Clever hacker fits 537,000 domains in a $5 ESP32 ad-blocking dongle

A developer just pulled off the kind of stunt that makes the internet clap, nitpick, and immediately start joking. Using a tiny ESP32 board that costs about as much as a snack, ZedAxis built a backup home ad blocker that can stop 537,000 domains while using very little memory and replying in about 10 milliseconds. In plain English: it’s a super-cheap little box that helps keep ads out when the main blocker goes down. And yes, the crowd noticed.

The loudest reaction was classic comment-section energy: half "this is genius", half "cool, but have you considered doing it my way?" One early drive-by critique summed up the engineer-vs-engineer drama perfectly: "Clever hacker needs to look up a Bloom Filter"—basically the internet’s way of saying, “Nice trick, but I have notes.” Meanwhile, others were straight-up delighted by what this says about cheap hardware. One commenter basically crowned it the real Internet of Things, unlike those bloated smart fridges and Wi-Fi faucets nobody asked for.

And then came the jokes. Someone immediately asked the only truly important question: is it enough to block all ads on Tom’s Hardware? That’s the kind of cheeky self-own the internet lives for. Another commenter looked at their dusty drawer of unused boards and had a mini-existential crisis about all the weird little gadgets they could build next. So the mood is clear: impressed, slightly smug, deeply unserious—which is exactly how online tech fandom likes it.