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That's not news, the websites have been getting fatter and fatter for a very long time now. Maciej Ceglowski calls that "the website obesity crisis", and he gave a very good talk about this problem. Goes into a bit more detail than TFA. The text version is available here: http://idlewords.com/talks/web....

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/12/22/2015231/average-web-page-approaches-1mb

And of course there's this great rant from 2015: The Website Obesity Crisis (Video). Money quote: "If current trends continue, it is very likely that by 2020 articles about web bloat are going to be 5MB in size or bigger."

This whole "responsive" design (slow, bloated, ajax-on-meth pile of shit) shift and "mobile" revolution has been a wholesale disaster.

• Websites are slower, less usable, less useful, and even more ad and spyware ridden than they were so much as 3 years ago.
• Mainstream, text-only websites now take 20s to load on i5s, need megabytes of css and and javascript code to even display images.
• Even the best Web 2.0 sites have degraded, losing functionality, common sense, text on buttons, borders on buttons for Christsake.
• Mammoth advances bandwidth, storage, latency, processor power and memory are mullified as fast as Node.js can devour them.
• Every page is now an app

Brutal reality: Websites were better when IE6 was still around.
When we didn't have standards. When "Designers" didn't have the ability to treat the browser as a turning machine and hijack everything about it. When sites pretended to give a shit about bandwidth.

Web 3.0 is a pile of shit.
http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

There is a hilarious (and sad) commentary on website bloat at http://idlewords.com/talks/web... that shows truely outrageous examples of this sin.

You left out "Responsive Design", which is anything but.

Ever since Google instituted mobilegeddon, every site now has 500KB of extra javascript and css code and now take 5-10 seconds to completely load and render -- with an ad blocker. The internet has turned into molasses over the last 3 years, and personally I've stopped browsing a lot of sites because of it.

It is incredible to see how fast pages actually transfer when you use something like Dillo, verses how long it is taking them to render now. I've got a MBs/sec web connection, but waiting for pages to render feels like it's taking me back to dial-up waiting times. The blame lies with web-designers, who have bloated things to such a degree that pages complaining about the size of webpages are themselves over 3MB in size.

Let's take a look at the Apple page that explains iOS on the iPad Pro. .... The page is 51 megabytes big.

Honestly, I think we need to go back to metered connections and charging per Gigabyte. This can't go on.

The Website Obesity Crisis. Why not start the new year with a chuckle.

Yep. A Rocket To Nowhere remains the best analysis of this mess that I've seen. If the STS had been built to the original, smaller specs and launched on top of a rocket it still wouldn't have been efficient, but certainly would have been cheaper and safer.

For most people in Argentina, a vegetarian is something you eat

#3 It will cost money.

Besides the fact that this news is breaking on slashdot (which should be a huge red flag), I would suspect the chinese (and a huge chunk of Asia) would be willing to bankroll this, especially if it was designed so that they could ship 300' wind power blades through the tunnel. This would be like the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel, except on a grander scale: http://www.idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm

Fine, pick and choose your comparisons. How many teachers, policemen, and education programs for at risk youth could we have bought?

http://www.idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm

You could switch the phrase around to be, "You can taste the joy".

Stolen from this excellent article:
http://www.idlewords.com/2006/04/argentina_on_two_steaks_a_day.htm

It's a bit dated now in regard to the beer and some other small matters, but it really does feel like you join a cult when you eat beef there.

http://www.idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm
 
"Electronic displays in each taqueria light up in real time with orders placed on the East Coast, and within minutes a fresh burrito has been assembled, rolled in foil, marked and dropped down one of the small vertical tubes that rise like organ pipes in restaurant kitchens throughout the city."

Oh, but is it anything like the The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel?

"...An expansive spiderweb of tubes running through San Francisco’s Mission district as far south as the “Burrito Bordeaux” region of Palo Alto and Mountain View. Electronic displays in each taqueria light up in real time with orders placed on the East Coast, and within minutes a fresh burrito has been assembled, rolled in foil, marked and dropped down one of the small vertical tubes that rise like organ pipes in restaurant kitchens throughout the city."

