jammsession

Nvidia pushed a connector

NVIDIA? Or the the PCI SIG? Why did nobody intervene?

Users are not to blame

Agree, and I don't blame the users. I just think it is a none-issue in real life (also according to Igors own failure rate numbers).

That is what I thought, thank you.

My summary of that whole 12VHPWR situation:

• Still no hard data on failure rates. We simply don't know if the 12VHPWR is more error-prone. There is however less wiggle room for imperfections because 600W is a lot of power.

• Igor writes like NVIDIA is some kind of bad villain that infiltrated the PCI SIG. I have no idea how the PCI SIG works, I simply find it laughable to think that NVIDIA can dictate stuff to the PCI SIG. It is a consortium with experts from AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, and many, many more people and companies. To suggest otherwise is dishonest.

• There were badly produced ASTRON adapters

• CableMod adapters are a stupid idea to begin with. Unlike a cable, a hard PCB has no wiggle room and thus can not compensate for a non-perfect production.

• Flipped ASUS design is a bad idea

• Igor again argues that NVIDIA tried to blame users for user errors. I agree that there could have been a better design that allows for more wiggle room and user error. But then again, without any numbers on how many cards actually failed it is hard to tell. What if this is not really an issue in real life? What if besides ASTRON, ASUS, and CableMod adapters, millions of cards work flawlessly and only a handful of users are affected? Even to Igor's own numbers (which he got from CableMod), if we leave out the twisted ASUS design, it is an extremely small issue.

• Igor again argues that NVIDIA blames users because it would have affected Q3 results negatively. Assuming this is true, why did it not affect later quarterly results? Also, why should any at NVIDIA care? Because otherwise, they would have to do insider trading and sell their stocks before the bad news. That is not how it works.

• PCI acknowledged design flows and came up with 12V-2×6. You could now scream "See?! The old 12VHPWR was bad! That is why they changed it!" but that does not have to be true. If a Boeing crashed, because there was ice on the ground speed sensor, it is easy to say "Well, there needs to be redundancy and some kind of heating, this is a stupid design to begin with, how did the FAA approve that? Boeing probably pressured the FAA! And they hide the truth because quarterly earnings are up." If Boeing then does implement these changes, it is still not a gotcha moment.

I like the work Igor has done here. These old-school electrical engineers who later switched or grew into IT are very much needed. They offer excellent knowledge. And I think if we look at Igor's reporting, we can feel that he had a lot of fun and put his heart into it. But it also affected his objectivity. He himself acknowledges that! That is not easy, hats off!

And I think the more recent Iphones do actually block certain functionality if a part is replaced by a 3rd party, genuine article nonwithstanding. Having the part identified as genuine, 3rd party or non Apple installed in the settings or something would probably be fine, but that's not what's happening.

I think that is exactly what is happening, but I am very open to new evidence.

but a business profiting from a customer's desire to do good doesn't disqualify the good that a business might do while also profiting.

God no, and I hope that my writing did not come off like that. English is not my native language. No, I think they do an excellent job, I just take what they say when it comes to repair regulations with a grain of salt.

so that does need to be replaceable

Totally agree. But to be fair, it is pretty easy to replace a battery for most phones and laptops. It is way harder to get none Aliexpress battery replacement. Especially if you bought some random Acer or Asus model. Then even iFixit is not able to sell you a battery.

It is not green to repair a phone, it is green to get a case for your phone so you don’t destroy it in the first place.

Also I saw way more phones and laptops go into the trash because I could not buy a replacement part (2,5y old Acer Laptop, according to Acer end of life, could not find a new battery) or because software support ended (Windows 10 support will end 2025, lots of laptops don’t meet the hardware requirement for Win11, or smartphones like Galaxy S20 only getting 3y of security updates) is a WAY bigger factor than „easy repairability“.

I also don’t agree that something is difficult to repair, just because you need some tools or have to peel of some glue that prevented water damage of thousands of smartphones. I also don’t agree with the iFixit conclusion that it is anti consumer that the iOS tells the customer if the screen, battery or something else was replaced, which could potentially be of worse quality. As long as the device does not block these parts (which it does not to my knowledge) I think it is pro consumer because it prevents second hand ripoff’s.

I agree, that repairability is highly overrated when it comes to e-waste. iFixit did a good job convincing people of that.

But to be fair (no pun intended) Fairphone uses some obscure automotive QCM6490 in their Fairphone so they can offer software updates until 2031. So they did a pretty good job on the in my opinion by far the biggest contributing factor when it comes to smartphone e-waste, offering long software support.

I am not denying that and totally agree. But it was still enough to scare gov into banning huawei.

And I am also not claiming that Ai is not real. The question is more, for what? I think some use cases are currently undervalued (like adult entertainment) while some are overvalued (Ai replacing coders)

We also simply apply the batch AI to stuff we already did years ago but did not call it AI back then. Like, Airbus using machine learning to find better and lighter shapes for airplane parts.

And for stuff like writing code, it turns out to be not as helpful as expected. It is impressive for coding noobs like me. According to people I know that code for a living, it is not that big of a deal. A nice addition that helps a little bit on some tasks.

AI really shines in tasks where accuracy is not important. Like making up stories, drawing pictures, creating designs and logos, and writing buzzword PR. And of course rule 34!

Haha, I totally forgot these nutjobs. They probably already moved on to other topics :)

Remember 4y ago, when 5G was the next big thing?

Self-driving cars thanks to 5G?

Every industry will be transformed and every single production line will have a 5G campus network.

We will only stream games over 5G!

5G was so frigging important, we needed to ban Huawei from building cell towers because otherwise, they could shut down our whole economy because our whole economy depends on 5G?

Well, that turned out to be a hype. Of course, it did not go away, just like AI will not go away. But it will have a completely different focus, than what most think now. I see a bigger future for AI in girlfriend simulators or user preference adult movies than in replacing STEM jobs.

Even relatively casual users who load up on browser tabs and inefficient Electron apps (household names like Slack, Teams, Discord, etc.) can find performance compromised by running out of RAM.

Gosh, if the Reddit community would have the same outrage towards that, as to the base model being 8GB, we would be in a better world. The increasing demands in productivity apps and in games due to shitty code is just ridiculous.

And it really sucks for consumers, because if this negative trend won't stop, your new 16GB RAM MacBook will be EoL in a few years. Unlike your old 2013 that you could use for almost a decade.