5 ms·

>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 maintaini

by gruez 5mo ago

>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 for more practical reasons, like the phone getting slow, the battery wearing out, or wanting a better camera. Moreover being able to replace firmware blobs/kernels/whatever doesn't mean such updates will actually materialize. For lineageos, many phones are stuck on 22.2 (android 15) because android 16 requires linux 5.4 and above, which means phones with earlier kernels are out of luck. Prior to this, there were phones from as early as 2016 (eg. the original Pixel) that could be upgraded to the latest Android. This isn't a "firmware blobs" or "locked down systems" problem. The kernel sources are available, and the kernel can be replaced, but nobody is going to bother upgrading the kernel for a 10 year old phone. https://lineageos.org/Changelog-30/#legacy-devices https://lineageos.org/Changelog-30/#legacy-devices >You should not be connecting these old devices to an internet accessible network. This depends on the use case. If you're using this as some sort of NAS or compute cluster running trusted workloads, you should be fine as long as there isn't some sort of RCE in the kernel.

jauntywundrkind 5mo ago
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 & GUI, it's not hard to imagine an 8 year old phone doing fine.
- carlosjobim 5mo ago
  Battery swaps usually don't work very well, unfortunately.
  - zblibli 5mo ago
    [dead]
- jstummbillig 5mo ago
  > 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.
  - jauntywundrkind 5mo ago
    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 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/google/ax https://github.com/googlecloudplatform/scion https://github.com/googlecloudplatform/scion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47675213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47675213
- datadrivenangel 5mo ago
  Have you ever owned an older phone or older computer in general? Whether hardware or software caused, they get slower.
  - msh 5mo ago
    Only if the software gets slower. My 2015 MacBook Air is slow with the latest supported macOS but runs Linux super snappy for the same tasks.
    - protonbob 5mo ago
      Unless the thermal paste goes bad and the fans get clogged and you get thermally throttled.
lukeschlather 5mo ago
> Approximately nobody is throwing away phones because the OEM stopped providing security patches. This becomes a practical reason more quickly than you think. If a company only provides 4 years of security updates and they only provide 2 android MV releases, you quickly become out of date. I had a BlackBerry Key2 that I bought in 2018, I had to replace it in 2024 and I was really holding onto it despite a lot of practical problems - Slack dropped support for the version of Android a year earlier, it was only when I tried to install Google Wallet and could not that I finally decided despite the hardware and software functioning fine it really wasn't practical to use a device that was stuck on such an old version of Android. (I would've tried to figure out the kernel myself if the bootloader wasn't locked.)
- throw-the-towel 5mo ago
  But that's feature updates, not security updates? If the manufacturer kept providing security patches for your old Android version, it wouldn't have helped you install Slack and Wallet.
Aachen 5mo ago
> Approximately nobody is throwing away phones because the OEM stopped providing security patches. I thought that, but a surprising number of people think that no support means that their device becomes vulnerable on the very next day. Not all of them act upon it but that seems to be the understanding of people who know what a security update is (not my grandma, but my mom for example) but aren't real techies or just not in this area. And it's not like these people are installing non-OEM patches! Nice as that would be... Some time before and during covid, I feel like security update awareness became a lot more mainstream. Maybe because there's not much else to talk about in smartphones anymore anyway, so you shift from "ooh this fancy new one has a fingerprint reader in the power button and its notification LED on the back!" to "I don't want a new one; which one can I use for the most amount of years to avoid this hassle" Probably also a culture thing. I guess most people in low- and middle-income countries have other worries; I'm speaking from a northwestern european viewpoint
ozyschmozy 5mo ago
> 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.
initramfs 5mo ago
Phones don't get "slow" on their own. It's usually due to bloatware from upgrades. Many phone cameras are already quite good. The only remaining reason to upgrade is possible security vulnerabilities, but even that doesn't require heavy software. Supporting larger apps is the main reason the system requirements continue to increase, since Niklaus Wirth wrote, "A Plea For Lean Software" in 1995. But even if people could trade in their phones for a small deposit, how many actually do (and not because they would use it- typically storing it in their drawer is safer than and less time consuming than figuring out how to run a factory reset before giving it to a datacenter. I've thought about a program where people could drop it off in their mailbox and have a delivery service pick it up (possibly the USPS, but I think they wouldn't want to be burdened with handling lots of lithium batteries). 20 years from now phones will be powerful enough that they can run on capacitors, thinner than a credit card, and deconverged from the multimedia omnibus systems that they are today. Sure it is convenient, but I think the feature adds will plateau.
- SuperQue 5mo ago
  > Many phone cameras are already quite good. Of course, you and I know that. But most people just listen to the marketing material. My mother's most used feature on her phone is the camera. She asked me about getting a new phone when she has a perfectly working Samsung flagship phone from 3 years ago. The marketing says "The S26 camera is _SOOOO_ much better". But, really, it's exactly the same sensors as the S23.
  - initramfs 5mo ago
    And unsurprisingly, the S23 camera is probably still better than most entry level phones being released today.
youngtaff 5mo ago
I’ve got a Pixel 4a as a second phone just for work… it’s a perfectly fine phone I’ve stopped using it because Google abandoned it after 18 months There are plenty of Android phones out there that are usable but get abandoned by the makers

by gruez 5mo ago

jauntywundrkind 5mo ago

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 & GUI, it's not hard to imagine an 8 year old phone doing fine.

