I spent some time in the Electrical Engineering subreddit a while back. I commented on how today's EE's don't even get any lab time with hands on experience and how that lack of experience is GLARINGLY obvious in their designs. I was shocked by the pushback when I mentioned repairability and common sense design. They basically tried to tar a feather me for even mentioning such heresy. The repair problem is systemic and a direct result of how shitty EE's education is now. "Back in my day" we learned hands on and lab time was half of the education process. New EE's cannot even do the most basic aspects of tech work. They design things on paper and CAD without ever touching something as simple a potentiometer (seriously some guy was bitching that he had never even touched one before and now had to do so in his new job. Things have to change at the source (education) as well, before Right to Repair will ever matter.
Apparently not. They qctually seemed angered at the entire concept of actually going hands on (How dare I suggest they get their hands dirty..). It boggles the mind, doesn't it? And it explains a LOT about why modern devices are such a shit show.
This is shocking. Here in Argentina there is a lot of push to have more lab practice, in the new curricullum in my university incorporated more labs. Every course, except math, has at least two labs. We don't really solder unless you are doing the final proyect or you are in the robotics club, but we use educational kits (either made in house or bought), instruments like multimeter, oscilloscopes, signal generators, etc. Bassically, out most important problem is founds and time. How do you do a EE course without using real instrument? You just simulate everything and nothing more?
Don't be confused, I understand seeing this as a job. I'm also studying EE because I consider it more as a job (I will not live by doing music or comics because I want to do whatever the fuck I want there without worring about if it sells or not), but is something I will like to work. But, my point still stands, how you can be a proper professional without knowing touching anything?
From what I saw in that subreddit, yeah that's exactly how things are now. All theoretical and simulation work, no hands on at all. I cannot conceive of how you learn a damned thing about a subject like electronics without ever touching a resistor or circuit board. That's akin to a mechanic that's never turned a wrench or a cook that's never chopped onions. Just pure insanity.
Umm auto mechanics have cursed car designers since the model T. It depends on the product but when you draw up the requirements, repairability is often fairly low on the list.
Ultimately the design constraints that matter are what makes the company the most money. If you are selling city buses or long haul commercial trucks, you know your customers are sophisticated enough to check repairability and will remember if you screwed them in a prior vehicle lineage. Military radios same idea, those will be repairable.
But smartphones? What matters is being able to swap the battery and for repair shops to be able to swap the other major parts. Otherwise glue away.
In first world maybe, in the third world we more or less we care because not always you can repair something that suddenly got broken, the problem is that spare parts are normally kit genuine so it still brake after a few months.
And stuff is generally developed thinking in developed countries that doesn't care about repairing thing.
They don't care (or even think) about repair until the device actually needs to be repaired. Then, they get angry that they bought a $1k paperweight. Which is their own fault.
This is not by choice it is the fact that most people alive today never knew anything different. They did not exist when things were easily repairable.
I can go on and on with examples, but the real iceberg was limited access to documentation like schematics. Imho it started getting bad somewhere around 2005.
As things get more complex, it gets harder to home repair. Add to that the hyperspecialization of people nowadays and you get people not understanding the need to repair.
Remember how you could open the cover and swap battery in e.g. Sony Erricson K510i in like 5 seconds? I looked up how to change battery in my motorola one vision and almost got a stroke... the battery is FUCKING GLUED AND YOU CAN NOT REMOVE IT WITHOUT DEFORMING IT.
Yes, the current state of replaceable batteries in cell phones is pathetic. In the US market, there are three models with user-replaceable batteries: the Samsung Xcover 6, the Sonim XP10, and the TCL Ion X. That is it.
During those times, normies didn't take advantage of or care about it. They went to the T-Mobile/AT&T/Verizon store and had a retail associate install their SIM card for them.
Of course apple controls how apple parts can be imported.
Counterfeit here just means not bought from apple and apple didn’t sell them. So there were no option to buy parts that would not have violated trademark.
The government doesn’t really know if it’s real or not. What they need is official license information from the manufacturer that shows these specific parts have been manufactured with license. Without that it is assumed to not be real. So you can only get legally real parts from official channels. Which is apple.
It’s understandable that apple wants to limit parts that are not actually apple products from being imported with apple logos. But they also limit stuff that they themselves printed the logo on.
The desire to avoid fake products is understandable, but it should also be weighed against the sociatal benefits too. If i visit another country, buy a product there and ship it to myself back home, im not doing anything wrong and yet in this case it would be illegal because of the trademark.
