If it's the same mod from a few years back it's possible that they view this a nostalgic feeling.
There is also the possibility they don't keep up with modern AI development at all and then this looks like any old spam that will stop in a few days (as it did).
Now whether it is wise to keep an old page which such outdated behavior online is another question.
It would open up a tertiary market for smaller companies to do that (maybe even sell into a different market).
Not every business venue needs to be a multi billion multi national and using some devices for a long time is better than burrying them all in a land fill.
> it wouldn't provide much value to the vast majority of customers
I should have phrased it as:
> it wouldn't provide enough value to their customers to create meaningful value for the company.
You can argue that "ha ha, we shall enact regulation to force them to do this!" but the reality is that only a small percentage of customers would actually benefit from such regulation. Because most people are not going to tinker with their devices, especially if there is no easy or straightforward way to do so.
So in the end, you'd have more regulation that makes it harder for new players to enter the market, while doing little to solve actual customer problems and ultimately imposing significant costs on manufacturers.
For people who actually care about long-term device support, they can choose reputable manufacturers that already offer it. If no such manufacturers exist, that may instead represent an opportunity for someone to build a business around providing better long-term support.
> It's the large stream of perfectly usable e-waste modern practices emit.
From my point of view, the proposals suggested here, although difficult to discuss in detail because of how abstract they are, would not solve this issue in any meaningful way. By "meaningful" I mean that the cost-to-benefit or cost-to-regulation ratio would be rather poor.
IMO, the core issue with e-waste isn't necessarily bad practices by manufacturers, but rather consumer behavior. People often throw away 2–3-year-old phones that are still fully supported by the manufacturer. For example, with the exception of the phone I broke, I usually replace my phone every 5–6 years. Within that timeframe, I have the battery replaced by the manufacturer at least once, and the phone continues to work just fine.
This issue extends beyond electronics as well. People often throw away clothes once they "go out of fashion," which these days happens exceptionally quickly. The same applies to furniture, appliances, and other consumer goods that are often replaced simply because newer models are available, rather than because the old ones are no longer functional.
This is ultimately a broader issue of consumer culture and our tendency to replace things rather than repair or continue using them. I don't agree that this is primarily due to a lack of repair options or difficulty accessing repairs. In many cases, the means to repair these products already exist, but consumers simply choose to replace them instead.
> This issue extends beyond electronics as well. People often throw away clothes once they "go out of fashion," which these days happens exceptionally quickly. The same applies to furniture, appliances, and other consumer goods
This deserves a 'in the first world' caveat. Most waste streams terminate in the not-first world. There's a reason there are so many photos of African and SE Asian markets full of a hodgepodge of mobile device and English-printed t-shirts.
Which is to say, increasing repairability shouldn't just be measured by how likely the first world is to use it, but also to how useful it would be to downstream consumers.
To your list, there is a critical caveat to my caveat though: weight and volume.
Things like appliances (small motor, big bulky box) and furniture (bulky) are exceptions to the above, given their difficulty to efficiency ship en masse.
> I don't agree [consumer tendency to replace over repair] is primarily due to a lack of repair options or difficulty accessing repairs. In many cases, the means to repair these products already exist, but consumers simply choose to replace them instead.
It's a gradient, like all things. Repair has difficulty and cost. Policies (like this one) could be enacted which decrease that difficulty and cost. Are they worth it?
> cost-to-benefit or cost-to-regulation
Which gets to the measuring. My suspicion is that most HN commenters (myself included) are weighing from placing a high value on 'owning your own tools' which may not generalize to the populace.
But even so, I think it's a valid question of whether society would be 'better' if people had more ownership of their devices. Versus the current outsourcing to the mercy of Google / Huawei / Samsung / Vivo / Xioami / Apple.
> Which is to say, increasing repairability shouldn't just be measured by how likely the first world is to use it, but also to how useful it would be to downstream consumers.
Cars are a good example of this. Historically, people in Western Europe would sell their used vehicles into what was essentially a second-hand market in Eastern Europe. This worked and continues to work to this day.
While a car is a good example of something whose lifespan can be extended beyond its first user, I don't think the same necessarily applies to mobile phones that are more than seven years old and are no longer supported by the manufacturer. That said, broken phones or phones that are traded in early in their lifespan can definitely find a home in secondary markets.
> Things like appliances (small motor, big bulky box) and furniture (bulky) are exceptions to the above, given their difficulty to efficiency ship en masse.
It's largely a matter of the weight- and volume-to-cost ratio. Otherwise I agree.
> It's a gradient, like all things. Repair has difficulty and cost. Policies (like this one) could be enacted which decrease that difficulty and cost. Are they worth it?
There are already vendors that refurbish phones and resell them today. However, it is not a particularly profitable business, largely due to the high labour costs involved. And I'm not talking about the difficulty of replacing a glued-in battery, but rather the cost and expertise required for component-level repairs on the motherboard, something no regulation is going to magically make disappear.
> But even so, I think it's a valid question of whether society would be 'better' if people had more ownership of their devices. Versus the current outsourcing to the mercy of Google / Huawei / Samsung / Vivo / Xioami / Apple.
