6 ms·

Also Firefox will get headless mode in few releases https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1338004 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1338004

imr_ 10y ago
thank god. I was afraid we will be back in the grasp of the google's moloch.
- tyingq 10y ago
  Curious what "moloch" means in this context. I can google it, of course, but I get "Biblical name relating to a Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice". Which doesn't help me much. End users are children that Google is sacrificing? Or?
  - Pent 10y ago
    They are probably referring to http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
  - fnovd 10y ago
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/49303 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detai... Heading II
  - philh 10y ago
    To give a shorter answer: Scott Alexander (at the slatestarcodex link), through the poem, associates Moloch with negative-sum games, where no one comes out better than they went in. In extreme cases they force us to sacrifice the things we love in order to survive. You throw your children to Moloch to help you defeat enemies; otherwise, you die. Your enemies do the same thing. It would be better if nobody sacrificed their children, but nobody is in a position to bring that outcome to pass. In this context, I would interpret "google's Moloch" along the lines of: Google is net-bad for the world, because of privacy issues and problems with centralisation and so on. Using Google's software (and services) makes them more powerful, so people don't want to use Google's software. But because everyone else is using Google's software, the world is optimized for Google users in a way that it isn't optimized for non-Google users, and so it's difficult to escape. And so Google grows yet stronger, and it becomes more difficult to escape. (To clarify: this is my interpretation of grandparent's use of the phrase. It's not my own position, and there's a decent chance that I'm completely off-base and it's got nothing to do with grandparent's position either.)
    - pvg 10y ago
      It's a term that's been kicking around literature for centuries. It's in Paradise Lost, for cryin' out loud. Why on earth would its use be a references to some random prolix internet dude's weird verbal recreation of the La Brea Tar Pits?
      - tyingq 10y ago
        Well, there is more than one social allegory related to Moloch. Many of them have no obvious relationship to Google. Which is why I asked the question in the first place. So people tried to be helpful and identify any sources that might be related. I just read the character description for Moloch in Paradise Lost, and don't see any obvious theme you might tie to Google. In fact, I'm still not quite sure what the original comment was trying to say. Apart from some fuzzy notion that capitalism is sort of like Moloch and we keep feeding it with our "children". Where children is what? Privacy? Money? Open source tools?
      - philh 10y ago
        Like I say, I don't know that it is. I presented a hypothesis that seems like it fits the facts fairly well. Do you have another hypothesis about what the term means in context? I note that "it's a reference to Paradise Lost" is not very descriptive: for example, if I talked about "Google's Frodo" you might ask what I mean by that, and "he's a character in Lord of the Rings" does not answer the question.
        pvg 10y ago
        I don't really have to have a hypothesis, it's not that uncommon a term. It's used for all sorts of things including a fairly generalized 'insatiable and demanding metaphorical monster'. If someone offhandedly mentions Icarus it seems reasonable to assume they're not really alluding to a review of the Hungarian brand of buses posted to alt.rec.bus in 1991. Take a look at, say, http://www.nybooks.com/search/?s=moloch&option_match=&year_after=1963&year_before=2017&type=all&orderby=relevance http://www.nybooks.com/search/?s=moloch&option_match=&year_a... Lots and lots of Moloch. Your hypothesis is 'it's a reference to some logorrheic blogger'. Sure, it's possible you're right but it's one hell of a weirdly specific guess. It's not like the three people to ever mention Moloch were Milton, Ginsberg and internet-man-addicted-to-his-own-typing.
  - hluska 10y ago
    I don't think that "Google's moloch" was proper usage, but in literature (ie - Howl by Allen Ginsberg), Moloch refers to something requiring a very costly sacrifice. In Howl, many critics argue that AG is referring to capitalism when he uses Moloch.
corford 10y ago
And while people wait, you can already do a 'poor mans' headless Firefox thanks to SlimerJS and xvfb. Phantomjs is less resource heavy if you're constantly spooling up and down lots of instances but I prefer SlimerJS w/ Firefox since it lets you keep up to date with a modern version of Firefox (rather than relying on sporadic QTWebkit updates from Phantomjs). If you're using Casperjs, SlimerJS is virtually a drop in replacement for Phantomjs (though I worry about how long/well Casperjs will continue to be maintained).
- kozhevnikov 10y ago
  One can use Xvfb to run normal Chrome as well (with few gotchas like --no-sandbox, --disable-gpu and dep on dbus-x11). A test I'm working on at the moment takes 28 seconds in PhantonJS and 6 in Chrome under Docker and Xvfb.
  - vaviloff 10y ago
    Very interesting comparison! Could you write a note on your experience somewhere?
- vor0nwe 10y ago
  I'm actually hoping CasperJS will support headless Chrome, and headless Firefox later on too.
- Jimmed 10y ago
  A colleague and I spent a couple of days setting up high-fidelity webpage->PDF rendering, and by far the best results were got with SlimerJS and xvfb.
- chrisber 10y ago
  If you need a real good alternative checkout https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf it's based on electron.
  - corford 10y ago

imr_ 10y ago

thank god. I was afraid we will be back in the grasp of the google's moloch.

