[charcircuit]

>The files are huge—up to 15 gigabytes each—so as a general rule, nobody downloads them.

This is not the reason and it's hard to call 15 GiB huge in 2026. Plenty of people download video games or stream television series that are more than 15 GiB.

[accrual]

HuggingFace and access to a fiber connection changed my concept of "large downloads". I can easily grab a 20GB model within a minute or two now, same for big Steam games. Meanwhile my childhood self was hyper aware of loading images and other assets that would bog down our home dialup connection.

[maccard]

The broadband speed to my work PC is the same as my hard drive read speed from 15 years ago. My hard drive read speed is the same as a single channel RAM read from 15 years ago.

It’d absolutely unbelieveable how much faster machines are even since 2011

[entropicdrifter]

I think it's well worth noting that while streaming does imply a full download, it doesn't actually render the full sized download on the client device at any one time, it's simply cached and then the oldest parts are evicted when the cache fills up.

[iberator]

Not everyone have fast or unlimited Internet. For example my 4G phone that im using for having internet is capped at 40mb/s and 200gib per month.

But 10km from the city center i barely got 2mb/s (megabits).

[pistoriusp]

You've got to place that within the context of Sub-Saharan Africa.

[leereeves]

For Hickisch himself, yes, but that part was about data from "Hickisch’s home country of Austria".