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The Bullshit Web

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Re: The Bullshit Web

#421

Post by voltagex_ »

JetSpiegel wrote: post #260
TeMPOraL wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which news sources? How did you find the ones that still provide RSS? How much of it do you actually read?

Re: The Bullshit Web

#422

Post by cshenton »

giardini wrote: post #383

Useful might be a browser that extracts most of the information content from web pages and discards most of the formatting information? The text-only browser Lynx comes to mind but I think its obsolete now and doesn't show graphics, which sometimes are useful/necessary.

Reading mode on safari does this.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#423

Post by tlrobinson »

Heh, if you look at the JS console while loading cnn.com you'll see the following:

     .d8888b.  888b    888 888b    888
    d88P  Y88b 8888b   888 8888b   888
    888    888 88888b  888 88888b  888    We are trying to make CNN.com faster.
    888        888Y88b 888 888Y88b 888    Think you can help?
    888        888 Y88b888 888 Y88b888
    888    888 888  Y88888 888  Y88888    Send your ideas to: bounty AT cnnlabs DOT com
    Y88b  d88P 888   Y8888 888   Y8888
     "Y8888P"  888    Y888 888    Y888

Re: The Bullshit Web

#424

Post by z3phyr »

I am using a 4GB RAM HP Probook for the last 5 years (Student Artifact). You have to be very disciplined to use it though. I never open more than 10 tabs on the browser. While programming and testing, I generally close the browser. Use only lightweight WM. Avoid using JS based UI. My stack is vim/emacs (sorry) + a compiler (clang/rustc/sbcl) or perl/python + zsh/bash (userspace) + a terminal emulator + occasional firefox + wget/curl and weechat

I read pdfs with emacs. My computer's pretty fast wrt my peer's higher spec machine (16GB) with VS Code, Slack, Chrome and whatnot.. But he does play games better!

Re: The Bullshit Web

#425

Post by cjohansson »

liquidwax wrote: post #231
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 first realised how heavy these pages are when I disabled javascript. Things load in the blink of an eye. \ Most\ pages work and the web remains largely usable.

Yes this is my experience as well, JavaScript is often the key antagonist. Unfortunately many websites require JavaScript to function

Re: The Bullshit Web

#426

Post by blub »

wuliwong wrote: post #181
blub wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many logical reasons why various websites are so bloated. Certainly the market realities and web development culture play a role. That doesn't change the fact that the end result is bullshit, though. The tragedy of the commons is still a tragedy. I don't have a solution for commercial news organisations. If they can't completely subsidise their web presence through other means, it's pretty much guaranteed t…

I don't understand how you are relating this to the tragedy of the commons other than saying that because something has a reason it doesn't preclude it from being something.

The internet is a shared, unregulated resource which is spoiled by individual actors selfishly following their interest of making money through ads.

It is rational for each commercial website to use advertising, and tracking and other crap. As the parent said, those people aren't idiots.

But in the end they are still ruining the internet for all of us.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#427

Post by z3phyr »

As an external observer, I must say we are going to fast in an unorganized fashion! Software is eating the world and swallowing more than it can chew.

Businesses have monetized the web in so much unsustainable way that we have to introspect to clear our shit. What would have gone wrong if the general public still got good high quality old print media while the otherwise tech savvy worked patiently to make a better web? What would have gone wrong if the web remained just a portal to share textual information, while the other people did what they had been doing traditionally?

Re: The Bullshit Web

#428

Post by blub »

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.

Temporal literally said that the internet is the "commons" and your counter is that companies and protocols aren't the commons.

You're just being purposefully obtuse, this is not hard to understand, assuming ones paycheck doesn't depend on not understanding it.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#429

Post by textmode »

smadge wrote: post #400
textmode wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

"I don't think there is anything wrong with user agents downloading resources (like images and stylesheets) linked to by an html document."

Neither do I. For some websites, this is both necessary and appropriate.

However, in cases where the user does not want/need these resources, or where she does not trust the provider, I do not think there is anything wrong with not downloading images, stylesheets, unnecessary scripts, fonts, spyware, advertisements, etc.

Re: The Bullshit Web

#430

Post by michaelmrose »

na85 wrote: post #387
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.

Can you run recent versions of Photoshop? How about Premiere, or Final Cut? SolidWorks? CATIA? Matlab?

Matlab works on linux.

Premier or Final cut don't but DaVinci Resolve and Lightworks do.

Obviously if your workflow and thus your livelihood depends on a particular tool you should run a platform that runs it but I would question why someone with money would pick windows over mac.

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