I attended Google I/O in 2013 and was given a Chromebook Pixel, their $1300 laptop. The hardware was very, very nice, and I quite enjoyed using it for a while. One day, I dropped it and damaged the screen well outside of its warranty period. "Oh no," I thought. "This is probably going to be pretty expensive to fix." So, bracing for the damage, I called up Google and told them what had happened. They replied that there was no fixing it. They would replace the laptops under the warranty, but there was no repairing to be done. I was welcome to call around and ask local repair shops if they could do it. That went nowhere, of course.
I've been pretty skeptical of Google laptops ever since.
Looks and feels premium, but ultimately fundamentally disposable.
This pattern extends to so many goods in modern life. Washing machines, microwaves, etc aren't worth the time of a local repairman. Repair is economically incompatible with its life cycle.
Clothes are replaced, not stitched. And after a few washes at that. Cars, phones, etc, consist of proprietary parts all sealed up.
That’s a western perspective because we are spoiled and have no thought for sustainability.
Please take a look at poor countries of the world like Pakistan. They have a repair culture. They have vehicles from the 80’s out on the road doing daily driving work instead of being used as vintage show pieces. It’s a poor country, this is a necessity. But nevertheless seeing the repair culture there in contrast to the disposable culture in the western world makes me pause.
This... I wonder why isn't there a market in Tijuana, Juarez and other border towns for fixing broken electronics and similar appliances.
Here in Mexico there are plenty of "unofficial" laptops/mobile (Apple, Windows, Androids) repair shops that even receive your device by DHL/UPS, fix it and return it. Because the labor costs are low enough to make it worth. The only downside is that most of the spare parts are imported from the US.
In Western countries, the time of skilled repairmen is better spent repairing things which are much more important and expensive than consumer goods.
And a consumer usually has a much higher return from working in his specialized field to earn money and buy a new product, than spending time with difficult repairs of a broken product.
Yeah, this is entirely a function of labor costs. If you want your stuff repaired, ship it to a low-labor cost economy or hire someone to whom it’s worth the time.
> labor costs are largely a function of local real estate costs
Difficult to determine causality in that system. All we can say is places with expensive labour tend to have expensive real estate. (The confounding variable, I imagine, is immigration.)
> Looks and feels premium, but ultimately fundamentally disposable.
I'd add that experiences like GP help expose that the main difference in most products between 'premium' and 'disposable' is in the branding and the price tag. With few exceptions, most companies that used to make the respected brand of the thing (e.g. Sony, G.E., Craftsman) now churn out the same garbage as you used to find 30 years ago in a fleamarket with a brand you'd never heard of - and that's if they don't actually outsource the design and/or production to that low-bidder company and simply license their logo directly to them.
And that's because these are all public or PE-owned companies, and it's a shortcut to easy short-term quarterly growth if you can cut your costs while keeping your price high or almost as high (after all, you're a "Premium Brand" so you can leverage your past reputation to trick customers into continuing to pay that premium).
Good clothes can be definitely stitched. Some brands even offer free or reasonably priced repairs. Patagonia or Citizen Wolf are two examples that spring to mind, and it's even more common once you cross a certain price point. Same applies to good hardware, but you need to do some research before buying.
I am afraid Google's business model is incompatible with this approach as they have almost no customer service because it doesn't "scale". Actually, what they are doing is turning customer service costs into externalities, i.e. environmental waste.
Isn't that a feature not a bug? That means labor, a proxy for quality of life of the laborer, is more expensive than parts. That's abundance.
In fact, in "shithole countries" where everyone wants to emigrate from, it is exactly the opposite: i.e. you try to fix everything even if it takes sooo long.
Absolutely not when replacing costs 100% and repairing usually costs 0.1%.
And the reason people want to leave certain countries is for totally different reasons than not wanting to repair something. In fact, I would say with quite some certainty that emigrees who repaired first before leaving would still do it after emigrating.
