frankie-tales

AI training, copyright and the future of contents creation

2026-01-11T21:00:00Z

I have already addressed the implications of modern LLMs, specifically their training, in the context of copyright and licenses for both code and original content. A 'IANAL' disclaimer applies to this post, but my honest opinion is that such training is a legitimate type of reading and learning after study, unless explicitly excluded in licenses among the licensee's rights.

Following the exploitation of LLMs and the AI boom that began in 2022, several lawsuits and litigations emerged among multiple parties, with a few reaching a significant milestone through the first court rulings. Note that every country has a bit different regulations about copyright and fair use, so the current lawsuites could be only the starting point of a long list of legal actions.

While most of the current lawsuits seem to demonstrate that Anthropic or Meta had the right to use books bought (in paper or digital form) for LLMs training (on the basis of the fair use principle), the most problematic aspect instead is the apparent use of pirated books taken from LibGen and other known piracy websites, which - if confirmed - can result in potentially destructive damange for the companies, to compensante authors and pay fees in the order of hundreds of billions.

The same problems are present in the coding parts: again, using FOSS-licensed code for training could fall under fair use, but training using private codebases, as well as proprietary ones, could be equally destructive for the same companies, as well as for GitHub and Microsoft. The key point would be demonstrating, without any doubt, the unfair use of private or pirated content, of course.

Of course, I'm quite sure future licenses for FOSS codebases and documentation could include an explicit exclusion clause for AI training, which could jeopardize the legitimation of use even for future FOSS code. I would expect such a license change, as some projects already explicitly exclude AI-based contributions. My opinion about such a question is that it could represent shooting oneself in the foot, due to the pervasivity of AI tools among developers currently. Adoption of AIAD could represent a boost in development time if adopted with a healthy dose of skepticism (i.e., a human-in-the-loop approach). About that, I'm quite convinced of Linus Torvald's point of view: the point is not who writes the code, but who is technically responsible for it and ensures the required quality review and supervision.

Moreover, an implication of the current polarization in the AI hype is the future (present?) crisis of traditional web content providers. A symptomatic case is the StackOverflow crisis, which will, with high probability, lead to the end of the service as we know it in the near future.

That will have an impact on future AI training, too, for sure, because SO has been for years a huge source of knowledge about multiple fields in IT. What if fewer and fewer people will contribute to Wikipedia and general web content? What if more and more sources of information were to reserve the right to use their information for pure human-driven study? Knowledge has not been static in human history; AI models will need to continuously enrich their training sets and stay up to date.

It would be grotesque if the whole AI hype were brought to a halt by such copyright-based legal questions (even if I'm pretty sure a fully fair training would be possible now for such companies, who knows the impact of a more limited approach on the final result?). Surely, this seems the most serious threat to the future of such companies and the whole AI-based solutions.

The only true solution to such a threat is finally having a true open training model, which details sources and the whole process of training with full transparency, something that even the so-called open AI models are still far to be ready to provide.

References

This was for every one: about the crisis of the web

2025-12-25T15:30:00Z

I just finished reading the delightful book by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, titled This is for Everyone, published this year. It is a trip, long, almost 400 pages, about the origin and evolution of the World Wide Web, seen by those who conceived and pushed it from the start. The entire first part of the book is dedicated to the history of the web, the W3C, and the Web Foundation's operations as we have known them in the first 30 years of its development, from 1989 onwards.

I was there at the very beginning of the 90s: I was connected to the Internet since 1991, and reading such a book for a good part has been an emotional trip in my memory of those events and people. He is a visionary and an idealist who fought for an extended period to prevent his WWW creature from being intercepted and disrupted by for-profit interests.

It happened almost from the start, when first NCSA, then Netscape, and Microsoft tried one after the other to change the whole idea of openness into something proprietary, driven through the same scheme of embracing, extending, and extinguishing. In practice, the complete negation of standard and openness, with a clear goal in mind: obtaining users' lock-in into proprietary products, clearly for profit.

