Parts for the Fairphone 2 (2015) and Fairphone 3 (2019) aren't available anymore, but I suppose that's not all that surprising after 11 respective 7 years.
Afair, they started running out of some Fairphone 3 spare parts around 2024 and kept the ones they still had for warranty repairs. Source: I own one (and switched to the Fairphone 6 early this year).
presumably longer if they were more popular and repair shops stock up on the parts. I assume most FP users are fairly tech savvy and would just purchase multiple components that are more likely to fail as a just-in-case (much like I do for bearings, headlights, and other small parts for my car)
It no longer does for the first few generations of Kindles. My Kindle Keyboard (16 years old, but it still works and I still use it almost daily) is essentially a useless paperweight now, as far as Amazon is concerned. De-registering it will brick it and they shut down the "send file to e-mail" service, too. Can no longer buy and download books off Amazon either (they shut that down in 2024, afaik).
If not for Calibre, I would have absolutely no option of ever getting new books on it.
So it still works as a generic ereader via Calibre? That seems like a pretty fine outcome. I don't think Amazon (or any company) should be on the hook supporting a device for 16 years. I can't think of any company which does. Dropping support for old devices frees up eng resources. If you've ever worked in a shop needing to support legacy devices, it becomes a huge burden to keep up support (especially as the supporting software/hardware starts to degrade, like 3P updates) for what becomes an increasingly small number of users. Of course, if the number of users remains significant, support should be maintained.
I've decided with all my commercial e-readers that the USB+calibre is my only option as I do not wish to share my reading habits with the zillionaire overlord.
There might be new and fancy UI or something, but I spend 99% of the time only flipping pages so the outdated UX is nothing compared to the privacy I get.
Ancient Basic Kindle works still nicely and so does 1st gen Paperwhite + the few Kobo's we have in the family.
tldr is: They either get a successful IPO to stave off bankruptcy for a couple more months, or they're going to be bankrupt by the beginning of next year.
Or they stay private and raise more capital. Until they have a failed round people predicting bankruptcy are getting way ahead of how this would actually play out. Some of us are old enough to remember the "Amazon can never make a profit and will go bankrupt" predictions of 25 years ago.
The early years Amazon wasn't profitable by choice. They could have stopped that at any time and even did demonstrate it by having a single quarter with $1 profit or some such.
Anthropic and OpenAI have no choice but to go public if they want to avoid bankruptcy. Venture capital firms are struggling to raise more capital, the bond market is so saturated that the borrowing costs are getting too high and big tech is also at the limit of how much they can invest, all while AI companies' costs are going through the roof. Retail investors is the last market they haven't tapped into and to do that, they have to go public. There's just no way around it.
The tech industry is currently spending more on AI infrastructure every single year than the United States spent during the absolute peak annual years of the post-9/11 wars.
That said, $2T was spent during GWOT with another $8T in veteran care, DHS, interest in debt.
Current AI spend this year is expected to be $2.59T (chips, infra, etc)
There's a very low chance of OpenAI doing an IPO this year: https://polymarket.com/event/openai-ipo-by. So the assumption that they "have to do an IPO" already seems questionable. The rest of the analysis also feels pretty hand-wavy. I'm not saying OpenAI is in a strong financial position, but this article doesn't make a solid enough case for why it's supposedly in such dire straits.
"It means that OpenAI could soon rack up losses that exceed its asset value. In other words, they are on course to slam into bankruptcy this year."
...that's not how bankruptcy happens. What is this guy's background?
Assets on a balance sheet are held at book value. You can absolutely run GAAP losses that exceed net assets without running into bankruptcy, particularly if you're granting (and having employees exercise) options.
The critical measures are cash in and out and debt-like obligations. None of those metrics point to OpenAI going bankrupt this year unless they do something really fucking creative. (Which, to be clear, is Altman's M.O.)
You're right of course, but in this case the statement doesn't look that false. The source article [0] states that half of the assets is cash, so "assets" is defined a bit more freely here.
If we assume a 2026 revenue of 23B (Q1 2026 revenue x4) and costs of 70B (2025 costs * (2026 revenue / 2025 revenue)), even those 25B in cash reserves won't mean much. And this napkin math even ignores their debt obligations. So either they raise money in the range of 50-75B this year (actual money, not datacenter vouchers), or ...
> costs of 70B (2025 costs (2026 revenue / 2025 revenue)), even those 25B in cash reserves won't mean much*
If all those costs are cash costs, sure. When OpenAI gets non-cash investment, and it "burns" that investment on compute, that should be counted as a GAAP expense. Yet it doesn't touch cash. (It would destroy a unit of compute asset. But again, book versus market value can mess with how that works intuitively.)