The real reasons, in my opinion, are: 1) it takes skill and will to repair something yourself, 2) something new generally feels better than repaired/used, 3) logistics make replacing/repairing less cost efficient, 4) with every replace, companies have a new touchpoint to try to upsell their customers, 5) it takes less time to go to a shop and replace than repair, 6) it takes some giving a shit about the environment to prefer the more complicated route. And probably more.
If repairing usually cost 0.1% then everyone would do it.
The reason almost nobody in first-world countries is getting their microwave repaired is because it often costs more than buying a new one. This is because the new unit is manufactured overseas in a place with cheap labor, but the existing unit has to be repaired locally with expensive labor.
Of course people aren't emigrating because they don't want to repair things. But they are often emigrating because they want to live in a place with high labor costs (i.e. high salaries), or for other reasons that are very strongly correlated with high labor costs.
You're confounding variables here, the cost of repairing a microwave is actually very often 0.1%: the part they broke and the work required to fix it is often nil.
Unless, you have businesses fighting for it to be repaired by making the microwave schematics impossible to find, the casing stupidly hard to open, etc. If you then have that a repair part is impossible to be found then of course only the truly motivated will attempt (and sometimes succeed).
Example: a friend bought an ebike with a bosch motor. Something happened and it stopped working. Now the only thing that is possible to be done with it, due to how the system has been constructed, it's to have it replaced by warranty and/or insurance. This is because there are locks on the battery that prevents it from being removed to safely analyse the system, the engine is covered by one piece that makes its opening borderline impossible, etc.
On the other hand, I have a top of the line ebike motor (Tosheng) that can be fully opened, its firmware modified and schematics and parts can be easily found online. That meant that when another friend had his motor break down, he could open it, see that it was only a gear that failed and replaced it for less than $10, he only needed to unscrew a coupleof screws to see what happened. With the world we are moving towards, the company would make you throw away the WHOLE bike instead of changing a broken gear.
This is actually a thought-provoking perspective! I have to admit you're right in your conclusions, though the issues are:
1. The waste is still a tremendous shame, both in the materials that will realistically never be recovered in 'recycling', and in the toxicity that results from a lot of that trash created.
2. Jobs in repairing lots of things were arguably pretty good jobs, and we've traded these for, best case, more complete drudgery retailing/supply chain jobs as we get a new laptop every year or two instead of 5 years. Arguably a bigger failing of our economic system, which doesn't seem capable of adapting to global trade, or this shift we're discussing here, nor AI, but still a bummer regardless of fault.
> repair requires more labor than recreating the entire product
It requires specialized and local labor. For products you can ship back to the assembly line, this can sometimes work. If you need a local technician, on the other hand, because the assembly line is in China or the product is heavy, yeah, it very well may be that there is no niche where repairs aren’t a material fraction of a new product.
this logic does not hold up if the reason that labor is more expensive than parts is that the labor involved in creating those parts has been outsourced to a "shithole country"
If anything the causality is exactly the opposite. The labor cost will go up (empirically provable) in such "shithole countries" once work is outsourced to them, improving their livelihood.
What are you talking about. Trash is inexpensive, but Americans absolutely pay for it (solid waste utility bill). I think people conceptualize that they have utility bills?
Where Americans are renters and garbage service is hidden in their monthly rent payment, sure, but for Americans who own a home, they have to pay their local jurisdiction a fee for taking away trash and recycling and compost (and batteries and light bulbs). Also sewage and water.
Wat. Almost all Americans either pay someone to deal with their waste or are dependents of someone who pays on their behalf. Do you think we're all burning our trash in barrels or dumping it in the local river or something?
Horseshit. It means we're doing less with more and anyone with a brain should be able to figure out that's bad for Quality of Life on a long term. Wasting your resources is not how an economy grows strong.
Labor is an input too. Fixing something in a way that saves some materials, but requires hours of skilled labor and specialized equipment doesn't straightforwardly mean you're saving overall.
There are various localities that add recycling fees to electronics. They're on the order of 1% of the purchase price, so it's unlikely to make a difference in the repair vs replace calculation.
