I used to have a specialized YouTube graphical client at that time. You don't need to load the bloated YouTube website to watch YouTube videos. Probably same applies to Reddit.
Sure, but the average user won't put up with all this: seek lightweight alternative to Windows/Mac/Ubuntu, then seek lightweight alternative to Gnome/KDE, then seek lightweight alternative to Chrome/FF, then seek lightweight alternative clients to youtube and reddit, just so they can watch youtube and browse reddit.
People are busy with work, life, etc, and life is too short, and sometimes going the quick and convenient way of having a system that can run Chrome/FF and Youtube/reddit out of the box, saves you time that you can spend with your loved ones or doing hobbies you like outdoors, instead spending hours/days faffing around learning and fiddling with niche obscure SW, just to feel triumphant that you found workarounds to running modern bloated SW on ancient obsolete HW people throw in the trash.
Not promoting wastefulness here, but sometimes there are points of diminishing returns, even for techies on a budget. I just try to see if LinuxLite or Lubuntu can save the system. If it's too slow even for those then it goes in the trash, I'm not wasting time with obscure linux tools I'm not familiar with just to potentially save some worthless e-waste that's not even a museum piece. I know there's some tinkerers out there who can get to run youtube on a Pentium 3 for shits and giggles, but that's where I'd keep it, at tinkering/entertainment, since I'm not a masochist to actually recommend people daily drive such a thing or do that myself, just to prove a point against obsolescence.
For example I tried to donate and find a new home online for my old Core2Quad PC from 2007 with 6GB of ram and 1TB mechanical HDD, and nobody would take it off my hands saying it's far too outdated to be usable today despite that not being true with some lightweight Linux on it, but people aren't looking to run and learn some new unfamiliar OS, they want Windows and Chrome and all that shit they're familiar with and would rather spend money to get something they see as usable instead of taking for free something they see as unusable. So I threw it in the trash.
Ahem. Back in the day we were used to use a lot of niche software for legacy machines, and we succeeded. Not even being bachelor graded engineers or trade/vocational sysadmins.
We seeked alternative browsers and today people even gets around paywalls with ease. Non geek/nerd people, I mean.
Then, using an external player for Youtube isn't rocket science. Several people do that with Newpipe for instance.
On Chromium/FFox, yes, it can be done, 1GB it's the lower limit if you set up ZRAM and add some flags to the desktop shortcut. OFC, Ublock Origin it's a must.
UBo, LXDE and Ungoogled Chromium with some custom flags (I can set an /etc/profile.d/chromium.sh guide with ease for any user) can make a Core Duo or Celeron notebook usable with just 2GB of RAM as today that machine can be handled as the new 'low end', kinda like a Pentium IV with SSE2 in 2008-2010.
1GB of ZRAM would be usable enough with ZRAM and just keeping two or three tabs open, something not unusual for the typical user. Even for a researcher. Also, both Chromium and Firefox have automatic tab suspending options, so in the end the CPU usage can be much lower and the RAM one would just be paged (and most JS bytecode or JIT will be GC'ed in the spot for sure, as there's no point on keeping objects for suspended tabs).
>Ahem. Back in the day we were used to use a lot of niche software for legacy machines, and we succeeded.
Who's this "WE"? Not me I think.
And "back in the day" computers were very expensive warranting the time investment into keeping them going, while now they're disposable commodities. Is it worth it to most (western) people who's labor costs are around 20$-80$/hour to spend hours/days figuring out Linux and several quirky tools and hacks that even tech workers never heard of, just to get a PC working that people wouldn't even take for free? Answer this.
Why not spend all that time in more meaningful endeavors instead of keeping alive a piece of junk. It's cool if that's your hobby, but for most people it isn't.
Everyone did; any experienced user had to seek lighter alternatives at some point.
>Why not spend
Tell that to a musician I know which uses a netbook and it can use Mastodon thru https://brutaldon.org under his old laptop he uses for music production, where audio software works but modern JS crawls it's machine lot.
>Everyone did; any experienced user had to seek lighter alternatives at some point.
Ha! No. For some users, their PC is just a tool, a white good, like their washing machine or their car. Do you think every car owner also knows how to change oil, brake pads or fix fender benders? No, they pay a profesional service to take care of it and once they see it doesn't run like they want it to, if they have the money they sell it off or take it to the junkyard and buy a new one, not keep it going forever through endless fixes and tinkering.
If a new washing machine is $200 do you spend $70/hour on a handyman to fix your broken one? Same with computers.
>Tell that to a musician I know
Exceptions that prove the rule. Without any context and what exactly a "old and slow" laptop means and what a person's income is we can talk here all day, as that skews from person to person.
If someone is broke AF then it's normal they'll keep their HW going for as long as possible if and less $20/month means skipping on food. But if someone makes a healthy income, they'll chuck the 6 year old laptop in the trash/ebay once it starts to be too slow for their standards and get a new one, instead of spending precious time learning about installing Linux and alternative foss apps, when they'd rather spend their precious time tinkering with their Harley or going to the beach and spend $1000 on a new laptop that works the way they like it out of the box.
Basically every game is written in C on a modern processor (MIPS) so i highly doubt it. Maybe some weird homebrew stuff like that flappy bird video uses it but emulators tend to deal with problems like that by ignoring them (e.g. IIRC there is no emulator that can properly run that N64 linux port from a few years ago, and there have been plenty of SM64 glitches that work differently on emulators vs real hardware)
there are loads of tools that can automatically convert images to ASCII art. most of the neofetch images seem to be generated that way because of the random looking characters but not all of them e.g. https://forum.endeavouros.com/uploads/default/original/2X/3/...
It's a completely different level compared to Wii.
The amount of sensors we have on controllers now means, it can pick your slight wrist movements for top spin, side spin and more accurately measure bat speed. The physics engine on these games are so close to being realistic.
Now, let's compare it to IRL and since I played college level cricket, I'll tell you the difference.
When I practiced as an amateur, I was able to face at the most 25-30 pitches per day. Of them, only 1 or 2 were what I can remotely call "quality" pitches and I'd have to spend 3 hours per day.
In the Metaverse, in 3 hours, I'd have faced 750 quality pitches including 95mph pitches (The highest I ever faced in IRL was 70mph) including extremely difficult curve balls, deception etc.
All this for a marginal cost of $0 and the physics and simulation will only get better
There are some that use the GBA slot for expansion too. The DS browser uses it for a memory expansion, and there's a Guitar Hero game that uses it for some extra buttons. When you boot the console with one inserted in Manual Mode it calls it a "DS Option Pak", and there's a lot more than i thought https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/DS_Option_Pak
Too much where? Let's ignore AI "startups" with no business idea beyond reselling system prompts for GPT-4 to end users. Does your bank have AI like last summer? A clinic? Any utility service? It is unlikely for most established businesses, cause they cannot move that fast. I just did a quick search on "{bank,hospital,...} integrated gpt-4 for client support" and similar queries and there's various "will be", "may use", but nothing specific. I believe ggp is mixing regular chat bots with integration of SotA in their statement.
Off the top of my head: Air Canada, shopify, ikea, car dealerships, ... It's common enough I'm sure I've seen more than that, those are just the ones I remember because they've either personally annoyed me or been in the news.
Health things around here have legal restrictions that definitely prevent them from using GPT, thankfully.
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