Tim provides evidence on multiple critical aspects of the current incarnation of the net as we know it today and over the last 20 years or more. They are both technical and social defects or drifts. The web is no longer what we learnt to know in its first years of existence. The start of the end of the original web concept was the mobile-first approach, which relegated the use of a regular computer to a second-class experience for most users. Most of the digital-native people never used a computer to access the network, and that user experience deeply affects the current vision of the web.

For years, nowadays, a browser has not been the main program for accessing content and services. Social networks are mostly not interoperable because companies have little interest in having their users leave the walled gardens of their apps. Using a browser and potentially exiting the company's services to access other servers and spaces is tolerated, but is perceived as damaging profits. That's simply because users are not users, but customers. The result is the shattered Internet about which I already wrote: the W3C standards are still relevant, but embedded in applications and frameworks that enrich and upset the user experience with proprietary workflows and extensions.

An emblematic case is Apple, which has, in practice, abandoned its WebKit engine and Safari browser in favor of apps and proprietary services to monetize customers and companies.

The concrete risk is that the whole web and its standards would become a marginalized component of the net, while most users are confined to walled-off realms of proprietary services and social networks. The recent AI innovation can mark the definitive end chapter of web content creation and search as we have used them over the last 30 years. More and more users will limit themselves to AI-provided overviews instead of collecting and consulting multiple sources of information and independent services. That will also have a concrete impact on revenues and interest in content creation and provision at large.

The second part of the book is fully dedicated to all such problems: the impact of social networks, the last few years of generative AI, the BigCo dominance, and includes all Tim's worries for the foreseeable future. He's an idealistic, optimistic, and positive guy due to his past experiences. However, he also has a good dose of sane realism. He understands that the path is nebulous and full of dangers (specifically, the AI path is highly polarizing and can hide multiple issues at many levels).

He sees in the indie web, and specifically in open and well-structured distributed standards (such as the ActivityPub protocol), a possible way to change the present and future by favoring interoperability and independence. A concrete proposal is the Solid standard for personal data wallets (or pods in Solid terminology) under complete user control for accessibility by third-party services. Such a standard is still in its infancy, but the true problem I see is the trustworthiness of involved parties, both companies and governments. Trusting is the key, and maybe we all individually lost such a superpower a long time ago.

Creating a corpus of rules to manage all such technologies and ensure ethical behavior can be a desperate illusion; the only concrete alternative would be to opt out, at the cost of exclusion from the social context (not only the digital one). But I agree there is no other way to recover the original idea of the web. The AI technologies are even more polarizing, among doomers and boomers, with a bumpy road ahead. For sure, open protocols and distributed multi-peer services are the inevitable starting point, but they won't be enough.

"It was not enough simply to release new technology and hope for the world to improve. You had to develop technology and society together. You really had to fight, in a principled and continuous way, for human rights. The web offered people a platform for their voices to be heard, reducing the cost of publishing and distributing information to effectively nothing. But, used improperly, it could also be turned into a tool of surveillance and control." (timbl)

References

Still, no silver bullet

2025-08-24T18:30:00Z

I recently re-read the seminal book by Fred Brooks about software engineering, entitled "The Mythical Man-Month" or MM-M for brevity. Specifically, I read the paper version of the 20th anniversary, which was revised and reprinted in 1995, after the first edition of 1975. I did that on purpose, firstly because it is always a fantastic read, and secondly to understand how much of its contents is still valid today, exactly thirty years later since its last revision.

Fred missed in 2022; otherwise, it would still be interesting to know his thinking nowadays after the LLMs boom and the birth of the AIAD (AI Aided Development) as a new revolutionary (or often seen as such) tool. Hi, Fred, wherever you are. It is worth mentioning that AI was already taken into consideration by Brooks at the time, even if limited to expert systems and other rule-based variants, which seemed promising and often sold as revolutionary before the mid-90s. A lot of the book's contents remained in the history of software engineering, including the famous Brooks' Law, and the whole book is still an excellent source of inspiration for any management and organization of complex intellectual projects (not necessarily limited to software systems), that heavily includes large teams of individuals.