It depends on where you draw the line on ownership and what benefits that provides to the end consumer.
There are specific areas where full ownership is explicitly restricted by regulation or other legal requirements, such as radio firmware or secure payment systems like Apple Pay or Google Pay. I don't believe consumers would benefit from increased access to these systems. In fact, I believe the opposite.
There are also cases where manufacturers rely on intellectual property from third-party vendors and simply cannot release or open-source the code without violating a non-disclosure agreement and potentially causing significant financial harm to the vendor. Even if regulation were introduced to allow manufacturers to disregard such agreements, that would not eliminate the underlying problem. It would simply shift the cost onto the third-party vendor, whose intellectual property and business model could be undermined by having its proprietary technology made public.
However, there are also cases where software or hardware becomes unusable for no apparent reason whatsoever. A good example, albeit purely a software one, is what Stop Killing Games is trying to address. I would generally agree with initiatives like that.
> And I'm not talking about the difficulty of replacing a glued-in battery, but rather the cost and expertise required for component-level repairs on the motherboard, something no regulation is going to magically make disappear
Fair, on the hardware side, but why shouldn't we try to improve things on the firmware/software side, if it can be regulated at negligible cost? (the vendor releasing things instead of simply not)
As the Penny Arcade quip opined about engineered artificial scarcity: 'It's like we were given a universal assembler, and the first thing we chose to make was cancer.'
> There are also cases where manufacturers rely on intellectual property from third-party vendors and simply cannot release or open-source the code
I don't buy the 'but third-party IP' argument. If regulation existed that forced, then third parties that want to sell into the mobile market would license / assign IP under the terms they have to. (Or they'd get out of the market)
The unreleasable stack due to third party IP is a contract/market problem, not a fundamental universal truth.
> If regulation existed that forced, then third parties that want to sell into the mobile market would license / assign IP under the terms they have to.
> The unreleasable stack due to third party IP is a contract/market problem, not a fundamental universal truth.
That was my point. The regulation would not come at negligible cost. It is also entirely unreasonable to demand that manufacturers provide the source code for their firmware when all a user may actually want to do is install a different operating system. Some kind of SDK or developer kit with closed-source binaries should be sufficient for this, with the understanding that users would lose access to certain features, such as Apple Pay or Google Pay, as well as some security features relying on the chain of trust.
> don't think the same necessarily applies to mobile phones that are more than seven years old and are no longer supported by the manufacturer.
Why? Just because it's the status quo, doesn't mean it's a fact. Moreover, remember how Google wouldn't provide even basic support for more than 2-3 years until it became painfully oibvious that most people don't switch to a new phone every year? And oops, suddenly "it applied" that support can last for many years. Sometimes 11 as in the case of Android 6.
This whole thread started with me talking about my perfectly working iPad from 10 years ago. Why the hell shouldn't I get updates for it?
I get where it's coming from but I think it is also very funny if someone actually believes their claims (except as a CYA strategy)
The AI companies have already shown how little they care about other peoples intellectual property and they won't care about their customers either if it stands between them and the promises they made to their investors.
This might be a reasonable thing for an individual consumer to believe about the value and enforceability of agreements with large companies, but given the context I think you’re off base.
ZDRs are backed by contracts negotiated against extremely capable and well-resourced counterparties. Being found to violate them would bankrupt even OpenAI and Anthropic many, many times over.
To the extent that you view these companies as your adversaries, it’s worth improving your mental model of their actual incentives and constraints.
Open weights are certainly something that is very eagerly being adopted in some companies.
It's not even that expensive because even the 15€/month/employee bill for people who use AI very little can stack up.
Beside that though, many companies already have most if not all of their data in some cloud (Microsoft would be a prime example). Giving them a few extra bugs to get a (potentially) very useful tool is not out of the ordinary.
If you are under the impression that not going AI would threaten your business right now (which may very well be true for some companies) then there isn't really a choice even if you believe the vendors will steal everything eventually (which they totally will)
It's not just putting up colo space for local models.
It's more about the harness and API proxy you use. They need to be smart enough to know when a (self)hosted model is enough and when to forward to a SOTA model.
The SOTA model _can_ do everything, it's just expensive as fuck. But so is shoving a difficult task to a sub-par model that takes (relative) ages and comes back with the wrong result.
I think the average corporation has 2 concerns largely:
1. Getting some exposure to LLMs while building out their AI strategy.
2. Preventing data loss via end users following desire paths to Gemini, OpenAI etc.
You really don't need bleeding edge models for that. A lot of these things are going to be writing emails and adjusting config files and whatnot.
My personal best case scenario is that LLMs are commodotizing and that the "We'll rule the world with our frontier models" vision of OpenAI and Anthropic is not working out.
They can and probably will still be very successful but what they pitched so far is not going to work if their is any meaningful competition not too far behind.
But who knows. VC money allows them to try a lot of stuff before their eventual IPO.
At least for me the solution was to grind ear training for a few weeks/ months 10 minutes a day.
I'll certainly never reach the heights of this skill but a bit of persistence to overcome lack of natural talent did propell me forward.
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