tyingq 10y ago
Curious what "moloch" means in this context. I can google it, of course, but I get "Biblical name relating to a Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice". Which doesn't help me much. End users are children that Google is sacrificing? Or?
- Pent 10y ago
  They are probably referring to http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- fnovd 10y ago
  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/49303 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detai... Heading II
- philh 10y ago
  To give a shorter answer: Scott Alexander (at the slatestarcodex link), through the poem, associates Moloch with negative-sum games, where no one comes out better than they went in. In extreme cases they force us to sacrifice the things we love in order to survive. You throw your children to Moloch to help you defeat enemies; otherwise, you die. Your enemies do the same thing. It would be better if nobody sacrificed their children, but nobody is in a position to bring that outcome to pass. In this context, I would interpret "google's Moloch" along the lines of: Google is net-bad for the world, because of privacy issues and problems with centralisation and so on. Using Google's software (and services) makes them more powerful, so people don't want to use Google's software. But because everyone else is using Google's software, the world is optimized for Google users in a way that it isn't optimized for non-Google users, and so it's difficult to escape. And so Google grows yet stronger, and it becomes more difficult to escape. (To clarify: this is my interpretation of grandparent's use of the phrase. It's not my own position, and there's a decent chance that I'm completely off-base and it's got nothing to do with grandparent's position either.)
  - pvg 10y ago
    It's a term that's been kicking around literature for centuries. It's in Paradise Lost, for cryin' out loud. Why on earth would its use be a references to some random prolix internet dude's weird verbal recreation of the La Brea Tar Pits?
    - tyingq 10y ago
      Well, there is more than one social allegory related to Moloch. Many of them have no obvious relationship to Google. Which is why I asked the question in the first place. So people tried to be helpful and identify any sources that might be related. I just read the character description for Moloch in Paradise Lost, and don't see any obvious theme you might tie to Google. In fact, I'm still not quite sure what the original comment was trying to say. Apart from some fuzzy notion that capitalism is sort of like Moloch and we keep feeding it with our "children". Where children is what? Privacy? Money? Open source tools?
    - philh 10y ago
      Like I say, I don't know that it is. I presented a hypothesis that seems like it fits the facts fairly well. Do you have another hypothesis about what the term means in context? I note that "it's a reference to Paradise Lost" is not very descriptive: for example, if I talked about "Google's Frodo" you might ask what I mean by that, and "he's a character in Lord of the Rings" does not answer the question.
      - pvg 10y ago
        I don't really have to have a hypothesis, it's not that uncommon a term. It's used for all sorts of things including a fairly generalized 'insatiable and demanding metaphorical monster'. If someone offhandedly mentions Icarus it seems reasonable to assume they're not really alluding to a review of the Hungarian brand of buses posted to alt.rec.bus in 1991. Take a look at, say, http://www.nybooks.com/search/?s=moloch&option_match=&year_after=1963&year_before=2017&type=all&orderby=relevance http://www.nybooks.com/search/?s=moloch&option_match=&year_a... Lots and lots of Moloch. Your hypothesis is 'it's a reference to some logorrheic blogger'. Sure, it's possible you're right but it's one hell of a weirdly specific guess. It's not like the three people to ever mention Moloch were Milton, Ginsberg and internet-man-addicted-to-his-own-typing.
- hluska 10y ago
  I don't think that "Google's moloch" was proper usage, but in literature (ie - Howl by Allen Ginsberg), Moloch refers to something requiring a very costly sacrifice. In Howl, many critics argue that AG is referring to capitalism when he uses Moloch.

corford 10y ago

And while people wait, you can already do a 'poor mans' headless Firefox thanks to SlimerJS and xvfb. Phantomjs is less resource heavy if you're constantly spooling up and down lots of instances but I prefer SlimerJS w/ Firefox since it lets you keep up to date with a modern version of Firefox (rather than relying on sporadic QTWebkit updates from Phantomjs). If you're using Casperjs, SlimerJS is virtually a drop in replacement for Phantomjs (though I worry about how long/well Casperjs will continue to be maintained).

kozhevnikov 10y ago
One can use Xvfb to run normal Chrome as well (with few gotchas like --no-sandbox, --disable-gpu and dep on dbus-x11). A test I'm working on at the moment takes 28 seconds in PhantonJS and 6 in Chrome under Docker and Xvfb.
- vaviloff 10y ago
  Very interesting comparison! Could you write a note on your experience somewhere?
vor0nwe 10y ago
I'm actually hoping CasperJS will support headless Chrome, and headless Firefox later on too.
Jimmed 10y ago
A colleague and I spent a couple of days setting up high-fidelity webpage->PDF rendering, and by far the best results were got with SlimerJS and xvfb.
chrisber 10y ago
If you need a real good alternative checkout https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf https://github.com/arachnys/athenapdf it's based on electron.
- corford 10y ago