ericra

Not only are loading times and total network usage ridiculous, sites will continue to violate your privacy via trackers and waste your CPU even when background idling. I've written about these issues a few times in the last few years, so just sharing for those interested:

A comparison of CPU usage for idling popular webpages: https://ericra.com/writing/site_cpu.html

Regarding tracker domains on the New Yorker site: https://ericra.com/writing/tracker_new_yorker.html

Cool resource.

Took me a bit to find it, so for anyone curious:

"All game assets found on the asset page are public domain CC0 licensed..."

There is a small FAQ if you click Support at the page bottom.

Info from the FAQ:

- Currently using Mistral 7B, but ability (by Mozilla) to swap the model used to another open source at any point.

- Hosted "by Mozilla" on their GCP instance.

- No obvious info about what it will cost them to run this since it is free to use.

- No training on user data.

Like others here, I'm very curious about the cost for Mozilla to run this service. It may be less than it initially appears given the 7B model they chose. I do wish they would focus their efforts on creating a very long-term endowment to pay devs for continued Firefox development in lieu of projects like this given the tenuous situation with their Google funding.

I'm not against this kind of thing in theory, but I hope it's being done in a cost-sustainable way.

I wasn't able to get many decent results after playing with the demo for some time. I guess my question is...what exactly is this for? I was able to get substantially better results about 2 years ago running SD 2 locally on a gaming laptop. Sure, the images took 30 seconds or so each, but the quality was better than I could get in the demo. Not sure what the point of instantly generating a ton of bad quality images is.

What am I missing?

It does seem like this is one of those domains where new AI models could thrive. From my understanding, the amount and variety of data necessary to make these models work is huge. In addition to historical data, you've got constant satellite data, weather stations on the ground for data collection, weather balloons going high into the atmosphere multiple times daily per location, Doppler radars tracking precipitation, data from ships and other devices in the ocean measuring temps and other info, and who knows what else.

It's incredible that we are able to predict anything this far into the future, but the complexity seems like it lends itself to this kind of black box approach.

*This is all speculation, so I'd be grateful if someone more knowledgeable could tell if if I'm mistaken about these assumptions. It's an interesting topic.

No problems here with a very similar setup (22.04, Firefox), and this is on a 2015 laptop. Very stable and uses very little background resources.

I am running unlock origin and privacy badger, but they don't block much of anything there.

This looks very interesting and I'm checking out the details now.

Btw, the link on the site to your GitHub repo has an extra dash, so it's leading to a 404.

I like the general idea of this, but this feels like it is trying to do too much. Removing ads, trackers, and unnecessary widgets is mostly a solved problem using unlock origin (+ possibly privacy badger).

I think it is a step too far to try and completely remove the step of actually visiting the website you get content from. This is the same thing Google is trying to do with their AI summarizer in search. Is the expected endgame of this that all useful websites just shut down because no one but bots visits them anymore? Even if those sites are user-funded and not reliant on ads, I find it hard to believe that many people would use AI summaries from the site then subsequently donate to financially support it.

I'm much more in favor of an approach that involves still visiting the actual website, but removes the content that the user does not want to see (ublock origin style).

I would suggest that once the browser extension exists, that it should transform the site "in-place" after visiting the site then pressing a button on the extension. And I could see that potentially having value (but I suspect this would take a lot of work to get right).

I genuinely think this is a great thing to offer and very much needed. Great work. Your ffmpeg tutorial also looks really interesting, and I'll definitely be checking that out when I have time.

But please consider removing or changing that huge cookie banner on the main page. The amount of people that will simply choose to not interact with the site at all and X out immediately when seeing this might be higher than you think. That would be my first instinct.

Honestly, this is just repulsive. Crypto has brought nearly zero benefits to society and has made income inequality even worse. Not to mention the environmental impact.

I don't see how any reasonable person can celebrate this. Ask yourself who is benefiting most from this.

You make a very good point about "good" option source options. There are also situations where plenty of open tools exist, but whole-system complexity is such that people choose proprietary/managed options anyway. Email hosting comes to mind.

This is not surprising, and unfortunately, this situation is unlikely to get better any time soon given our increasingly conservative (corp friendly) federal courts. It's really a shame because these corps have shown they can't be trusted to properly archive their own games, and any change of ownership or economic fortune can mean they are lost forever.