carlosjobim 5mo ago
Battery swaps usually don't work very well, unfortunately.
- zblibli 5mo ago
  [dead]
jstummbillig 5mo ago
> 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.
- jauntywundrkind 5mo ago
  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 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/google/ax https://github.com/googlecloudplatform/scion https://github.com/googlecloudplatform/scion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47675213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47675213
datadrivenangel 5mo ago
Have you ever owned an older phone or older computer in general? Whether hardware or software caused, they get slower.
- msh 5mo ago
  Only if the software gets slower. My 2015 MacBook Air is slow with the latest supported macOS but runs Linux super snappy for the same tasks.
  - protonbob 5mo ago
    Unless the thermal paste goes bad and the fans get clogged and you get thermally throttled.

lukeschlather 5mo ago

> Approximately nobody is throwing away phones because the OEM stopped providing security patches. This becomes a practical reason more quickly than you think. If a company only provides 4 years of security updates and they only provide 2 android MV releases, you quickly become out of date. I had a BlackBerry Key2 that I bought in 2018, I had to replace it in 2024 and I was really holding onto it despite a lot of practical problems - Slack dropped support for the version of Android a year earlier, it was only when I tried to install Google Wallet and could not that I finally decided despite the hardware and software functioning fine it really wasn't practical to use a device that was stuck on such an old version of Android. (I would've tried to figure out the kernel myself if the bootloader wasn't locked.)

throw-the-towel 5mo ago
But that's feature updates, not security updates? If the manufacturer kept providing security patches for your old Android version, it wouldn't have helped you install Slack and Wallet.

Aachen 5mo ago

> Approximately nobody is throwing away phones because the OEM stopped providing security patches. I thought that, but a surprising number of people think that no support means that their device becomes vulnerable on the very next day. Not all of them act upon it but that seems to be the understanding of people who know what a security update is (not my grandma, but my mom for example) but aren't real techies or just not in this area. And it's not like these people are installing non-OEM patches! Nice as that would be... Some time before and during covid, I feel like security update awareness became a lot more mainstream. Maybe because there's not much else to talk about in smartphones anymore anyway, so you shift from "ooh this fancy new one has a fingerprint reader in the power button and its notification LED on the back!" to "I don't want a new one; which one can I use for the most amount of years to avoid this hassle" Probably also a culture thing. I guess most people in low- and middle-income countries have other worries; I'm speaking from a northwestern european viewpoint

ozyschmozy 5mo ago

> 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.

initramfs 5mo ago

Phones don't get "slow" on their own. It's usually due to bloatware from upgrades. Many phone cameras are already quite good. The only remaining reason to upgrade is possible security vulnerabilities, but even that doesn't require heavy software. Supporting larger apps is the main reason the system requirements continue to increase, since Niklaus Wirth wrote, "A Plea For Lean Software" in 1995. But even if people could trade in their phones for a small deposit, how many actually do (and not because they would use it- typically storing it in their drawer is safer than and less time consuming than figuring out how to run a factory reset before giving it to a datacenter. I've thought about a program where people could drop it off in their mailbox and have a delivery service pick it up (possibly the USPS, but I think they wouldn't want to be burdened with handling lots of lithium batteries). 20 years from now phones will be powerful enough that they can run on capacitors, thinner than a credit card, and deconverged from the multimedia omnibus systems that they are today. Sure it is convenient, but I think the feature adds will plateau.

SuperQue 5mo ago
> Many phone cameras are already quite good. Of course, you and I know that. But most people just listen to the marketing material. My mother's most used feature on her phone is the camera. She asked me about getting a new phone when she has a perfectly working Samsung flagship phone from 3 years ago. The marketing says "The S26 camera is _SOOOO_ much better". But, really, it's exactly the same sensors as the S23.
- initramfs 5mo ago
  And unsurprisingly, the S23 camera is probably still better than most entry level phones being released today.

youngtaff 5mo ago

I’ve got a Pixel 4a as a second phone just for work… it’s a perfectly fine phone I’ve stopped using it because Google abandoned it after 18 months There are plenty of Android phones out there that are usable but get abandoned by the makers