Ars seems to have succumbed to this dumbass US trend of putting a random video 3 lines into any news article, since clearly 3 lines is too much for today's attention spans.

Edit: it may be a fallback for an ad, according to this forum thread? https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/ars-video-callisto-pro... Still stupid though - so the user is already costing you money by blocking ads, so how about we waste 10x the money in bandwidth serving up a pointless video?

Ars is perfectly usable without Javascript. Either use Noscript or click the uBo shield and deselect the script tag.

At this point I have uBo disable JS by default and bound a hotkey to turn it on as needed.