Article posted on: 2025-12-07 14:13
Last edited on: 2025-12-07 14:13
Written by: Sylvain Gauthier
The time of the year has come where I feel like blowing off some steam by impotently shaking my fists at the sad state of so-called “modern” web. You know, the bloated ad-ridden mess that you now have to navigate for things as simple and basic as paying a damn bill.
Yes, that thing where we collectively “decided” that running a multi million SLOC insult to God we call a browser, now written in a preposterous midwit-tier language whose compiler is so complex that you just sort of give up compiling it yourself because it takes a literal 16Gb of RAM to build. Who needs to compile things themselves nowadays anyway right?
King Terry was right, it does look like we’re moving to the post-PC era where Nietzsche’s untermenschen just consume AI slop on fully locked terminals served by cloud based services. I’m fully expecting the blue helmets to knock on my door and ask me to surrender my C compiler at this point.
Anyway.
Paying bills. You’d think a static web page asking you a damn payment reference send by a text email and a credit card number would be more than enough, right? Wrong! What about the analytics? The fancy CSS animations? You know, all the external-CDN-served garbage that needs to run on your CPU just so you can see how much you owe the utility company?
But the thing that prompted me to write this article goes one step further.
One day, for no particular reason at all, the web portal of my utility company started freezing when I tried to log in. Some script among the myriad of JS snippets written by code monkeys was freezing the entire page.
The only solution I found to be able to simply PAY MY FUCKING BILL was to patiently go through all the tree of scripts downloading more scripts downloading more scripts until I found the right combination that would give enough functionalities for the payment to go through without, you know, crashing the entire browser.
This brings to my mind the great talk by Jonathan Blow about complex systems eventually collapsing and dragging along entire civilizations. Please, pretty please, make this happen ASAP. I don’t think I can’t take much more of the literal clown show that m*dern tech has become.