this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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And it's not the data transfer costs that's the monetary bottleneck. It isn't even the data storage costs (unless you run a media server, but let's ignore that for a moment). It's the computation costs that is the largest cost center for most websites. You can run simple static pages on a potato but if you have significant visitors you need CDNs or significant infrastructure to handle it. If you start to make dynamic pages, maybe even web apps, then your computational workloads will increase significantly too.
Paying for an HTTP transfer, for example, would not be able to distinguish between a simple HTML website or an AI prompt.
Capitalism may have some ugly sides but the fact that you pay to prompt Claude but can see my simple static HTML website for free is a way to distribute the money to where your activity costs money. If you want to burn down the rain forest to power your AI prompt, then you pay for that. If you want to see a blog about kittens, then you pay by seeing an ad (or maybe not at all if the website is run purely as a free hobby project). My personal website is running off of my old gaming PC so the only cost is the electricity. But I am running most of my services I need on there too, so the public website is negligible in comparison. A byte transfer wouldn't even be worth a penny while Claude probably could be measured in dollars.
So, you're CDN example is completely off-base. CDNs are complicated companies, to be sure, but the endpoint of a CDN is the closest thing to a potato possible. That's why CDNs exist. They are trying to colocate as much data as possible in the cheapest hardware possible in as many locations as possible to drive the cost of serving an HTTP request down as low as possible.
You're correct that the cost of running a website is not in the network, much like the cost of your home computer is not in the Internet service (it's in your computer), but that's not the point.
The point is that I am paying for my network and also the service is paying for their network.
Now, normally we can frame this as paying for infrastructure. I am paying to subsidize the infrastructure that brings my traffic to the backbone and the service is paying for the infrastructure that brings them to the backbone.
And we can leave it at that and it's fair. As soon as a network provider charges for volume, like mobile data caps, we're in a double-dip scenario. Now I am paying for the bits transiting the network from backbone and the provider is also paying for those same bits transiting the network to backbone.
I agree with most points but IMO CDNs are not just a potato, it is a ton of potatoes all easing the load on your server. The individual endpoint is not much but one endpoint does not a CDN make. You'd need the network to be able to lower the load on the server significantly (depending on the data type and caching method of course, but generally I'd say this is true).
Also agree with data caps in the current age. In the early mobile internet transfer was expensive but now it isn't. I cannot put words on how grateful I am for being able to have no data caps on 1Gig (up to 2.5Gig with same carrier, just in a location where they have upgraded the equipment) as well as no data caps on 4G/5G mobile.
From the perspective of the provider yes it's millions of potatoes. But from the perspective of the consumer, it's one potato. Their HTTP request is served by the dumbest, cheapest piece of equipment feasible. The fact that there is a complex network of millions of them only means that each HTTP request made is guaranteed to be served by the closest potato.