As mentioned in the article, prompting for minimal changes does help. I find GPT models to be very steerable, but it doesn’t mean much when you take your hands of the wheel. These type of issues should be solved at planning stage.
The average time before a car NEEDS a replacement part to run must be at least a few years. That's a different situation from flipping a switch to turn all connected cars off.
It's an interesting concept, but perhaps a bit financially and environmentally wasteful, when you can get a 10 year old ThinkPad for 10% of the price that will perform roughly as well as this one. We don't need to bring more low-powered laptops into this world.
Maybe https://www.ifixit.com/News/94927/how-open-hardware-empowers... helps to get how it's different than "just" getting older hardware that had good repairability scores (indeed like ThinkPabs,cf https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/laptop-repairability-sc... ) namely that the idea isn't to "hijack" a locked-down supply chain and get cheap parts assembled anywhere. Rather it's to challenge that supply chain and open it up, which is indeed going to be expensive, maybe even environmentally wasteful (to clarify IMHO) at first but then long term will radically improve the situation.
MNT is entirely open hardware and much more free-software-friendly, right? If you care about stuff like freedom and autonomy in computing, and you have the money to spend, the Reform seems like a far better product to me.
MNT publishes everything: source code, schematics, complete BOMs, mechanical design files. You could produce one of their laptops, or any part of it, yourself through normal PCB suppliers like JLC and 3d print a case.
Reproducing what they have aside, you can also modify any aspect of it by remixing their designs. The most common example of this has been custom keyboard layouts (ergo, split, etc).
Framework is perhaps well-documented, but it's not open. There are only pinouts, partial schematics and some MCAD stuff published for extension development but no ECAD designs.
framework doesn't open source their firmware. despite major demand from their community [0]. they're the only ones among major manufacturers of linux-ready laptops (novacustom, starbook, system76) who haven't bothered to do it. i consider framework to be driven by marketing more than values or honesty
It took me a while and a few regrettable purchases to come to terms with this, but you hit the nail on the head here. I tried to replace an old ThinkPad T440p with a Pinebook Pro at one point. It wasn't even a sidegrade, struggled with video playback, had a very small amount of soldered RAM that made web browsing difficult. I'd love to move away from x86 but maybe it'll be another decade before any of the affordable stuff is worth using. It really is hard to beat a ThinkPad from eBay. Even 4 years old or newer you can get quite performant machines for under $1000. On the less low-end there are the Apple Silicon machines, but Asahi needs a bit more time to bake as well. I'm still hopeful for the future, but will be more cautious in actually embracing it from now on.
On the other hand, since all the design files are available, anyone can design an upgraded motherboard for this machine and keep all the other parts out of the landfill.
That’s true. It doesn’t even have to be just „anyone” as they sell compute module upgrades themselves. The thing it though, the old ThinkPads are already here, readily available. It’s still more environmentally conscious to get one every few years instead of buying a new compute module.
I'm not sure it's so clear. On one hand, businesses will continue to purchase computers and sell them in lots every few years. On the other, every computer purchased from some other supplier is one less made by someone else. What's important about a computer is it's suitability for purpose, which is not necessarily the same thing as fastest / latest / cheapest / whatever. If my purpose requires modular expansion, my choices are this thing and Framework. Neither of which I'm going to find inexpensive used. I can think of a lot of scientific and engineering data logging applications that would be great for. And a machine like that might serve 20 years if it works well at the task. I've seen a lot of machine controls still running Windows 98.
https://www.clockworkpi.com/home-uconsole is another great example of a machine I've seen people mod into all manner of special-purpose device that wouldn't work as well with a used business laptop.
I think it’s very important to have someone making new, open, upgradeable computers. Getting an old computer might be more environmentally conscious now, but it doesn’t feel sustainable in the long term. New computers will (need to) continue being made, and the Reform by far seems like the best way to go about that.
A few nerds like us getting all wrapped up in environmental impact is going to be overshadowed by 1 day's worth of laptops bought at a single Costco. Unless you're able to affect a large group of people (ie: what Framework is doing), I wouldn't get too worked up about the impact of custom PCBs vs old ThinkPads - on any reasonably scale, it just doesn't matter.
I agree, it's probably a better idea to stick to something that was sold in high volume - if only for replacement parts down the road. If one really needs low power, an older M series Mac would also suit the bill (sacrificing many of the other benefits of course).
