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Title: Re: YouTube as the "Challenge" for "Old Computer Challenge"
Date: August 03, 2024

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  So, I've been getting some things properly running on my MacBook, and one of
those little features has been my Sheepshaver install with Mac OS 9.0.4. And
one item I've been toying with in that old OS is an even more obscure internet
"suite" of sort called /Cyberdog/. To test it, I pulled up my personal website,
my gopherhole, then SDF's gopherhole. I checked the latest posts in the
Phlogosphere, and one from canfood stood out regarding the Old Computer
Challenge[0]. In particular, this quote:

> But to answer my own question, any computer that is unable to run
> a modern browser to render and play youtube is what I would consider
> old and quite challenging to use day-to-day. The horsepower needed
> to run a modern browser and render youtube to play webm or mp4
> files is by today's standard, modest. rasberry PI single board
> computers do that with ease.

> So any computer that CAN'T do that would be pretty challenging in
> my opinion. Youtube is a great proxy for the modern javascript
> heavy web.

  I actually challenge that for two reasons: my Dell Latitude E6430 (2011), and
the 2009 MacBook Pro I'm writing this on. See, I can play videos from YouTube
via third-party tools like yt-dlp and Invidious with little issue from both of
these laptops. But YouTube proper? Even my gaming rig/media PC from 2021 can
struggle with that mess, mostly depending on whether the YouTube developers
are feeling more malicious than usual or not.

  The Dell laptop is currently running Windows 7 Ultimate, but even under
Debian 12 with a light desktop, its Core-i5 pinged like crazy, and struggled
even more when on battery due to throttling. And even *with* the throttling, it
could cause the battery life across two(!) batteries to go from 12+ hours of
normal use, to a pitiful 2-4 hours while watching a video on that site. As long
as I didn't use YouTube proper, it wasn't as much of an issue, only dropping to
about 7-8 hours of life while watching something. That's using Firefox proper,
and the R3dfox fork.

  This MacBook Pro? It's a Core2Duo 2.53GHz model. Runs up to 720p video
easily from Invidious on its 1440x900 screen, using Interweb as the browser in
Mac OS 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard). That can't run YouTube proper since the site
won't even allow it to load. So, Windows 7 with Firefox or R3dfox, or Windows
Vista with R3dfox, means I can do so, and it loads...with lots of slowdown and
pain. But it's not the video, just the horrible spaghetti code of YouTube's
broken website. Pretty much everything else runs just fine. Also craters the
battery life to less than an hour if I go through YouTube, but it's fine
through Invidious.

  Still, I'm honestly curious if "poorly coded website" is really a good
benchmark for an Old Computer Challenge. I mean, the idea makes sense, but
I've seen low-end desktops from 2023 (like my uncle's little HP SFF tower)
barely able to get Facebook up and running in a tab in Firefox *or* Chrome,
much less YouTube. *If* he's seeing a YouTube video, it's usually embedded in
another website, where it's far more capable of actually rendering the thing
he wants to see.

  YouTube and the like are why people demand 16GB of memory as a minimum these
days, even though I'm handling 8GB on my MacBook Pro, and 12GB on the Dell. It
all comes down to mitigating other people's poor choices, so to speak. Then
again, my daily driver is ancient compared to what most people in the US use,
so I'm used to working around issues as I run into them.

  I don't hate the idea. It's just that the mention of it sparked some thoughts
in me. The whole thing comes down to personal goals, and that's where all the
fun is found. Like how I find it fun to get around problems with what I have
access to, either through software, or a proxy of some sort, or whatever. It's
why I'm still able to use OSes that give me joy instead of stress.

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[0]: gopher://sdf.org/0/users/canfood/phlog/2024-08-02