"Propelled by powerful bursts of compressed air, the burritos speed along the same tunnel as the BART commuter train, whose passengers remain oblivious to the hundreds of delicious cylinders whizzing along overhead. Within twelve minutes, even the remotest burrito has arrived at its final destination, the Alameda Transfer Station, where it will be prepared for its transcontinental journey."

"Every four seconds a ‘slug’ of ten burritos, white with frost, ratchets into the breech. A moment later it flies into the tunnel with a loud hiss of compressed gas, and the lights dim briefly as banks of powerful electromagnets accelerate the burritos to over two hundred miles an hour. By the time they pass Stockton three minutes later the burritos will be traveling faster than the Concorde."

http://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm

If only it were true.

I thought we had this already... http://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm

I only support this if it can eventually make Maciej Ceglowski's awesome Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel a reality, so that we can finally get decent burritos on the East Coast:

Propelled by powerful bursts of compressed air, the burritos speed along the same tunnel as the BART commuter train, whose passengers remain oblivious to the hundreds of delicious cylinders whizzing along overhead. Within twelve minutes, even the remotest burrito has arrived at its final destination, the Alameda Transfer Station, where it will be prepared for its transcontinental journey.

High pressure pneumatic tubes from all over the Bay Area emerge in the center of the facility, spilling silvery burritos onto a high-speed sorting line. The metal-jacketed burritos look like oversize bullets, and the conveyor belts that move them through the facility resemble giant belts of delicious ammunition. Within a few seconds of arrival the burritos have been bar coded, checked for balance and round on a precision lathe, and then flash-frozen with liquid nitrogen.

The mouth of the tunnel is a small concrete arch in the side of a nearby hill, about as glamorous as an abandoned railway tunnel. Yet if you could open the airlocks and stare down its length with a telescope, you would see airplanes on final approach to Newark Airport, three thousand miles away! To reduce drag on the burritos to a minimum, the tunnel must be kept in near-vacuum with powerful pumps. At the tunnel’s deepest point the burritos will be traveling nearly two kilometers a second - even the faintest whiff of air would quickly drag them to a stop.

I only support this if it can eventually make Maciej Ceglowski's awesome Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel a reality, so that we can finally get decent burritos on the East Coast:

Propelled by powerful bursts of compressed air, the burritos speed along the same tunnel as the BART commuter train, whose passengers remain oblivious to the hundreds of delicious cylinders whizzing along overhead. Within twelve minutes, even the remotest burrito has arrived at its final destination, the Alameda Transfer Station, where it will be prepared for its transcontinental journey.

High pressure pneumatic tubes from all over the Bay Area emerge in the center of the facility, spilling silvery burritos onto a high-speed sorting line. The metal-jacketed burritos look like oversize bullets, and the conveyor belts that move them through the facility resemble giant belts of delicious ammunition. Within a few seconds of arrival the burritos have been bar coded, checked for balance and round on a precision lathe, and then flash-frozen with liquid nitrogen.

The mouth of the tunnel is a small concrete arch in the side of a nearby hill, about as glamorous as an abandoned railway tunnel. Yet if you could open the airlocks and stare down its length with a telescope, you would see airplanes on final approach to Newark Airport, three thousand miles away! To reduce drag on the burritos to a minimum, the tunnel must be kept in near-vacuum with powerful pumps. At the tunnel’s deepest point the burritos will be traveling nearly two kilometers a second - even the faintest whiff of air would quickly drag them to a stop.

http://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm

A tunnel bored directly between London and New York would be even faster and require less cooling. Only two points intersecting the center would be competitive with my Earth Chord Trading Tunnels!

Your idea intrigues me and I would like to subscribe to your burrito delivery service.

The shuttle program was a huge waste of money, for almost no science benefit. See http://www.idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm

A random quote: "And of course, there was John Glenn, monitored inside and out, blood tested, urine sampled, entire organism analyzed for signs of accelerated aging. Close observation of the Senator suggested that there might not be any medical obstacles to launching the entire legislative branch into space, possibly the most encouraging scientific result of the mission."

Did anyone notice that they don't say where they are going in this capsule?

Sounds very much like LEO yet again. Because the ISS has turned out to be oh so very useful.

