Hey HN! Minus is an open source hardware device that sits between your streaming stick and TV and blocks ads that appear on your TV in real time at 4k60fps.

This was made out of a labor of love after seeing nonstop "Hims" ads for months, so I created a hardware-in-the-loop test platform to gather over 80k screenshots of ads and train a custom model to detect and block ads in under 300ms.

Since we are blocking the ads at the hardware level we have complete control over the screen, so currently replacing the ads with language learning content, pictures from trips, random fun facts, haikus, etc.

Code is open source and the weights for the model are on HuggingFace