5 ms·

I would like to see more e-waste initiatives based in reuse instead of recycling. To me it seems like any advances on the recycling front are outpaced by throw

I would like to see more e-waste initiatives based in reuse instead of recycling. To me it seems like any advances on the recycling front are outpaced by throwaway tech culture and general overconsumption. Seeing as processor speeds have pretty much plateaued [1], I wonder if it is useful to start thinking less in terms of precious metals and instead in potential processing power of e-waste. I remember a discussion on here about cheap web host providers using consumer grade boxes as servers. With today's cluster technologies, there's certainly creative applications for processing power that would end up in a landfill. [1] https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt-increasing/ https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt-incr...

bahmboo 8y ago
Power consumption is going down with each gen and is big cost driver. Also heat dissipation in data centers is costly. Gotta consider TCO in these cases.
- gascan 8y ago
  Semiconductors are fairly unique in this regard- power consumption has been going down so quickly for so long, it can often be both uneconomical and environmentally unfriendly to continue to operate older hardware.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    I'd like to see a detailed calculation. Teaching sand how to think doesn't sound like an environmentally friendly process.
    - gascan 8y ago
      Embodied environmental impact is a difficult calculation, and nobody ever agrees on a number for any complex product like semiconductors, cars, solar panels. But, if we one day price in all the externalities, we can count on the markets to run the numbers for us. If anything, electricity production probably has more subsidies & externalities than semiconductor manufacture.
- kragen 8y ago
  This is almost completely wrong, because Dennard scaling ended around 2002. Power consumption in mainstream CPUs has been a few picojoules per instruction since the Pentium. Even the MSP430 is almost a pJ/insn. Modern ultra-low-power CPUs like the STM32L reach down below 0.3 pJ/insn, as did the LPC1110 a decade ago. Its more mainstream STM32F siblings are still stuck at 1.5 pJ/insn. Research CPUs using exotic logic families have been below 0.05 pJ/insn since 2000, but are too slow for mass adoption. Power reduction this millennium is almost entirely about changing architecture to GPUs and other more specialized hardware, using wider registers (with SIMD instructions at times) and being smarter about turning things off and ramping their clocks. Concurrently we've seen a huge move from languages like C and Java to languages like JS (10x the computational load of C even with JIT) and Python (200x, or 5x if your program is dominated by Numpy.) So power usage is not a big reason for not using CPUs from 5 years ago.
  - bb88 8y ago
    From that argument, we should be coding everything in hand tuned assembly, because hand tuned assembly gives a 10% to 200% speedup over C. The number one slowdown I've seen in rendering web pages, were not bad algorithms or bad programming languages, but bad database queries. And if that's the case, there is a lot more optimization in the DB to be gained than rewriting your back-end to C, say.
    - pcwalton 8y ago
      > From that argument, we should be coding everything in hand tuned assembly, because hand tuned assembly gives a 10% to 200% speedup over C. Yes, all things equal, it's better to write faster CPU-bound code. In a world in which writing optimal machine code all the time was possible without sacrificing anything else important, then we would always want to do it. This is hardly a controversial conclusion. The reason we don't write faster CPU-bound code is that, in the world we live in, all things are never equal. Correctness, security, maintainability, development velocity, portability, engineering culture/trends, and so on are usually more important than raw CPU performance.
    - kragen 8y ago
rolleiflex 8y ago
There is a Vancouver-based non-profit called FreeGeek (https://www.freegeekvancouver.org/ https://www.freegeekvancouver.org/) that takes in e-waste, salvages usable parts and sells them back to fund their tech-education efforts. I'm surprised that this does not exist in Silicon Valley, it most certainly should. Edit: fixed the link
- jerrysievert 8y ago
  while there is indeed a Vancouver based FreeGeek, the one that you linked to is the Portland based FreeGeek. here's a link to the one you're talking about: https://www.freegeekvancouver.org/ https://www.freegeekvancouver.org/ edit: adding the link to the fantastic portland version, now that op has fixed their link: https://www.freegeek.org/ https://www.freegeek.org/
  - rolleiflex 8y ago
    Apologies, you’re correct.
- throwaway31246 8y ago
  Freegeek is a franchise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Geek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Geek There is another in Chicago that is pretty awesome.
subway 8y ago
Sadly the quality and build methodologies on most modern hardware that becomes e-waste isn't really suited to long-term re-use. Solder joints get smaller and closer every year, leaving whiskers more and more likely to eventually short out two adjacent pins. Not to mention the cheap failure prone board level components found everywhere. (Yay for esploding capacitors). And that's before you even get to all the junk embedded devices that have little in the way of standardization or documentation, etc. That hardware will likely never run software the OEM didn't ship.

