Tape is still the cheapest option for mass amounts of storage since the actual tapes are so cheap. You just need to store enough data to offset the cost of the drive. Drive cost increases very quickly the higher you go in storage density.

Interesting that that is the workflow that works best for you. I’ve personally always found it a much better experience to do my searching/browsing off of the server and wget whatever I need to download. If that’s truly your situation, then you may just need to use another browser that supports JS or use a different search engine. I prefer DDG anyway, lol. Not a huge deal.

You’ve seriously been in situations where you had no access to the internet except through a terminal, and you had to do a google search? No phone or other computer that you’re remoting in from?

Even so, there are terminal-based browsers that support javascript like brow.sh or links (not lynx).

I doubt the nothing-but-terminal users comprise a significant enough portion of Google’s userbase to justify the extra costs to test and maintain non-JS functionality.

I think this isn’t a case of if Google can, but rather of why they should. Do enough people really use the modern web without JavaScript to justify spending the resources to test and maintain functionality without JS? And they probably don’t want to let the few people that don’t have JS to open support tickets or write articles about how google.com is broken. Easier to just block it on purpose than to let it decay.

It makes more sense that a government website would support it, since they can’t let even a single person fall through the cracks, and changing laws/regulations is more difficult than making a company decision.

Search suggestions require JS. Also, why would Google spend the resources supporting the 5 people that block JS when virtually all websites and users rely on JS. This is a nothingburger of a story.

Google is a lot more than just the one google.com page. And even if it were, JS adds some nice features like predective text / suggested searches.

Tracking, ads, and AI can be done without JS. They may be slightly less granular in the same way as the user experience will be slightly worse, but disabling JS won’t stop it.

I’d bet the biggest reason Google decided to do this is so that they don’t have to support a version of the site that virtually nobody uses.

Imo, the most compelling reason for non-JS versons of typically JS-driven sites is to support lower power devices. But it’s 2025 and even a 10 year old phone you found in a dumpster behind a decaying Radio Shack can run modern websites without issue.

Even the article is grasping at straws for why this might be bad. “It might make accessibility more difficult or add security issues”. One of the most valuable companies in the world, with some of the best engineers in the world, is going to have problems adding aria attributes and updating dependencies? Give me a break.

If you want to block tracking, ads, and “AI”, there are plenty of ways to do that without disabling literally all JS. If you want to construct your google search request without the rest of the stuff on google.com, use your browser’s search bar.

I’m as anti-google/tracking/etc as the next guy, and I’ve been using DDG almost exclusively for years, but I’m not going to pretend like asking companies to make HTML/CSS-only versions of their sites is a reasonable request in the modern web environment. It can be really fun and cool to build a site without JS, but there aren’t many scenarios where it’s actually beneficial.

The replies in this thread are just plain ignorant. Basically every website uses JS heavily and disabling all JS with something like noscript is just a plain bad time.

Even in your comment, every sentence is wrong. Google searches are done with GET requests, and there are plenty of reasons to force JS other than tracking, ads, and ai.

Honestly, JS is such a core part of the web, I’m surprised it took this long.

Oh, and “other AI CEO agrees, saying just imagine a world where everyone uses our AI, isn’t it wonderful?”

“Company selling AI snake oil claims that they will maybe consider possibly using AI to run their business maybe and not immediately rehire the engineers they laid off only a few months ago, definitely because of the AI and not for any other reason.”

And

“Our custom AI has revolutionized the way we do business and saved us millions! No, you can’t see how.”

But… they aren’t even really in the same market. There’s some overlap, sure, but not entirely.

This is laughable.

And then at BrightonSEO, Marcus Tober from Semrush shared a slide that assumes ChatGPT has continued growth of 13% MoM growth rate. It would then catch up to Google in four years.

Idk, a tablespoon is the largest spoon-based unit

I mean, what other type of controller would you buy on PC if you’re looking to buy a game controller? Unless you’re not including 3rd party controllers as “console controllers”. Afaik, the xbox pro controller is still considered the best controller to use on PC, and while it is made by Microsoft, it’s not a controller that comes with the console.

The PC controller market just isn’t large enough to support pc-only controllers. Of course the recommendation is to always buy a console controller, pc controllers don’t exist! 😂

Yes, I know some games have their own controller type like flight sticks, game pads, and OSU, but nobody is seriously using those for rocket league and elden ring.

The headline focuses on the wrong thing. Making a bunch of crappy songs and uploading the to Spotify and other streaming services is perfectly legal, AI or not.

The illegal part is that he created lots and lots of fake accounts that constantly streamed his songs and masked them to look like authentic listens. So much so that he was making $110k per month. That is straight-up fraud, which is what he was arrested for.

It has nothing to do with AI, but that makes more people click on the article.

� is used to represent an invalid character, so it makes sense that it’d appear often when bad data is being rendered (or good data is being rendered improperly).

LOL the Steam launcher is basically just a web browser. Literally the same concept as Electron. It’d be Electron if it were built today, but it was built before Electron existed.

Thank you! Ever since the start of the Epic Store, I’ve always thought this whole “exclusive” scandal was blown out of proportion. There is a MASSIVE difference between a game being exclusive to a $400+ console vs to a free launcher that you can install in 5 minutes and add your already multi-launcher platform.

They don’t ban your account, they ban your switch. If your switch is caught, it won’t be able to use any Nintendo services ever again. But your account would still work on other devices.

You probably already know this, or are talking about another language, but JavaScript is inherently single threaded, so unless you’re running blocking I/O in parallel, you won’t actually see any performance boost. Service workers get their own thread though.

Grep is as high power as vim and emacs??? In what universe?

No, but he went with a thousand other shipping company CEOs and only him and the UPS guy came out with money.