One of the main theses of the latest book edition is that in the short term of 10 years from its proposition (the original essay was dated 10 years after the first edition of the book), he did not expect a silver bullet. That means no significant technological or managerial development was expected to be able to improve our productivity in programming by one order of magnitude. Ten years later, he confirmed the same idea, even considering exceptional tools like old-generation AI, visual programming, CASE tools, and so on. Is this thesis contradicted in 2025 by the existence of current AIAD tools, including chatbots, agents, and AI-empowered IDEs? My honest idea is no. I mean not now and not for the foreseeable future. The reason is exactly the same as Fred posed at the time. Reducing accidental problems in software creation (what AI is able to do) cannot be confused with the essential problems in software creation: the complexity of defining an articulated task, its analytical specifications, and an algorithmic solution to solve it. First of all, ignore the simplistic case of asking an AI engine to implement a very simple program. Here, the word simple means truly that. If you can specify a request by a whatever large manageable token context and formulate your request in terms of a brief question (let me suppose a question of some dozens of rows), well, that's probably an example of a simple (or dumb) problem. Too few, too easy. We are talking about a whole system that is generally difficult to describe, even in thousands of pages of specifications and documentation, written collectively by large teams of developers, architects, and domain experts.

The hard truth is that most of the real-world information systems out there cannot simply be specified in such a way. We are not able to define an unambiguous and complete enough specification to describe such systems, not to mention being truly able to write a complete and neat documentation of it, including its inner workings and use. We live in a deep illusion about that. The context size to get the required level of details to avoid bugs and ambiguities in specification would be impractical for current and even future tools, as well as for any humans. We would get in any case buggy (i.e., incomplete or misunderstood) results even if the AI engine were able to avoid hallucinations (which is not the case) and had no limitations for context size. The presence of AI hallucinations is only accidental in this regard.

In the current AI tooling, we are simply moving the complexity from the writing of a formal language step by step to using a natural language with a higher level of abstraction to express the problem. The complexity is still there, and it is inherent to the problem. Again, we resolved an accidental difficulty in a creative manner, not different from moving from assembly to using a modern programming language. Now the difficulty has moved elsewhere, but it is still there, and natural language is even more complicated to use compared to formal language. These difficulties translate into multiple refinements and trials to try to be more precise and get sensible answers and code in a continuous iteration. Isn't that so similar to the whole ordinary process of developing a program? In the most simplistic approach, such a process becomes vibe coding, and iteration could tend to infinity, with a forever loop. The smarter programmer for an easy task will do that in a reasonable (limited, hopefully) number of iterations, instead. Is that a significant improvement of one order of magnitude? I think not, as in most cases for the past. As in the case of high-level languages instead of assembly, they improved efficiency in coding as asserted in MM-M, but not by a whole order of magnitude. The AIAD is again another helper to solve accidental difficulties. The problem and all its complexity are still there. Thinking that we found the silver bullet is again (and again) an illusion or pure marketing.

So why do many CEOs insist on predicting a bright yet unlikely future of AI agents instead of having developers create applications? Brooks already wrote about that: there is a profound confusion in exchanging months and men, and an excess in optimism when approaching software development, even among techies, but that becomes paroxysmal among managers. None can seriously provide even a decent and reasonable evaluation of development time starting from incomplete, ambiguous, or vague specifications: the same simply happens systematically in overestimating the capabilities of current AI tools.

So what? AIAD is simply yet another tool among those available to developers, but the management problem of dominating complex projects is still there, with all its inherent difficulties. And the possibility to use natural language instead of a high-level formal one is only an apparent simplification of the process. It looks more familiar and easier, but it is also much more ambiguous, and the so-called prompt engineering is again a pure optimistic illusion, an euristhic approach to try to overcome our totally insufficient capabilities of dominating nuances and semantics.

Breaking dependencies on BigCos and a US centric IT world

2025-05-17T15:00:00Z

I recently read some interesting articles (see [1,2]) by Bert Hubert about IaaS and SaaS in the EU, which are generally considered cloud computing at large. He has quite a deep understanding of such topics, and the reading is enjoyable and triggered a few reflections.

The problem could be analyzed as a vast version of the indie web movement. Ensuring independence from a handful of big companies, all geolocated out of the continent and possibly subject to the inconstancies of a humoral government, as in current times, is a duty not only for individuals (who should also protect themselves locally), but also for whole countries.