It's the result of manufacturing at scale being so tremendously more efficient. It really does use less human effort, resources, energy, whatever metric you want to measure, to just produce a brand new one than to produce a more resource-intensive one and then try to fix in a one-off fashion.
My washing machine started making weird loud noises recently. Had a repair guy come by and he told me it's the plastic gears in the gearcase wearing down. I asked him what it would cost to repair and he said with parts and labor it would be cheaper to buy a new one. He told me to just keep using it and deal with the noise until it stops working, so that's what I'm doing. When the time comes I'm considering paying $150 for the new gearcase and trying to fix it myself, but it's so stupid to that it's come to this
The rose-tinted era of things being made to last never really happened. For each of the old survivor washing mashines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and Casiotron wrist watches that are still out there doing good work, countless thousands of others were recycled or landfilled because it was better to buy something different than to fix the old one.
It was never cheap to pay someone to work on stuff. The costs of hiring professional labor and the overhead associated with that labor (for service techs, that means things like vehicles, buildings, inventory, tools, training, insurance, book keeping, and covering next week's paycheck even if this week was slow) have always been expensive.
Parts have always been relatively expensive, too. Availability of parts has always been somewhat hit-or-miss.
It seems like an unpopular opinion, but I don't think it came to this. Instead, I think that it started off this way, and that it simply remains this way today.
So, sure: $150 for a new widget? Not so bad. Maybe a pro could get it done in a few hours (maybe they can even get two of them done in one workday!), while perhaps it will take you a day or two to work through R&Ring this thing on your own for the first time.
Whether the total investment (including time) is worth it to you is a personal decision, but that kind of decision-making is also not new. :)
Slightly off-topic but this is why 3D printing becoming popular is a boon to the repair industry. Yeah, the part might be bad, but instead of paying a ridiculous sum for a piece of plastic, you can take the old one, model it, and make yourself a compatible one within a day. Of course, this requires modelling skills and the ability to be able to disassemble the machine but so does any other kind of repair work and at least you are no longer reliant on the manufacturer.
Plastic gears in a washing machine just seems stupid, though. That's probably on me for buying a cheap one, but the repair guy said it's extremely common now, even in nicer models
Metal gears also break and wear out. All materials have finite strength and endurance.
It's up to the folks doing the engineering to make sure that the gears last long enough.
After all, it doesn't do anyone any good at all if the gearbox (whatever it consists of) still works after while the rest of the machine has failed.
And plenty of plastic gearboxes exist in the world. We just don't usually hear much about the ones that end up working Just Fine.
I have a 20+ year old cordless drill that I've beaten the snot out of. As cordless drills go, it offers a mountain of torque. I used it to roll new threads into long, extruded holes that were stamped into radiator supports of new Chevy Impala cop cars. Where my co-workers' drills would just flatly give up and they'd use ratchets instead, this drill would finish the job without a complaint. It did take two hands to hang onto the thing when doing this job and it was not kind to the operator even then, but it accomplished the work.
The plastic gears inside are still fine. The plastic drill body is also holding up very well. Again, we don't usually hear much about the plastic parts that outlive the rest of the machine, but those parts have been great.
In this particular case the nicad batteries for it became NLA, and the ones that came with it (and their replacements) are dead AF, so it has no value to me at this point. I really should take it apart, keep whatever bits are interesting to me and recycle the rest of it.
Due to the lack of new batteries, my world of power tools has moved on. This drill is not doing anyone any good how it is -- despite the astoundingly-good plastic gearset still being (as far as I can tell; ran when parked) just fine.
If it had metal gears instead and those also lasted longer than the machine's lifecycle, then that added expense wouldn't have been an advantage at all.
---
Anyway, I aim to be helpful instead of deconstructive here.
If gearboxes are a weak link in washing machines, then it is possible to eliminate them. There are washing machines that don't have gearboxes at all; these are usually front-loaders that only spin-a-ma-thing and that don't really do much in the way of reciprocating motion, but they exist.
