Unsustainable for who? The websites use CDNs for dirt cheap bandwidth, mobile providers love that 20gb doesn’t go as far as it used to. It inevitably creates a synergy, between stuff like news websites and local telcos, and YouTube love it too. hell, it’s not like all bandwidth cost the same, especially when major orgs will cache + colocate or peer to your isps.

If you’re a consumer you might be right, but your opinions and feelings aren’t of importance to those in power.

  >Unsustainable for who?

People who live on Earth?

Bandwidth is never free from environmental impact, and given the same server/CDN/whatever the environmental impact will increase monotonously with increasing bandwidth use.

Besides the FBI recommending it for security, running a good adblocker is one of the most "green" ways to reduce your footprint from internet usage.

Regardless of how efficient the CDN, it still has a lower footprint to not connect to it at all.

  >hell, it’s not like all bandwidth cost the same

I don't see where anybody says that, nor where that claim would be necessary to support the thesis.

Let’s be honest, general browsing internet usage is probably the least offensive use of energy in existence, particularly when talking about bloated filesizes of javascript. Feel free to disregard me while watching Netflix in 4k on Netflix approved hardware decoders on your 100 inch tv and surround sound, while using your heater to keep you warm, and enjoy your Uber eats hot chocolate for desert while scrolling tiktok on a phone you’ll throw away in two years time, though.

I don't disagree, but ecological impacts aren't addressed by one big magic bullet solution, it's a game of adding up pennies.

This is after focusing a lot on the other personal emission sources, but OTOH "install uBO and set it to Easy Mode" is one of the cheap and easy (low-hanging) interventions. Incidentally I generally watch videos at 360p, unless it's a lecture with small text on slides. Most 'taking head' content is just wasted pixels at higher resolutions.

I don’t think the savings of my browser are at all comparable to say, the Chinese industrial carbon footprint, not by a million miles.

A better approach than your current lifestyle would be to focus your efforts into something scalable that would actually have an impact rather than wasting your time.

I'll say it again: combatting ecological impact is a game of pennies.

You're missing the point by complaining that it's a smaller impact than all the industry in China (what isn't?), because there's nothing I (or anyone else) can do to eliminate the impact of all the industry in China. That is not one of the available 'moves' in this 'game.' It's a red herring.

That's what I meant by "magic bullet" thinking: you imagine you can only do one thing, and that one thing must fix 100% of the problem. In real life this problem (like most problems) isn't like that.

Also adblockers don't waste my time, they actually save me time. As far as mitigations go it has a good cost-to-benefit ratio, hence "low-hanging."

  > focus your efforts into something scalable

Like, say, convincing lots of people (ideally some convenient population of technology thought leaders) that they should install uBlock Origin? :-)

But again, this premise that we're only allowed to do one thing is silly. I contain multitudes, and so do you.

I've been long enough on HN to hear this argument since early 2010s, yet the market keeps proving everyone (including me!) wrong. Nobody cares if your website loads 20kb of text with a side of 1mb of ads. Most people are just swiping through megabytes of videos on TikTok and IG anyways.

> The (oeconomical, an economical)

"oeconomical" is just an extremely archaic spelling of "economical", since the root word from Greek is "oikos", which Latinizes as "oecus".

Why did you mention it? Do you see it as a separate word?

html email was the start of a slippery slope. i remember complaining about data consumption of non-text email BITD. that was when the state of the art for email servers was to dedup list email so that the server would save only one copy and just reference it for all recipients.