A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

Post by msh » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

datadrivenangel wrote: post #81

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phones don't actually get slower, or, they shouldn't, if they are reasonably well maintained. A battery swap might be necessary to preserve battery life under load. A NAND might start going bad. Apple just shipped iOS 27, which has support for 2019's iPhone 11. So we are around 7 years there. It's probably fine for many people's use! For a task like openclaw or hermes, or even something more aggressively graphical &…

Have you ever owned an older phone or older computer in general? Whether hardware or software caused, they get slower.

Post by bethekidyouwant » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 4:43 PM UTC

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #67

noodlesUK wrote: post #8

I would love to see regulation that required making bootloaders unlockable to enable this sort of thing. People have been making clusters of consumer hardware for decades: I’m sure people remember the PS3 supercomputers of the mid 2000s. I personally have lots of batch jobs like CFD simulations that could easily run on a fleet of phones with no real reliability issues, and I’d love to reuse old hardware and give it a…

Make it a seven year rule: hardware vendors must release necessary source code for firmware, blobs, etc. I think there should be a 20 year rule for all released commercial software to release the source code outside of national security concerns.

Post by lukeschlather » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 4:49 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #62

zipy124 wrote: post #3

This is ignoring the fact that the main reason retired phones are e-waste is proprietary firmware blobs and locked-down systems preventing users from maintaining their phone with security updates, and very limited support length from OEM's leads to VERY insecure devices after they drop out of support. You should not be connecting these old devices to an internet accessible network. Google notably does well here with…

>This is ignoring the fact that the main reason retired phones are e-waste is proprietary firmware blobs and locked-down systems preventing users from maintaining their phone with security updates, and very limited support length from OEM's leads to VERY insecure devices after they drop out of support. Approximately nobody is throwing away phones because the OEM stopped providing security patches. They're doing it fo…

Post by wky » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 4:55 PM UTC

bethekidyouwant wrote: post #84

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make it a seven year rule: hardware vendors must release necessary source code for firmware, blobs, etc. I think there should be a 20 year rule for all released commercial software to release the source code outside of national security concerns.

lol or what? How do you make people do a thing, anything, 20 years later?

Post by Jaxan » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 5:45 PM UTC

jrmg wrote: post #69

It’s counter intuitive to me that this is a net carbon win. - Are these phone processors really as compute-pet-watt efficient as a regular data center processor? - There’s so little embodied carbon in a phone motherboard - and presumably some embodied carbon in whatever custom racking hardware up is being used to house these. Is that really compute-power-per-embodied-carbon-footprint efficient than making a new serve…