I frankly don't understand why RAM for consumers is a thing. I don't know of any other popular consumer good that is routinely built by the consumer out of individual components. You buy cars, phones, refrigerators, amplifiers, et cetera et cetera whole. Why computers are different, in the year of our lord 2025, is a mystery to me. This shouldn't be happening, and I am saying this as a hardware enthusiast who builds his own computers since Windows 3.1 days.
PCs are one of the few things we build ourselves because it's one of the few goods that have standardized and commoditized parts.
If there was a large degree of interchangeability between engines, transmissions, bodies, dashboards (etc) the auto enthusiast community would for sure be building cars from scratch out of parts. But realistically the pieces are tightly coupled and you can't pick and chose.
It's the same with coffee machines - if there were interchangable pumps and boilers and group heads etc, I bet building your own coffee machine would be the norm in a certain crowed.
And to be clear there's good technical, aesthetic, regulatory and business why most large machine's are made of interchangeable parts. I'm not saying car and espresso machine manufacturers have done something nefarious. Just that PCs happen to be free of a major constraint.
I think this is because it's one of the few things commonly owned which is expensive enough to customize, but not pressed for space/weight savings. The inside of my PC tower is like 80%+ empty space, totally different than under the hood of a car. No space in there to make it easy to drop in a totally different engine with just a few hookups.
> No space in there to make it easy to drop in a totally different engine with just a few hookups.
It's not about the space, but rather standards and engineering. Old flip phone was as busy around the battery as is modern smartphone. It's hard to change a dying battery if its glued in behind a solid case, no matter the device.
It is about space, laptops don't really have the same luxury as PC.
Currently the trendy ultra small PC cases are going in the same direction with tightly coupled components, not in the connector spec, but dimensional fits.
> It is about space, laptops don't really have the same luxury as PC.
Whats the difference, really? If your laptop CPU and RAM are socketed you can replace/upgrade. If mobos and peripherals were standardized you'd see macs with thinkpad keyboards, and thinkpads with mac internals.
"Why shouldn't it" does not answer the question, which is "what made desktop computers (and servers, to a certain degree) a unique popular product that customers routinely build out of parts".
I am not questioning repairs (which almost never happen, as PC hardware in general is very robust these days) or upgrades to factory-built PCs (which should account for probably 1% of the PC component retail volume). I am wondering why there is an entire industry selling colorful boxes (as opposed to brown cardboard with a part number) with things that are not usable in any way when taken out of the box and are only functional when combined with 10+ other things in somewhat nontrivial way. Forget about "why shouldn't it" and "it was like this forever" and look at this phenomenon with a fresh eye. This is ridiculous (in a factual way, not saying this judgmentally).
I don't know what kind of bubble you live in but it's wild reading this as someone who replaced parts of _literally all the things you listed_.
Just this month:
- Wifes friends laptop: installed new NVME and upgraded with additional 2.5 SSD, had to get SATA cable from china since no one else had it
- Replaced fuel hose on my old e34, need to replace fuel pump on the diesel before end of the year, replaced tires (summer to winter)
- Replaced charging flex cable on my Poco X3 smartphone
- Changed the door gasket on the office fridge
Last month I replaced peltier element in wifes makeup fridge, this summer a starting cap in the office fan, last year old caps in vintage amplifier I got cheap.
My father threw out almost new fridge few years back due to ripped gasket, wife almost got rid of the makeup fridge when the cooling element went out, her friend started looking for new laptop because "old" one had "boot device missing". If you don't care to fix/upgrade or don't know how, then yes, everything is a black box.
"Industry" is f-ing us over and people with your attitude are encouraging it.
I have a couple old radios from the 1940s/1950s. They come apart with a handful of screws and on the inside of the case there is a full schematic. I'd argue that it is perhaps not PCs that have changed but rather the rest of the universe of household appliances.