Some of them are very stout indeed, though they may appear to be fairly featureless.
Dexter may be at the high end, here, with a belt-driven drum and a VFD-supplied motor; they're made in Iowa. Many places like laundromats and fire stations love these machines for their durability and repairability. Dexter is certainly proud of them; they are not cheap. I once read about their in-house factory testing: IIRC, they take a machine off the line, weld a weight onto the side of the drum that is 40% of the mass that the machine is supposed to handle, and let it run at its highest speed for for 1000 continuous hours. If it fails, they consider it to be a problem that needs to be corrected upstream. It's a pretty good test, I think.
Whirlpool has similarly-shaped mechanisms at a fraction of the cost; many of those are made in Ohio. That's not necessarily an unsafe bet. (I did have a long chat with one of their process guys about things like air-conditioned final assembly areas and conformal coatings once. I've also cleaned up some corrosion on the VFD board's contacts and installed some dielectric grease on a machine that was built in that same plant, but it was built years before this conversation happened.)
Speed Queen is a common consumer favorite. They're still independent, AFAIK. (I've never been inside of a Speed Queen machine or hung out in their factories, so my commentary here is limited. The one I once had in my laundry room was completely trouble-free.)
I'm going to offer a counter narrative here based upon my experience. I have LG appliances and they have fairly reasonable "fix everything wrong" prices. It's not literally everything, your bells and whistles might not work, but if you want just a washing machine, just a dishwasher, or just a fridge/freezer, it will be less expensive than the cheapest new option out there.
When our fridge stopped fridging, we got it fixed for $300: this included replacing the compressor and the coils. When our dishwasher stopped washing, we paid $250 to have 3 or so things fixed at once. And so on.
I don't know if any appliance makers offer this, but if LG still offers it when we eventually replace, they're going to be on the top of my list.
> Repair is economically incompatible with its life cycle.
No, it's because repair involves labor and unless we ship it across the world to take advantage of people making a dollar a day it's just not worth it.
The cost of making and importing stuff from the third world is just so cheap now that it's simpler to get a new one then to have someone making a living wage in the west fix it.
Unlike a lot of hardware and such in our homes, this mostly just boils down to people refusing to learn and is incredibly easy to remedy. Basic stitching is not super difficult. My partner has very light knowledge of stitching, learned it mostly as a kid and never used it much, but has repaired plenty of my clothes. I'm wearing stitched jeans as we speak (pocket got caught on a hook and tore nearly off). Typically gives my regularly worn clothes an extra year or two of life.
Strata
Pixels,
Nest Cameras
Google Smart Speakers
Nest Home Security system
but then I broke my Google Pixel 1 watch. I ended up chatting with service in India and they pretty much told me that there was no way to fix it. After that, I quit buying all things Google and switched to Apple. Now I only buy Google software products, no consumer devices.
I went all in on the Nest ecosystem when I bought my house eight years ago, and Google absolutely ruined it with the botched acquisition. Half the stuff is Google branded, half is Nest branded, a different half has Google branded software and a different half has Nest branded software. None of it really works reliably anymore. The lock to my front door is completely incompatible with modern "Google Home" and I'm unable to change its passcode.
It's a total disaster and I will never buy Google hardware again.
How is Apple any different? IIRC Apple watches have an abysmal repairability score too.
If anything, Apple is in general the worst on this particular metric. Switching to Apple because you had a repairability problem with another brand is kinda funny.
I haven't had an issue with Apple, but it's only been 3.5 years.
Are there stories where Apple straight up said they wouldn't repair a watch? I thought they'd repair it even if the repairs were more the the replacement value.
I really miss the Chromebook Pixel / Pixelbook / whatever it was called.
It was my travel laptop for at least 5 years.
It was expensive, but the quality, performance, and durability was top tier. And it lasted 5+ years.
The Pixelbook also had a "Google Assistant" button built in the keyboard. Should be easy enough to relaunch the hardware and swap in a gemini button...
