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The Bullshit Web

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331–340 of 568 posts

Re: The Bullshit Web

#331
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This evening there was that broadcast on our national radio about "white zones", I don't know if you listened to it. The 3 guests were directors in major telecommunication organisations and administrations of the country. They discussed how high-speed Internet should be available to ev…

That sarcastic example you're giving is most likely to be true. I had heated arguments on reddit with people (most likely gamers) being very tense about my dismissal of the need for FTTH. And the telecom companies are just in it for the new market, they couldn't care less about anything else. xDSL was also meant to be high speed for everybody, and it's not the case. And sadly, as long as there's a market, there will…

> And sadly, as long as there's a market, there will be products.

Moreover, if there is no market, one will soon be created to fill the void and make some money of any 'underused' resource until it saturates.

> I often want to assemble low bandwidth low power (solar powered even) router nodes. Something you could drop in a field and have a mile radius range of wifi (some people on youtube got more than that with a tiny esp8266 IC). The rest would be some mesh network topology. Just enough for simple data, emergency, maybe compressed voice you know.

People will laugh at you. If I understood correctly, 4G (not DOS ;-) ) has become a basic human right, and no-one should be deprived of it for a 10 minutes ride, be it in an underground 20 metres below surface or in a country bus in the middle of nowhere. I mean, megabit 3G is already almost everywhere in the country, but it seems it is not enough for a decent human life.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree in theory. However, I haven't noticed the slowness in their website and the ads are well done and blend in with the webpage. They may have to redesign/rearchitect their whole website to get what you are asking for. It should be noted that traditional newspapers include ads alongside news content and no one complains. In fact people used to sift through the Sunday NYT simply for the ads.

Tbh they could email me articles plaintext and I'd happily hand over my money.

we used to have usenet...

Re: The Bullshit Web

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Thousands of cpu hours, megabytes and dollars wasted on some user spying turdheap the marketing guys NEEDED to put in an app, 'to track user behaviour'. I understand that somewhere in a perfect universe, tech guys just make things right and money just flow in without those pesky marketing people ever involved. Unfortunately, in our universe if you don't do marketing and don't analyze user behavior your business is t…

Sure, if your content sucks. If you need all that bullshit to stay profitable then perhaps the business isn't really needed at all. "but that is the industry competition for you, everyone does it." To that, all I can say is perhaps some regulation is required to level the playing field.

Strictly speaking, most individual business isn't needed.

If the NY Times folds tomorrow due to bankruptcy, there are dozens of other papers where we can get the news. Their reporting is good, and I choose them over their competitors but losing them wouldn't be the end of news as we know it.

That's the case with most businesses---the marketing and sales are only needed to compete, whereas without them the product would still exist for consumers.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have given this discussion a good looking over to see if anyone cares for the environment. Glad to find someone that does. I believe that care for the environment and design that puts being green first is going to have its time in web design. I also believe that along with document structure, accessibility and 'don't make me think' UX that eco-friendliness is going to become a core design principle in a lot of the…

Awesome take on the situation.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#335

I disagree that the AMP cache is the main benefit of AMP. There are plenty of CDNs that give performance similar to, or better than the AMP cache. The only benefit of AMP is that the pages are promoted higher in results. Back to the main topic of the article, the same could be said for the desktop and the mobile phone. Developers and framework builders are constantly adding bloat as cpu/memory increase. Since most pe…

>The only benefit of AMP is that the pages are promoted higher in results.

Not just promoted in the results but actually pre-loaded in the background when you're using google search. It's double the monopoly fun.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#336
Whilst this is true, and it already references another analogy in 'bullshit' jobs, it's just another piece of the 'bullshit' magnetism of human nature.

Church, TV, Music, Movies, Conversation, Food, Meetings, Politics, Watching sport

The 'bullshit' to 'worthwhile' ratio is 95:1 at best.

I've just depressed myself.

Maybe it's a pattern that humans are programmed to follow subconsciously. Our brains cannot handle consuming / participating in anything less than 95% bullshit. Maybe it's the bullshit time that allows us to cope with the 5% of the 'real'?

Things such as the 'bullshit' web are just a differently-contexted manifestation of that pattern of behaviour.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#337

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…

Moby Dick doesn’t have any pictures or video. Audiovisual media has value.

Audiovisual media of value has value.

Audiovisual media that I choose to donate my bandwidth towards downloading may have value.

Audiovisual media in and of itself has no value.

Audiovisual media that automatically loads, thus slowing down the loading of everything else, has negative value.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#338
That CNN article he mentions does take 30 seconds to finish loading... However, you can start reading the article in less than a second. Actual perceived load time is nearly instant.

For the actual end-user perspective, this article is mostly bullshit.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#339
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…

You just used “maybe” eight times to make an argument without having to support it in the slightest. Maybe you’re right, or maybe you’re just bristling at an argument made well and strongly supported without a leg to stand on. Maybe if you bothered to support your claims, or even make them real claims instead of “maybes” it would be easier to take your non-arguments seriously.

Of course it would also be easier to take you seriously if ad blockers and script managers and cookie sweepers weren’t so incredibly popular, along with VPNs. Every site begging people for money or to stop using an ad-blocker is a nail in your “point’s” coffin.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#340
post #34

You know how building wider roads doesn’t improve commute times, as it simply encourages people to drive more? It’s that, but with bytes and bandwidth instead of cars and lanes. That's the core insight. Higher availability of resources leads people to consume more of said resources - in tech, typically for more and more abstraction layers to deal with hardware of ever growing complexity to make the lives of developer…

(Can't edit anymore, but finally found the relevant Wikipedia link for the phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox)
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