The first home computers were sold as kits and put together by fervent hobbyists. The original PCs relied on many iterations of standardization and competition amongst clones to become cheap enough to hit peak household adoption. Now PC use is waning in favor of tablets, phones, and smart TVs. As before, the pool of PC users includes a higher-than-average concentration of enthusiasts who enjoy to tinker, thus sustaining a market.
What kind of answer would satisfy you? It seems that you're being dismissive of the very reasonable responses here.
In short, standards exist because IBM built the original PC in 12 months using off-the-shelf parts and published the full technical specs...obviously copycats took off with them and reverse-engineered the bios.
IBM did try to close it when they launched PS/2 with Micro Channel architecture (proprietary, with licensing fees). The industry formed a consortium and created an open alternative, which was bad for IBM.
The colorful boxes exist because there's a profitable consumer market for components, which exists because the standards remained open, which happened because the industry defended them against the company that created the platform. Maybe this clears things up a bit.
I'm not going to get too far into this argument, 'cause... just no thanks, but I will say that one reason we don't assemble things like cars ourselves is... it's fucking hard. So are pretty much all the other examples you listed. On the other hand, computers are basically giant LEGO with how plug and play they are.
I strongly suspect that if we had phones that were as modular as computers, they'd be very popular.
Huh (Britney Spears head tilt)? Consumers have "built" PCs since the 80s. I was very upset when Apple started soldering RAM to motherboards in order to edge out the competition. Also, people modify and repair cars, I fixed my refrigerator when the water solenoid part failed. Isn't repair and upgrade a normal aspect of everyday life?
I might not have built my car myself; but have made several after market upgrades to it. My current car features an after-market head unit and tire pressure sensors that I installed myself.
Computers are just the most obvious example because they are expensive, easy to assemble, and have a high markup (which can be obscured on Tim's like now, as there is a larger lag time for component price increases to effect them).
At the time PC's came to market, High Fidelity music systems still were built from components such as preamps, amplifiers, turntables, FM tuners, tape decks, CD players, and speakers.
A PC was similarly a collection of base unit, monitor, printer, keyboard, mouse, and other components connected via interface cards plugged into a standard bus. Memory was also originally on cards plugged into the bus.
Bicycles are an odd duck where this is concerned -- you go to a department store (no, actually don't) or a bike shop and buy a whole bike as a single assembly. But because there are standards, as others have pointed out re: computers, it's very feasible to just buy all the parts individually and piece together the bike that you want (which is what I do). Honestly, working in a hot (or cold, it is Minnesota, after all) garage, sometimes I question my sanity when I'm assembling these things...but the ability to fine-tune what you want and not be beholden to the standards of some marketing department or the cost-cutting assholes that run private equity funds is quite nice.
Ultimately, I'd love it if there were enough standards out there where I could spec out a car, and have it built up from parts...or just buy a stock one, if that's what I wanted. I feel that way about a lot of products that I interact with -- appliances usually have shitty UX, car software is usually garbage, and I'd love it if I didn't have to rely on DJI for a drone (good luck getting them in the U.S. anymore, anyway).
I think that with any product there's a subset of people who are like, "Eh, good enough," and willing to buy whatever the big manufacturers are pushing, but there's a smaller subset that wants to really dial-in something that fits their needs.
Just like car people buy off the shelf cars the customize them, many of us will buy off the shelf computers and upgrade their RAM, SSD, GPU, or CPU. Maybe all 4, or more. For desktops that aren't Macs, I usually buy used and plan on bring my own SSD and GPU at a minimum. For laptops (again that aren't Macs), I also tend to buy used and plan on upgrading the RAM or SSD or both.
It's not any different. You can buy a whole prebuilt PC like you can a car or a fridge and most people do.
You can also go out a buy car parts and fridge parts to replace things that break in either of those.
I can go out and buy a new steroe, new muffler, new seats, etc. for my car and replace them, just like parts in a desktop.
wait, what?
i buy a motherboard, I buy ram for it.
am I supposed to exist in the total vendor-lock-in world?
where I have to get a special license to get RAM / SSD?
