Comment by jholman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jholman | Hacker News Reader

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Well, stop disbelieving, I know in-the-flesh at least one person who does this more or less constantly.

She doesn't like how her aged macbook behaves when it screenlocks, and she refuses to adjust the auto-screen-lock settings, and refuses to let me change them for her. She streams, not black screen, but youtube videos, 24/7. Sometimes videos she once liked, sometimes videos she aspires to watch, sometimes videos she is watching, sometimes "soothing music". Sometimes she leaves them playing audio, but if there's a reason to stop the audio, she doesn't stop the video, she doesn't change to a silent video.... she presses the mute button on the keyboard. That way her computer won't sleep. If she doesn't want video AND doesn't want audio? (such as if I'm visiting and the videos are bothering me) No problem, press mute, and turn the laptop to face the wall.

She is using a shared internet connection with several other apartments, too, so she's actively degrading the experience of other people when she's doing this.

This irrationally bothers me, so I ask her to stop. She won't. I have learned to cope.

This is a person who gets annoyed if I leave a 15W light on, in one of the cheapest electricity markets in the world (well under 10c/kWh).

If I try to ask why she's doing this, she immediately gets confrontational. But, again, it's not because of tech illiteracy, because she refuses help with it, and I'm fairly confident she could do it herself anyway.

Thank you for listening. Apparently my learning-to-cope is not 100% effective.

> it's not because of tech illiteracy, because she refuses help with it

That is still a big sign of tech illiteracy imho. It can be uncertainty about the outcome of changing the settings combined with the fact playing YT videos all day is not too inconvenient for her. You know changing the settings is not a big deal, but someone who sees it as a semi-magical box that sometimes throws random error messages?

I also knew a person who refused to reboot her smartphone in order to fix the problem that it couldn't reliably receive SMS anymore. It had an uptime well over 6 months. The reason? She didn't know the PIN code anymore and didn't want to bother trying to find out. Well, until she bought a shiny new phone that is.

Find something you agree upon. You could appeal to her energy saving mindset.

For example mention how much power an always on computer is drawing and say that videos use CPU which ramps up the wattage and usage. Bright monitors use more energy than dim ones etc. Sleep mode vs always on.

If you want to go even further you could mention the carbon footprint of youtube and internet servers but this is pushing it a bit.

Not going to work

Sometimes we need to accept insanity in our friends and partners. My wife does stuff that I used to hate but now I just accept that’s how she does that particular thing. As a society I think we care too much about people doing certain things the right way.

a good example of this is having a massive number (50+) of tabs open in your browser ... I think that's completely unusable, but I've worked with other techies who do this, and also seems to be a common thing here on HN. Another example is having tons of stuff all over your desktop.

Ahaha, you think 50 is massive? I have over 20 browser windows open, and several of those windows have literally hundreds of tabs. At various times when I've done an actual census (usually before my every-few-years purge) I've had 700 to 1500 tabs. I'm not saying you should like it or emulate me or whatever, but I can't understand what you could possibly be thinking when you say it's "unusable".

Of course, many people use browsers that can't handle it. That would make it literally unusable.

Trying to come up with post-facto explanations which arent your true reasoning in order to manipulate your partner's behavior is a huge red flag. If you follow this sort of advice in your own relationship it is very likely going noticed and dissolving trust in your relationship.

Using a different then my own true reasoning is completely normal, and everybody does this. One adjust your reasing to the understanding of the other person for example. Moreover, there is like a miles wide gab between rhetoric and manipulation.

utilizing deceit to change someone's behavior for your own personal reasons is, by definition, manipulation.

communicating your true feelings and intentions is the only way to grow trust. what you are describing is needlessly eroding trust.

It is perfectly fine to present alternative reasonings to convince someone of something as long as you don't pretend that reasoning is the basis of your own position.

I've just tested letting a Youtube video play on my M2 Macbook Air.

At 25% screen brightness, it uses around 4 Watt.

At 50%, around 6 Watt.

At 100%, around 11 Watt.

The person in question is unlikely to have a modern computer, but letting a video play all the time could technically still be using less power than the light.

That's insane to think about. Extrapolating down to 0% brightness means the actual compute required to manage the network connection and decrypt and render the video, plus anything the OS is doing in the background happens in maybe 2 watts?! With 2 watts you could power a fairly dim LED lightbulb or perform the equivalent of thousands(?) of man hours of hand computations.

https://xkcd.com/676/

The computer idles at 3.5 Watt.

A 1440p video is played at 4.0-4.5 Watt at 0% internal screen brightness.

The same video at 4k uses 4.5-5.0 Watt.

And at 8k, it's 15-17 Watt.

The xkcd is apt, as usual. The last time I felt with Intel as I feel with Apple since the M1 was with Haswell.

https://xkcd.com/1172/

Just for those reading, you can turn this on in Mac by just running the `caffeine` command in the terminal, or using hammerspoon, which will add a nice little button for it to your taskbar.

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