111–120 of 568 posts
you only need to use a wifi connection on an airplane to see how painful things are - it's like a time warp
Things are different now. When I was on a modem... pictures, almost any, were bullshit as far as being big and annoying to download. A lot of the time I hated them. Nobody thinks about pictures that way anymore. I suspect that goes for a lot of the bullshit listed in that article. I'm no fan of tracking or auto play videos, but web applications are a thing now and the people visiting sites, building them, and paying…
> People really hate autoplaying video Yes, this a billion-fold! Every single newspaper site I peruse uses autoplaying video. The experience goes like this: Load up the front page of newspaper site. Select an article of interest and click on its link. Article loads. A video player pops into existence on the lower right hand corner of the page, and the video starts playing. Most annoying. However it gets more egregiou…
Why can't my browser (Chrome) still not give me appropriate control over audio?
> People really hate autoplaying video Yes, this a billion-fold! Every single newspaper site I peruse uses autoplaying video. The experience goes like this: Load up the front page of newspaper site. Select an article of interest and click on its link. Article loads. A video player pops into existence on the lower right hand corner of the page, and the video starts playing. Most annoying. However it gets more egregiou…
I've been thinking about building either a local proxy or firefox addon that puts everything into "first-party only" mode unless whitelisted. It would probably break the web (at least the genuine parts) less than disabling javascript wholesale which is just too awkward, but it would vastly cut down on the "bullshit" as this article calls it. It would need some care, for example it would probably have to work from roo…
uMatrix / uBlock seems to do what you want.
Access your data for all websites
Clear recent browsing history, cookies, and related data
Read and modify privacy settings
Access browser tabs
Access browser activity during navigation
But that's just the very broken permissions model that addons currently have so thank you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product and you can only achieve that with javascript tracking pixels (Server logs aren't good enough). No they don't. They really don't need to know any of that. They don't even get a pass on tracking because they're providing a free whatever - I pay for a subscription to the NYT. The business, or a meaningfully substantial…
Except that the content is directly related to user behavior. If they see no one reads the style section, they'll cut it and move resources to financial news. If they didn't have tracking they'd never know that, be wasting resources and having a comparatively inferior product. They can't do UX anaylsis, nothing.
Most websites are not optimized well because optimization costs money and software engineers are expensive. There probably is not a market failure here.
Most web sites send a lot of data that is not for me, the user; it's for the website, to serve ads or track me or do other things that I either don't care about or would much rather they didn't do. The website had to make a conscious choice to include all that stuff; it's not as though it was already there and would have to be optimized out. In other words, the problem is the most websites are optimized, but not for…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
1. Well how is the format of plaintext the best method of getting information to the end user? What if you added a thin indexing layer on top of the plaintext? That would allow people to jump through huge documents with ease, but it's no longer plaintext. Sounds more valuable to me. Where is the line? What's the ideal? 2. Fair enough 3. Referencing "increasing the entropy in the universe" isn't a good argument becaus…
As previously noted, if you don't find that waste is fundamentally wrong on a moral level, there's no point forward from here. I view myself on a planet of dwindling resources, vanishing biodiversity, and warming at increasing rates.
If you think the energy that goes into computation is free or lacking external environmental downstream effects, then at the root of it, you carelessly shit where you eat and I don't. That's a fundamental disagreement.