It must be said that "cities", as used in this piece, is a rather generous term. Sedro-Woolley has 13K residents. Stanwood has 9K. They probably don't have enough people on payroll to handle FOA requests, hence "panic".
You know, in hockey there's sometimes a saying that "if you're too small to carry your gear bag, you're too small to play hockey." Feels like there might be some kind of moral lesson there for this situation.
If the local governing body is too small to handle the requirements of governance, what then? Laws can be broken just because there are too few clerks?
If they can’t afford to provide the service, then they can’t afford to provide the service. In this case, they simply can’t afford to video anything that would require redaction for FOIA requests. Stanwood joining with Camano Island or Marrysville, it’s still a rural area that can’t afford it.
I really don't know, it's a difficult question. In this case I agree with most people here on HN that these sorts of mass surveillance tools are not desirable but the reason why is not "because the city is too small to handle FOIA requests".
For another example, some rural localities want to restrict drone usage, but actually enforcing that is expensive and difficult. What's the solution? I really don't know.
I think this is where the conversation is from theoretic vs practical limits. Most folks don't care about government overreach until it affects them or theirs personally. And because of costs, government overreach has been theoretical versus practical. And even when practical, it's more whiteglove treatment.
First example is that most folks don't care about police checkpoints, simply because they are rare, and when they do happen they are over pretty fast. You do have some that care and think they are an infringement of rights, but they are a loud minority, and even those that do have issues with them, just bite the bullet and provide them their license and tell them where they are going.
Some things we don't care that much about is simply because they can't be abused that much. For example, majority of the population doesn't care too much that the NSA is hoovering up all traffic including encrypted traffic, because there's no way to practically decrypt it a mass scale.
But if quantum computing or some other method makes it cost effective and allows them to effectively decrypt this traffic, we would see a lot more people calling their lawmakers complaining of government overreach.
Another current example is that most people never cared about the fact that ICE or border patrol can require ID and have warrantless stops within 100 miles of a border simply because the stops weren't front page news.
I seem to recall FOIA provides pathways for overloaded clerks in situations where there's mass requests. But, it only grants an extended period in which to respond (eg, 14 days instead of 48hrs). But, you can take escalate with the State government like you can with denied requests.
This is tinted with my knowledge of my Locaal (long a), and the areas I've made FOIA requests with.
And, turns out if you want to affect change- you have to make the bureaucrats care- Not the officials.
Using invasive surveillance tech to govern is not needed then. If you can't handle the full service (on both ends) of the technology, then you can't deploy it and have to use regular old police work or legacy techniques to enforce it.
Using this tech is not mandatory to have governance.
FOA requests are a part of the total cost of ownership of these products. At some point a vendor, the state, a consultancy was negligent in this fact, and we should not entertain ideas of minimizing the issues I agree. Cities is the correct term, below that size are villages and hamlets and if they are incorporated they are a city.
If they actually don't have the staff to do it, like I can imagine in small municipalities, then a fee wouldn't help either unless it allows for surge pricing that actually reduces the demand.
FOIA allows for "reasonable costs." For example requesting a copy of Obama's birth certificate is something like $20.
There's a real problem though- anybody (might need to be a US citizen) can FOIA any document anywhere in the US that's not excluded. When they can punt you to the paywall and then reply with a generic reply to a birth cert it's one thing.
When you have to actually find people to do the work of reviewing ALL video footage as $small_fraction of 200million people request every second of recorded footage from every camera... You're(as a city) kinda screwed. If they claim privacy they have to be able to prove it but can charge slightly more. But, if they don't then they have to provide the specific request (possibly a little more- say 1hr segments) at a cost representative of the labor involved... Which doesn't include the cost of trying to staff a FOIA center larger than your city.
If it takes the city clerk multiple hours to assemble and distribute the video clips and time gets billed to $1k/request because it's being done in the most inefficient, asinine way, well, how many FOIA requests really have $1k of urgency behind them?
