This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Electronics recycling really needs to be more mainstream. We’re burying way too much mineral content.
Yeah throwing out an entire computer because one little component is burnt out, or throwing out a whole component because one little connection is burnt out. And then there's even micro soldering if you want to get surgical...
Or simply throwing a computer away because it's slower than the new one. The price paid by the environment, by future generations, for e-waste needs to be front-loaded into the manufacturing process.
Otherwise companies are just stealing from the future and turning collective horizon into an unlivable garbage dump.
Its such a bummer because I would have went into electronic repair if I'd been born sooner. Right as I was thinking about it all the radioshacks were shutting down etc and everything became disposable and unfixable. Really sad because I enjoy fixing things. I just stick to old stuff now.
It sickens me how much has been thrown away just in the past 15 years, not to mention since the 50s...
Yeah and I feel like if we actually respected the nature and our fellow humans, made sure everything was mined as ethically as possible, everyone paid along the way got a living wage with self-determination, made to last, actual plans for disposal — all that. Then we'd actually cherish these devices like the amazing things that they are.
Sure we'd probably just be getting to the point of streaming video now, but I honestly don't think we'd feel like we missed out.
The problem isn't that it can't be done, it's that the manufacturing cost vs. labor cost in the US stops it from making economic sense. They do repair and reuse electronics in places like China (that's where those modified GPUs with extra RAM and cheap desktop motherboards with old Xeon CPUs on them you find on EBay and Aliexpress come from, for example), but that's because the technicians doing the work get paid a lot less than skilled people would be willing to accept here.
Also, much less labor law burden. No pesky ppe required while breathing toxic fumes!
But you know one day in our cyber punk future, you’ll be able to fish rig parts out of the dump like ya did for the ol’ beater your dad kept around.
I have several old but working electronics and I literally haven't been able to give them away for free. They're probably going to end up in the eWaste trash. I don't know if that leads to anything being reclaimed, but probably not.
I know what you mean, it makes me really wary to buy anything new because I know I'll have trouble getting rid of what it's replacing.
Luckily I've got some nephews that take a lot of hand-me-downs, but the breakneck speed of consumer electronics leads to some stuff becoming "obsolete" (read: harder to support) long before the hardware actually gives out.
I will typically not buy a new thing if I don't have a plan for the old one it replaced.
Hey, uh, any ereaders or tablets in that pile? I need something basic I can just read comics or books with but all the used stuff around me is priced as new and the new stuff is priced insane.
Sadly, no. Two ancient laptops (circa 2004, 2008) and a 20-something inch crt with no HDMI.
If that CRT has a Trinitron tube it'd probably be pretty easy to find an arcade/retro gaming enthusiast in your area who'd want it (and probably even if not...)
Our dumps will be goldmines for whatever species takes the helm after we’re gone.
And then prices will come back down!
...the prices are coming back down, right?
*Anakin smirk*
An insane waste of valuable metals if it isn't recycled.
One of the good things that could come from this is the flood of cheap used hard drives and RAM which will hopefully drop used prices back down…beyond that everything else about this just sucks.
Those cheap drives will have been run really hard, though. I don't know how much I'd trust them with anything important.
We'll all be running RAID, buying 18TBs by the dozen
Pretty much what I was thinking except at the 24-26TB level lol 😎
Same but like 3-4TB 🥸
Same but 4G
True it depends largely on the manufacturer of the drives but yah agreed, likely to be used harder than your typical large scale vps/web server hosting company but, still, its gotta help the pricing market some because its just bonkers expensive now for used drives.
The whole point of this ai thing is so they can make it impossible to have a computer you own in your house. theyre probably just going to shred everything
That is certainly possible, but at the other end is the argument that these corps are greedy as all hell so they will likely try to profit reselling the used hardware as well given the current market for it.
If their plan doesn’t work they’re going to crash the economy so hard that RAM and storage will be the last thing on anyone’s mind. This is why they think they’re invincible.
If they thought they were invincible, they wouldn't be building bunkers and prepping.
The ram will all be server ram sadly, which is great for us homelab people, but sadly doesn't solve the gonna consumer ram problem.
Maybe everyone just makes a huge homelab now with all that ram and we all just stream our games instead of worrying about a beefy pc lol
If there is a glut of ram that can only be used in specific machines then someone will find a way to modify systems to use it. Or I can see a company buying up huge stores of it and release consumer products that use it.
I don't think that's going to be the case. All that bitcoin mining stuff, completely used up and mostly worthless at this point, and by the time the next (or two generations) comes out, so much of the old serve stuff is expensive to run, and then unsupported. I think re-use is great, but at a point real recycling needs to be the better option.
I just saw a video yesterday on hacking old bitcoin mining GPUs to unlock their RAM and PCI bandwidth and whatnot for general-purpose use. Desperation is the mother of invention, after all.
Woohoo! Send it all to my address please!
You really don’t want it. At least most of it. I get discarded stuff from work quite frequently and 95% of it is way too loud, way too hot, and uses a boat-load of power. And I don’t mean like sitting next to a running house fan loud. I mean sitting next to a jet engine loud. Like if you are in a data center behind this equipment, you struggle to have a conversation with a guy a foot from you.
But if you got a nice cool basement and you never have to pay for power, you can get lots of good stuff relatively cheap.
I think we are okay making that mistake ourselves.
I mean that’s true. I probably would too. Well for about a week and then my wife would tell me to get rid of it.
You get a week? I had to get rid of it same day 😔
This is how you end up with a homelab, it just takes one managed switch or a blade server amd now youre on ebay everyday looking for deals and struggling to pay electric bills.
Discarded electronics unusable by consumers.
Pretty much, or hardware that's so expensive to run because of electricity that newer stuff makes sense. That's always been the case, like ohh I can get cheap server hardware, until I look at my power bill.
I will be scooping up GPUs by the bucketful when the time comes
Buying used hardware for homelabs right here! Accepting offers
There's gold in them there hills.
