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 believe some mysteries are best left 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: clarity beats clutter. A high signal-to-noise ratio is non-negotiable. This site is an extension of 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 do not consider this a flaw but 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.

This 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. That pride is being sandblasted away by the boring corporate web, where every page looks like it was stamped from the same mold. This 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). That placed it 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 is 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. This site does not phone home.

Lightweight pages load fast on slow connections. Rural broadband. Mobile data caps. Developing nations with limited infrastructure. People in these places get left behind by bloated sites. Fast-loading pages are an equality issue. 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.

Why These Choices?

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 a site that takes more than three seconds to appear. A single second of delay costs seven percent in conversions, which as a blog I am not too concerned about, but it speaks to how quickly people bounce from pages. As of May 2026, only fifty-ish percent of sites pass all Core Web Vitals. JavaScript, it turns out, drags down performance worse than images or video, byte for byte. It is the rock hidden in your pack by your buddies while you sleep.

Then there is the surveillance. The typical modern website arrives with an entourage: trackers, consent banners, analytics scripts, chat widgets, A/B testing tools. Browser fingerprinting silently collects signals to identify users without cookies—screen resolution, installed fonts, timezone, browser version, hardware configuration. These stitch together into 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: 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. Their privacy commitments are backed by independent audits. 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 are not just technical choices. 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.

See inline links for sources and further reading.