I don't know enough about municipal billing to know how defensible that is, but it's definitely one of the escalation paths here.
Not very defensible. Wherever you are, this is probably fairly settled law. In Illinois, playing games with fees for non-commercial requests is likely to land you in a suit with fee recovery for the plaintiff and thus good legal representation on contingency.
It would seem a reasonable case to make that their vendor should be able to assist them in these data requests, too, particularly if the vendor were profiting from the data.
My own opinion is that vendors who collect data from governments like this should be subject to foia themselves.
Again I can speak only for Illinois (and 'chaps is more authoritative than I am) but for the most part you're not going to be axiomatically deriving what you can do with FOIA; most permutations of what can be done have already been attempted, and there's really rich case law. It's super easy to FOIA things! Lots of relatively normie people use FOIA. So FOIA lawyers have seen some shit.
Generally I'd predict that it's unlikely that you'll be able to do anything with a FOIA law to compel a vendor to do anything directly.
The real one is people coming up with minor, but recognized, reasons to request footage from different cameras.
Most everything is covered, as you mentioned. But there's a huge difference between things like Obama's birth cert(canned reply after paying the fee), and the entire US populations worth of people requesting a single 5min segment from a camera... But everybody wants a different camera, date, and time.
I suspect an organized campaign will sink the cities/flock, or they'll make the streams public and not retain anything. Public streams with no retention is how TXDOT handled this.
It's not really meaningfully different than existing closed-circuit cameras and bodycams, except for the ALPR plate/ID records they create, which states are simply going to exempt from FOIA, as Illinois did.
Sure. But until then, the US at large can hammer them to dust. And, I expect adding ALPR to an exemption was for simplicity's sake- since it's already general knowledge they don't have to create anything for a FOIA request. Easier to just make it explicit so they can point to the law/code.
Not sure where you got the idea I thought TXDOT was not being honest. No retention, live public views, only keep aggregate metrics needed for traffic flow (the official purpose for those cameras- PSA's for traffic jams and expansion plans.).
Besides, TXDOT is... Unlikely... To have a black ops budget, so if they lied it'd be public PDQ.
I'm reminded of the case of a recorder's office in Ohio charging $2 per page for copies of public documents. NYTimes made a funny dramatization of a transcript from that case, pretty good.
There's been multiple incidents of that. Including one where they wanted a per page fee for a DVD. Did not go well for the recording office.
Ah well, MERS (mortgage electronic registration system) has kicked recording offices out of the loop for all secondary market mortgage stuff. (Assignments, servicing, etc).
This gets shot down PDQ. A significant case of this was a County charging $0.50/page for a title company requesting a CD of all their records (note: they're digital) going back a large length of time. The judge over the lawsuit ruled they could only charge costs (note, this isn't wishy washy 'going rate'- they have to expose salaries and actual times and the employees involved can be asked directly, under oath) which amounted to $100/per CD/DVD.
Kind of a teeth grinding win though, because title companies are absolute scum.
Just a small bunch of XROS people came from FB proper (mostly managers) because an average FB SWE has no required skills. Most folks were hired from the industry at E5/E6 and I think we had ever took one or two bootcampers that ultimately were not successful and quickly moved elsewhere in FB.
I just realized that you might not know what a "bootcamper" is. Facebook's hiring process generally goes like this:
- you're interviewed with a random team and evaluated if you'd be a good fit for the company.
- you are hired and go through a multi-week "bootcamp" to learn FB's vocabulary, processes, and tech stack, fixing some real bugs and implementing some real (but minor) features in the process.
- upon completing the bootcamp you seek a team that is of interest to you and if interest is mutual, you join the team. If you can't find a team after X weeks, you part ways with the company.
Knowledge of C (XROS was written in C and during the interviews the candidate rather uncommonly wasn't given a choice of programming language) and general understanding of how a computer works at a low level. Knowing the purpose of "volatile", understanding cache lines, mapping virtual memory to physical memory, DMA, this kind of thing.
