Back in the ancient days of the web, browsers allowed you to set resource limits (ram, cache, etc) to prevent websites from hogging the limited resources of your desktop system.

It's really a shame that all major browsers have since decided that you as a user should have almost no control over how much ram and storage any arbitrary website can consume now.

Goes with the territory of allowing remote code execution arbitrarily and all the time otherwise you won't be able to..

* checks notes *

read text on the internet.

> read text on the internet.

B—b-it 4K scaling! Reactive design (to read text)! Emojis, reactions, badges! Memes and gifs!

All of which can be done with HTML, CSS, or UTF-8

This is a fantastic claim. I've been making web pages since the '90s and using web browsers just as long, and I can't think of a single instance of this. Perhaps it existed and I never knew about it? Can you provide some evidence for where and when this was the case?

Old versions of Netscape Navigator had settings where you could tweak that kind of stuff - I don't recall if IE3/4 did or not.

Given the web of the 90s didn't include tons of overly complex javascript most of the settings were targeted at how much ram/disk was used for caching website assets IIRC.

It's the principle of the thing though - we should have the ability to set resource allocation limits instead of potentially handing our entire computer's resources to a random website just because we clicked on a URL.

It seems that AI-scraping hysteria/paranoia has reached a point that more and more resource sites completely block me without any recourse (e.g. having an account) if my traffic is coming from a datacenter IP. I really wish sites blocked agents/IPs based on actual bad behavior instead of reflexively blocking by IP != residential/mobile.

I do understand the frustration though. I've had to deal with bad bots scraping every crevice of a few web based services I host and while most went away after I tweaked robots.txt there were a few I've had to blanket ban IPs assigned to entire ASNs because the bots on their networks refused to play nice.

Since I've dealt with "EE" Java in a previous life, that's actually pretty tame as far as parodies go.

I hate the fact I can say that. :-/

As long as there is a financial benefit to lying, there will always be people willing to do so.

I personally believe that many of these "influencers" do not believe any of the stuff they spew into the public space.

  It instead is a chat where a thousand group chats are open, and no once wants to read any of them.

I really wanted to like Zulip and use it as a personal chat service for a small group and it was exactly that feature that made it basically unsuitable. Forcing everything into titled threads did not make any sense for lots of user to user interactions that are ad-hoc in nature.

I didn't think it was terrible software by any stretch of the imagination - just not really suitable for informal communication.

It does seem like a lot of doctors prescribe GLP-1s without any corresponding education on the dietary changes one should make while on them. A friend of mine's mother was hospitalized briefly because she was basically starving herself of proper nutrition while on GLP-1s.

Since I already knew that rapid weight loss is very unhealthy, I intentionally eat very nutrient dense foods in order to keep my weight loss in a reasonable range.

Another N=1, I've noticed zero impact on my desire to engage in my normal obsessions while on GLP-1.

What GLP-1 did (initially) was give me horrible insomnia that peaked a couple of days after taking the injection so I had to time my dosage so that I suffered through that on the weekend. That got better over time and eventually went away after about 6 weeks.

Regardless, as another poster mentioned, it's a weekly injection and if you don't like the effects you can stop taking it.

Same here too. Ironically, the blog is accessible over TOR for me.

Exactly - the FTDI drivers refusing to work would have been reasonable and emitting a log or error message that my device was counterfeit would have actually been helpful. Instead, they vandalized end user equipment by permanently bricking the devices which is arguably illegal.

I am not nearly sophisticated enough as an end user to spot a counterfeit FTDI usb-to-serial device so I am not going to risk buying that brand and end up with their drivers intentionally bricking the device.

It's the web browser and electron based apps that are the primary consumers of ram on my desktops with the DE and OS ram usage being minimal by comparison.

I have an ancient laptop from 2008 with 4GB of ram that runs a modern KDE desktop and related applications just fine that I use for troubleshooting stuff. However, the moment I open a web browser it basically falls to pieces.

I hate everything about this. :-/

That's easy to fix:

    Step 1:

    sudo tee /etc/tmpfiles.d/mglru.conf <<EOF
    w-      /sys/kernel/mm/lru_gen/enabled          -       -       -       -       y
    w-      /sys/kernel/mm/lru_gen/min_ttl_ms       -       -       -       -       300
    EOF
    
    Step 2:
    
    
    apt install zram-tools
    sed -i 's/#PERCENT=.*/PERCENT=130/' /etc/default/zramswap

I'm on an older LTS kernel so no support for lru_gen but I will definitely check out zramswap - thanks.

Then also do this:

    echo vm.page-cluster=0 >> /etc/sysctl.d/85-swappiness.conf

> I have an ancient laptop from 2008 with 4GB of ram that runs a modern KDE desktop

Try Alpine Linux, with Xfce which can do most of the same things. Then enable swap compression -- add this to the end of the kernel line in your bootloader:

zswap.enabled=1

This compresses everything going to swap, and decompresses it coming back: less disk reads and writes, and less space used.

Everything gets quicker.

People are saying that 8GB for Android phone is too small. All of those applications are not electron either.

There is bloat everywhere.

4GB still seems excessive, by at least one and probably several orders of magnitude, for what vanilla KDE actually does: browse files, manage windows, and edit text. And KDE is one of the best modern options.

KDE doesn't need 4 GB of ram - that's just what my laptop happens to have which is more than ample to run the OS + KDE + native applications.