Comment by AYBABTME | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AYBABTME | Hacker News Reader

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perl4ever had an interesting comment that they deleted after being downvoted for some reason. I'm happy to take the downvotes because I think their take was a thoughtworthy counterpoint.

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>"Just-in-time" means "no buffer"

No, it doesn't. It just means the buffer is somewhere other than where you assume it's necessary. That may in fact be a net gain. Computers and cars and whatever don't wear out instantly. It will be a long time until all the newest equipment that already exists is old enough it absolutely has to be scrapped. In some other thread on HN, someone said that everything depends on manufacturing, and services don't mean anything without manufacturing capacity. Services! Like maintaining and repairing what's already been manufactured! Like, for an extreme example, what happened in Cuba when they couldn't get new cars for a long time. Or during WWII when civilians couldn't buy new cars. Day in and day out, people talk about how terrible a disposable society is, and then we have a crisis that requires like 1% less disposal and it's the end of society.

This comment was probably down-voted because it completely misses the fact that not everyone already has access to the needed resources. Sure, even if you already have everything you want/need now, and you own high enough quality parts, you may be golden for a decade or so. Eventually though, you'll need replacements. If access to those replacements is limited, how much value does the rest of your scrap really have?

Creative outlets for junk are going to continue to become more and more fashionable as we struggle to meet our values and practical prices.

I don't think the comment completely ignores that. As the Cuba example demonstrates, the potential for a strong second hand market for existing repairable hardware is another form of buffer.

One of the issues is that repairability and/or durability have also been decreasing for many categories of goods.

The central part of the comment was this:

> It just means the buffer is somewhere other than where you assume it's necessary.

The rest was an example of one place you might see such a buffer. In practice, there are many such buffers, of varying capacity and time duration. For transportation, there’s the households who have 3 cars but could get by with only 2: they’ll sell their extra car once the price makes it worth their while. There’s the cyclist who’d like to have a car for out-of-city trips, but decides to hold off until inventory catches up (a demand-side buffer, if you will). Many more “buffers” could be imagined.

And, well, the market libertarian might feel really satisfied over the last year of commodity prices. Sure, supply constricted and prices rose, but at no point did we see any mass crises where people became stranded somewhere because they had no transportation option. For the vast majority of people, they just had to make convenience/cost tradeoffs that were a little bit different than before.

> but at no point did we see any mass crises where people became stranded somewhere because they had no transportation option.

You are just not paying enough attention. As prices rise the poor become poorer. How can you possibly claim that nobody is stranded by the increase of prices?

I think we’re maybe speaking past each other. I don’t disagree that things have become more expensive — and hence that the poor can own relatively less than they could before.

But, no. I haven’t heard stories of people being stranded in mass. I meant that word literally — because of the context of transportation — if that wasn’t clear? Even in the days of mass lockdown: I saw huge lines at food banks in suburban and even rural areas, but even those who are in a position to wait four hours for a few days of essential goods seem to have still found ways to get there. That observation is subject to some obvious biases, and yes I’m sure some people did fall through the cracks, fatally. But no: I truly haven’t witnessed what I would consider mass crises caused by people losing access to transportation. Despite massive shocks to a system of JIT manufacturing, there wasn’t a collapse of the supply side in the sense that you would have expected had you looked at inventory, divided by the rate of consumption, and thought “that’s how many weeks it’ll be until anyone who doesn’t own some form of transportation will be physically stranded”. Whatever services and goods existed two years ago, equivalents can by and large still be found today, albeit at a possibly-increased price or a possibly-decreased utility. They may have dimmed, but “the lights stayed on”. Is the world free of problems? No.

I also got downvoted for stating that I feel I have enough HW and can live a few years off what is there. I guess people have been trained to get the newest thing every year, that it now hurts them bad to not be able to do so for a few months. And yes, I agree, this could be a wonderful time to actually strengthen our knowhow regarding keeping things alive, instead of just throwing them away. Sounds like a great chance for the climate change people. How is the market for used equipment doing btw?

To speak to a "long perspective" on the issue, that was one of the things that scared people when electronics moved to integrated circuits. There's no "knowhow to keeping them alive". Once the magic smoke gets let out, they're just dead.

There was a time when every part of a computer - including, literally, an individual "bit" of ram, could be hand-repaired, craftsman-style (and even visually assessed for failure), but we've been on a long, long trajectory towards none of this stuff being user-serviceable.

We're now watching the rise of SoC, wherein my graphics card and my ram crawl into my CPU and disappear as discrete components. Strange times.

Well, I get your somewhat nostalgic attitude. But back then, computing equipment was also way large, louder, and energy consuming. Heck, one of the "museum" disk drives we have at work used to make the light flicker in the lower floor if you powered it on. So yeah, we're past a certain point of repairability. Thats sad, but more a function of progress, not really something we can do about.

But that doesnt mean all our existing tech will emit the magic smoke in the next few months. The endless need for more computing power is mostly driven by software bloat. We could extend the current smartphone and gadget usefulness by a significant amount of time if we stopped to fall for constant featurism and did lets say, a year or two of cleanup. Sure, "the future" like AR and such will have to wait, but heck, this "we will sell you 3d" thing is around since the 80s and didnt take of in the mainstream yet, so what?

If floppy drives were common today I think many of the issues you highlighted like increase power usuage would be solved and applied to this domain. We don't have to be past that power.

Are there any standards bodies or informal organizations that try to quantify software bloat and featurism? Seems like an opportunity for groups that are motivated to keep software lean and consumer friendly to pool some resources ala open source. Anything like that out there already?

