Former Imgur engineer here who worked on the desktop site and helped on mobile when I could. A lot of the code that is loaded supports features that are used by a long tail of users [1]. However, they do serve the javascript with appropriate cache-control headers and serve them from Fastly's CDN so analyzing a cold load is a bit misleading to say the least. Moreover, as other commentators have mentioned, they optimized more for the subsequent images than the initial pageloads (they'd prefetch the next N images).
Keep in mind Imgur is not a large company despite their high traffic, even at their peak of employees the engineering team was pretty small (probably about 12-15 people after series A), and the mobile web team in particular was a handful of people, with a handful of people on iOS and Android, and a handful of people on desktop/backend/API (where I worked).
That said, I think Alan does care about these things. I know at some point they did support NoScript and did care about the experience with JavaScript off (and had code to support uploading images and viewing images with no JavaScript at all). But it's hard to have it as your top priority when Reddit and Instagram are trying to eat your lunch.
I'm sympathetic with the page bloat problem and noscript and I do think more effort should be spent on optimizing this stuff, especially because bandwidth is much of their opex.
[1] Posting, voting, commenting, uploading, accounts, tagging, albums, search. There is even a hidden-ish feature to "auto-browse" in a slideshow-like manner which you can find if you crawl around the source code.
They don't (currently) issue dividends because the expectation is they will buy back their stock or will issue dividends in the future.
If a company never issued dividends and never bought back their own stock, then there would be no reason for investors to buy stocks in the first place. Most investors don't invest out of the goodness of their hearts, they invest to get a return on capital.
In that case you would probably still roll back to prevent further data corruption and restore the corrupted records from backups.
There are certainly changes that cannot be rolled back such that the affected users are magically fixed, which is not what I am suggesting. In the context of mission critical systems, mitigation is usually strongly preferred. For example, the Google SRE book says the following:
> Your first response in a major outage may be to start troubleshooting and try to find a root cause as quickly as possible. Ignore that instinct!
> Instead, your course of action should be to make the system work as well as it can under the circumstances. This may entail emergency options, such as diverting traffic from a broken cluster to others that are still working, dropping traffic wholesale to prevent a cascading failure, or disabling subsystems to lighten the load. Stopping the bleeding should be your first priority; you aren’t helping your users if the system dies while you’re root-causing. [...] The highest priority is to resolve the issue at hand quickly.”
I have seen too many incidents (one in the last 2 days in fact) that were prolonged because people dismissed blindly rolling back changes, merely because they thought the changes were not the root cause.
If rollbacks are not safe then you have a change management problem.
If you have a good CM system, you should have a timeline of changes that you can correlate against incidents. Most incidents are caused by changes, so you can narrow down most incidents to a handful of changes.
Then the question is, if you have a handful of changes that you could roll back, and rollbacks are risk free, then does it make sense to delay rolling back any particular change until the root cause is understood?
Private letters have long been acknowledged as covered by the fourth amendment, that is that searching requires at least a warrant based on probable cause. It’s changed over times whether searches of papers are per se unreasonable [1]. Consent can authorize agents to open mail of course, but it might be an interesting question whether it’s an unconstitutional condition to require waiver in order to access the mail services.
People have programs that scan github uploads for AWS, etc credentials accidentally uploaded by victim and spawn images that mind crypto for the attacker’s.
