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PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading

stuartbreckenridge.net

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Re: PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading

#401

Post by throw10920 »

psychoslave wrote: post #397
throw10920 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s precisely the elephant in the room. Money is a distortion and filtering lense No, money is the most accurate way of measuring value to people that has ever been invented . It quite literally is the least distorted lens you can possibly get. Every single other metric is worse . Aren't you aware of the well-known scientific truism that it's impossible to directly perceive reality, and that all of the indirect…

>No, money is the most accurate way of measuring value to people that has ever been invented. It quite literally is the least distorted lens you can possibly get. As they say "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it", which also have many other more flavors.[1] >Aren't you aware of the well-known scientific truism that it's impossible to directly percei…

> As they say "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it", which also have many other more flavors.[1]

This is a useless, irrelevant, and fallacious thought-terminating cliche that you're using as an attempt to disguise the fact that you have presented no alternative - because you know I'll tear it to shreds if you do. (an LLM comment doesn't count, because they lie and hallucinate, and it's not you responding)

> even LLMs run by capitalist companies will explain that to anyone interested to ask.[2]

You can't even be bothered to try to think for yourself. "psychoslave" is an extremely apt name for your account.

> Money at best is a proxy for binding individuals into social classes.

Oh, and there's the politics - you're not interested in debate, you're a propagandist. You're not arguing in good faith (if that wasn't clear enough from the LLM-generated responses, failure to make any sort of coherent argument, and not including a single actual alternative to money as a proxy for measuring value). If you respond, I'll do my best to debunk your arguments for future HN readers, but it's useless to try to convince you while your basic mindset is that you're shilling for a particular political point.

Re: PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading

#402

Post by ZaoLahma »

carlosjobim wrote: post #354
ZaoLahma wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly we don't, and what's worse is that the "content" is getting to the point where we need _content_ blockers. I recently got hit by an "article" that promised to tell me which three AAA games would be released with PS Plus soon. A three point bullet list was all I wanted. Instead I got pages after pages of word-manure about nothing at all for reasons I don't even understand. At the end of it I still couldn't tel…

> I recently got hit by an "article" Exactly how did you "get hit" by an article? Did somebody hack your computer and pointed your browser to it? Or did somebody ambush you on your walk to work and show a magazine with the article into your face? If you seek out content from low quality sources, you get the low quality treatment. The only way for consumers to fight this is by paying for good quality content, which is…

A notification on my phone. I don't know what produced it exactly, but it was probably connected to my google account (sigh!) somehow.

It's something that happens rarely enough for me to not having developed an automatic "aw hell nah, no f-ing way" filter towards it anyway, and I (naively) did click the notification and "got hit" by the article.

Re: PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading

#403

Post by cozzyd »

qingcharles wrote: post #394
cozzyd wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember 10+ years ago I had to do my on-boarding paperwork from a research station on the Greenland ice sheet. Workday would just not work with the high latency (but otherwise, not terribly slow) connection. I had to remote desktop to a CONUS computer and use a browser there in order for it to work...

In 1999 I got a job to build one of the first streaming and download systems for the major record labels. Working from home as they didn't have offices yet. I'd been unemployed for months, and the day before I started my broadband got cut off for nonpayment. For the first few weeks all I had was my 9600bps serial connection to my Nokia 9000i. I had to remotely re-encode hundreds of CDs in 2Kbps audio so I could at le…

What codec were you using? I didn't think mp3 went that low.

Re: PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading

#404

Post by lxgr »

throw10920 wrote: post #387
lxgr wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who are you to decide which are the most important? The customer.

Um, no. You are one customer, out of thousands (or tens of thousands). You do not get to speak for anyone except yourself.

I'm not claiming to speak for anybody other than me, although I'd be surprised if using half a gigabyte of metered mobile data would generally be very popular with users on metered plans.

Re: PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading

#405

Post by throw10920 »

lxgr wrote: post #404
throw10920 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, no. You are one customer, out of thousands (or tens of thousands). You do not get to speak for anyone except yourself.

I'm not claiming to speak for anybody other than me, although I'd be surprised if using half a gigabyte of metered mobile data would generally be very popular with users on metered plans.

Half a gigabyte if you stay on the page for five minutes, which is a pretty big assumption. If you have a TikTok attention span and are there for 30 seconds, you probably care far less.

(again, I'm not saying this is a good thing - read my parent comment again)

Re: PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading

#406

Post by freedomben »

timpera wrote: post #57
MBCook wrote: post #17

The title buried the lede. > In the five minutes since I started writing this post the website has downloaded almost half a gigabyte of new ads. I’m guessing this is due to autoplaying videos. *500 MB* in 5 minutes. 37 MB is petite compared to that.

Downloading 500 MB in 5 minutes in the background of a random article is really disrespectful to readers on low-end devices or metered data plans (and these two groups are often the same people!). What a waste of ressources.