Tying the browser version to the system version was a mistake too. Once it stopped getting system updates, it stopped being compatible with big corners of the web that expect Chrome to always be the newest version.
That's still the default state of Google Hardware. Just look at their out-of-warranty Pixel Watch repairs.
And if you're not in North America (or EU), chances are very high that any repair to Pixels is going to be either not possible or will cost you dearly. I personally had a terrible experience of this with Pixel 7 Pro that was in warranty and had a water-related damage, since then, I've stayed away from any device made by Google.
Those original Chromebook Pixels were awesome machines.
I wish they'd had open bootloaders, but I seem to recall you had to keep it in developer mode which required a nag screen, or something along those lines, if you wanted to run your own OS on it.
You can easily remove the nag screen by opening the device and unscrewing a screw and running coreboot with SeaBIOS. Pretty neat security approach (not too hard to do, not too easy for a layman to fall for instructions to self-compromise). I have two that work just fine today.
When I was actively hacking my chromebook, there was tons of advice like this, and 90% of it didn't work on both arm and intel-based chromebooks, and the advice-givers never mentioned which category it worked on. Sometimes it was buried 5 paragraphs into the webpage you were sent to for downloads, sometimes not.
Has any of this changed?
Also, I tend to take with a grain of salt any comment that starts with "it's easy/simple/obvious", especially if it doesn't provide details or a link.
I was talking about a specific device on a specific dimension brought up by the GP, i.e., "freedom to tinker for the owner while preserving security for the masses." Whether that became a standardized process is a different story. By and large it has changed across models, but nevertheless it was a good balance of ownership/hackability without compromising security that can be emulated by other devices if they choose to.
MacBooks aren't that unrepairable, you just have to go to someone who isn't Apple. Apple will tell you that you have to replace the entire logic board, and then you go to the independent repair shop and they can fix whatever it was for $100.
I've repaired my MacBooks multiple times before (although not one in the last seven years, so maybe they are totally unrepairable, but I doubt it).
The main issue is that Apple will want to replace everything to avoid you coming back and saying it didn't work, when it's actually a different issue.
The soldered on RAM and SSD, while technically replaceable, make it a much more difficult process than just swapping some DIMMS and an m.2.
I understood the technical need for soldered on memory (physical limitations of SODIMM got in the way of power and speed requirements), but the soldered on SSD is just inexcusable considering flash memory is very much a wear item.
It is absolutely unlike the situation for MacBooks, where you can walk into any of hundreds of retail stores and talk to someone who will quote you a repair or replacement price.
It sounds like problem with the lack of volume then? Since macs are super common, you can find a lot of places that repair them. Doesn't say much about the HW comparison between the two, IMO.
How is "I don't like the price of the readily-available vendor or third-party repair services" the "same" as "no repair is available for any price from the vendor or third parties"?
I have a macbook but my father had dropped my m1 air (which my brother has gifted me) accidentally from his car on literal straight concrete bricks from a considerably high height.
The damage is literally close to none aside from just a very small bump* but later I realized that if it was any other laptop then it would've been smashed to pieces but Apple's aluminium body came into clutch.
I am not much of apple's fan but I wish to give credits where its due and so from my anecdotal evidence it wouldn't have been the case with atleast my mac air.
This thing is crazy light, has a decent battery life and survived quite a high damage with tis but a scratch. Credits where its due to Apple hardware engineering.
I don't wish to oversell apple tho but from my anecdotal evidence, it handled pretty good in real life stress test and I am super happy with it surviving that drop with almost literally no difference, so there's that.
"AppleCare+ covers fall and accidental damage (drops, cracks, liquid) for a reduced, fixed service fee per incident. It offers unlimited incidents (or up to two per 12 months, depending on the plan), providing a significant discount over out-of-warranty repairs. A service fee, such as $29 for screen repairs, applies"
The author (who is also the submitter; it seems nearly all his submissions are his own blog posts) is not a physicist, so it's hard for me to take seriously his sweeping dismissal of the field. Then I see he links to his own Revolutionary Theory, and it starts to look like outright crankary.
