DDoS

July 22, 2025

Granola AI is an AI Internet company that, well, summarizes the notes you take for your meetings... with the power of Artificial Intelligence. Basically it analyzes your notes and the transcript and writes a text dump for you that is meant to be the meeting summary. Does this mean you won't be in 20 meetings a day because AI can summarize them for you? Probably not, because the people this is aimed at exist solely to join meetings. Sorry!

What is the issue here then? Well, this app "mysteriously" used 60% CPU and 25% GPU of one of the founding engineers' M2 Macbook. But worry not, because he investigated this blatant resource leak through Chrome dev tools, because, you guessed it, Granola AI is an Electron app! This irony being lost on the founding engineer, he realized that the real cause of wasting all those resources was... the CSS! Specifically a CSS animation that might as well have been vibecoded into existence. The engineer, nay, Engineer, decides to do research on, yes, the W3C specifications! The W3C is, to the unaware reader, an obscure organization known only by the most esteemed of Hackers and Engineers, short for World Wide Web Consortium. It sets the standards for the Web. Anyways, the Engineer manages a solution that keeps his visualization, but now it only costs 6% CPU! At this point, yours truly was very curious, and after doing Research, discovered that Granola dot AI managed to raise $43 million at a total valuation of $250 million USD. Amazing things are happening in the tech/VC world.

Hackers are very concerned about this, wondering if they can restrict how much CPU a given process (or browser tab) has access to. A Hacker wonders if they can limit a browser tab to 100% CPU for "only" 5 seconds when it first opens then throttle it. This sets the stage for a truly entertaining comment section. I have to first however give a shout-out to the one Hacker that realized the solution the Engineer proposed has been, well, proposed for a bit over two decades by now. Credit where credit is due.

Some other Hackers claim this animation is actually a useful feature that totally deserves the 6% of CPU usage, which might as well be true, as the users this would affect might as well have the intellect of a lobotomized monkey, or perhaps a very smart hamster. I cannot stress this enough, this note taking app is going to use more electricity by itself than multiple small nations every year, because some HR person cannot write proper notes or use Taskwarrior. Talk about a colossal wreck.