For example, Britain’s national mapping organisation’s brand is associated in our national consciousness with going to a small shop in a quaint village to get a map showing how to walk up a mountain. It’s called Ordnance Survey. If that sounds like Artillery Research to you, that’s because the project started because the king wanted to know how to accurately bomb Scotland.
4,000 years ago, we were doing trigonometry, but just 200 years ago we were still putting leeches on people and not washing our hands before doing surgery.
Also, we sent people to the moon and got them back using less computing power than a smart watch.
Those computers has less memory than a dollar store calculator. The bits in memory were physical magnets woven by hand into a mesh. It’s insane that it left our planet and came back with people alive.
Yeah, they even employed weavers to make the memory units, because it was easier than training factory workers to deal with such thin wire.
It’s insane how wasteful modern software is. The infinite growth mindset causes companies to pack more useless features into software and load it up with spyware and adware.
Google and Facebook’s tracking and ad software are a big cause of computing waste in most websites and mobile apps.
uBlock Origin ftw
uBlock Origin just prevents the network requests from these tracking frameworks from completing. All the javascript tracking code I believe still executes, just doesn’t return.
If it were possible it would be great to prevent these javascript frameworks from being loaded at all by the browser. But I guess the website javascript code would break.
It would be interesting to replace the tracking frameworks with an empty stubbed out implementation that does nothing. Not for sure how feasible that would be.
May I see a source on this? I’d love to read more about it.
I was actually trying to do some research on this as well to verify my claim, but couldn’t find a definitive answer. I’m not for sure whether uBlock blocks complete JavaScript libraries from loading by default or if it is only blocks the HTTP request like PiHole.
I did find this interesting project by DuckDuckGo which provides empty implementations of the JavaScript libraries when adblockers break the site. This seems to imply that some adblockers do prevent the JavaScript library from loading at all.
https://github.com/duckduckgo/tracker-surrogates
I believe it actually prevents from loading.
You can see the error messages in the browser console how it couldnt execute. Bunch of red errors.
We still do that. Leeches are surprisingly useful when treating certain blood clots. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
The difference is putting them on because you actually understand the problem you’re trying to treat lol.