[retired]

Future proofing. Websites nowadays load tens of megabytes for a simple news page. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future a website consumes 500+ megabytes on the initial page load. That will take 40 seconds on a 100 megabit link and 400 milliseconds on a 10 gigabit link.

Try to load any modern website on dial-up. The connection will likely timeout before a full page load.

[_kb]

This is the most dystopic use for that bandwidth I could possibly imagine.

[AdamH12113]

Step 1 of displaying a web page is to download a small LLM from the server to create a rendering framework at run-time...

[organsnyder]

Next iteration of vibe-coding: you only ship the prompt.

[ChuckMcM]

This is a future hell I fear. :-).

[mrexroad]

Fr. There was that small window back in the early ‘10s where data was slow and expensive in India and 4g wasn’t yet pervasive in China. Execs were still receptive to my pitches that we needed to spend some engineering cycles on rework to improve initial load times / weight after showing them simulations of absurdly slow first paint / first content over simulated 2g/3g from India / China data centers.

Once 5g became pervasive and data cheap, no one gaf about a cold load weight fitting on a floppy.

I’m still clutching my iphone mini, which after ios 26 just boggs down under the absurd weight of many pages and turns in to a space heater before reloading entire page b/c of error. No need for forced obsolescence when the enshittification of basic websites takes care of that for you. :-/