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Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

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Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#161

Post by gryffyn »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #146
the_fall wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because inexplicably, there's random pixel-level noise baked into the blue area. You can't see it unless you crank up contrast, but it makes the bitmap hard to compress losslessly. If you remove it using threshold blur, it doesn't change the appearance at all, but the size is down to 100 kB. Scale it down to a more reasonable size and you're down to 50 kB. Modern web development never ceases to amaze me.

What is that noise actually? It's clearly not JPEG artifacts. Is it dithering from converting from a higher bitdepth source? There do appear to be very subtle gradients.

I would bet it's from AI upscaling. The dark edges around high contrast borders, plus the pronounced and slightly off-colour antialised edges (especially visible on the right side of the J) remind me of upscaling models.

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#162

Post by unleaded »

laughingcurve wrote: post #120
Anonyneko wrote: post #101

Why is everyone using Vercel and the likes anyway? Setting up a VPS with Node takes ten minutes and is miles cheaper. And it's not like you never have to debug issues with serverless configurations, which can even occasionally be harder to debug because of their proprietary natures.

It’s just that simple! https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Fam...

it literally is though that's why i'm confused. you pay a flat monthly fee and get a box that runs linux. yes you might not be able to press one button and Effortlessly Deploy Your AI-Managed SaaS Infrastructure Product To Valued Customers Across The Metaverse or whatever vercel does but it only takes a couple hours to learn how to setup nginx node rsync and cloudflare (and even then i think there's some easier closer to one-click solutions)

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#163

Post by aeternum »

Anonyneko wrote: post #101

Why is everyone using Vercel and the likes anyway? Setting up a VPS with Node takes ten minutes and is miles cheaper. And it's not like you never have to debug issues with serverless configurations, which can even occasionally be harder to debug because of their proprietary natures.

Most people don't know what VPS and Node are.

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#164

Post by nucleardog »

iOSThrowAway wrote: post #33
Nextgrid wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t it just serving static content and the content fitting in RAM? If so your laptop can serve it just fine even.

A laptop would have a hard time serve thousands of people hitting a single endpoint multiple times a day.

I just fired up a container on my laptop... running on kubernetes... running in a linux VM. It's lightly dynamic (no database or filesystem I/O).

While I've also got enough other stuff running that my 15 min load average is at 4 and I've got 83% RAM used ignoring buffers/caches/otherwise.

I went and grabbed a random benchmarking tool and pointed it at it with 125 concurrent connections.

Sustained an average of 13914 reqs/s. Highest latency was 53.21ms.

If there are 10,000 people online at any given time hitting the API on average once every 3 seconds (which I believe are generous numbers), you'd only be around 3.3k reqs/s, or about 24% of what my laptop could serve even before any sort of caching, CDN, or anything else.

So... if a laptop can't serve that sort of request load, it sounds more like an indictment of the site's software than anything.

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#165

Post by burnte »

Anonyneko wrote: post #101

Why is everyone using Vercel and the likes anyway? Setting up a VPS with Node takes ten minutes and is miles cheaper. And it's not like you never have to debug issues with serverless configurations, which can even occasionally be harder to debug because of their proprietary natures.

They spend $$$ on marketing to execs. A couple of months ago my CEO came to me with a $30k Vercel app I could have done for $1500 on our own hardware.

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#166

Post by nathancahill »

ndneighbor wrote: post #145
ramoz wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single mentioned service is either an AWS or GCP abstraction.

Angelo from Railway here, Railway runs our own metal for the sheer reason to preserve margins so we can run for perpetuity. We're nuts for studying failure at the company and Heroku's margins was one of the things we considered to be one of the many nails in that coffin. (RIP) (my rant here: https://blog.railway.com/p/heroku-walked-railway-run )

Fascinating, thanks for chiming in.

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#168

Post by acejam »

danpalmer wrote: post #167
acejam wrote: post #105

450 million pageviews on Vercel = $46,000 450 million pageviews on a single 16c/32t OVH box with nginx and a 3 Gbps connection = $245

450m page views in 1 month is only 173 requests per second. You can do that on a much cheaper box.

Sure, you are only proving my point even further. I just happen to have a personal policy of "no boxes in prod under 16 cores". :)

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#169

Post by LightBug1 »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #57
LightBug1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In 2025, global anti-Israel and pro-Palestine demonstrations intensified, with ACLED recording more than 49,000 protests across 133 countries. Public sentiment shifted significantly, particularly following Israel's interception of a humanitarian flotilla in October 2025. Largest Global Mobilisations Bangladesh: On 12 April 2025, Dhaka hosted what was described as the largest pro-Palestine protest in history, with an…

Those are all very small numbers in the context of the actual electorates, and supports the claim that it is the same small group of activists obsessed over Israel, and not a widespread “community” concern.

Get real. Even the US right and much of MAGA hate Israel now. Not because they love Palestine, but because they hate Israel sucking away US taxpayer money to slaughter women and children and bring them nothing but hassle.

Frankly, watching Israel has been the closest we've come to having a petri dish to understand how Nazi'ism developed and rose. I have a better understanding now of how the Hitler Youth developed, and how cultural blindness, manipulation, nationalistic obsessives and ideologues enable a cancer to spread among its politics leading to full blown Nazism. I have a better understanding of all of that from watching the current Israeli state and reading about it's history.

It's a disgusting tale and shouldn't have been funded by US taxpayers.

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#170

Post by SahAssar »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #143
SahAssar wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this is due to "modern web development". It's just about a dev not checking reasonable asset size before deploying/compiling, that has happened in web, game-dev, desktop apps, server containers, etc. etc. This should be an SVG (a few kb after proper compression) or if properly made as a PNG it'd probably be in 20-ish kb.

The dev not having the common sense to check file size and apparently not realising that the PNG format was being grossly misused for this purpose (by not even having a single tone of white for the J and the corners, let alone for the blue background) is modern web development.

Right, so you mean that this is unique and inherent to web dev and specifically modern web dev.
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