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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2493 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 10, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Off the top of my head, $50.

  • Fermi estimate:
    Multiply the following:

    • 207 "report" ctrl+f matches = comments
    • 5 lines/comment
    • 20 words/line
    • 5 characters/word
    • 4 bytes/character
    • = 414kb

  • Comparing to dev tools, which shows 5.3MB, a factor of 10 I can't account for.

    • I'm a backend dev...what's an order of magnitude between friends.
    • Using that figure and 24k thread views on the culture war thread so far this week:
      • = 127gb/week
      • = 210 kilobytes/second

  • Let's assume we want to serve a peak traffic of 10x average and don't care enough to set something that automatically scales up and down:

    • = 2.1 megabytes/second

  • This is... jack shit.

    • A 3.5" floppy disk can do 100 kbps, filling the entire 1.44mb in 14.4 seconds.
    • I think it could probably be served off a Raspberry Pi.
    • If the vyvanse hadn't worn off, I could probably calculate how many threads/Ghz/etc are needed, but I'm pretty comfortable saying "one of any shitty processor can handle this load"

  • Google cloud charges for egress:

    • Checks notes:
      • $0 for up to 200GB/month, then $0.11/GB up to 2TB.
    • So (127 * 4 - 200) * 0.11 = $34.
    • I am not actually sure if serving traffic is "egress". Best guess: no.
    • (This is why startups shouldn't hire FAANG engineers.)

  • Worst case:

    • Something like $34 for egress and $20 for the VM itself.
    • Pretty close to my first number!

  • @ZorbaTHut, how'd I do? And would you be willing to share what % of costs you've had donated, vs paid out of pocket? You really shouldn't have to be paying yourself.

    • Edit: the patreon is at $140/month, so it looks like this site may be slightly profitable (ignoring the enormous value of the free labor). Nice!

That was all without chatgpt, but here's a transcript from my talking to it afterwards. I think it looks reasonable until maybe the end when I ask about vpn costs. Still comes out to ~$50. It did a decent job analyzing the amount of cpu used (which I skipped in the "jack shit" section).

People upload images to the Motte, could that account for the difference between the 400kb and 5mb?

I think some variety of "I'm an idiot" is more likely. I don't see any images. If they're included as hyperlinks, they're not loaded until you click (I think, and ~confirmed by dev tools)

Attached a screenshot of the resource usage breakdown. Largest element is 402kb for the banner, compared to 215kb (fifth place) for what I think is the actual comments (compare to my 414kb estimate - not bad).

Some of the overestimate is from my extensions. Filtering those out, I see 2.0MB (2.3 uncompressed). 1.15 of that is fonts (unclear to me why that needs reloading each time - presumably this could be optimized out.)

/images/17366984362281015.webp

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