From a personal level, I'll just keep doing what I've always done. Help archive the things I can. Support and buy games from smaller devs or publishers who care about their games. And if you want to play something from a shitty AAA dev, nothing is stopping you from playing it anyway for free and just giving the money to your favorite charity instead. Consumers can have a lot of power if they choose to exercise it.

Gotta be honest, given much of the news I have been consuming in the past few weeks, I could read 100 articles like this. Concise, well-written, interesting and about potentially useful research...

And the prospect of helping wounds heal with nano spaghetti is just cool

Sorry that I wasn't clear. This was in Toronto. I've yet to see quite as many such ads here in the US, but it's possible they were just pushed out by political ads during this period.

I'm American but lived in Toronto from 2022 until a couple months ago.

I was astounded by the amount of online gambling ads just literally pasted everywhere in Toronto. When I got YouTube ads, a huge percentage was for these. They were pasted over the whole body of streetcars and in transit stations throughout the city.

I don't know much about the current status in the U.S., but Ontario at least seems to be completely infected by gambling ads. They must be making insane amounts of money off exploiting people's gambling addictions, as well as creating new addictions daily.

Great project. I particularly love the:

1) mit license 2) using plausible instead of Google analytics. Practically speaking, uBO is going to block both by default, but for non-tech users this is great. 3) appreciate how the app respects your pc when the web app is running in the background. Very low footprint, no random CPU spikes or anything.

Wish you guys the best.

Appreciate it! Looks like it's just on my end.

Ok interesting. Very weird since I tried from multiple devices and IPs.

Anyway thanks for confirming.

Is anyone able to access the USPS website? I have been trying from multiple different IPs and had no luck. Could not find any info on social media about it.

I would normally think nothing of it, but the timing is conspicuous.

Having produced only a single book for standardebooks, I don't think many people appreciate the amount of effort that goes into the corrections, semantic html additions, and other edits it takes to go from a typical Gutenberg file to a standardebooks release. Granted, the tool chain you guys have created is great and is immensely helpful.

All that to mainly say..I appreciate you. It's one of my favorite projects, and I hope it keeps going strong indefinitely.

I've always been a bookmark guy, and I don't know how you hundreds-of-tabs guys do it. It would driv me crazy I think.

That being said, have you looked into something like this:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

(Disclaimer: have never used it, but it is a recommended extension). It may not meet your needs exactly since it would likely reload YouTube tabs when "undiscarded", but it might be worth a look.

That's interesting. I don't have a Facebook account anymore to check, but I'm guessing you only see this when logged in, correct? I get very little CPU usage on their main/login page when logged out.

I don't doubt that Facebook is a hellscape when actually in the web app, though.

At least the news/media sites can pretend they are loading something useful for the user, even if that is not usually the case.

I can't figure out why Google needs 15X more CPU indefinitely to display a white page with a search box, though (compared to a blank tab or simple site).

Thank you.

It surprised me quite a bit that so many resources were being used even though Firefox is not in focus. It makes sense from the browser perspective, though, since you don't want to completely stop a web app when tabbing away. Almost all CPU usage is the result of the active website's design.

It actually made it appreciative of how Firefox uses almost no CPU "passively", and I'm curious if the same thing would be true for Chrome. If you discount memory usage, the browser is surprisingly lightweight.

Just a little experiment I did to test the inefficiency of websites. When looking into this, I found that most people measured website efficiency mainly based on the amount of network requests or just general subjective slowness. I wanted to see what the objective results were when isolating a website and observing CPU usage directly.

Yes this is similar to the popular Stephen Mitchell "translation" in that neither spoke the original language.

That being said, I'm glad both of them exist. They are interesting and feel much different to me than the literal translations.

This looks great, and your examples seem very high-quality.

I'm curious to play with it, but I'm always weary of signing into things with my Google / other accounts. Any plans to have the option to just make an account for your site (unless I'm missing it)?

That is an insane price spike for cocoa. 239% price increase YoY!

Are these Androids actually less powerful than an 11 year-old, base-spec MacBook?

Yes. Definitely. a Macbook Pro from 2013 has between 4-16GB of memory for one thing. The lowest spec phone in the article (Itel P32) has 1GB. A 2013 Macbook Pro has a 4th gen i5 processor. This phone has a MediaTek MT6580. It's not even in the same ballpark.

This is a bit of an extreme example, but the fact is that a very large number of people in many areas of the world use phones like these.

Certainly an option for me. But not a scalable solution for the large number of non-tech people with older devices.