Similarly, if you're granting lots and lots of options they're going to generate lots and lots of compensation expenses (and thus losses) as they vest. These aren't cash expenses, however.
This was never marketed as a feature of the consumer CPUs and if some malignant actor does get physical access to my (consumer) hardware, then them being able to read out bytes through cryo-freezing the RAM really isn't high up on the list of things I'm going to worry about.
Reminds me of that Seinfeld episode where George tries to move a Frogger arcade machine without powering it off in order to not lose his high score leaderboard.
> Five guys moving a server to a new datacenter without shutting it down. Without cutting it off from the internet. And as using a car would have been too easy, they used public transport.
> The HotPlug allows hot seizure and removal of computers from the field to anywhere else. The HotPlug's patented technology keeps power flowing to the computer while transferring the computer's power input from one A/C source (such as a wall outlet or power strip) to another (a portable UPS) and back again.
Thanks for sharing the video of moving the server.
I wouldn't say that I miss those days, but there's some good nostalgia there having done some things that feel pretty similar (early 2000s). Not quite to that extreme though.
If anything, thats an indication to me to make a HA setup so you can power down 1 member.
Im not going to watch a video, honestly, but HA with a front-facing Zookeeper and sharded Postgres isnt super hard. Can be if you didnt initially plan for it.
Ideally, you need an odd amount of quorum machines to properly handle split brain decisions... But if its a money issue, you can technically get by with just 2, and accepting a possibility of split brain.
It's more than just for cryo-freezing and attacks like that, it also helps defend against row-hammer and other DRAM refresh related issues since the scrambling means that the host kernel or application can't determine what the physical bits on the chips are going to actually be and end up determining the layout in a way to flip specific bits. It might still be possible but it's yet another layer of defense against memory related security problems.
Oooh, I saw this memory scrambling trying happening on the Open titan chips and I couldn't wrap my head around why they would scramble the memory since on read you descramble it anyway through the circuitry. That makes sense! Thanks for the explanation.
Transparent communication would have been appreciated nonetheless. You have customers not just lawyers on the other side, it's not just about making sure you're legally covered.
Let me give you an analogy: If you e.g. figure out some undocumented endpoints for a REST API, which are intended for internal use only, and started using them, do you expect the developers to inform you about changes?
As far as AMD is concerned, this was never supported, nor documented. Now pulling the rug with a firmware update isn't a very nice thing to do, but maybe they've had some actual reason for that beyond "this shouldn't be enabled". Nobody should expect undocumented and unsupported features to just continue to work in perpetuity, simply because they did work at some point in the past.
There is more nuance to this. Let me give you a better example that actually happens — SSDs. Manufacturer will tell you some miniscule amount of specifications, such as that the drive reads and writes some amount of MB/s. That's basically the only spec you get. Reviewers review this drive. It is a really good drive, dedicated controller, MLC/TLC flash, all the good stuff. It gets raving reviews. Some months after this, during which the drives have been selling like hot-cakes and have been recommended everywhere, the manufacturer swaps parts, without creating a new SKU/model. Some examples are swapping TLC flash for QLC flash, making the SSD DRAMless when it had a dedicated RAM before and such, all negatively affecting the performance in some way. After the changes, you can still read/write with the advertised speeds, but only for 10GB instead of indefinitely or the drive has much worse latency or what have you, you basically got bait-and-switched and bought an inferior product to what was expected. The question is, is this ok? I think it is not ok, even though the manufacturer technically did not promise all the seemingly undocumented stuff (although one could argue that it has been documented by the reviewers).
> As far as AMD is concerned, this was never supported, nor documented.
Maybe this is the only thing that concerned them but not the only thing they knew very well. AMD knew that this was widely used by consumers and that every motherboard manufacturer exposed the option to the user. They pulled the rug legally, knowing that all those many people standing on the rug will fall on their ass.
That's an asinine take. We're not talking about a remote subscription service changing an undocumented implementation detail. Physical artifacts shouldn't lose features due to the remote action of the company that made them.
My oven has a proofing feature. It wasn't really advertised, it's just there. I like that feature and I use that feature when baking.
If one day my oven manufacturer pushed an update which removed my proofing feature, I'd be upset.
The same could be said for encrypted memory. If you as a computer owner discovered and turned on encrypted memory because you wanted to feel a bit more secure about your hardware getting stolen. You'd probably be upset that on a normal firmware update that feature suddenly went away. Not because the hardware doesn't supported it or didn't support it. Not because AMD's firmware didn't or couldn't support it. But because someone in an AMD product management team said "Woopsie, that's an enterprise feature, we better disable that".