bahmboo 8y ago

Power consumption is going down with each gen and is big cost driver. Also heat dissipation in data centers is costly. Gotta consider TCO in these cases.

gascan 8y ago
Semiconductors are fairly unique in this regard- power consumption has been going down so quickly for so long, it can often be both uneconomical and environmentally unfriendly to continue to operate older hardware.
- adrianN 8y ago
  I'd like to see a detailed calculation. Teaching sand how to think doesn't sound like an environmentally friendly process.
  - gascan 8y ago
    Embodied environmental impact is a difficult calculation, and nobody ever agrees on a number for any complex product like semiconductors, cars, solar panels. But, if we one day price in all the externalities, we can count on the markets to run the numbers for us. If anything, electricity production probably has more subsidies & externalities than semiconductor manufacture.
kragen 8y ago
This is almost completely wrong, because Dennard scaling ended around 2002. Power consumption in mainstream CPUs has been a few picojoules per instruction since the Pentium. Even the MSP430 is almost a pJ/insn. Modern ultra-low-power CPUs like the STM32L reach down below 0.3 pJ/insn, as did the LPC1110 a decade ago. Its more mainstream STM32F siblings are still stuck at 1.5 pJ/insn. Research CPUs using exotic logic families have been below 0.05 pJ/insn since 2000, but are too slow for mass adoption. Power reduction this millennium is almost entirely about changing architecture to GPUs and other more specialized hardware, using wider registers (with SIMD instructions at times) and being smarter about turning things off and ramping their clocks. Concurrently we've seen a huge move from languages like C and Java to languages like JS (10x the computational load of C even with JIT) and Python (200x, or 5x if your program is dominated by Numpy.) So power usage is not a big reason for not using CPUs from 5 years ago.
- bb88 8y ago
  From that argument, we should be coding everything in hand tuned assembly, because hand tuned assembly gives a 10% to 200% speedup over C. The number one slowdown I've seen in rendering web pages, were not bad algorithms or bad programming languages, but bad database queries. And if that's the case, there is a lot more optimization in the DB to be gained than rewriting your back-end to C, say.
  - pcwalton 8y ago
    > From that argument, we should be coding everything in hand tuned assembly, because hand tuned assembly gives a 10% to 200% speedup over C. Yes, all things equal, it's better to write faster CPU-bound code. In a world in which writing optimal machine code all the time was possible without sacrificing anything else important, then we would always want to do it. This is hardly a controversial conclusion. The reason we don't write faster CPU-bound code is that, in the world we live in, all things are never equal. Correctness, security, maintainability, development velocity, portability, engineering culture/trends, and so on are usually more important than raw CPU performance.
  - kragen 8y ago

rolleiflex 8y ago

There is a Vancouver-based non-profit called FreeGeek (https://www.freegeekvancouver.org/ https://www.freegeekvancouver.org/) that takes in e-waste, salvages usable parts and sells them back to fund their tech-education efforts. I'm surprised that this does not exist in Silicon Valley, it most certainly should. Edit: fixed the link

jerrysievert 8y ago
while there is indeed a Vancouver based FreeGeek, the one that you linked to is the Portland based FreeGeek. here's a link to the one you're talking about: https://www.freegeekvancouver.org/ https://www.freegeekvancouver.org/ edit: adding the link to the fantastic portland version, now that op has fixed their link: https://www.freegeek.org/ https://www.freegeek.org/
- rolleiflex 8y ago
  Apologies, you’re correct.
throwaway31246 8y ago
Freegeek is a franchise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Geek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Geek There is another in Chicago that is pretty awesome.

subway 8y ago

Sadly the quality and build methodologies on most modern hardware that becomes e-waste isn't really suited to long-term re-use. Solder joints get smaller and closer every year, leaving whiskers more and more likely to eventually short out two adjacent pins. Not to mention the cheap failure prone board level components found everywhere. (Yay for esploding capacitors). And that's before you even get to all the junk embedded devices that have little in the way of standardization or documentation, etc. That hardware will likely never run software the OEM didn't ship.