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The Bullshit Web

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Re: The Bullshit Web

#61

Post by Pete_D »

pc86 wrote: post #49
cheezymoogle wrote: post #5

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…

Comparing the raw text of a fiction novel to the code of a website is a pretty asinine comparison, honestly.

Maybe you'd prefer comparing the code of a website to the amount of useful content on the website, which OP also did. Taking "I'm downloading 100mb worth of stuff (83 Moby-Dicks) to read 72kb worth of plaintext" at face value, we could also say that 0.072% of the data transferred is useful, or, equivalently, that 99.928% of it is crap.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#64

Post by peterwwillis »

pseudocook wrote: post #6
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…

Yeah, because cross-platform is a PITA. The reason web apps are popular is they're thin-terminals. You write your business logic on your mainframe/terminal server (linux vps) and the web app just handles the user interface. You maintain less portable code, deployment and upgrade is easier, and it simplifies the user experience a bit. The downside being network issues and supporting the server.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#65

Post by agumonkey »

soared wrote: post #24

Have you ever seen this discussed outside of HN or dev-centric subreddits? Your average user doesn't care about this 'issue' at all, and thats why it won't ever change. Proof the author doesn't relate to any typical user: > I’m not asking much of it; I have opened a text-based document on the web Nobody besides devs would open a website and think "Oh this a text-based document opened in a web browser". Its a website,…

Indirectly yes, they will ask why their computer is slow. Then they'll buy a new one and accept the salespitch for fiber gbps link.

ps: you all must understand that the average user believe in tech, if the web is slow, it can't be google's fault; if the salesman spread that 'of course you need a machine that is web capable' all they'll care is that it's not too expensive and they'll buy the damn machine, and maybe throw the old one out. source: my recycling bin.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#66

Post by simmons »

lainga wrote: post #35
simmons wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed that a lot of sites will end up using 100% CPU usage on their Chrome tab. I haven't investigated, but I do wonder what sort of faulty design leads to this. You occasionally hear talk of sites using your CPU to mine cryptocurrency, but I'm more inclined to suspect lousy programming. I sometimes wish I had an easy way in Chrome to restrict a tab to, say, 5% CPU, for the cases where the CPU usage is clearly…

renice 19 ?

It's my understanding that renice doesn't limit CPU usage, but rather adjusts the process's priority in the scheduler relative to other processes. So I don't think it would stop a process from eating up all available idle cycles, draining the battery, and ramping up the fan.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#67

Post by cheezymoogle »

_louisr_ wrote: post #39
cheezymoogle wrote: post #5

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…

This is both an appeal to people's universal appreciation of efficiency, and a weak denunciation of the modern web. Your argument is 1) that a website's value is the number of words on the page, and 2) that raw text is the highest value data that can be transmitted over the internet, and 3) that inefficiency and wastefulness of bits is a bad thing First off, you need to defend your first two assumptions. Don't websit…

1. A website's value is the amount of information that it provides to the end user. I would argue that the entirety of the works of Shakespeare or the 1911 Brittanica Encyclopedia provides more information than a high-definition picture of Donald Trump grimacing at EU leaders or an autoplaying ad for Doritos Locos Tacos NEW AT TACO BELL. As far as supplemental uses, at the end of the day, people are using plaintext to communicate with other people. Images and videos are secondary. If that ever changes, then society is already doomed as literacy is fundamental to the maintenance of technology.

2. Raw text is the highest value data/information return that can be transmitted over the internet. There's a reason that Morse Code and APRS are still around: they're reliable, appropriate tech, and require little to no middlemen outside of the transceivers themselves.

3. If wantonly (namely, for no enduringly good reason) increasing the amount of entropy in the universe isn't tautologically bad to you, then I really doubt that any argument would sway you to the contrary.

Concerning the relative value of HTML and CSS, yes, you could argue that UX matters in that department, but even the most bloated static HTML/CSS page is going to pale dramatically in comparison to the size of what's considered acceptable throughput today.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#68

Post by tannhaeuser »

ukulele wrote: post #45

Unpopular opinion alert: Maybe the "bullshit" is only bullshit to you, the thorny tech-savvy reader. Maybe businesses have tried the plaintext approach, and their business was improved by adding fonts, stylesheets, API calls, spinners, scripts, high-res images, and god knows what else. Maybe speed improvements are not important beyond a certain point. Maybe 5MB doesn't matter to most people. Maybe micro-optimization…

Sounds like you work in the publishing business (and also that GP has tripped you up somehow). Care to elaborate what the rationale for publishers to bloat their web sites could possibly be? Because I know I've come to use news aggregators like HN as portal sites (plus RSS) rather than go to news sites directly for many years now, precisely because I want to know beforehand if a particular article is even worth visiting, rather than receive a crapton of script for nothing valuable in exchange.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#69

Post by cozzyd »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #47
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.

My GMail tab runs between 225MB and 400MB+. And I used to think Java's memory usage was bad...

If I leave gmail open too long, it starts eating 100% of CPU for some reason (Firefox on Linux).

Re: The Bullshit Web

#70

Post by nawitus »

Most websites are not optimized well because optimization costs money and software engineers are expensive. There probably is not a market failure here.
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