Completely different story if these CPUs never supported that feature. Completely different story if future CPUs didn't have that feature or had it disabled in firmware. Heck, even a different story if with the disable AMD also said "We disabled this because there's an unrecoverable fault in the memory controller which causes memory corruption."
I have to assume the reason wasn't because of a bug in the feature, but rather because management decided the feature wasn't supposed to be there.
I'm not a user of it, so It's not hurting me personally. But if I had read about how Ryzen CPUs support encrypted memory, and had chosen a Ryzen CPU for that reason, I think I'd have a pretty good reason to be upset that the feature I needed from a hardware product I bought suddenly vanished in a firmware update.
Because I think ethics goes further than "bad thing happened to me", I've formed an opinion that this is a pretty shitty move.
This doesn't matter; it's post-sale enshittification... They didn't even wait to make the next model shittier!
Also, it probably wasn't the selling point, but it was the baseline of quality, and probably documented online or in manuals.
Furthermore, accepting this as normal opens the door to further post-sale enshittification of ALL things. Next thing you know, upgrades here and there are going to degrade the quality of products and services just because it wasn't explicitly written (think post-upgrade slowdowns of mobile phones to pressure people to buy newer ones).
This is THE slipperiest slope; and it's just taking place because the deregulation mafia is turning a blind eye to these tech cartels.
Given it was never marketed, it's possible perhaps despite the feature being exposed it never worked correctly and AMD saw fit to just disable it rather than people get a false sense of security through it.
"no one uses it and there is a bug" may invite more questions or panic, but "that's all we're going to say" implies that Mythos found something scary, or that the NSA demanded they all get turned off.
What is it about today's tech scene that makes you think it's FUD? Do you see strengthening regulations that prevent monopolistic and anti consumer practices? Do you see more competitors and companies being split, or are have there been more consolidations and stripping and politicizing of personal rights and freedoms?
Additionally, if you look at the changelogs for old ABL, it seems like this policy decision (only supporting for PRO SKUs) has always been implemented in firmware:
And? do you worry about the gaming server owner's neighbour breaking in, freezing the ram, quickly transferring it to another machine and reading it off?
So reading between the lines, you're saying it's bad for AMD to disable undocumented features because people still might have bought them for those undocumented features, particularly for gaming servers?
You shouldn't be remotely disabling hardware features in my opinion at all. It's not really like changing an API or something, this is like an update removing something from your car or another appliance years after you bought it.
> You shouldn't be remotely disabling hardware features
I don't know what current case law is but I think that ought to be explicitly illegal. A physical product should be required to maintain the features that it had when it was purchased. Anything else is clearly cheating the consumer.
Yeah, basically you'd trade uncertainty for the ability to remotely enable/disable hardware features not ready at launch I understand, which totally makes sense as a position, I probably agree with you. I think from AMD's side they like the option of being able to remotely enable things though, so new software updates in the future could be major releases enabling functionality that wasn't quite ready at launch. But, I suppose the uncertainty is the tradeoff here.
Even if you have the ability to remotely enable new features:
1. You shouldn’t use the same ability to disable existing features.
2. You shouldn’t enable them, either! It should be opt-in. Any kind of change has the potential to break something. Just don’t be changing my hardware without me initiating the change.
Overall I agree with you, and aim for the same, as a professional user I can't really have my environment and hardware change automatically, I really despise that too!
> Just don’t be changing my hardware without me initiating the change
In this case it seems to have been disabled in future firmware, so "you" did initiate the change, as you did an firmware upgrade that included the change. Still, shitty to sneak it in, I agree, but the feature wouldn't literally be there one day then not the next, requires human initiation at least.
IIRC, this memory encryption function can let a hypervisor tell the platform to use different encryption keys for different virtual machines. So even if somehow a compromised VM managed to read data from a neighboring VM theoretically they'd get garbled, encrypted data.
That is not in this one. That is only the datacenter one(SEV) This one (SME) is a single machine wide key and it doesn't have integrity protection either.
Except let's say the argument for running a local model is for your finances or marriage, counseling or help raising children and you want privacy for that, and you're willing to buy the new AMD AI Halo box for that ($4,000 MSRP, July 10th). You're gonna want this shit to be trustable that depending on your marriage that notification that the other person's reading, your shit is accurately being logged. But in the case of a domestic dispute, in this age of AI the partner is being cheated on only has to have a targeted conversation with AI in order to figure out how to read out bytes via cryo-freezing the RAM. The attacker isn't the police because you're not committing crimes. The attacker is your partner that you thought you could trust or maybe your kids trying to get access to your bank account to buy drugs or some such.
