are a construct. A construct of human culture. Of humans. Companies do not suffer, they do not laugh or cry. They are an idea. A useful idea for sure. But when considering the well-being of a human vs the 'well-being' of a company, the human should always win out. The human has experiences. The company does not.

That means that whenever a company is benefited at the behest of humans, something has gone wrong. When a law is passed that gives rights to companies while taking them away from humans, it is a bad law. Whenever a human needs to piss in a bottle because "company needs number go up more", that company needs to be reigned in.

The site is still very new. A lot of content may be incomplete, incoherent and/or unchecked. I promise I will fix all the issues over time.

For now, if you have any thoughts, feel free to reach out at thoughts [at] adsarebad [dot] org.