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The Bullshit Web

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Re: The Bullshit Web

#251

Post by _louisr_ »

kup0 wrote: post #182
_louisr_ wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

#3 is an interesting thought. So when something is abundant, inefficiency and wastefulness are fine? When it comes to bits, abundant to who? Those who can afford said abundance? Certainly not to those with bandwidth caps and slow internet access. Reminds me of a cartoon I saw once: "What if climate change turns out to be a hoax and we end up making the world better for nothing!" Since when is doing something efficien…

  Since when is doing something efficiently and non-wastefully not a good idea for its own sake?
I agree we should make things efficient for their own sake. But that's not what people are arguing about. They are arguing that the modern web is bad, and their reasons are weak. The modern web is terrific and we should not carelessly denigrate it, which is what I'm against.

Do not denigrate the modern web in the name of efficiency when your measure for evaluating websites is wrong and you incorrectly assume that the difference between a 1mb and 10mb payload matters to the actual operation of the site and visitor satisfaction.

Re: That comic you once saw.

Yeah, what if we shut down all coal power plants and make the earth better? Oh wait, now we have destroyed our critical infrastructure and our government/nation has absolutely no leverage to even make decisions regarding the environment. If people would stop dumbing down these complex problems, it would be a good thing.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#253

Post by dwild »

ryandrake wrote: post #203
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…

> Moby Dick is a book, written by 1 guy and maybe an editor or two. NYT employs 1,300 people. Totally irrelevant. Why should the number of employees in the company have any bearing on the size or cost of the product? Ford has 5x as many employees as Tesla. Should their cars be 5x as big or 5x more expensive? > NYT needs to know how long you spent, on which articles, etc. They need data to produce the product They may…

> Totally irrelevant. Why should the number of employees in the company have any bearing on the size or cost of the product? Ford has 5x as many employees as Tesla. Should their cars be 5x as big or 5x more expensive?

If the cost or the size wasn't a constraint, for sure Ford would build a car 5x as big or 5x as expensive.

The website size isn't a constraint here, if it was, they would works on it and make it smaller. It's only a constraint for highly technical people here. Currently at my job I'm optimizing some queries that takes way too long. It has been like that for years but we hit a wall recently, our SQL Server can't take it anymore. I always found it stupid that it took so long to optimize it... but at the end of the day, the clients just didn't care that it took 3 seconds to load the page. I could be working on more features right now, something that the client actually care about.

What makes the number of employees relevant to the size? Well if you were the only one building that website, you would know everything about it right? You would always use the exact same component, reuse everything you can, you already know every single part of the code. Add a second employee, now you don't know exactly what he does, you do know some of it but some time you forget and you may duplicate something or do it badly or whatever. At one point, something is just too big to be understood by a any single employee and you get code badly reused, stuff that serve no direct purpose too but make maintenance easier, etc... You never decrease the size simply because it's never worth it to but each and every single one of the employee add stuff to it.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#254

Post by makecheck »

jazoom wrote: post #239
amiga-workbench wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers should start offering the option to deny all cross origin resources too.

It would be easy to make an extension to do that but I suspect most websites would no longer work correctly. Many websites have their own API server on a different domain, many host images on another domain, most use a CDN of some kind which hosts CSS, JS and sometimes HTML on another domain, etc.

Even a simple limit would probably help a lot, e.g. “at most one alternate domain” (your main CDN, and not sketchy-analytics.com or unnecessary-ad-malware.net).

Re: The Bullshit Web

#256

Post by jazoom »

makecheck wrote: post #254
jazoom wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be easy to make an extension to do that but I suspect most websites would no longer work correctly. Many websites have their own API server on a different domain, many host images on another domain, most use a CDN of some kind which hosts CSS, JS and sometimes HTML on another domain, etc.

Even a simple limit would probably help a lot, e.g. “at most one alternate domain” (your main CDN, and not sketchy-analytics.com or unnecessary-ad-malware.net).

Just use one of the many ad/tracking blockers. Websites will still work. Blocks sketchy-analytics.com. Why make this more complex than it needs to be?

Re: The Bullshit Web

#257

Post by amiga-workbench »

jazoom wrote: post #256
makecheck wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even a simple limit would probably help a lot, e.g. “at most one alternate domain” (your main CDN, and not sketchy-analytics.com or unnecessary-ad-malware.net).

Just use one of the many ad/tracking blockers. Websites will still work. Blocks sketchy-analytics.com. Why make this more complex than it needs to be?

Because when I go to use a website its an interaction between me and them, I never want any third party involvement. Allow requests to subdomains but nothing outside that.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#258

Post by _louisr_ »

cheezymoogle wrote: post #118
_louisr_ wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 far as #1 goes, I'm arguing that plaintext is the ideal to strive towards, not the living practical reality. As far as indexing and access, the Gopher protocol and Teletext are great options to look at. 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 a…

Well hold on, I don't disagree that we are on a planet of dwindling resources. It's the method of environmental improvement that will have the greatest positive effect that is the root source of disagreement. That's the crux of the problem - what is the process of solving these problems?

I would argue that arguing over how big our websites are is not the important factor. I submit to you that PC electricity usage is the most relevant quantity we need to discuss when it comes to consumption of bits. I argue that the increased load on the network of sending more bits is negligible compared to the many endusers and their PCs that consume our data.

If we agree that PC electricity consumption is the most important thing to address, then we must ask whether or not the electricity generation process is bad for the environment. Most likely, electricity is generated by hydroelectric dams or coal/combustibles power plants. Suppose we replace those two types of power generation with low-maintenance, 50-year-lifetime solar panels (for which the tech exists). Can you still argue that the increased amount of bits sent over the wire for heavy modern websites is an environmental negative that we should address? I would say, no, at this point we have reduced the environmental impact of most electricity-consuming devices, and we can ignore PCs for the time being.

Therefore it is not the personal computer and the quantity of bits it consumes that should be your focus. It should be electricity generation.

I would like to ask you to consider whether or not your compassion-based arguments contain any resentment. Are you acting and speaking entirely on the grounds of compassion? And if so, how can you be sure that your supposed actions are going to reduce suffering of people and the planet and not have the opposite effect? How can you suggest solutions, like decreasing the weight of websites, and know with a high degree of certainty that it will produce the desired outcome (environmental preservation)? Could it have an unintended consequence?

Re: The Bullshit Web

#259

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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…

NoScript cuts the bullshit down to 1.35 MB with all scripts blocked and it's still readable. I can barely tolerate the web without it.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#260

Post by JetSpiegel »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #162
cheezymoogle wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if you're just reducing the content even further, just request that they make the reduction possible server-side and everybody wins.

I was more thinking about e.g. running a script to fetch 3 different lightweight sites, run some personal code on it and combine the data. If the script would spend 99.9% of its time waiting on IO because of "human speeds", I wouldn't be too happy. That said, I would be willing to bite the bullet and accept speed limits across the board if it resulted in lean web.

I achieve this with an RSS reader, in my case Miniflux.

Runs on a RPi under my TV and I stay well below my 300MB data cap, while consuming dozens of news sources.

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