The Bullshit Web

#1

Post by codesections » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:24 PM UTC

Re: The Bullshit Web

#2

Post by modzu » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:41 PM UTC

i duno, if a site is taking more than a second to load, goodbye! then again surely most of the hn crowd uses something akin to ublock. what of those other poor souls

Re: The Bullshit Web

#3

Post by edhelas » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:46 PM UTC

It's not only the web anymore. What about the desktop Slack that can take up to 1Gb of RAM for a "simple" chat client.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#4

Post by petermcneeley » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:49 PM UTC

Everyone demands that the services of the internet have zero explicit cost. This means that all the cost is borne implicitly.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#5

Post by cheezymoogle » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:49 PM UTC

I've said this before, but it bears repeating:

Moby Dick is 1.2mb uncompressed in plain-text. That's lower than the "average" news website by quite a bit--I just loaded the New York Times front page. It was 6.6mb. that's more than 5 copies of Moby Dick, solely for a gateway to the actual content that I want. A secondary reload was only 5mb.

I then opened a random article. The article itself was about 1,400 words long, but the page was 5.9mb. That's about 4kb per word without including the gateway (which is required if you're not using social media). Including the gateway, that's about 8kb per word, which is actually about the size of the actual content of the article itself.

So all told, to read just one article from the New York Times, I had to download the equivalent of ten copies of Moby Dick. That's about 4,600 pages. That's approaching the entirety of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, without appendices.

If I check the NY Times just 4 times a day and read three articles each time, I'm downloading 100mb worth of stuff (83 Moby-Dicks) to read 72kb worth of plaintext.

Even ignoring first-principles ecological conservatism, that's just insanely inefficient and wasteful, regardless of how inexpensive bandwidth and computing power are in the west.

EDIT: I wrote a longer write-up on this a while ago on a personal blog, but don't want it to be hugged to death:

http://txti.es/theneedforplaintext

Re: The Bullshit Web

#6

Post by pseudocook » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:51 PM UTC

edhelas wrote: post #3

It's not only the web anymore. What about the desktop Slack that can take up to 1Gb of RAM for a "simple" chat client.

Desktop Slack runs on Electron, no? Which essentially lets web developers develop a "native-ish" cross-platform app, without learning a whole new platform.

There is a long, long history of attempts to make good, cross-platform, native apps. In the late 1990s there was a company called Visix that had such a library that worked on Windows and Unix. There have been Windows implementations of Motif/XWindows. There was of course Java/JWT. These days there is Qt. None of these seem to have really caught fire.

edit: I wrote Mac but I meant Unix

Re: The Bullshit Web

#7

Post by cascom » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:51 PM UTC

you only need to use a wifi connection on an airplane to see how painful things are - it's like a time warp

Re: The Bullshit Web

#8

Post by moolcool » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:51 PM UTC

edhelas wrote: post #3

It's not only the web anymore. What about the desktop Slack that can take up to 1Gb of RAM for a "simple" chat client.

I don't know why the slack desktop client is so popular. It's almost no different from the web client, but eats more RAM if you already have Chrome open. Just pin Slack in a tab and save your memory

Re: The Bullshit Web

#9

Post by pmarreck » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:51 PM UTC

I am increasingly encountering news sites that detect ad blocking software and (understandably) refuse to show me their content as a result but the problem is that I enabled ad-blocking on those sites to begin with because they were loading nasty javascript ads on the fly which pegged my CPU!

As a web dev, I feel extremely conscious about what I'd call "javascript library hygiene", and I feel that whoever's in charge of many of the news sites out there, just does not give a shit.

Respect my computer's resources and you'll get your ads re-enabled.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#10

Post by slowmovintarget » Tue, Jul 31, 2018, 5:52 PM UTC

edhelas wrote: post #3

It's not only the web anymore. What about the desktop Slack that can take up to 1Gb of RAM for a "simple" chat client.

I'd be saying "Yeah!" along with you, but that client is also a video chat and audio calling app, not just text and images.

There's bloatware out there, and this may even qualify, but it isn't just text chat. (Why would you use the desktop client for text chat anyway?)