First of all, it is evident enough that Europe is not that bad about infrastructure. In multiple countries on this continent, there are quite a few big companies that have nothing to envy, such as Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, for their capabilities and critical mass. There are already companies with multi-region data centres, a good level of automation, and high SLAs. Of course, they are mid-range companies, not monsters with country-size balances.

It is already perfectly possible [3] to depend on EU-based standard capabilities, including email services or file storage, which represent a primary part of common cloud services. What is truly missing is a capable enough set of web-based cloud personal productivity software based in Europe, which would be comparable to Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, including video conferencing and instant messaging.

Other important services could be Youtube equivalent, but what it is evident for me is that such kind of services are also available at small scale, what it is really missing is a sizeable financial effort to fund consistently projects that already exist in the FOSS/indie web ecosystem and the will of doing that instead of paying new consortia to develop from scratch some new solutions. Europe is full of brilliant people and companies that are just waiting for that.

As a personal example, by manual, at work, the central management recently abandoned the whole idea of maintaining fully on-premise systems to move some key services to the cloud for the entire national research network. Our non-specialistic needs were quite average profile: shared storage, email system, the usual personal productivity tools like Microsoft Office, and a teleconferencing/webinar system. The same could be enough to cover the digital needs of most of the companies and bodies out there in Italy. The result has been a national contract with Microsoft for MS365 and a more limited contract with Cytrix for GotoMeeting/Webinar. IMHO nothing is transcendental, something that could be implemented with a decent pumping of money to scale up a multi-datacenter on-premise solution to have full redundancy and an equally decent dedicated team, with many more possible features and capabilities available, at the end of the day. Maybe the only actual key point was the availability of MS Office, which is the only severe lock-in source for most users (and also why Google Workspace here has no hope of being considered). But even in the past, we paid a lot of money for desktop multi-licenses in any case, without any additional cloud solution.

I will not deal deeply with these incomprehensible dependencies on a single application: in my honest opinion, a lot of users are simply too lazy to refuse such a kind of lock-in, even if they depend on a very limited number of features of such an application. There are at least three different alternative desktop programs that most users could use successfully, but we still see Microsoft Office as the holy grail (and I would also add that its web version has an embarrassing UX).

Anyway, so what? That has been a precise abdication to autonomy of digital services and choices, whose consequence will be for sure visible in the future: loose of internal tech skills, missing investiments in FOSS alternatives, lack of human resources growing, and missed diversifications of solution providers (now both located in USA, not even Europe).

Seriously? We did not even have to externalize such services, only to reasonably invest in the right direction for additional human resources and infrastructure improvement instead of paying fees. In the last thirty years, I have not even seen a cent directly paid by my organization for FOSS projects used daily by tons of us, except for some rare fees for conference participation and sometimes indirect payments for people that incidentally worked on FOSS project during their daily job.

Let me be quite pessimistic about the actual intention of European bodies to find a concrete way of improving continental clouds, which could be perfectly viable instead. Until this moment, I have seen only an exaggerated capability of defining rules for the IT ecosystems that are not always sensed and also often misapplied. I saw instead a great lobbying capability by the well-known BigCos that have sustained their own interests and de-potentiated any past effort about this subject (hey, Gaia-X, yes, I'm talking about you).

Is this a lost war? I don't know, but I still don't see concrete signals of changes in European policies about digital innovation, except for a big regulation effort that does not change our full dependency on a handful of US companies. I have more hope in individual actions, but of course, as in the case of FOSS, they require a high level of awareness, which I still see in a limited measure: just compare the number of Mastodon accounts against Meta socials, TikTok, or Twitter/X ones. Maybe we are now at the same level of FOSS as about 30 years ago: a few visionaries and geeks see the problem and act, and most people will follow. Or at least, I hope so.

References

Digital communities, toxicity and other drifts

2025-02-08T17:56:00Z

In a previous post, I suggested that people should escape from big company-based social networks and find refuge in the Fediverse. The reason for that is simply to avoid being constantly considered a profitable customer, being profiled, and continuously bombed from advertising campaigns or sponsored posts. In brief, the purpose is returning to the original spirit of the big network of peers of the 90s.

