Kilobytes of Principle

I am Jesse Pisel. Geologist, AI researcher, adventurer. By day I coax machines into predicting what lies beneath our feet. By night I coax my legs up mountains. I build tools, share the code, and leave some mysteries unanswered.

This site reflects those values. Simple by design, fast by choice, private by principle.

I grew up in the Western United States, where the land rewards directness and the sky stretches on forever. Years outdoors have taught me that resilient and maintainable beats disposable convenience every time. Running rivers has shown that the line matters more than force. Two decades between geology and AI have confirmed the same lesson that clarity beats clutter. A high signal-to-noise ratio is non-negotiable. The site extends that philosophy.

Design Choices

The design takes direct inspiration from Lowtech Magazine, whose solar-powered website runs on a balcony in Barcelona. It goes offline during cloudy weather. They consider this a feature. A vibrant online presence does not require high-energy infrastructure or perpetual availability. Sometimes the best statement is knowing when to go quiet.

The site also rejects the creeping homogeneity of the modern web. Corporate conformism has turned the internet into a strip mall. A/B testing and template-driven platforms have bleached the individuality out of sites like sun on cheap plastic. Different used to be a point of pride. Unique designs were badges of honor. The corporate web sandblasts that pride away, where every page looks like it was stamped from the same mold. The site remembers when the web had character, edges, and far less bloat.

According to Unlighthouse, fieldramblings.co before optimization weighed in at a svelte 855.4 kilobytes for mobile (sans this blog). It ranked in the top 25 percent of the lightest websites on the HTTP Archive scale. Only ten requests. Performance score of 74. The breakdown: 84 percent images, 15 percent comes from a single Tailwind script, and 1 percent fonts and markup. I am working to see how low that number can actually go.

What you will not find: analytics tracking your movements, consent banners cluttering the view, third-party scripts collecting your data, infinite scroll, lazy-loaded tracking pixels, or background calls to shadowy endpoints. The site does not phone home.

Lightweight pages load fast on slow connections. Rural broadband. Mobile data caps. Developing nations with limited infrastructure. Bloated sites leave people stranded in these places. Fast-loading pages address inequality. Not everyone has unlimited data or lives in a city with fiber. The web should work for everyone, not just the privileged few with fast connections.

The Design Philosophy

The modern web has a JavaScript problem. The average website now serves between 650 and 700 kilobytes of it with every page load. That is double the weight of 2015, nearly eight times 2010. The result? Fifty-three percent of users abandon sites taking more than three seconds to appear. A single second of delay costs seven percent in conversions, but as a blog I am not too concerned. It speaks to how quickly people bounce from slow pages. As of May 2026, only fifty-ish percent of sites pass all Core Web Vitals. JavaScript drags down performance worse than images or video, byte for byte. It is the rock your buddies slipped into your pack while you slept.

Surveillance plagues the modern web. The typical website arrives with an entourage of trackers, consent banners, analytics scripts, chat widgets, A/B testing tools. Browser fingerprinting silently collects signals to identify users without cookies such as screen resolution, installed fonts, timezone, browser version, hardware configuration. These signals create a unique digital silhouette. Privacy laws now require honoring browser signals. Most sites ignore them. The modern web has become a surveillance platform wrapped in the guise of convenience. I declined the invitation.

The Hosting Decision

I went hunting for a durable, low-surveillance home for this site. Looked into the indie hosts: NixiHost, PikaPods, AccuWeb, Hostinger, WebHostMost, Krystal. Turns out none met all four criteria of low cost, ease of use, solid support, and actually running on their own hardware. Most so-called indie hosts are just reselling Amazon or Google infrastructure. The emperor has no servers.

Cloudflare Pages emerged as the least evil option. Unlimited bandwidth for static assets. A free tier with no bandwidth caps and global distribution. Independent audits back their privacy commitments. They do not sell user data. They publish transparency reports. They have even challenged disproportionate censorship in court. Until something better comes along, this will do. I would rather poke myself in the eye than cut off a leg.

So here we are. A site that weighs 855 kilobytes. No trackers. No surveillance. No bloat. It loads fast on slow connections because not everyone has fiber. It respects privacy because not everyone wants to be watched.

These choices extend beyond technology. They are the same choices I make in life. Travel light, move with purpose, leave no trace. A fast site is an honest site. A private site is a respectful site. A simple site is a maintainable site.

This site works for everyone. That is the point.