DAMMIT NASA TAKE SOME RISKS! WHERE THE FUCK IS MY MOON BASE?? AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

New York City does have a fascinating history of pneumatic transport projects. A particularly elaborate example is when New Yorkers were supplied with fresh burritos via pneumatic delivery.

Just because there's nothing like it doesn't mean it's a good idea.

I thought that long distance pneumatic tubes were already a reality. See here.

Yup, exactly. The one to watch out for, however, is the increasing aggression of a Nazi run Germany leading to the annexation of Poland, which could very conceivably start WWIII.

Er, that already happened. More than 4 years ago!

No doubt the concept can be extended to Pizzas and Chinese takeout as well...

Sure. And there's already a working prototype. To carry passengers or mail, we'd just need to build a bigger burrito...

I'm not sure that the STS as it was finally created could ever be called a 'responsible' use of resources

IMO the combination of the retarded shuttle design and the pointless money-pit ISS have held back meaningful space exploration at least a decade, probably more.

it's not a money sink

http://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm

First:

http://www.idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhe re.htm

Second, covering up what a piece of shit it might be isn't going to make it any better, and good luck covering up anything like Columbia(which would probably be more likely in the insular environment you propose).

Tautologically speaking, the future lies in the future, not the past. The space program should take stock of that and abandon its current public relations focus and get back to doing interesting stuff, like imaging the entirety of the planet in interesting frequencies and so on. Ten unserviceable Hubblets would have done plenty of good science too.

I thought it was NYC to San Francisco, and only for burritos.

This sounds like an even more impressive project than the current world record holder -- a real feat of engineering. ;)

It may be longer, but this project has nothing on The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel.

It was more a case of justifying manned flight. There was a big fear that if the shuttlle could fly completely by remote, astronauts would be simply passengers and therefore not really required. According to this article, the decision was at the request of the astronauts. (I am sure I have seen other articles that go into more detail but can't find them at the moment.)

It seems the US space program has been prone to decisions such as this in order to make the astronauts look more important than the trained monkeys sent up in the earliest test flights... ;^)

This article should not have been published without a link to Maciej Ceglowski's excellent analysis, Rocket to Nowhere. It seems to answer a lot of questions folks have here.

A quote: "Taken on its own merits, the Shuttle gives the impression of a vehicle designed to be launched repeatedly to near-Earth orbit, tended by five to seven passengers with little concern for their personal safety, and requiring extravagant care and preparation before each flight, with an almost fetishistic emphasis on reuse. Clearly this primitive space plane must have been a sacred artifact, used in religious rituals to deliver sacrifice to a sky god.

As tempting as it is to picture a blood-spattered Canadarm flinging goat carcasses into the void, we know that the Shuttle is the fruit of what was supposed to be a rational decision making process."

Graham has engineers disease: he believes that being an accomplished engineer makes him qualified to speak authoritatively on art, law, science, film... He probably caught it from ESR.

Anyway, I heartily recommend you read this fine demolition of Graham's opinions on painting before giving this dilletante blowhard any of your copious free time.

Why the hell can't these folks give a WRITTEN transscript along with the podcasts? Podcasts are just audioblogging, and audioblogs suck. Let me read the damn thing, please.

> Hackers and Painters -- Another entertaining and informative talk by Paul Graham

Once you've read that, go read Dabblers and Blowhards for an alternate view on Graham's analogies.

Someone wrote a whole essay expanding on the above. A
choice quote:

"These essays and this writing style are tempting to people outside the subculture at hand because of their engaging personal tone and idiosyncratic, insider's view. But after a while, you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism."

The whole essay, "Dabblers and Blowhards" is here:

http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blow hards.htm

Matt

The ISS was another child of the Cold War: originally intended to show the Russians up and provide a permanent American presence in space, then hastily amended as a way to keep the Russian space scientists busy while their economy was falling to pieces. Like the Shuttle, it has been redesigned and reduced in scope so many times that it bears no resemblance to its original conception. Launched in an oblique, low orbit that guarantees its permanent uselessness, it serves as yin to the shuttle's yang, justifying an endless stream of future Shuttle missions through the simple stratagem of being too expensive to abandon.

