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.
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.
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.
Of course, many people use browsers that can't handle it. That would make it literally unusable.
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.
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.
communicating your true feelings and intentions is the only way to grow trust. what you are describing is needlessly eroding trust.
Even if I spend too long in the bathroom it will go to sleep with the maximum lock time settings, and my amazing Mac crashes if it has external monitors plugged-in when it goes to sleep.
I'm also not at all surprised that people are tech illiterate to the point that they don't know how to change basic settings. My girlfriend sure as hell wouldn't for example.
Well, I did not expect that, but I found an actual explanation that really makes sense.
(For your own Mac, there's https://www.caffeine-app.net/ available though)
They are really not restrictive overall, especially for software engineer's computers, but I would still have imagined that a tool which allows us to bypass some restriction specifically put in place would be blocked.
I guess since that security can be defeated by a long YouTube video they didn't see the point.
I didn't know caffeinate was a thing though, that's good to know.
Do you mean Poe's law? Although given the general quality of youtube comment sections, I wouldn't be surprised if Godwin's law[2] applies as well.
Corporate managed device. 24 hour ML prototype model training on a MBP. Lock killed training.
YouTube cat videos to the rescue.
(Was not involved, but saw this happen)
There seems to be quite a market for this teeny tiny tools.
[1] https://www.softwareok.com/?seite=Microsoft/DontSleep [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/awake [3] https://www.caffeine-app.net
Looks like PowerShell is the updated version: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9795442
Point being that it's runnable on any Windows machine, without additional binaries.