Fully agree. Having worked closely with a marketing exec/entreprenur type, I've never felt more incompatible with a person's worldview. I mentioned the ads that are "disrespectful to users" at one point when he put one of those annoying modals that pops up half way through the story, and he looked utterly perplexed that anyone would even think thoughts like that. When I pointed out that his analytics and ad stuff were turning my hard-fought 100 ms full page load work into a 5 second nasty mess (I used much more diplomatic language with him :-) ) it was like I was trying to tell a hunter-gatherer to go vegan during the winter.

I really think the marketing people behind most websites just could not give a shit less about users. To them, they are faceless plebs to be manipulated and milked, not humans to be respected. It's quite disheartening.

Re: PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading

#408

Post by kuschku »

duskdozer wrote: post #400
roywiggins wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The COTS solution for some web browsing is Opera Mini, which may still work? It also uses a proxy to prerender and compress websites, and worked ok at 2G speeds last I used it. It used to work well as a java applet and made the wider internet functional on feature phones. Very solid software. But as a practical matter, what people rely on phones for are services that are app-based. Good luck completing a Venmo transa…

>Opera Mini I just tried to look for this and all links I'm seeing just forward to the main Opera page

Opera Mini, like actual Opera, was killed when Opera was purchased and relaunched as another Chrome clone.

Re: PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading

#409

Post by psychoslave »

throw10920 wrote: post #401
psychoslave wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No, money is the most accurate way of measuring value to people that has ever been invented. It quite literally is the least distorted lens you can possibly get. As they say "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it", which also have many other more flavors.[1] >Aren't you aware of the well-known scientific truism that it's impossible to directly percei…

> As they say "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it", which also have many other more flavors.[1] This is a useless, irrelevant, and fallacious thought-terminating cliche that you're using as an attempt to disguise the fact that you have presented no alternative - because you know I'll tear it to shreds if you do. (an LLM comment doesn't count, becau…

>This is a useless, irrelevant, and fallacious thought-terminating cliche that you're using as an attempt to disguise the fact that you have presented no alternative - because you know I'll tear it to shreds if you do.

Once again, this kind of sentence show a total absence of will to go further than I/you mentality. A wider perspective is hard to achieve, if even possible, without putting the pretence of this/that personality. This is a path that seems as relevant as yelling at a computer when a software bug occurs. That might feel like a way to evacuate the frustration, but the computer won’t work better not matter what profanity is uttered (though it will never be bothered either, unlike fellow humans which have limited patience and have awareness of their own limited time to be alive).

>(an LLM comment doesn't count, because they lie and hallucinate, and it's not you responding)

LLM can certainly generate confabulations, but pretending they hallucinate or think is a lie. LLMs can also make totally sound output. Using a tool that can generate summary quickly doesn’t mean it voids the hand crafted answer that point to it.

It’s wise not taking LLMs output as a given regarding truth, but they certainly can be useful to point to considerations that can be falsified on one own preferred means.

>You can't even be bothered to try to think for yourself. "psychoslave" is an extremely apt name for your account.

Once again, this kind of attitude brings zero constructive contribution to the discussion. Everyone can be tired or have a bad day and push easily the "ad hominem" button. Hopefully that’s not an deeply engraved habit, and just taking some rest might be enough to step back and provide more positive prose in a near future.

>Oh, and there's the politics - you're not interested in debate, you're a propagandist. You're not arguing in good faith (if that wasn't clear enough from the LLM-generated responses, failure to make any sort of coherent argument, and not including a single actual alternative to money as a proxy for measuring value).

If anyone that disagrees with some premisses is disqualified of being a good faith debate participant, there is actually not much debate to hold, isn’t it?

> not including a single actual alternative to money as a proxy for measuring value

It makes manifest that this comment don’t take into account what was linked previously, so it’s better stop here, but for those interested in some other way to measure value and social systems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Progress_Index

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...

Re: PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading

#410

Post by filoleg »

coryrc wrote: post #244
filoleg wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe there is a contradiction. The FCC page you linked is talking about major carriers decommissioning 3G. The grandparent comment is talking about rural/remote areas that no major carrier served in the first place.

The big-3 have nationwide coverage (well, at least 2 of them). But even beside that, AFAICT USCellular shut down 3G in January 2024, Appalachian Wireless in Dec 2022, Cellcom in Dec 2023, and C Spire sometime in 2022. I'm interested to know where exactly public 3G still exists in the USA.

> I'm interested to know where exactly public 3G still exists in the USA.

I gotchu, but I wanna be clear that it is all just fringe/regional operators (which is what the claim was originally about anyway, not about major telcos).

I found a couple with user reports claiming 3G support still being active in random pockets of Wyoming/Colorado/etc. (but no confirmation on the official website), and one with confirmation on the official website.

The one with the official confirmation is Union Wireless[0], with UMTS being a stand-in for 3G (color-coded in grey on their coverage map; mostly southern Wyoming plus parts of Colorado, Utah, and Idaho).

I agree with your overall point though. Functionally, 3G is dead in the US. But factually, there are a few holdout fringe remote areas that still have it.

0. https://www.unionwireless.com/wireless-coverage

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