Reading here and there on the Fediverse, I see that many people abandoned the well-known prime-time socials because of the diffused toxicity of such environments, censorship, and other bad personal experiences in their use. Unfortunately, the past examples of newsgroups and IRC channels showed that even Mastodon profiles or Matrix stanzas are not an answer for such drifts of digital life. The new Fediverse simply changed the user experience of communication services, not the core social experience of them.

Nothing is truly different between modern Fediverse services and groups, channels, or mailing lists of the old good days. Like it or not, we had trolls, spammers, and other strange beasts even in the 90s - when the men were men, to use an abused clause. Of course, the smaller the communities, the fewer the social problems of interaction among individuals in the digital world, and that's a fact of life. Therefore, a microblogging platform such as Mastodon could seem a great place to live digitally happy. IMHO, it is only a matter of time and critical mass (number of active accounts) before experiencing the same type of dynamics, unfortunately.

Of course, we had solutions to mitigate the problems that have been always the same in the last 30 years or more:

Defining netiquette and conduct codes.
Introducing community-driven pools of moderators with privileges to kick off pernicious individuals based on their behaviors and repeated violations of the conduct codes.
Never feeding the trolls.
Having a reasonable number of good bots to manage spammers and other harmful agents automatically.

Note that anonymity has never been a problem, so identifying users is not a solution and should not be considered in the equation. It does not work as a definitive deterrent, and those proposing such a practice are probably in bad faith.

That said, there is also a profound difference between a self-governed community with a set of rules chosen and defined by the community itself and censorship imposed by a company, a government, or any other external entities. This would be an excellent opportunity for the Fediverse to conjugate a non-toxic environment for users with a sane distributed network far from profit-only logic. It only needs to be caught by Fediverse communities.

Socials, they are not your home.

2025-01-20T17:00:00Z

Recently, I participated in a brief thread on Mastodon about how to maintain relations with people that have been built around a social network, specifically through Facebook. This is not different for Instagram, X/Twitter, TikTok or whatever you prefer.

I explained that this is simply not possible because, in my experience, people use multiple socials based on their age, technical experience, personal taste, and even the presence of other peers in any of the existing social systems.

This post explains in long form what I think about socials and, in brief, why you should not base your relationship life on any of them, including any serious business, of course.

In the last 30 or more years, a series of social networks appeared on the Internet with different characteristics, and all of them are (or have been until their closure) typically usable for free (as beer). Of course, they are pretty expensive toys, requiring a lot of servers, data centres, worldwide networks, software and human resources. As said briefly with a joke, if they are not selling you anything, you are the product.

The game is clear: they are profiling your personal data and preferences to create selective advertisement campaigns (included in the social network feed) if you are not paying a premium charge. That could happen even if you pay for a subscription, of course, but it is less disturbing, at least. Moreover, those networks also have been subject to data leaking from time to time, because of security issues or intentionally, and probably you would not appreciate that your personal data, telephone number, and the photo of your children/cats, or the photo of you drunk and naked in a party ten years ago walk publicly on the net.

If this is something you are not available to accept, avoid any not-so-free social network, plain and clean. Of course, any of your peers (family, friends, colleagues, any other) could have a different opinion about that. Any of them could choose one of the many social networks out there, and those networks leverage specifically the FOMO syndrome to collect and increase users/customers. If any of your friends are on Facebook or Instagram, you could be captured in the network easily because of that mass syndrome. The only way to escape is simply not playing that game.

A viable alternative is participating in modern independent networks of small community-based services, such as Mastodon for microblogging or Matrix for one-to-one communications and groups. Of course, they need to be sustained for cost coverage, and any instance can always disappear at any time because the admin(s) move to other interests or costs exceed what the admin(s) are available to pay at the end of the day. They are probably not long-term solutions, but one can always move from one instance to another when things turn down. Simply, do not rely too much on them. And probably they will not solve the problem of the leaking of photos of you naked and drunk in a party of ten years ago: shit happens even on those systems.

