101–110 of 177 posts
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Have you ever owned an older phone or older computer in general? Whether hardware or software caused, they get slower.
Only if the software gets slower. My 2015 MacBook Air is slow with the latest supported macOS but runs Linux super snappy for the same tasks.
Is be more enthusiastic about this if one could remove the batteries. Dealing with spicy pillows is a pain
... carbon is fungible. Are they sure the effort of recycling them isn't higher than the effort of producing a single modern GPU?
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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?
You factor in the expense of having your code releases escrowed by a third party (where part of the escrow contract itself is: "must be buildable from sources as provided"), and have a post-release pipeline that automatically uploads the new version. At the end of the term, the escrow holder releases all the versions.
This is a fairly common arrangement in high finance. If you want to supply services to a bank/insurer/etc. they will typically require an escrow arrangement as a contingency plan against you as a vendor going away. And yes, they pay the escrow costs.
EMMC in phones has a finite lifetime and dies after a few years of use. That it is not mentioned in the article tells me everything I need to know about its seriousness
You guys should check acurast.com . This is decentralized compute network with over 200,000 retired devices connected. You can already run any workloads on it at a fraction of a price of traditional cloud services.
However it does worry me that I've never heard of acurast... I consider myself pretty well read on the subject of decentralised projects, has it just not taken off?
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…
I have no numbers to back up my argument, but smart phones are very power efficient by their nature are they not? I can play a 3d game, with impressive graphics, on a tiny device powered by a battery... With very little heat generated.
If your goal is to run LLM inference on a gpu in a power efficient manner, I bet a smart phone is a good place to start.
If only the phones could run a real Linux, let us bring our normal payloads of tools & scripts!
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> This is ignoring the fact that the main reason retired phones are e-waste is proprietary firmware blobs and locked-down systems Couldn't Google somehow fix this? Since they control the substrate (Android) and they would be doing it for their convenience
They're literally doing the opposite, right now you can't install a custom operating system, but in the near future you won't be able to install custom apps either: https://keepandroidopen.org/
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…
Isn't the story that some gaming consoles were sold at or under cost price and the markup was on the game sales? I don't know if it's fair to require that needs to be unlocked Yet I 100% agree on a generic computing device and they're not really that different in the end. Maybe that it needs to be unlockable after it has been on the market for 4 years or so (all units, no matter when they were sold, no matter if supp…