> Then I see he links to his own Revolutionary Theory, and it starts to look like outright crankary.
But what an AI-generated crankery! Because I enjoy wasting my time, I chose a random point (beginning of ch2) and started reading:
> Standard field-theoretic practice selects equations using symmetry, gauge invariance, and conservation. This
chapter proposes a cognate selection principle built from three structural demands. A potential that carries
energy must appear on the right-hand side of its own equation, because the energy it carries is part of what
sources it. A potential that describes the same physics in every frame must have an equation that survives
change of observer. A tensor equation must have matching ranks on both sides.
I've italicized a couple of items: Cognate selection principle? Really?
A tensor equation must have matching ranks on both sides? As opposed to all those tensor equations with differing ranks on both sides? Not exactly the type of thing that makes someone slap their head and shout "Why didn't I think of that?!"
The technobabble is interesting in that any single sentence might make sense in the absence of sentences nearby; It that regard, it's much like an Escher painting: Locally sensible, but globally out-to-lunch.
That choice is doubly false. On the one hand, there was a diplomatic option. It was working until Trump decided to kill it. On the other, it's insane to think that you can bomb a large, industrialized country of 90 million people out of the ability to make nuclear weapons short of wiping them out of existence.
That's not what this is about. The bill explicitly defines "sexually oriented material" to include anything that "involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism".
I don't mean to tear down your project at all. If you want to make an editor, I think that's great. I'm actually working on a text editor of my own. But I think that you've fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of Emacs. It has little to do with the key-bindings, or even any particular part of the user interface. Many people don't even use them. Doom, a very popular Emacs distribution, enables Vim-like bindings by default. It's an old joke that Emacs is a great operating system in need of a good text editor.
The appeal of Emacs is that I can, at any time, with only a few keystrokes, dig in to how it does something and then modify it. The self-documenting and customizable behavior is extremely pervasive. Emacs Lisp is not just there for extensions. Every single layer of the application--save for core primitives--is implemented in it. All of it can be inspected, modified, swapped out, wrapped, hooked into, and basically do anything you want. There's absolutely nothing else like it.
> But I think that you've fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of Emacs. It has little to do with the key-bindings, or even any particular part of the user interface.
You mean the default keybindings for readline and macos? I think you're greatly overestimating the extent to which you can speak for other emacs users. I love the default keybindings and never even thought to change them, and I very much understand being leery of the lisp runtime. The modal editing of vim, doom etc always struck me as pointless typing and too much like issuing commands rather than making typing an extension of your fingers.
This isn't for me (electron—blah; I have microemacs etc), but I 100% get it.
Yeah! For typing, you could use cat and be done with it. But you think about editing, then ed(1) start to make sense. You think about it a little more and ex(1) makes sense. You want better visual feedback and vi(1) is born. And then you want more programming features and you’ll get vim.
Emacs is what you get when you sidestep the whole process with something as versatile as lisp. Instead of being economical with commands, you just create the specific actions you want
I've found that it's not any better than emacs at this and you end up spending more brainpower and time issuing commands than editing, but of course YMMV. Plus it gives you cred with people who never learned to exit vi, which I suppose counts for something.
"Making typing an extension of your fingers" is exactly what I was aiming for. I personally love the default Emacs keybindings and the "muscle memory" they provide, so I wanted to create a tool that focuses purely on that physical experience.
Thank you for the incredibly insightful comment. I completely agree with your definition of Emacs, and I have the utmost respect for its true nature as a fully programmable Lisp environment. You are absolutely right—that infinite extensibility is what makes Emacs unparalleled.
When I call my project "Emacs-like," I certainly don't mean to deny or replace that beautiful philosophy. I am simply a software engineer who deeply loves the UI, UX, and keybindings that Emacs pioneered.
My goal was just to recreate that specific physical experience as a standalone application. I truly love the sensation of operating an editor entirely by muscle memory and pure reflex—allowing the words in my head to flow seamlessly onto the screen without consciously thinking about the tool itself. I just wanted to package that exact typing experience into a zero-setup app.
