An insane waste of valuable metals if it isn’t recycled.
Electronics recycling really needs to be more mainstream. We’re burying way too much mineral content.
Yeah throwing out an entire computer because one little component is burnt out, or throwing out a whole component because one little connection is burnt out. And then there’s even micro soldering if you want to get surgical…
Or simply throwing a computer away because it’s slower than the new one. The price paid by the environment, by future generations, for e-waste needs to be front-loaded into the manufacturing process.
Otherwise companies are just stealing from the future and turning collective horizon into an unlivable garbage dump.
Its such a bummer because I would have went into electronic repair if I’d been born sooner. Right as I was thinking about it all the radioshacks were shutting down etc and everything became disposable and unfixable. Really sad because I enjoy fixing things. I just stick to old stuff now.
It sickens me how much has been thrown away just in the past 15 years, not to mention since the 50s…
Yeah and I feel like if we actually respected the nature and our fellow humans, made sure everything was mined as ethically as possible, everyone paid along the way got a living wage with self-determination, made to last, actual plans for disposal — all that. Then we’d actually cherish these devices like the amazing things that they are.
Sure we’d probably just be getting to the point of streaming video now, but I honestly don’t think we’d feel like we missed out.
The problem isn’t that it can’t be done, it’s that the manufacturing cost vs. labor cost in the US stops it from making economic sense. They do repair and reuse electronics in places like China (that’s where those modified GPUs with extra RAM and cheap desktop motherboards with old Xeon CPUs on them you find on EBay and Aliexpress come from, for example), but that’s because the technicians doing the work get paid a lot less than skilled people would be willing to accept here.
Also, much less labor law burden. No pesky ppe required while breathing toxic fumes!
I remember as a kid my mum getting angry that she had to buy a new vacuum cleaner with more non-replaceable plastic parts. She was used to being able to just get a guy to fix it. It’s sad that that’s just everything now - even cars.
I have several old but working electronics and I literally haven’t been able to give them away for free. They’re probably going to end up in the eWaste trash. I don’t know if that leads to anything being reclaimed, but probably not.
I know what you mean, it makes me really wary to buy anything new because I know I’ll have trouble getting rid of what it’s replacing.
Luckily I’ve got some nephews that take a lot of hand-me-downs, but the breakneck speed of consumer electronics leads to some stuff becoming “obsolete” (read: harder to support) long before the hardware actually gives out.
I will typically not buy a new thing if I don’t have a plan for the old one it replaced.
Hey, uh, any ereaders or tablets in that pile? I need something basic I can just read comics or books with but all the used stuff around me is priced as new and the new stuff is priced insane.
Sadly, no. Two ancient laptops (circa 2004, 2008) and a 20-something inch crt with no HDMI.
If that CRT has a Trinitron tube it’d probably be pretty easy to find an arcade/retro gaming enthusiast in your area who’d want it (and probably even if not…)
I have several old but working electronics and I literally haven’t been able to give them away for free.
Few years ago I got a pile of old switches and other network stuff. Unmanaged 24 port gigabit switches, some firewalls and other network hardware you might find in a generic ~50 person office. No one wants them, but I don’t want to throw away working and (potentially) useful hardware either. I suppose I eventually have to as my own network doesn’t really need 200 ethernet ports and they are consuming the already crammed storage space I have.
And no, I’m not offering to ship them across the globe on my own expense. But trying to sell them on our version of craigslist for 15€ (shipping included) doesn’t seem to work either.
Our dumps will be goldmines for whatever species takes the helm after we’re gone.
I’ve recently signed up for Ridwell and while I absolutely love it (they recycle electronics by the way, at least in Los Angeles) I hate that I have to pay a private company to recycle things.
Woohoo! Send it all to my address please!
You really don’t want it. At least most of it. I get discarded stuff from work quite frequently and 95% of it is way too loud, way too hot, and uses a boat-load of power. And I don’t mean like sitting next to a running house fan loud. I mean sitting next to a jet engine loud. Like if you are in a data center behind this equipment, you struggle to have a conversation with a guy a foot from you.
But if you got a nice cool basement and you never have to pay for power, you can get lots of good stuff relatively cheap.
This is how you end up with a homelab, it just takes one managed switch or a blade server amd now youre on ebay everyday looking for deals and struggling to pay electric bills.
I think we are okay making that mistake ourselves.
I mean that’s true. I probably would too. Well for about a week and then my wife would tell me to get rid of it.
You get a week? I had to get rid of it same day 😔
Just give me RAM and SSDs.
I guess those will also be mostly proprietary and unusable :-(
If it exists, then there is an adapter.
Nah, the RAM will be ECC, but AMD motherboards often will take that. SSDs will be m2 or SAS, you may have to find yourself a PCIE card to hook up those, but it shouldn’t be impossible.
NVME slots are pretty ubiquitous on mobos now
Exactly!
Or Dell Precision Workstations. The SSDs would likely be SAS but maybe U2 or E1.S. Those would be harder to use but not impossible. I saw a QNAP that takes E1.S just yesterday. Of course the 5 bay without drives was $1k.
Nah that surprisingly is some of the most useful stuff. I have a machine upstairs with 512gb of ECC DDR4 from just that sorta situation.
Anything useful will be smashed before they go into the dumpsters. There will be plenty of slightly discounted “refurbished” SSDs that will fail after a day though.
Metals can be recovered and recycle from smashed technology
Sure but do you know what’s going to happen to scrap metal prices when the bubble bursts? Good luck making a penny on a dump truck full of SSDs, especially when diesel will be $20/gallon. Maybe a river barge full will be worth the trouble.
Sell your copper soon folks.
And then prices will come back down!
…the prices are coming back down, right?
*Anakin smirk*
I will be scooping up GPUs by the bucketful when the time comes
They would rather crush the GPUs than let us have them
As I said above, most of this stuff is not useful to home labbers.
I mean if you could get something like a H200 NVL (this is the normal pcie version) that would be useful. But most of these datacenters are using something like an H200 SXM5 module which only works in HGX/DGX GPU baseboards.
Chinese sellers on ebay have been making sxm2 mezzanines that use standard slimsas connections for a while. They even go up to sxm4-5. I have dual nvlinked v100s with their giant 4u tower coolers, some arctic 92mm fans and PTM for the TIM and they never break 70c under load for my personal use.
They definitely aren’t the flashiest, but local LLMs have come a long way in a short time to the point where they are quite nice to work with.
I didn’t know any of this. Great … now I have another rabbit hole to go down! 🤣
Seriously though, thanks for that. I’ll go check it out.
It’s quite a ride lol. There’s a group of people on the level1techs forum trying to get mi250x OAM units working on similar hardware.
I made a post about my own lab earlier this year too: https://lemmy.world/post/47291115
i did not need to see any of this… 😳
This looks amazing.
which only works in HGX/DGX GPU baseboards.
Necessity is the mother of invention. I expect a bridge by the time we’ve finished… Uh… Cleaning the guillotine.
Or maybe we make the guillotine out of the equipment. That would be fitting.
Discarded electronics unusable by consumers.
Pretty much, or hardware that’s so expensive to run because of electricity that newer stuff makes sense. That’s always been the case, like ohh I can get cheap server hardware, until I look at my power bill.
Buying used hardware for homelabs right here! Accepting offers
There’s gold in them there hills.
