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The Bullshit Web

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Re: The Bullshit Web

#391

Post by flukus »

MrEldritch wrote: post #314
MrEldritch wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "You actually don't need all that crap to serve adverts, or really even to do tracking: people managed without it in the 90s. It's just that it's more work to get the same effect without a buttload of JS in this day and age" While I sympathize with this sentiment, this is also the entire history of computing in a nutshell. Moore's Law has driven us orders of magnitude beyond where we were when personal computers fi…

(All that being said, I'm also fairly salty about having 8 GB of RAM and a mechanical hard drive rendering my computer incredibly painful to use as technology has marched on. Discord - which I use almost exclusively as an IRC chatroom with persistent while-you-were-gone chat history, embedded media, and fun custom emotes - is an entire Electron app that eats over 100 MB minimum; Firefox is eating 750 MB just keeping…

> I saw a discussion on HN a few months back about a survey of computer hardware, and one dev in the comments was shocked - shocked! - to find out that the typical user didn't have 16 GB and a 4k screen. That definitely rustled my jimmies a bit.)

This is extremely common in dev circles, it's an area where we're completely detached from average users. Just to make the point, here is the mozilla hardware survey that shows >50% of users having 4GB or less: https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/ .

If we look at the more technical users on steam (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey) then only ~15% of users have 4GB or less, along with 40% having 8GB.

There's a good reason macbooks top out at 16GB.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#392

Post by giardini »

titzer wrote: post #172

The Web is the quintessential human artifact. This is what happens when large groups of people crap and eat from the same pile, the fast, the slow, the brilliant and the stupid, the refined, mundane, bloodthirsty and curious, the intricate and obscure. I think of the web in layers. Not discrete, divisible layers, but more like the layers of any ancient city that's seen habitation for centuries. At the lowest level is…

Best post this month, possibly this year.

titzer says:"...You cannot find that stuff anymore. It's hidden by a huge layer of commercial bullshit that is designed to lure you in..."

So true. [And wouldn't it be nice if search engines had an option whereby one could first set a date and thereafter search results would display as they once did on that date?]

But again, great post! Kudos to you! Well said, sir!

Re: The Bullshit Web

#393

Post by jshevek »

lphnull wrote: post #388
michaelmrose wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My i3wm environment doesn't randomly start anything I don't ask it to start and runs very comfortably with 8gb of ram heck it would run fine with 4gb and no swap. Maybe you are running the wrong os.

Funny thing is I use my i3wm environment on 16gb of RAM and a 4k screen. I'm actually migrating to rat poison because it's so incredibly simple and basic that it has been making me drool. I mean, look at the source code. It doesn't get much simpler than that for a tiled WM.

If you are interested in rat poison, you may also enjoy xmonad. I've used both and much preferred xmonad

Re: The Bullshit Web

#394

Post by sixstringtheory »

ubernostrum wrote: post #361
fwip wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data caps are like your city bus. You can buy a bulk number of rides per month at a discount, and everything over that is billed at a regular rate. The bus doesn't magically add more seats when you make extra trips on it, but it still costs more to take the bus three times a day than twice a week. Even though the marginal cost of your body on the bus is minimal, having the fee serves to reduce crowding (demand at tha…

Both of the public transit systems I use on a regular basis sell me monthly unlimited-use passes.

That’s nothing more than marketing.

Do you ride more because it’s unlimited? When you get to your stop for your office or dinner or whatever, do you go back home and then back again before getting off? Do you go all the way to the end of the line to minimize your cost per mile, then walk back to your actual destination?

Of course not, you use it as efficiently as possible to do the thing you used public transit to actually _get to_.

Do you consider the money you spend for your unlimited pass as rent for housing or office space? Do you just stay on the bus all day, working on your laptop and holding meetings?

Unlimited transit passes are similar to unlimited vacation plans: people normally need and use much less than 100% of the resource offered. People also don’t normally push 100% bandwidth 24/7 through their unlimited plans.

If everyone decides to use their unlimited transit pass in this way, they will go away or increase in price accordingly.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#395

Post by buchanae »

Amen!

And this article doesn't even touch on the bullshit content – I don't want 10 websites that all say generally the same thing with different layouts (and 10 times more total bullshit consumed). I can't stand the internet today. The experience on mobile is even more unbearable.

I want simplicity.

Can we all just band together right here and now and create a subnet with a better set of principles?

- minimize page weight - minimize duplicate content - minimize UI variation - what else?

Re: The Bullshit Web

#397

Post by eksemplar »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #132
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…

I like this rant, you should go the next step: All you need to 'fix' this is a fast loading news website that gets enough paid subscribers to earn enough margin from subscriptions that you can pay for a news staff, an office, and various overheads. That is a longish way of saying that 99.9% of the overhead in any modern web site can be traced almost entirely to the mechanisms by which that web site is attempting to e…

The most profitable news paper in my country, didn’t have a website with articles or news stories on it until earlier this year. Their page was something from the 90ies (it was probably newer), and all it really offered was info about the paper and a way to buy it.

What they do, that other Danish papers don’t, is write lengthy meaty articles that takes time to read because they actually teach you something new. There was a story on Trumps connections to Russia, it was three full pages long, and we’re talking old school news paper format, so that’s what? 10 a4 pages worth of text?

The paper only comes out once a week, because it takes time to write, but also because it takes time to read.

I’m not sure where I am going with this, I just think it’s interesting how they’ve increased their subscription amounts while not really giving two shits about the bullshit web.

They may give two shits about the bullshit web now of course, having gotten a webpage with articles. I don’t know though, I’m a subscriber, but I haven’t visited their site yet.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#399

Post by [deleted] »

komali2 wrote: post #146
ChuckMcM wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this rant, you should go the next step: All you need to 'fix' this is a fast loading news website that gets enough paid subscribers to earn enough margin from subscriptions that you can pay for a news staff, an office, and various overheads. That is a longish way of saying that 99.9% of the overhead in any modern web site can be traced almost entirely to the mechanisms by which that web site is attempting to e…

Hilariously, the New York times tries both: you get five or so article reads (with shitloads of tracking), and then you have to pay to read more per month. But if you're paying, the pages don't load any different. You're paying to be mined.

[deleted]

Re: The Bullshit Web

#400

Post by smadge »

textmode wrote: post #319
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…

"I just loaded the New York Times front page. It was 6.6mb." ftp -4o 1.htm https://www.nytimes.com du -h 1.htm 206K For the author, 206K somehow grew to 6.6M. Could it have anything to do with the browser he is using? Does it automatically load resources specified by someone other than the user, without any user input? Above I specified www.nytimes.com. I did not specify any other sources. I got what I wanted: text/h…

I don’t think there is anything wrong with user agents downloading resources (like images and stylesheets) linked to by an html document. It is the providers, not the user agents, who have violated the trust of users by including unnecessary scripts, fonts, spyware, advertisements, etc.
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