Dude. I thought That was bad. Just now I went to arstechnica to view one article and I did the same thing to "support" the site. It was 36MB in one minute.
GnuLinuxDude
joined 2 years ago
Just yesterday I was on a news website. I wanted to support it and the author of the piece so I opened a clean session of firefox. No extensions or blocking of any kind.
The "initial" payload (i.e. after I lost patience approximately 30s after initial page load and decided to call a number) was 14.79MB transferred. But the traffic never stopped. In the network view you could see the browser continually running ad auctions and about every 15s the ads on the page would cycle. The combination of auctions and ads on my screen kept that tab fully occupied at 25-40% of my CPU. Firefox self-reported the tab as taking over 400MB of RAM.
This was so egregious that I had to run one simple test. I set my DNS on my desktop to my PiHole and re-ran my experiment.
Initial payload went from almost 14.79 -> 4.00MB (much of which was fonts and oversized images to preview other articles). And the page took 1/4 the RAM and almost no CPU anymore.
Modern web is dogshit.
This was the website in question. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/welcomefest-dispatch-centrism-abundance/
but the flooding of the art fields with low quality products
It's even worse than that, because the #1 use case is spam, regardless of what others think they personally gain out of it. It is exhausting filtering through the endless garbage spam results. And it isn't just text sites. Searching generic terms into sites like YouTube (e.g. "cats") will quickly lead you to a deluge of AI shit. Where did the real cats go?
It's incredible that DrNik is coming out with a bland, fake movie trailer as an example of how AI is good. It's "super creative" to repeatedly prompt Veo3 to give you synthetic Hobbit-style images that have the vague appearance of looking like VistaVision. Actually, super creative is kinda already done, watch me go hyper creative:
"Whoa, now you can make it look like an 80s rock music video. Whoa, now you can make it look like a 20s silent film. Whoa, now you can make look like a 90s sci-fi flick. Whoa, now you can make it look like a super hero film."
Have you had to code review someone who is obviously just committing AI bullshit? It is an incredible waste of time. I know people who learned pre-LLM (i.e. have functioning brains) and are practically on the verge of complete apathy from having to babysit ai code/coders, especially as their management keeps pushing people to use it. As in, they must use LLM as a performance metric.
Does this analysis hold for luxury goods? A Switch 2 is not a necessary purchase, and alternatives to it (games and game consoles) can be found for extremely cheap.
I also think Nintendo has even more strong competition today than it used to with the rise of cellphones and app stores. I'd argue those mobile games tend to be crap, but that's a separate concern from how accessible they are...
Self-hosting your own media considered harmful - I just received my second community guidelines violation for my video demonstrating the use of LibreELEC on a Raspberry Pi 5, for 4K video playback
What kind of place do you go to to find these things? Sometimes I get really lucky (see my post history about my wonderful new printer), but if I could increase my odds that would be cool.