Most everything on the desktop is going to be light on ram except the web browser and electron apps (i.e. web browsers). Games use a lot too, but thats less of an issue because you don't tend to multitask as much with games. Using onetab or some other way of limiting browser tabs severely helpa a lot.
Same here. Modern 32 gb machine from work is a slog. 2 minutes from wake to actually working, can be 10 seconds just to use the start menu sometimes. Older thinkpad with 16gb and linux/cosmic desktop - wakes almost instantly and perfectly snappy for most things.
The company was literally founded on the principal of “thanks for all the free software I learned on, from this point forward, everyone needs to pay (me) for everything and sharing is bad”. Sort of paraphrased from Bill Gates email to the hobbyists. Then it got big by selling vapourware based on nepotism and then nearly stealing a product to fill the order. Then they got their fingers into legislators and it got worse for everyone.
XP was the first consumer OS with the NT kernel which was far far more reliable than win32 in the previous ones. I remember people bragging that they could leave their computer running and it wouldn't crash -and that seemed crazy. I used windows 2000 for many years as a stripped down XP, but not many people got it. I think the interface peaked around 95, but the kernel was terribly unreliable.
Having played around with it recently, I have to say the ui was pretty bad (try it: https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/windows/3.11/ ) Go to Windows 95 and you get all the basic desktop ui principals that modern desktops use.
Email aliases are typically used for account signups so said services have no way of connecting accounts. If the alias provider is at least as private and secure as your regular email provider it can be a net win. PGP is rarely an option here, and usual caveat that email is already a nightmare bad thing for authenticating accounts.
Corporate AI criticism always ends up being AI boosterism. This is just a way to laugh at “early” AI’s mistakes while implying that it will get good any day now.
You don't think they are already using the surveillance state/surveillance capitalism in this process? Its not hypothetical, its just that the scope is narrow this moment.
Cognitive dissonance. “I dont care” is much easier to say then “wow, Im a fool that has shared way too much personal information and that has put me at risk”. The latter literally attacks your own identity.
These people do care because 5 minutes later they will be sharing their pet conspiracy theory that Siri is listening to their conversations.
When powerful people (government or not) have a record of every little thing a person does for decades retrospectively, just watch inconvenient people you like suddenly start disappearing from public discourse.
I see this take online a lot, but in person, everywhere I go people play netflix and whatever directly on their TV. I think there might just be a huge divide in perspective between those with and without game consoles of some sort always connected to their TV.
That would still pressure the browser teams to work on memory optimizations.