This is actually a well-known phenomenon in ML, called "The Bitter Lesson".

> One thing that should be learned from the bitter lesson is the great power of general purpose methods, of methods that continue to scale with increased computation even as the available computation becomes very great. The two methods that seem to scale arbitrarily in this way are search and learning.

The full essay is worth a read, it's pretty short http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

Is that page served from a secure domain anywhere?

Not quite. The Wikipedia page is worth a look through if you don’t want to click on an http page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson

Out of curiousity, I like security just as much as the next guy and ensure that certs are valid, ciphers are fresh, and protocols are mature, but I am also not really concerned with an informational site that runs http being browsed. Would you mind sharing what your concern would be with browsing this content over http?

MITM injection by your ISP or government

Use uBlock Origin and add custom filters to block scripts on http:// ; e.g.

    http://$inline-script,domain=~localhost
    http://$script,domain=~localhost

Inject what exactly? Why should I trust incompleteideas.net more than my ISP or government?

You could read it through internet archive if it's this important.

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the page is nearly just a .txt file.

the reason for https is MITM injection, regardless of original content

ah, didn't know that. thanks!

If you'd like to dig more into the history, let's encrypt did so much to enable the movement to https by making certs free, and chrome with the red text and warnings in the url bar, which has since graduated to a full on page that requires clicking to still go despite the warnings

So what? Are you worried someone replaces the txt with a different txt?

what if they add js?

What if the original page is untrustworthy and adds JS?

extremely HN comment

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