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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: April 25th, 2026

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  • Infrastructure is important, and walking back from these gigabit targets is awful. There is no replacement for fiber. We all deserve to have access to fast internet.

    But to yell at a cloud for a moment, if we’re being honest most people should not need gigabit. I know everyone is a gamer now, but let’s forget about bulk downloads. For normal browsing most people should not need much more than about 12mbps. 12 mbps is fast enough to have two 1080p h265 streams running concurrently. And yet, when you try to use the modern web at that speed, it’s a terrible experience because of all the adtech bullshit that gets crammed into every page. When I measured this Ars article it was 6.53MB. That is, to borrow a yardstick from a blogpost I reread recently, long enough to fit 3 or 4 of the great Russian epics inside. It is bigger than the shareware version of DOOM, big enough to fit the entire python standard package library documentation. For one article.

    Don’t let this cheapen the FCC being chickenshit and captured by specific perverse corporate interests, but publishers have sold us a bridge when it comes to the modern web. Web3 was supposed to fix all this with micropayments. I’d gladly pay whatever my paltry share of Ars’ CPM they expected to get out of my pageview, wouldn’t you? But cryptobros turned it into a get-rich-quick slopfest and then it died.

    edit: having meandered over to my computer because I just cannot sleep, I decided to measure the page as I access it, with ublock, noscript, and umatrix turned on. That article now weighs just over 724kB. Way better. Reader mode loses the images and gets the article down to 2.49kB. Meaning the actual content is roughly 0.04% of the delivered size of the original page. The stylesheet alone is many times the size of the content. I know I’m really indulging my old man energy but web pages do not need to be this large. I know cache exists, and that’s fine, but it’s still a bit ridiculous. Some people in this world do still use dialup and/or pay per MB. Your 6.5MB web page might cost somebody a nontrivial sum to read, relative to their means.

    The irony is not lost on me that my home instance itself is not the most lightweight web app. The page I am using to edit this comment is 1.9MB. With the cache active it’s <100kB transferred per page load but still, if I weren’t a hypocrite I’d probably switch to a Piefed instance.

    edit 2: added emphasis










  • What they are describing is a natural reduction in population that occurs automatically when countries become more economically developed. Trying to steer this is gonna have downstream impacts. You are not going to roll out these reforms everywhere all at once, so where are you going to start? Because if democracy and a global economy are still going to exist in 2200, relative population sizes matter. If, say, India develops their rural regions, does a 180 on feminism, and halves their population in the process, but Pakistan doesn’t, that’s going to have geopolitical ramifications, and not good ones. This kind of thinking scares me, no matter what the framing is. People are good, and we can have more of them, and we should have more of them. We just need to be smarter about how we use our resources.