> you can get a 10 year old ThinkPad for 10% of the price that will perform roughly as well as this one.
Eventually those Thinkpads will run/wear out. The hardware designs for a [pretty much a Thinkpad] will be a good thing to have then. Let rich nerds looking for bragging rights support development for the future; call them patrons.
Also, they will sell 6 of these, it's not an environmental concern in any way.
Fully free documentation and modding from scratch makes it possible to fix problems that go unsolved im commercial devices.
for instance, some intel cpus with ME could be hacked from both built in ethernet and wireless OUT OF BAND. The ME was accessible in commercial laptops, but since it was not "supported" the end user had no way of even disabling it.
Agree, being weaker than an N100 I would argue by large it is already ewaste compared to just getting an old thinkpad or similar.
Its over engineered in some ways and woefully under engineered in others. Any real effort in making it more performant or trying to extend it's life will just generate more additional ewaste than it will save by just reusing existing hardware.
I read this as "never buy new electronics because someones old used one is less e-waste".
The motherboard is modular and the compute part of this is replaceable, it's sort of the whole point.
The modules are mostly compatible between all of their products: MNT Reform, MNT Pocket Reform that are available now and the future MNT Reform Next (a more streamlined laptop) and the MNT Station (mini desktop pc).
Good luck reusing that existing hardware when the bespoke battery is no longer available. As far as I know this is the only laptop maker with an open-access (open source?) charging circuit, no reverse-engineering needed.
Also there's a user story out there where a laptop is a mobile terminal and the actual processing power happens remotely in the cloud. With modern agentic workflows and how fast they're changing it makes sense to optimize for longevity on the client hardware.
Depending on the model though, aftermarket (or even new old stock) is readily available. If you buy used business class laptops like I do, you’re all but guaranteed to be in good shape regarding at least batteries.
"The final layers (Troy VIII–IX) were Greek and Roman cities which served as tourist attractions and religious centers because of their link to mythic tradition."
Yes, definitely. There was tourism in Greece in the Classical Period, too. Epidaurus is a good example: a major religious sanctuary, side by side with a theatre and athletics venues, all part of the thriving local economy propped up entirely by tourism. Fun fact: history's first recorded hypochondriac was a frequent patient/visitor at the temple of Asclepius in Epidaurus.
according to medieval reports the white limestone surfaces of the pyramids were absolutely cluttered with Egyptian Roman and other in eligible graffiti
It seems that a major objective of Judaism’s monotheism and singular Temple complex was predicated on being “A Light to All Nations” and a central, exclusive focus for pilgrimage (and therefore, economic activity) during the Jewish feasts.
In fact this is exactly the same situation which drives pro-Israel sentiment in modern times: pilgrimage == tourism == $$$.
no, but in first century bc and after that the roman world was connected enough that rich young romans were doing their version of the grand tour. Cesar managed to be kidnapped by pirates doing something like that, if I remember it correctly.
It's such an underrated advantage of open source operating systems that if you like some bit of software, you'll likely be able to use it for decades to come. Even a core bit of software like a window manager. I grew to hate how you need to conform to someone's whim at Apple or Microsoft, or else you get locked out of new features.
Well, unless you decided to use GNOME, then you get rugpulled by a bunch of people that think they know better than user what user wants and actively ignore any feedback
As far as I can tell, every major version of GTK should be thought of as an entirely separate project, and nothing in GTK 4 made GTK 3 or GTK 2 harder to use.
Please link me to the python3 gtk2 library so that I can migrate all my python2 gtk2 software to python3 without rewriting the entire UI. Thanks in advance!
what does make GTK2 harder to use is that it is not supported anymore. you can't build or run GKT2 based apps on new systems without building the GTK2 libraries yourself.
There are forks though. The only version i don't think that has a fork is GNOME 1 but... the code is out there (and there is an actively maintained GTK1-based toolkit that was posted here not too long ago, though you may need to make some modifications to the GNOME 1 code to work with it as IIRC it isn't backwards compatible).
People made CDE to work on modern systems and IIRC CDE wasn't even compatible with Linux when the code was first released.
They do control the content on the notification. It's a bit odd to put the sensitive text in the notification only to recommend disabling it at the system level.
Signal does NOT send encrypted notification, they send a blank notification that act like a ping, the actual encrypted data is then fetched by the app itself.
Sorry, the “recommended” was a bad wording on my part. The recommendation comes from the 404 Media article who did the expose on this incident, not Signal itself.
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