The ads are the real content from Medium’s perspective. The article is actually the medium by which the real content is delivered, like a train carrying dark passengers. The article is not what Medium cares about delivering to your browser, but the ads. And delivering the ads requires a lot of complexity.

The article is an ad: "*** provides uptime monitoring and flow-based monitoring for APIs."

This is an important subject, thus it's one for which clickbait is generated.

Size is a problem. I look at my Rust compiles scroll by, and wonder "why is that in there?". I managed to get tokio out, which took some effort. The whole "zbus" system was pulled in because the program asks if the user is in "dark mode". That brought in the "event-listener" system.

Lately, "bash" in a Linux console has become much slower about echoing characters. Did someone stick in spell check, or a LLM for autocomplete, or something?

I'm not sure if it's related, but I have the git branch in my PS1 and I've noticed that it's much slower to show a new prompt when inside very large repositories now, and I don't think that was the case previously.

I'd check your .bashrc because that shouldn't be happening without your say so.

.bashrc hasn't change since 2021. But Ubuntu pushed a new /usr/bin/bash in mid-March.

It's more likely to be system-provided config files like bash-completions.

It's Ubuntu, with their automatic updates. Canonical is now at least as intrusive as Microsoft was in the days of Windows 7.

…what ads? See the last paragraph here [0].

Obviously your statement is true about most other sites, but I thought it was an odd thing to say about a platform that famously doesn’t serve ads.

[0] https://medium.com/about

Firefox about:process reports the article taking 239 MB of memory and 0.06-0.2% of my CPU ten minutes after it finished loading - 45% of the CPU time seems to be spent in Google's reCAPTCHA.

I wish Mozilla or Google or someone aggregated statistics for cpu/memory/energy usage by domain to shame devs who clearly don't otherwise care.

And browsers are larger that some operating systems. And talk about a closed off ecosystem ... WASM is still crippled and JS/HTML/CSS is your only real viable option for web development.

The web feels like 2005 again. Only thing is, this time the popups are embedded in the page...

I think I would prefer 2005 web again. I'd probably be able to see more of the internet. I use heavy DNS filtering, no javascript on untrusted sites, no cookies, no fonts, VPN and so on. With cloudflare blocking me I basically can't see the majority of websites.

Oh don’t worry. Once dns-over-https becomes standard, you won’t be able to do any dns filtering anymore.

Why not? I can still mitm DOH now? I try to use DOH for everything I have. I did recently switch to self hosted recursive resolution.

I don't know about other browsers but on firefox I can decide which DNS server is used for DNS over https.

For that I fire up a Gemini browser against gemini://gemi.dev/bin/waffle.cgi and paste the URL. For non Gemini network users, just change medium.com to scribe.rip at the URL.

It's fine in a text-mode browser.