If we kept our tech level at around the 80s but only increased the power efficiency, we wouldn't be in such a bad position.

Aren’t most of the power efficiency gains from integration and miniaturization? If you’re charging/discharging a larger amount per bit, it’s going to take more power than a smaller (physically and electrically) equivalent would. That tends to work against practical field repairs (other than replacing at the IC or subassembly level).

The shorter the distance between two components the less energy you're going to lose to resistance, electromechanical components have physical friction, conversion inefficiencies going from electrical to mechanical energy, and the energy needed to accelerate a mass.

Really, what nukes the repairability of a lot of products these days (ignoring the repair-hostile practices of many companies) is the cost of the item vs the time needed to disassemble the unit, track down where something went wrong, repair it, reassemble, and hope that component didn't blow because something else upstream is faulty that you didn't find. Cuba and Africa the time is cheap while replacement units are somewhere between expensive and unobtainium, USA/Japan/Europe not so much.

We couldn’t really have achieved this degree of power efficiency on 80’s tech though. Likewise, we couldn’t have gotten to 2020’s tech (always-on wrist-watch displays that last days), without increased power efficiency. Advancements in either one facilitate advancements in the other.

As a fun example, I’ve been simulating core memory at the level of electric/magnetic fields lately. It takes literally trillions of floating point operations to simulate just 1 nanosecond of a single bit of core memory. In doing this, I can identify things like “if we were to arrange the cores like <this>, we could reduce the peak magnitude of the radiated fields when a core flips, thus we could get by with using slightly softer ferrites (which use less energy when switching state) without encountering noise problems.”

But of course, a trillion fp operations was a lot more back then! Having more advanced tech made it substantially easier to optimize the earlier tech. Optimizing compilers are maybe a more direct, but limited, example of this. The faster a CPU can run your code, the more cycles you can have your compiler spend making that code run even faster. I’m not sure there’s a good term for these “mutual feedback loops”, but they seem to pop up a lot.

> if we stopped to fall for constant featurism and did lets say, a year or two of cleanup

I hear that all the time. Usually, in the same paragraph, they'll also ask for Feature X, Y and Z.

This can still require a certain amount of DIY.

I've just replaced a Blackmagic Atem Mini: sadly, I tinkered with my previous one trying to keep it alive and couldn't return it. I burned it up trying to do too much with it: ran the internal processing at super HD from a Pocket Cinema 4K, with two separate other inputs coming in and having to be rescaled, color corrections, and then the output downscaled after chromakeying to HD.

The unit basically melted itself until all it could do was flash bright colorful lines. Total loss.

So the replacement (dropping right into the previous workflow, though I'm making a point to not run as many rescaled inputs by default) will sit on a homebrewed heatsink with thermal pads and fan. That way it probably won't burn up, but if it did I won't have taken it apart, and I can most likely return it for a replacement.

The inability to repair is a concern, but on the other hand building the larger environment into the cooling support the unit should have already had, is the DIY aspect. Should work.

There's definitely a sort of "keeping up with the Joneses" that goes on in technical fields with regard to hardware. I do all my personal projects on a 2013 model Ultrabook. Sure it's underpowered, but not for editing text, compiling small codebases, or building CRUD WebApps. If I need to do some derp learning, I can just spin up a cloud instance. There are certainly productive tasks that benefit greatly from newer hardware (video editing, compiling the Linux kernel, launching a single instance of the Android Studio emulator), but most of this hardware capacity is probably for gaming and, like many people, I'm not much of a gamer.

Since I am still mostly on a plain terminal, I used to have a time when I used a rpi0w as a laptop, since I really dont need much more then an instance of Emacs and a few ssh sessions in a tmux. I switched to a real laptop by now, and its nice to have a bit of local power. But I could actually do all my dayjob on a rpi0w.

https://blind.guru//blog/2016-06-12-brlpi.html

https://hackaday.com/2019/03/26/not-all-raspberry-pi-laptops...

>> How is the market for used equipment doing btw?

I sold my stockpile of laptops (anything i5 or newer) for triple it's value last year. People would buy anything at that point.

Crazy. And also good, since that hardware is likely getting used more now.

What's HW in this context? I can only think of homework and hot water, but neither makes sense.

Hardware

> I have enough HW and can live a few years off what is there. I guess people have been trained to get the newest thing every year

I imagine the downvotes were for implying that everyone else is in a similar situation as you. What about people who were being efficient before the shortage, and now can't keep their aged equipment running any longer? What about businesses who suddenly need much more equipment than they did previously, due to pandemic restrictions?

> How is the market for used equipment doing btw?

I've found it much harder to find available supplies at any given time, but I haven't actually seen prices going up as a result.

Have you never had a laptop stolen or a phone destroyed by water damage or a car totaled in an accident? Sometimes you actually need a replacement, and when you do, you need it now because you depend on it for your livelihood. Buying new is not always the mindless plodding on the capitalist treadmill you make it out to be. There are plenty of people who can and should delay purchases right now, but there will always be those who just can't wait.

I think the message is true but misses a major point: yes, using existing hardware, we generally have some buffer though the simple fact of delaying replacement or new purchases. Equipment can recirculate (second-hand) and be maintained.

What is being missed are the larger societal needs for new hardware. If you build infrastructure (new public transport line, factory, power plant, communications network, etc) you need new components, lots of them.

The impact of shortages gets projects delayed or cancelled due to lack of availability of components or ballooning costs. It's also not just electronics, it's also shipping and raw materials costs that are impacted.

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