By the way, I am very curious about the project you mentioned! What kind of text editor are you working on? I would love to hear about it.
Oh, I don't have much at all, yet. I decided to use a piece tree, which is what VS Code calls the data structure they used. I implemented part of that, then realized that VS Code does it that way partly because of limitations with V8. So now I don't even know if I want to go forward with using it or switch to something simpler.
I actually went through the same VS Code articles and ended up implementing a minimal Piece Table for this project. I focused on adding just enough functionality to handle Undo/Redo according to my specific needs.
So far, it has been working well for my use case. Since the codebase is compact, it is straightforward to test and maintain. For a solo project, I've found that using a data structure I can fully grasp is an advantage.
I’m interested to see where your project goes, whether you stick with Piece Tree or pivot. Building an editor from scratch is a unique experience, isn't it?
I have to agree, if only because when I hear "the emacs keybindings" I wonder, does that mean the defaults that nobody uses, or the ones I've carried around for 20+ years?
As a quick example "M-g" ("Esc" [pause] "g") has been bound to "goto-line" in my emacs startup file for at least 20 years, and is something I press without even really thinking about.
There are many default keys (such as C-x C-f for finding a file), but even core functionality gets rebound to suit my preferences.
I agree that extensibility is one of the core charms of Emacs!
That said, when it comes to keybindings, I’ve actually stuck with about 95% of the defaults. The only exception I can’t live without is exactly what you mentioned:
(global-set-key "\M-g" 'goto-line)
I've used that for so long that my fingers just do it automatically. It’s funny how even a "minimal" user like me has that one specific rule that feels essential.
Using overall life expectancy here is misleading, as it includes the risk of childhood mortality. You have to look at life expectancy at a given age. According to the SSA's life tables[0], life expectancy for men at 65 in 1930 and 1940 was about 12 years. In 2020, it was about 17. A significant increase, but not nearly as extreme as you're saying.
In 1930, if a person starts paying into the pension at 30, at that point they have a life expectancy of 37 years, ie they will benefit from the pension for 2 years. Life expectancy at age 30 goes up to 48 in 2020, which gives them 13 years after retirement, 6.5 times higher. Assuming linearity, the average life expectancy after retirement during the time you are paying into your pension between 30 and 65 would be 7 years in 1930, and 17 in 2020.
"The 160 MFLOPS Cray-1 was succeeded in 1982 by the 800 MFLOPS Cray X-MP, the first Cray multi-processing computer. In 1985, the very advanced Cray-2, capable of 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance
...
By comparison, the processor in a typical 2013 smart device, such as a Google Nexus 10 or HTC One, performs at roughly 1 GFLOPS,[6] while the A13 processor in a 2019 iPhone 11 performs at 154.9 GFLOPS,[7] a mark supercomputers succeeding the Cray-1 would not reach until 1994."
These flops are not the same. The 2013 phone flops are fp32, the A13 flops look to be fp32 as well (not entirely sure), while the Cray numbers (like the rest of the HPC industry) are fp64 (Cray 1 predates what would become IEEE 754 binary64 though, so not same exact arithmetic but similar in dynamic range and precision).
A modern Nvidia GB200 only does about 40 tflop/s in fp64 for instance. You can emulate higher precision/dynamic range arithmetic with multiple passes and manipulations of lower precision/dynamic range arithmetic but without an insane number of instructions it won't meet all the IEEE 754 guarantees for instance.
Certainly if Nvidia wanted to dedicate much more chip area to fp64 they could get a lot higher, but fp64 FMA units alone would be likely >30 times larger than their fp16 cousins and probably 100s of times larger than fp4 versions.
Years ago, I installed the Facebook app on my phone. I immediately uninstalled it when I saw, horrified, that it had hoovered up all my photos and uploaded them to Facebook (there was no fine-grained storage permission at the time) "for my convenience". I never ran their app on my phone, again.
I've been pretty skeptical of Google laptops ever since.
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