What would you do if the wizard gets stuck? Coarse the wizard into making the black box work through somebody else's direct perspective on the problem?

The only thing I can think of is games, and the Windows binary most likely works better under Wine anyways.

There are many embedded systems like CNC controllers, advertisement displays, etc... that run those old applications, but I seriously doubt anyone would be willing to update the software in those things.

The drivers will surely get better over time and support for integrating the compute stack that they use will come if the incentive is good enough.

I really hope this doesn't turn out like HIP in AMD Radeon cards. That is absolute dog shit and has been dog shit for ages. It's really sad that an AMD card from 2017 is useless for compute while an equivalent Nvidia card from the same era is just now getting dropped by the latest CUDA versions.

It is a problem for importing large quantities to resell though, I'm not defending the ability to import 100s of death traps and sell them to people.

I have practically zero knowledge on the physics behind semiconductors to try to think why this could occur but I find it fascinating nonetheless.

But if you remove the battery and mod the phone to power it directly from an external power supply you're all set!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40969391

Points: 215

# Comments: 197

I wonder how much damage (if any) that caused considering I didn't do it very frequently. And how much damage could it do to someone that does it every weekend during their late teenage years?

When running software RAID, memory errors could also cause data to be replicated erroneously and raise an error the next time it's read. That said if the memory is flaky enough that these errors are common it's highly likely that the operating system will crash very frequently and the user will know something is seriously wrong.

If you want to make sure that files have been copied correctly you can flush all kernel buffers and run diff -r between the source and destination directory to make sure that everything is the same.

It's probably way more likely to experience data loss due to human error or external factors such as a power surge than bad ram. I personally thoroughly test the memory before a computer gets put into service and assume it's okay until something fails or it gets replaced. The only machine I've ever seen that would corrupt random data on a disk was heavily and carelessly overclocked (teenage me cared about getting moar fps in games, and not having a reliable workstation lol)

But the low-end device thing still stands. At least here in Argentina where I live most people can't buy a $1000+ phone without going into debt or saving money for a stupid amount of time to get it. Some people that really can't afford to do so still buy them though. Maybe it is reasonable for some but I never saw any appeal in spending so much money (comparatively to a monthly salary) on a non necessity. I happily spent that kind of money on a PC to use for work/study, but a phone? Nah.

I daily drive a OnePlus 5 running Android 14 through LineageOS and the user experience for non-gaming tasks is perfectly adequate. This phone has 6GB of ram, so it's still on par with most mid-range phones nowadays. My only gripe is that I had to replace the battery and disassembling phones is a pain.

Meanwhile a Galaxy S8 with the same SoC, 4GB of memory and stock Android 9 with Samsung's modifications chugs like there's no tomorrow.

I can understand that having two more gigabytes of memory can make a difference but there is a night and day difference between the phones. Perhaps Android 14 has way better memory management than Android 9? Or Samsung's slow and bloated software is hampering this device?

Either way it's irritating to see that many companies don't test on old/low-end devices. Most people in the world aren't running modern flagships, especially if they target a world-wide audience.

With a firmware update and an additional charge to the customer a model for detecting polished wooden furniture could also be used.

(I used x86 assembly as an example assuming you wanted to boot your OS on a PC. An alternative could be to target a well documented SBC like the BeagleBone Black)