[Video] 'Modern' Computing Excessively Bloated, Wasteful, and User-Restricting
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Dude, Where Is My RAM?
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TIME is passing, but things do not necessarily improve for computer users. I've just had to reboot my main PC for the mere mistake of opening this article in a Web browser (the video explains my ordeal in finer details). The Web is getting so much worse, not just in the sense that stories/journalism are less accurate but also in the sense that they take more resources and nag the user. Ironically, the article entitled "YouTube uses lower quality options on browsers running on Arm-based systems — misreporting as an x86 CPU appears to be a widespread browser fix" caused me to reboot for the first time in 300+ days; it seems that the Web is nowadays so malicious that it spies on what hardware you use (might be a bridge leading to WEI one day), set aside all the other forms of malice. For now they "just" read user agent strings, in the future they might resort to DRM with binary proprietary blobs and root (or Admin level) access.
Things were not this bad when I was a kid in the 90s. We could play fun computer games with 100+ less in terms of computer resources and in fact DOOM has just turned 30 (it ran fine in the 486 era). Where are the John Carmacks of today? Working for Mark Zuckerberg on bloatware? Not anymore?
Zuckerberg also hired the person behind Firefox, in effect using him to make the Web's worst (and very bloated) spying machine. I used to run Firefox on a laptops with just 32 megabytes of RAM (for the entire system, not just Firefox). Good luck trying this today on Zuckerberg's Facebook, which quickly takes up more than 1000 megabytes of RAM for a single tab with "infinite scrolling" (for addiction, basically wasting your time).
In terms of news on the Web, why did I need to reboot an OK machine (bought in 2022) for merely opening an article several paragraphs in length?
It's not like there are many active news sites anymore (there used to be loads more). My RSS feeds list is mainly blogs, as far as the interesting stuff goes, as an associate put it. It's getting really hard to find unique and important news online and blogs are insanely time intensive to process, this associate said. "Each has a different non-pyramid structure."
As more sites go offline (or become inactive) we're left in the precarious position of having to check some rather odious sites that take bribes to produce spam, puff pieces, and disinformation. If our blacklists grows too long, we'll have nowhere left to check for news.
Dilemma...
The issue noted above shows that machines without Windows are being discriminated against, even at the Web browser and Web site level. Yesterday I watched a video on a quad-core ARM processor and it turns out that YouTube has begun throttling systems for reporting ARM CPUs in the user agent string. "YouTube changes the quality and resolution options for 'aarch64' Arm-based systems under Linux," the above 'webapp' says (the site became mostly a spamfarm with malicious components and the habitual real article). It says that "changing the user agent string to indicate an underlying [defective chip maker] Intel CPU delivered better video quality defaults and unlocked 4K playback on [Fashion Company] Apple systems with Arm-based architectures."
Maybe Google thinks this is helping users with slow processors, but in practice this defies the concept of 'Web neutrality', wherein you assume nothing and do not discriminate against the user. Those are issues we did not have more than 20 years ago. These issues have begun to emerge in the past decade or so and their rationale is financial - as we shall cover in the next video/article. It's all about money and deterioration is always at the users' expense. █