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"Tan/AI built the website so that when a user visits, their browser makes 169 server requests for various assets totaling 6.42 megabytes in size. For comparison

"Tan/AI built the website so that when a user visits, their browser makes 169 server requests for various assets totaling 6.42 megabytes in size. For comparison, the minimalist Hacker News homepage (also run by Y Combinator) makes seven requests for data totaling just 12 kilobytes. The website ships 28 actual test files (code developers use to reality-check their work) straight to every visitor’s browser. That’s 300 kilobytes of pure developer scaffolding that users never asked for. It loads 78 different JavaScript controllers for features like AI image generation, voice extraction, video tools, etc., none of which appear on the homepage. The browser still has to download all of them “just in case.” The site’s logo is an illustration of a bear. The site downloads the logo in eight different formats, including a completely empty 0-byte file that somehow made it to production, Gregorein found. The website uses huge, uncompressed old-school PNGs (some nearly 2 megabytes each), even though the browser literally asks for modern tiny formats. Two images alone waste about 4 MB; with newer formats they could have been just 300KB. Gregorein also found duplicate page content, an empty CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) file, a huge rich-text editor loaded on a read-only page, missing image descriptions, and analytics code that deliberately routes through a proxy to dodge people’s ad blockers (with a comment in the code admitting it), Gregorein reports," Brave new world indeed... It might be elliptically relevant that in the original novel by Aldous Huxley, the protagonist John the Savage hangs himself at the end when his search for truth fails.

philipp-gayret 3mo ago
Impressive. Now, let's see the link in this post to fastcompany.com; It opens a website that also pulls in 6MB using more "server requests" than 169, in fact the number keeps going up, and all it does is display a paywall. So, let's not pretend this is something unique.
- Semaphor 3mo ago
  I’m not a huge AI fan, and was ready for some Schadenfreude. But with every paragraph I thought "so, just like modern human-created websites?"
  - matwood 3mo ago
    Exactly, it's like that old anti-drug commercial from the 90s where the dad asks the son where he learned to smoke pot or whatever and son retorts, "I learned it from watching you!"
- coldtea 3mo ago
  The difference is that nobody brags about churning out pages like the fastcompany.com link landing page. If anything, they're ashamed of it - and they only do it because managers and shady SEO types push for that shit. Nor are such bloated pages regarded (or were regarded pre-AI) as anything else than as a symptom of the sickness of modern web practices.

philipp-gayret 3mo ago

Impressive. Now, let's see the link in this post to fastcompany.com; It opens a website that also pulls in 6MB using more "server requests" than 169, in fact the number keeps going up, and all it does is display a paywall. So, let's not pretend this is something unique.

Semaphor 3mo ago
I’m not a huge AI fan, and was ready for some Schadenfreude. But with every paragraph I thought "so, just like modern human-created websites?"
- matwood 3mo ago
  Exactly, it's like that old anti-drug commercial from the 90s where the dad asks the son where he learned to smoke pot or whatever and son retorts, "I learned it from watching you!"
coldtea 3mo ago
The difference is that nobody brags about churning out pages like the fastcompany.com link landing page. If anything, they're ashamed of it - and they only do it because managers and shady SEO types push for that shit. Nor are such bloated pages regarded (or were regarded pre-AI) as anything else than as a symptom of the sickness of modern web practices.