initramfs

I also contributed to one of those clubs.

There's also 10KB club: https://github.com/spxy/10kbclub https://github.com/marcus0x62/tinyblog

I agree most of the issue is on the "web" and not the physical infrastructure, although there is an internet outside the "world wide web" too: https://yesterweb.org/zine/issue-05/08/

"The internet and the web are not one and the same. The web is simply one protocol of the internet. You see the "https://" at the beginning of the url bar? That's the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or as it's more commonly known, The World Wide Web."

I sometimes mention the two because multiple protocols are part of the Transport layer. But then again, relying on one too much may be part of the problem, hence the emphasis on examining all the layers and protocols, like UDP.

the references are metaphorical. App developers like Facebook have Lite versions of their Messenger. No actualy physical sectoring or allocation needs to take place. What it's emphazing is that App developers have a liteweight mode. Google got rid of their HTML page version when checking GMail on the web in 2024. Their app still works relatively fast, but on a 128KBps connection, loading a single page on the Javascript only desktop browser version is really, really slow. Like 5-10 minutes slow. I wrote more in another response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48453653

The Symbian phones from Nokia and Sony were ultra-efficient. Not everyone remembers that era, but they were real time operating systems that ensured tasks got completed in a certain time, including user-prompted inputs. It's not a technical limitation of a company or service, but a lot of their revenue might depend on a minimum number of ads or cookies and web analytic trackers being visible on a page. Often in the numbers of 30 or 100+. With all those elements removed from a site, the service might not bring in much revenue. So it's not really an issue of technical capability, but a business model.

Personal blogs don't typically have this issue, as they can be hosted on a small home server, or a remote server, and aren't concerned as much with ads. I can't suggest how the internet should be run, and the article does acknowledge the benefits of a decentralized web. But predictability of content delivery ETA from internet speeds is not an impossible thing to optimize towards, even if uptime isn't above 99%. What is somewhat novel in this proposal is standardizing a subset of typical website activities, like checking news, weather and mail, and getting a more predictable completion time for certain tasks, but factoring in known latencies from wireless providers (as pings will not be as low as a wired connection), and lowering the average latency for the round trip.

On a much larger scale of interactions- but again the web is so wide and varied, that most of those things cannot be standardized, nor should. But kind of like measuring the commute time of an expressway in a city, or subway trips to a grocery. Things that people need and won't optimize more with an Uber. Hence measuring static over HTML is an easy test, and more sophisticated web services can and do have those kinds of benchmarks. But integrating the device, ISP, and server in a way where certain activities can get slightly preferential treatment like ordering and picking up a prescription at a pharmacy, setting appointments with a doctor, would not get deprioritized bandwidth compared to someone streaming something in 4k, and maybe temporarily limiting that other user's bandwidth to 1440p for maybe a few minutes.

So I do think a tiny bit of QoS or speed throttling is needed only in exceptional cases, but for the most part, the typical user wouldn't notice or necessarily need that level of speed adjustment. Most of the optimization would take place at the software, website, and OS level.

I wrote a number of articles that try to address the many stacks of the application, transport, and OS layers. The best platform I can think of are the mid 2000's Symbian S60 phones, which were Real Time Operating Systems and used J2ME: https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/how-about-new-java-ba...

There are new Java'based platforms that could build upon that, but chips today have so much processing power that they might think it's easier to develop a higher level language with more dependencies. But that leads to more maintenance if some package gets lost or broken.

As for the internet speeds themselves, It is similar to net neutrality but a voluntary guideline by the website developers: https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-sierpinski-triang...

I also explore QUIC, but it's already implemented and not everything needs it, except higher bandwidth: https://inavoyage.blogspot.com/2026/06/5-things-to-lighten-d...

Once Android and iOS became the leading smartphone makers, code efficiency wasn't super important, because they hardware makers could add 10-20X the RAM. The competition between Symbian and iOS was a brief decade, but it actually made efficient code development interesting and beneficial for battery life. Since RAM got cheaper, even though it's expensive at the high end (HBM3e), it's a lot easier to develop with 4GB of phone memory than 4MB on the Nokia 7650 (2002). Those are quite extremes, but most symbian phones had a lot of features with as little as 32MB of RAM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7650

Yes, and Seward also made a Folly. I suppose he missed out on some things, but his success rate at predicting features that are now standard was higher than most in that era.

You're listening to WWSJD, the Los Altos FM station where Apple pilgrims tune in to the station that Steve Jobs did!

You have the right ideas, and there are protocols that do this, some more isolationist than others: https://yesterweb.org/zine/issue-05/08/ "The Web Outside the Net" and https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/SmolNet

Modern smartphones could implement more Data Saver features, but websites could opt-in by using less data. For example, https://marcusb.org/hacks/tinyblog.html

It's all of the above, integrated with a maximum latency for each tier level. Not a new protocol, but adopting the best of the best, like QUIC over UDP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC#Client_support Apple is a vertically integrated company, so the idea is that a mobile carrier/ISP could help ensure the middle trunk from server to client arrive in a timely fashion. Often that involves good QoS and limiting streaming to 720p. But there are a lot of other things that can be done to limit slow page loading. For example, I tried loading Reuters on a slow data connection, and it took much longer than BBC. https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

I get that, but a lot of design decisions today are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee

For something so complex like a PC or desktop experience, having a bunch of oppositional goals (like ad pop ups) do not serve the user well enough. Often times a committee releases a product, but there is no real consensus or accessibility in mind.

by train. The internet train. :)

Great article.

I've wanted to write an article about mulberries (long before this article), and the reason why they are not sold in grocery stores, is because of their precious shelf life and tendency to stain with gendle handling.

