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The Bullshit Web

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Re: The Bullshit Web

#241

Post by TeMPOraL »

cheezymoogle wrote: post #204
Gravityloss wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how many people here read usenet or were on old mailing lists. You could have removed a some hard edges in usability and everything would have been connected to phones with monochrome text displays back in the nineties already. They didn't even provide decent email experience. But instead we got the technology developing through some ringtone stuff advertised on TV. I guess it's something that you can in…

That's one of the wildest things! We had the technological capacity to run Unix systems with several hundred users simultaneously and access at the speed of thought with 26kbps modems back in 1992, complete with instant messaging and personal directories! What happened?!

Another wild thing like this is what you'll notice when you read up on Lisp machines. We had development environments in the 70s/80s that would seem magical today.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#242

Post by TeMPOraL »

monadgonad wrote: post #240
TeMPOraL wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone selfishly optimizing their bottomline ("let's earn a bit more by including extra JS analytics bullshit", "let's save some time on our end by making a million people waste a little bit of electricity every pageview") - each initially reaping some short-term benefits, but together ultimately turning the web into the shitshow it is today. That's textbook tragedy of the commons.

People’s/companies’ own websites aren’t commons. The protocols that make up the web itself haven’t degraded through use; this is no more a tragedy of the commons than if every shop in your town made you wait a few seconds before you could go inside.

No, but the frameworks they use and services they outsource tasks to definitely are commons. Even more so are design and development trends.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#244

Post by jstarfish »

goatlover wrote: post #121
soared wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think thats a meaningful comparison. Moby Dick is a book, written by 1 guy and maybe an editor or two. NYT employs 1,300 people. When you read a book all you get is the text. NYT has text, images, related articles, analytics, etc. Moby Dick doesn't have to know what pages you read. 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…

> 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). This just seems like such an abuse of what the web was meant to be. I can imagine the horror people in the 90s would have experienced if they new what JS was going to be used for when perusing news sites. Sometimes I wonde…

> I can imagine the horror people in the 90s would have experienced if they new what JS was going to be used for

We understood the horror no less than we do now. Javascript in the 90s gave us infinite pop-ups, pop-unders, evasive controls, drive-by downloads and otherwise hijacked your browser and/or computer. There's a reason Proxomitron and other content blockers hit the scene by the early 2000s-- the need to shut that shit off was clear.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#245

Post by dri_ft »

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…

My pet comparisons for everything being too big nowadays are Mario 64 (8mb!), Super Mario World (512kb!), and Super Mario (32kb!!).

Re: The Bullshit Web

#246

Post by mrlala »

Pete_D wrote: post #61
pc86 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, we should revert all websites to plaintext because the content/garbage ratio is higher?

I am the developer of an Angular business application. It's about 7mb uncompressed javascript.

If I create a new angular app that just say "Hello world" it will also be about 7mb. By your standards 99.99%+ of the data transferred is "crap". Afterall, you just downloaded 7 megabytes to see hello world. Well now let's increase that by maybe 5-10k. Now you have a fully tabbed web-based application which can connect to a server and give you real-time information on blah blah blah whatever.

But.. only 0.01% is "useful content", the rest is just "crap".

I guess we should go back to the web 10+ years ago. Wow the data transfer is so small, this must be the best! I sure hope I don't need to ever change this website because the jumbled shit of unmanaged code that only the Messiah could hope to decipher a few months after it was written.

Just showing you how silly this entire argument is. There is obviously lots of overhead for many things these days- but so what? Data transfer and computing is cheap. Everyone's time is not. If someone is able to develop a website and have crazy flexibility to maintain it and the only tradeoff is some data overhead.. what in the hell is the problem with that?

Re: The Bullshit Web

#247

Post by soared »

theyinwhy wrote: post #135
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,…

Every person I know is using an ad blocker so I guess they do care. And yes, publishers care as well: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/05/27...

True - Pubs care because they lose revenue, user use adblock to block ads. I don't know anyone who uses an adblocker to improve load speeds.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#248

Post by soared »

foepys wrote: post #109
soared wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For the first, it's sufficient enough to just look at the number of page requests. For the second, I never got explained to me how UX analysis really works for news sites. Isn't it enough to put 2 or 3 people in a room and show them a few variations of the UI? There isn't really much to publishing text, images, and a few graphs. Graphs are a very well explored field, I don't think you can learn more about them by jus…

Server logs just aren't sufficient, no matter how many times hn says so. You don't get enough data to make data-driven decisions. Thats like giving a data scientist 1/3rd of the available data, and saying "thats good enough".

You'd expect ux to be a small unit, but that includes everyone who works on revenue-generating ads. Moving one tiny thing has a direct impact on revenue, which affects every person employed by nyt.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#249

Post by dri_ft »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #241
cheezymoogle wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the wildest things! We had the technological capacity to run Unix systems with several hundred users simultaneously and access at the speed of thought with 26kbps modems back in 1992, complete with instant messaging and personal directories! What happened?!

Another wild thing like this is what you'll notice when you read up on Lisp machines. We had development environments in the 70s/80s that would seem magical today.

It's heartbreaking.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#250

Post by kps »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #221
simmons wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, I don't think there's a trivial way to get the PID of the process handling a particular tab.

In Chrome, Task Manager shows PID along with CPU & memory usage.
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