Of course, the ISS has also been preemptively armed with science, but NASA has found much more effective safeguards against potential budget cuts. The station's inordinately expensive modules have mainly come from foreign space agencies, ensuring that even a NASA administrator foolhardy enough to let the thing drop into the sea would contravene a fistful of international treaties. And the station requires a permanent crew, a trick NASA learned from the Shuttle, so that there can be no question of mothballing it or converting it into an unmanned research platform.

In the thirty years since the last Moon flight, we have succeeded in creating a perfectly self-contained manned space program, in which the Shuttle goes up to save the Space Station (undermanned, incomplete, breaking down, filled with garbage, and dropping at a hundred meters per day), and the Space Station offers the Shuttle a mission and a destination. The Columbia accident has added a beautiful finishing symmetry - the Shuttle is now required to fly to the ISS, which will serve as an inspection station for the fragile thermal tiles, and a lifeboat in case something goes seriously wrong. This closed cycle is so perfect that the last NASA administrator even cancelled the only mission in which there was a compelling need for a manned space flight - the Hubble telescope repair and upgrade - on the grounds that it would be too dangerous to fly the Shuttle away from the ISS, thereby detaching the program from its last connection to reason and leaving it free to float off into its current absurdist theater of backflips, gap fillers, Canadarms and heroic expeditions to the bottom of the spacecraft.

The ISS doesn't really serve any useful purpose at this point. It exists as a place for the Space Shuttle to go to, and the Space Shuttle exists as a vehicle that gets us to the ISS. Check out this article for more indo.

We're going to be using speech in the future to talk, and we're going to read it off the screen.

I'll grant that the engine may wait for a person to finish a sentance before writing it out.

In sims where hearing a persons voice is a part of the fantasy (you do watch movies, right? You don't entirely read books, no?) we'll synth a voice. When it's important to us to actually hear another person's voice, we may use live voice, or a synth voice.

No: I disagree with you that they just add "who's on" features "just because they can." They do it because people like to know who else is around, and people like being with other people, and people like interacting with other people. People actually do use the IM systems built into community websites. In a lot of communities, people are interested in the people there, and they'd be tickled pink if they could actually transparently communicate in real-time. Not all would do it all the time, but many people would do it some of the time. If you are one of the few who doesn't like to talk real-time, ever, you can just opt out.

Yeah-yeah-yeah, I know the audioblogging manifesto. I teach it to people myself. But people have a real desire to hear voice, too. I think you're over-compensating.

Try reading this for some provocative reasons why ity's a big waster of time: http://www.idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhe re.htm "In the thirty years since the last Moon flight, we have succeeded in creating a perfectly self-contained manned space program, in which the Shuttle goes up to save the Space Station (undermanned, incomplete, breaking down, filled with garbage, and dropping at a hundred meters per day), and the Space Station offers the Shuttle a mission and a destination. The Columbia accident has added a beautiful finishing symmetry - the Shuttle is now required to fly to the ISS, which will serve as an inspection station for the fragile thermal tiles, and a lifeboat in case something goes seriously wrong."

The best and most bracing recent analysis I've seen of the Shuttle and its current situation is A Rocket to Nowhere by one Maciej Ceglowski. "The goal cannot be to have a safe space program -- rocket science is going to remain difficult and risky. But we have the right to demand that the space program have some purpose beyond trying to keep its participants alive. NASA needs to take a lesson in courage from its astronauts, and demand either a proper, funded mandate for manned exploration, or close down the program. By NASA's own arguments, the commercial, technological and intellectual allure of manned space exploration are so great that it will not be a hard case to make. But even if the worst happens and the Shuttles are mothballed, with the ISS left abandoned, the loss to science will have been negligible. That is the great tragedy of the current 'return to flight', and the sooner we force the agency to confront its failure, the greater our chances of salvaging a space program worth keeping out of the current mess."

• You do not require the target to listen to you,
• and you do not require the target to log in to voicemail.

An amusing take on one of his other essays, not strictly relevant but i'd just read it when this was posted.

Dabblers and Blowhards

Huh. I meant that to point at the footnotes on this page.

I think I'm going to start a Linux distro and name it Weenis.

Mandriva sounds like a drag Carmen Miranda imposter.