I recently read about CERN transporting antiprotons to another facility.

I then thought, if CERN can move antiprotons, surely someone can figure out how to sell mulberries at the local grocery?

Of course, not everything needs to be commercialized. Some of the best things in life are free.

Weights are the new electrolytes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMHfBobgLSI

This is a VERY long thread spanning over 2 years of drama. There is a lot of profanities in the threads. Luke Leighton fled the UK to India out of fear of the medical system, and currently resides with another UK expatriate. An American computer science graduate, Nina Zheng, was also hospitalized attempting to cover the story. Several extraordinary claims are made, some too numerous to mention or verify:

https://lists.libre-soc.org/pipermail/libre-soc-dev/2026-Mar...

bookmarked.

I think those authors have been trying to figure out what I've long suspected- infrastructure can't be build locally as easily as one that can be exported with extreme modularity. Building a nuclear power plant, even a small modern one, still requires a ton of permitting and environmental review. Setting up a portable solar power plant, with imported panels and inverters, in theory allows for much more adaptability and affordability.

I've heard/read common criticisms about NGO's having more power and private funding than weak and poor governments, but then again, if there isn't a centralized effort to develop infrastructure, citizens are more likely to prefer outside funding/investment https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/internation...

"What the ESL crowd missed was the massive gain that comes from compounding little gains. I am still somewhat blinkered by going for the big win (that would probably make me a bad gambler), but content recently gathered for a couple of articles has provided examples of how those small gains are a better use of time and money than gambling on the next big thing.

The first example is from Marc Swinnen at Ansys, who talked about power optimization. I had asked about the amount of power being wasted in a typical design. “In the past, I have talked to customers about this very problem. I might tell them that using my tool will save them 10%, 15% power. Their response might be, ‘That’s not going to make my day. That’s not worth it to me. Then there is another technique. What will that save me? I tell them that it will save you 5% or 7%. That’s not worth my time.’ Every technique was shot down because it wasn’t worth their time. And at the end they say, how is it that my competitor can manage to get these really low-power designs? Because they pay attention to power at every single step along the way, even the small increments, it all adds up. You can disregard the small contributions at every step, but in the end, it’s like going on a diet. Any particular cookie, any particular walk, isn’t going to make a big difference, but it all adds up over time. And that’s how you achieve a result — by being conscientious at every step.”

Many others agree this is the only way to achieve a low-power design, except some add that it only takes one bad cookie to spoil the whole thing. A very power-efficient piece of hardware cannot provide the expected savings if bad software is put on it, especially if it doesn’t use the very features that the hardware inserted to make it power efficient. Lots of small improvements can make a very big difference."

The article nicely points out that New York City also had an elevated sidewalk (or plans) in the late 1800s!

Here are the designs and sketches. It sounds so reasonable. I am curious why they didn't keep it.

https://culturenow.org/site/a5883d3d-b1fa-4cb1-a6ca-a3a692e5...

https://www.6sqft.com/in-1872-broadway-almost-became-a-giant...

Then the car industry got rid of the idea (along with the trams).

https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2016/06/a-city-of-bridges-...

https://www.nytimes.com/1915/05/06/archives/elevated-sidewal...

https://www.archpaper.com/2015/11/long-history-tall-sidewalk...

True in many ways.

I wanted to write an article or short blog post about how Windows 10, menus and javascript, increasingly tuck away important tools/buttons in little folds. This was many months ago.

I want to write it and title it, "What the tuck?" But tuck refers exactly to the kind of hidden menus that make those so called sleek and simple UIs for the the 80% of users.

The problem is that it stupefies computing literacy, especially mobile web versions.

Perhaps not every casual web browser needs to sit at a desk to learn website navigation. Then again, they may never learn anything productive on their own.

I do agree- i hate when an article doesn't include a thumbnail that Google News might indicate includes, but in this case, they just buried the lede, which is slightly different, and sometimes just as annoying: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PKJG!,w_1456,c_limit...

this has such great marketing zingers, I probably didn't know I needed TigerBeetle for something. I don't know yet, but I promise you, I'll find something to use it for.

This article can also be written as "The unreasonable effectiveness of abstraction in mathematics."

Great article about that: https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-goph...

36 years later, making the internet more widely available is still important to the rest of the world. While the U.S. is building and refurbishing nuclear power plants for AI datacenters, semiconductor process nodes have shrunk to the point where solar panels the size of a credit card can power an entire mobile device.

A 3D printer is symbolically considered the part of 4th industrial revolution- owning the "means of production" (though maybe not the supply chain). But just as the internet decentralized telecommunications and broadcast media, renewable energy has the ability to minimize coverage gaps, much like how 5G cell towers increase range.

The next step is owning the means of energy production. People are willing to pay $1100 for an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy phone and yet unwilling to integrate a $5 solar panel, because it is thought to be useless compared to the amount of power needed to run iOS or Android. Yet, there are other, lower power ways to send data, and an article about TCP/IP should be a reminder of that. https://indico.cern.ch/event/1331906/contributions/5606846/a...

The internet in 1988 was state of the art, and yet the protocols to develop even more autarkic computing systems have still not been optimized. https://newsteve.substack.com/p/from-telegrams-to-datagrams

I'm not saying he's resting on his laurels or that we shouldn't look back towards the success stories. I'm just encouraging people to wonder what a 34 year old Tim Berners-Lee would be developing today if he were adding another component to the internet.

I think the answer is hardware, not software.

does it work on 4MB RAM with a GUI?

very unrealistic because many train riders don't carry coins, nor will use a contactless payment to pay a random begger, even if they see them on the platform every day.

nice to know!

lol, i actually am trying to build a real solar powered phone: https://anycrap.shop/product/solar-powered-phone