If your major interest is ensuring privacy and security, all the protocols and software of those distributed networks are purely FOSS, and you can always create your own instance. Of course, again, this is not something free of cost; you always have to consider computing resources (both cores and storage) and your time. This is not viable for people who lack the required skills and knowledge, but potentially, it is the only indisputable solution.

Unfortunately, after creating your own Mastodon/Matrix instance or moving to a nice maintained instance by a trustworthy party, you still have to convince your peers to participate in such a network, and that is the tricky part. The hard truth is that most people do not care about abdicating their freedom and participating in a social network as a customer. That is until the whole thing becomes a PITA because of censorship rules, excess of advertisements, moderation, and lack of active peers. That happened in the past for X/Twitter and will happen again for other social networks. It is a matter of critical mass: if the network is not large enough, you can miss a lot of your peers, and you can do exactly nothing to solve this problem.

That is the same problem you find in IM systems. For historical reasons, most of your peers have probably registered a Whatsapp account, much less a Telegram one. There are even fewer with a Discord account (not that better) or something less invasive and respectful of privacy, such as a Signal or Matrix account. The only valid reason is that WhatsApp started in 2009, Telegram in 2013, and Signal in 2014 and all of them, in one way or another, tried to maintain a user's lock-in or managed to solve scalability and add features since then.

One should ask why they all avoided systematically extending the existing XMPP protocol soon instead of re-inventing the wheel. I'm a bad guy and think that standardizing does not solve the problem of sustainability for such systems. They need to lock in the users to survive.

Think if you had to use a non-standard SMTP protocol to send emails in the 90s. That would have been an epic failure for the Internet tech community and users. Curiously, this is not true on the current shattered Internet, and this is the reason for the current social nightmare.

It's not too late: let such non-distributed and proprietary networks die as soon as possible; simply close your accounts or freeze them and move to something more standard, distributed and human-sized. Don't care about missing out on someone; they will come sooner or later if they share the same ideas, so why care? And if they do NOT share the same ideas, why care?

Come on, let's free ourselves of any social dependency on closed and proprietary networks.

And possibly, if you absolutely have to go around naked and drunk in the next party, at least avoid that people make photos of you and publish them.

Refurbish to fight against planned obsolescence

2024-09-25T18:30:00Z

The planned obsolescence of computers and other IT electronic equipment is a well-known plague of our age. For years, I stopped buying new computers and prefer refurbished ones whenever possible. That includes all my personal ICT boxes, and even at work, I try to spin out the life cycle of the equipment in use under my direct management. Proprietary OSes often limit the lifespan of IT equipment, but in some cases, vendor-independent FOSS software can replace the original one at End of Life (EOL). This is beneficial because FOSS software is often more lightweight, customizable, and has a longer support life, thereby extending the usability of your equipment.

For instance, I'm writing these notes on a dual-processor Lenovo Thinkstation C30 refurbished workstation that left the factory 10 years ago with plenty of RAM I bought 4 years ago. Thanks to the use of SSD storage instead of the old HDDs, I hope to use it for at least another 4-5 years. My living room Thinkpad L540 refurbished laptop is the same age, again with a replaced SSD, and I bought it in the same period. My main office personal HPZ320 workstation has been around for almost the same number of years, while my office laptop is a damn new Thinkpad X1 Carbon 5th-Gen of 2017. Both of them were new at buying time.

Of course, all of them run Debian GNU/Linux and have been upgraded regularly during the years. This is essential. Otherwise, the well-known proprietary OSes will obsolete your boxes, and you will be screwed. Generally, this is an easy task because reasonably aged computers are better supported by FOSS kernels. It would be better to avoid well-known vendors with problematic or unsupported devices.

I have even run a couple of aged Seagate Personal NASes in EOL for years, thanks to installing a plain Debian for ARMv7 processors distribution instead of the original Seagate one. I think they have been around for almost ten years, and one is a used unit. Of course, HDDs changed in the meantime.

Some servers still in use are the rock-solid IBM xSeries.They were born with a Suse Linux ES 11 and are still around and doing their jobs under Debian. Of course, the trade-off between power consumption, budget, and goals must be rigorously considered.