> Amazon could effectively brick your device if so desired.
I have a 16 year old Kindle (Keyboard) that Amazon actually decided to turn into a brick last month [0]. Still works just fine and will continue to do so thanks to Calibre, but buying books from Amazon, or using their "Send to device" feature (both through the e-mail convert and for books already in my Amazon library) is now forever closed for me and de-registering the device will brick it with no recourse.
Starship in its current incomplete form (v3 fully expendable ship and booster) already has the lowest cost to orbit in $/kg of any launch vehicle ever. It's around $400/kg to orbit fully expendable.
Add in booster reuse, which SpaceX has already demonstrated on test flight 9, and the cost to orbit drops to $200/kg.
A fully reusable Starship has a launch cost of around $75m - $90m and the last V3 launch managed 44 tonnes of payload on a sub-orbital flight of not even 200km (Starlink satellites have an orbit of around 550km). That's an optimistic launch cost of $1.700/kg for a rather meaningless altitude and assuming a fully reusable Starship that doesn't keep blowing up.
I have no idea where you pulled your $400/kg number from, but it's complete and utter nonsense. To be economical at all, Starship needs to reach its target capacity of 100 tonnes to orbit, which is simply never going to happen. But even if it somehow does, it's physically impossible for Starship to ever make it further than the moon, at extreme costs, due to the refuelling requirements and fuel boil-off in orbit.
> A fully reusable Starship has a launch cost of around $75m - $90m
No, that's the Starship build cost, i.e. the cost of an expendable Starship. A fully reusable Starship currently does not exist, but reusable launch cost be around $5m/launch (amortized).
> the last V3 launch managed 44 tonnes of payload
Intentional, Starship wasn't fully loaded.
> on a sub-orbital flight
Intentional, test flights are sub-orbital.
> of not even 200km
Intentional, done to target the landing site in the Indian Ocean.
> That's an optimistic launch cost of $1.700/kg
You can do basic math, but you are intentionally using incorrect numbers. Garbage in, garbage out.
> I have no idea where you pulled your $400/kg number from
$80 million / 200 tons = $400/kg to orbit (fully expendable).
This number is already exaggerated, the booster is already proven to be reusable.
If the current Starship is mass produced, this improves to $50 million / 200 tons = $250/kg to orbit (fully expendable).
> To be economical at all, Starship needs to reach its target capacity of 100 tonnes to orbit
You do realize the Starship + Booster stack weighs 5,000 tons, and that a 100 ton payload is only 2% of the rocket mass? And that 2% is an achievable fraction, both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy have a payload fraction >4%. The Starship upper stage alone weighs 1,600 tons.
> refueling requirements
In terms of problem difficulty, orbital refueling is a minor engineering challenge to solve.
> fuel boil-off in orbit
I hope you are being facetious at this point. How do you think LNG is transported around the world? You realize this problem was solved decades ago?
That $75-90 million figure is the current cost to launch Starship. It is also the approximate cost to build Starship.
Both of these things are true.
$5 million per launch is an Elon Musk wet dream that's never going to happen. You know like Tesla FSD?
Sure 44 tons to orbit was intentional. You can report back when they intentionally launch 100 tons to orbit. Until then it's just another worthless Musk promise.
The fact that the Falcon 9 and heavy can launch more than 2% of their mass into orbit has no bearing on Starship's capability to do the same.
You're comparing apples with oranges.
Neither of those rockets is fully reusable like Starship. They don't have to carry a return supply of fuel for landing, or a heat shield, landing legs, aerodynamic wings and everything else that's required for full reusability.
And refuelling in orbit is only a minor engineering challenge? That's just hilarious! Try reading something other than Musk's X feed.
I hope you are being facetious at this point.
Please don't tell me that you think Starship is fuelled with LNG propellent.
Fuel boil-off in orbit is real, just like it is on the ground. Except in orbit you don't have a big cryogenically cooled tank of propellant to top it up with sitting only 100m away.
Have you ever watched any rocket launch ever? Serious question.
Ever wondered what those huge clouds of vapour are? You know, the ones streaming out of the rocket while it's sitting on the pad ready for launch?
Fairphone 5 (2023) parts: https://www.fairphone.com/shop/category/spare-parts-4?catego...
Parts for the Fairphone 2 (2015) and Fairphone 3 (2019) aren't available anymore, but I suppose that's not all that surprising after 11 respective 7 years.
Afair, they started running out of some Fairphone 3 spare parts around 2024 and kept the ones they still had for warranty repairs. Source: I own one (and switched to the Fairphone 6 early this year).
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