I think everyone had a degree but looking at my degree (applied math) in particular nothing that I had learned at the uni was immediately useful and I think there isn't really anything that would prevent a smart person with a GED and some history of, say, Linux kernel contributions from succeeding on a team like this. Except may be a degree is needed for H1B visa for those who need it.
XROS had a completely new and rapidly evolving system call surface. No vendor would've been able to even start working on a driver for their device, let alone hand off a stable, complete result. It wasn't a case of "just rename a few symbols in a FreeBSD implementation and run a bunch of tests".
Carmack absolutely 100% percent did not say "these people are incompetent". What he said boils down to "these people are world's best experts on writing operating systems and they'd love to write a new one from the scratch but I strongly believe that writing a new operating system is not the best path forward."
> Carmack absolutely 100% percent did not say "these people are incompetent".
Sorry if I wasn’t clear; this was the point I was actually trying to make. Direct and to the point should not a HR incident make. I was trying to contrast with something that would.
Only light fun. I'm just a little perplexed at their progress and direction over the past 7-8 years. I don't understand how they can have so many high caliber people and put out...that.
First of all, AR/VR is a tough problem space, often for reasons not immediately obvious to common folk. Second, Facebook in my opinion is a wrong home for long-term efforts that may not bear fruit for many years, with its 6-month attention span of employee performance management and its "move fast and break things" culture (both of which clashed with the meticulous hardware-oriented Oculus culture). And finally, a significant portion of people working in AR/VR didn't believe in AR/VR as a product. Some were there for the gravy train, some were there for interesting OS work, some were there for bleeding-edge technology, but I'd say less than half would say "we're working on something that people will love and pay money for". To me it felt more like well-funded academia even and less like a startup (which it was supposed to be).
There were many, many influential software projects done in the past that are not games. Some of the people responsible worked in AR/VR and drove its vision and technical roadmaps.
There were almost no kids on the XROS team. The bulk of the team were E6s with graying hairs, multiple kids, and very impressive history of work on other well-known operating systems -- and most of them wrote a lot of code. This was the senior-est team I ever was a member of. Also, the most enjoyable interview process I've ever been through, no bullshit whatsoever and a rare case that I actually had to implement the exact thing that I was asked about during the interview (took me 3 weeks compared to 20 minutes during the loop, go figure).
XROS was an org that hired for specific specialist positions (as opposed to the usual "get hired into FB, go through the bootcamp, and find your place within the company"). At one point we got two separate requests from the recruiting execs:
- Your tech screen pass rate is way too low compared to other teams at FB. Please consider making your tech screen easier to expand the pool of candidates.
- Your interview-to-offer rate is way too low compared to other teams at FB. Please consider making your tech screen more difficult to reduce time that engineers spend on interviewing and writing feedback.
Anyway, IMO it was a very strong team in a very wrong environment. Most of the folks on the team hated the Facebook culture, despised the PSC process (despite having no problems with delivering impact in a greenfield project), had very little respect for non-technical managers coming from FB proper (the XROS team saw themselves as part of Oculus), and the majority I believe fled to other companies as soon as the project was scrapped. The pay was good however, and the work was very interesting. My overall impression was that most people on the team saw XROS as a journey, not a destination, and it was one of the reasons why it was destined to never ship.
I chatted with someone on the language side of the project (I believe the same project) and it was fascinating how ambitious the concept was. I do wish it was finished or open sourced though
That’s what I’m saying. It sounds like a dream job. Like you said it’s a journey not a destination, but it’s also a journey on one of the wealthiest companies in the worlds dime, so it’s kinda lame when someone calls it out for being suboptimal. That’s why I said who cares. It’s not going to hurt meta in the long run.
I believe the suboptimality concern was more about time to market and innovation velocity, and less about money. At the time FB felt a real sense of urgency given the anticipated AR/VR explosion (in a good sense) and presence of competitors in the space, both real and imaginary.
