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A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

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Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#121

Post by jauntywundrkind »

jstummbillig wrote: post #77
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 &…

> Phones don't actually get slower, or, they shouldn't, if they are reasonably well maintained. Relative to ever rising hw requirements of apps they obviously get slower. That is why I personally buy new phones.

If you are trying to run lots of Pi or Hermes or whatever corporate whatever agent junk you have, to make a bunch of always on efficient agentic systems available to people, en masse, with low start-up costs, and high efficiency, there's a host of reasons that doesn't matter.

The big obvious central smoking gun that you'll get to in computer science 200 level classes is Amdahl's Law, which states:

> the overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used

You queue up some work for an agent. The LLM is going to do a bunch of work over time, and spend 20 minutes crunching on a task. Let's generously say it takes your PC 2 minute of it's CPU time for it to do the tool calls, to run the build, to run tests. If we expand this to 10 minutes to run it on a phone, that's indeed starting to be a big enough difference to notice. But in 99.9999% of cases, I don't think the harness consumes that much CPU and I don't think the growth factor is 5x to move to phone, and even if it did, it's still only an increase from 22 to 30 minutes: it's an async job either way, and the time budget is not dominated by the phone or PC running the harness.

Ideally yes, there's some intelligence to see: oh, we are about do to a build. Send the build to the build server, that's a 384 core 1U with terabytes of memory bandwidth and let it do that. But most work is not like running builds and tests. The harness doesn't need that. We need some small local computers cheap that we can have lots of running.

Model performance might radically improve in time, and that might change the Amdahl's Law calculations here. If you're paying for Turbo or Plaid or whatever, yeah, you maybe have the money to spend on a better harness too. I'd say that ideally these workloads become live migrate-able, that we can CRIU checkpoint/restore them across systems, ideally, anytime, so that we can give performance people performance when it actually counts, like the build concern above, when the agent is fast. LLM's built for speed like LFM2.5-8B-A1B (DiffuseGemini feels unlikely as it's fast, but low concurrency, but perhaps?), double the speed of many models, so that 20 minutes could become significantly less. But right now it feels like we need a lot of cheap not-performance critical harnesses that can sit around running, and that performance for them is not critical. https://www.liquid.ai/blog/lfm2-5-8b-a1b

If folks aren't aware, I also suggest taking a peak at Google Ax and Google Scion, two agent runtimes designed for scaling out, that are both kind of neat. https://github.com/google/ax https://github.com/googlecloudplatform/scion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47675213

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#122

Post by theendisney »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #95
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…

Which consumer ever cares about "security" updates on phones?

People get scam emails all the time and most dont know the weird ui to display the sender adress and/or dont know what an untrustworthy mail address looks like.

They might not understand the paranoia is real.

Remember people running 20 virus scanners and 3 firewalls on their win xp machine? Then it finds 12 suspicious cookies?

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#124

Post by theendisney »

Imagine you could buy some serial extendable base station and click all of your old phones in it.

Applications could offload all kinds of tasks.

You dont even need to invent useful applications the community will do it for you. But if you insist, think all kinds of cheap smart devices that offload the smart part.

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#125

Post by GTP »

lucb1e wrote: post #13
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…

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…

> Isn't the story that some gaming consoles were sold at or under cost price and the markup was on the game sales?

Yes, but I'm confident Android smartphones aren't. Maybe Google is an exception here, but all the other manufacturers profit mostly from the hardware and not from the Apps. Samsung has its own app store, but I think only a tiny minority of users spend money there.

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#126

Post by bethekidyouwant »

bostik wrote: post #104
bethekidyouwant wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Code escrow. 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…

So if I have software on my website and you pay for it and you’re in some European country that has this law then you (who?) can sue me for not uploading all my builds to what? some s3 endpoint?

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#127

Post by ozyschmozy »

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…

> Approximately nobody is throwing away phones because the OEM stopped providing security patches. They're doing it for more practical reasons, like the phone getting slow, the battery wearing out, or wanting a better camera.

I did this just last year because my Pixel 4a stopped getting security updates and some app I needed to use for work (I think Duo?) refused to install or run because of it. The phone was otherwise running perfectly fine and I had no reason to change it. I'm on a Pixel 8 now which is supposed to have 7 years of security updates, and I don't see myself replacing it until then.

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#128

Post by d3Xt3r »

RetroTechie wrote: post #5
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…

Obviously you'd have to replace the OS with an up-to-date one to use the phone as a cluster node. But... if Google can do so if handed a random pile of old phones, then why would a consumer not be given the same option for their phones? If it works only for phones sold by Google once, same question holds. And applies to other vendors. As you said: the "phone becomes useless just because OEM drops support" cycle needs…

Replacing the OS is only one part of the equation, it doesn't mean you're replacing the low-level firmware blobs provided by various chipset vendors (like Qualcomm).

For phones before the Project Treble era (~2018), the OS, the kernel, and the vendor blobs were all deeply intertwined with each other. Because you can't get newer blobs from the hardware vendors, it's generally not possible to run a newer OS on those devices. Community-made custom ROMs (like CM/LOS) had to rely on hacky workarounds to get newer Android versions to run on older kernels, which lead to stability issues and the famous "what works/what doesn't work" meme.

For Treble-supported phones, the OS framework is decoupled from the vendor implementation. This means that you can run the latest OS (using a Generic System Image) on top of the older vendor blobs. BUT you are usually still stuck with an older kernel, as those proprietary blobs still rely on the vendor's specific kernel drivers, although it's a bit more stable compared to pre-Treble due to the decoupling and the standardised vendor interface.

In either case (pre/post Treble) the main problem is that your low-level firmware remains permanently out-of-date, which puts your device at risk. An up-to-date OS can mitigate application-level risks, but not all of it. For eg, it cannot protect against attacks targeted towards the baseband modem, the Wi-Fi or Bluetooth controllers. If a vulnerability is found in the cellular modem firmware (like the infamous Broadpwn or Kr00k exploits), no custom ROM or other OS (PostmarketOS etc) can patch it because only the chipset OEM has the source code to update that specific chip.

So unless all the various chipset OEMs come to the party and either release the sources or provide updated blobs, these devices can never be trusted for use in a production environment.

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#129

Post by seba_dos1 »

Aachen wrote: post #120
seba_dos1 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using GNU/Linux as my phone OS for the last 18 years on several devices, enjoying "normal payloads of tools & scripts". Aside of a short time around 2017-2019 I never carried and relied on any other phone. It's not some wishful fantasy, it already exists and works.

Me too, but surely you also notice they're slowly raising the temperature of the pot we're in?

I do see remote attestation as a grave threat not just to mobile phones, but to general purpose computing as a whole (well, aside of offline use cases perhaps). It creeps in slowly, but I'm hopeful we can still fight it off.

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#130

Post by llsf »

RetroTechie wrote: post #5
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…

Obviously you'd have to replace the OS with an up-to-date one to use the phone as a cluster node. But... if Google can do so if handed a random pile of old phones, then why would a consumer not be given the same option for their phones? If it works only for phones sold by Google once, same question holds. And applies to other vendors. As you said: the "phone becomes useless just because OEM drops support" cycle needs…

The OS that would be put on those old phones, would be a bare minimal, stripped down OS. No need for managing screen, audio, radio/GSM/EDGE/3-4-5G.

Not sure about the IO interface, could reuse the USB, but maybe there is some internal (and standard enough) bus to reuse too...

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