Plan for the future in advance

In order to run computers for a long time, I found it essential to buy with more RAM than needed at the moment of buying (even in the case of new boxes). You will need more, and assume you still don't know. Possibly, the same is true for the number of cores. If you buy a refurbished computer, it is inevitably a professional/business unit you would never find in a shop for home users. That's better because they generally have superior quality and decent support in the Linux kernel. In the business market, note that many companies retain computers for an extended guaranteed time only (by internal policy), so you will always find 3-5 years-old equipment recycled by medium/big companies. For personal use, they are more than enough and exceptionally usable with a FOSS OS.

Even note that current computers (but for GPUs) are comparable to reasonably old computers (let's say the last 10-12 years) in terms of the number of cores, speed of RAM, and bus throughput. They are faster, but not so much. Their average power consumption should be lower, but Moore's law is dead, sorry. So, buying new computers is quite pointless in most cases, and even worse if you purchase a consumer low-end computer for a limited budget. A refurbished box is generally the best option because it is cleaned, incorporates ad hoc changes (e.g., a new SSD for old units), is tested, and includes a one-year warranty by its vendor (generally, but just check before buying). Even the refurbished computer was at least an SOHO one, not a home product, so it is a much better option.

Be redundant, be safe

I never base my daily activities on a single box. At home and at work, I always have forklifts and replacements for emergencies. You cannot trust old (or even new) units, and not for sure in the long term. The same goes for parts such as HDDs or SSDs. Ça va sans dire that you need to take care of your data and backup with required redundancy, too.

Missions impossible

As said, the refurbishing possibility is minimal for GPUs and in some application domains. I'm not a gamer, but there are rumors about forced obsolescence every few years for commercial reasons triggered by games and vendors. Even for high-performance computing, any GPU before late 2014 is not more truly supported or usable. Again, it is partially a matter of hardware, but proprietary software, including SDKs, renders old GPUs obsolete.

Nowadays, the 2016 generations of GPUs with 8GB of VRAM are basically to be retired for many applications: that was the standard size at the time, but now vendors have decided that 8GBs or less is too few for any practical use. Too bad.

Smartphones are another area where planned obsolescence is the rule. The most expensive ones have 7 years of software support, but most can only be upgraded to a pair of major versions. Basically, you should change your phone every 3-5 years because security support is limited in time. But the average replacement cycle seems less than 3 years, anyway. Often, an older phone can still be used, but it is at risk for security support. Too bad, again.

The same happens for many so-called smart electronic equipment: having a box permanently connected to the network and missing any security support is generally a bad idea, and only a small minority of them can be upgraded to FOSS firmware. Cameras, TVs, routers, access points, and many other objects in our homes have a sort of implicit counter for end-of-life that often stops before the end of the hardware parts. You need to be very selective in equipment vendors.

In many cases - guess what? - such devices now run an embedded version of GNU/Linux that could be community-supported after the end of vendor support if the vendor provided enough information appropriately, which is rarely a possibility. In most cases, the vendor only has a public archive of third-party FOSS source packages, not the entire build system, so community support is not practically viable. Even any development documentation is usually totally missing, just to discourage people from following that path. In many cases, the devices include totally proprietary chipsets and drivers, so there is no way. That's even the reason why Android is an almost-open mobile operating system. Too bad, take three.

Will it change in the future?

In general, this battle was lost years ago. Expanding or repairing a laptop could now be challenging due to the accurate practices of many vendors to discourage self-intervention. That's true for a lot of other equipment, too. They are always ready to obsolete your products more often than you are prepared. I'm a pessimist about the future of this war.

They're coming outta the goddamn walls

frankie-tales

AI training, copyright and the future of contents creation

References

This was for every one: about the crisis of the web

References

Still, no silver bullet

Breaking dependencies on BigCos and a US centric IT world

References

Digital communities, toxicity and other drifts

Socials, they are not your home.

Large social networks are an expensive game

The distributed small social networks can be a solution

Refurbish to fight against planned obsolescence

Plan for the future in advance

Be redundant, be safe

Missions impossible

Will it change in the future?