If i visit another country, buy a product there and ship it to myself back home, im not doing anything wrong and yet in this case it would be illegal because of the trademark
Which is the point Louis Rossmann tries to keep on making, but people conveniently ignore.
It also doesn't explain Apple's practice of locking specific parts to the phones they were installed to so even if you buy another Apple phone to divest it for parts to fix one phone you currently have, the 2nd phone will still try to ping the part from the 1st phone as a counterfeit.
Not surprised. I suspect part of the reason why Google stripped out the public dislike counter for Youtube was due to businesses' marketing that wanted to minimize any backlash over poorly received videos.
the way they did it is very strange too. Because in the code of the site you can still see the dislike counts. They are still there, just not displayed. Thats what the addon reads. (for videos after that, it uses dislike count from addon users and then extrapolates it, so dont take it as gospel).
They are still there, just not displayed. Thats what the addon reads.
I do not believe this is true.
Return YouTube Dislike
Starting December 13th 2021, YouTube removed the ability to see dislikes from their API.
This extension aims to restore power to users by using a combination of archived like and dislike data, as well as the likes and dislikes made by extension users to show the most accurate ratings.
Seems a lot like youtube. I know a few other examples of their haphazard fixes to "problems" that ended up doing more harm than good, but this is probably not a sub to talk about that.
Not surprised. I suspect part of the reason why Google stripped out the public dislike counter for Youtube was due to businesses' marketing that wanted to minimize any backlash over poorly received videos.
Close, the two events that prompted Youtube to remove the dislike button was the insanely negative reception Ghostbusters (2016) and Call of Duty Infinite Warfare's trailers got (both were in the top 5 most disliked videos on Youtube, with GB (2016) holding the crown until CoD IW's trailer showed up).
It was done to appease corporations, but in the process, it's gotten bad actors to put up scammy DIY and fix videos online with the viewer having no means on knowing its overall reliability.
why would 5 year old trailers be the main reasoning behind removing the dislike button? Not even Youtube is that slow.
It's not Youtube being slow, it's advertisers pointing it out as a detriment on why they shouldn't be putting their promotional material on Youtube. Ghostbusters (2016)'s trailer in particular and how it got downvoted to hell was one of the factors of the movie's poor performance on its first week, alongside the movie just being actually bad.
Right but why would they care? It was five years old at the time, no one cared about it.
I mean, if you believe media companies hold grudges like that, I guess it makes sense. It's very silly and not real, but in that fantasyland it makes sense.
Grudges? The fuck are you talking about? it's about money. Google loses in haggling when companies bring up points like these, the Adpocalypse was driven by the same reason hence why alot of Youtubers are forced to censor swear words, since brands like Coca-Cola don't want to be associated with Youtubers that aren't family friendly.
Why would Sony, Columbia or Activision want to advertise on Youtube when the platform has videos that show metrics that are costing them heavily in terms of PR?
I never once brought up emotions or grudges in any of my points, if anyone's in "fantasyland" here, it's you.
Okay, so explain to me how they lose money from dislikes on a trailer from five years ago. I don't need hard numbers, just the rough economics of how a movie that's already released on disc & been on sale and a game that's already received 99% of its lifetime revenue are so financially impacted by high-dislike trailers from five years ago.
Why would Sony, Columbia or Activision want to advertise on Youtube when the platform has videos that show metrics that are costing them heavily in terms of PR?
Does it? Actually?
I never once brought up emotions or grudges in any of my points, if anyone's in "fantasyland" here, it's you.
You've been very clear with your idea that Youtube removed dislikes after being pressured by companies for trailers with abnormally high dislikes years after they came out. That's what a grudge is. C'mon man, don't be silly.
/u/sysKin is failing to communicate, or you are failing to understand, that what he's talking about is that that incident served as an example of the kind of thing corporate customers would want to avoid. Imagine a steady drip, drip, drip of it coming up in negotiations over and over.
youtubers collectively decide to downvote it and enjoy the dopamine hit of seeing the downvote number go up
news outlets all report on the phenomenon, citing the downvote number being bigger than last month's downvote number
advertising company is pissed at the negative PR from the trailer, and in particular some random executives at the company are probably trying to shift blame around to avoid getting fired
Youtube has only one purpose: make it maximally easy and safe for advertising executives to give them most money, at minimum effort.
I doubt he's shadow banned, he's just gotten a lot less active.
If you listen to his rants from the past year or so he's mentioned wanting to scale down his public activity, due to some mix of personal circumstances and cynicism about the viability of RtR in the US. Looking at his channel now, his output has accordingly gone down drastically over the past ~3 months.
Using the illusion of ‘competitive advantage’ by trying to make devices as inaccessible and sometimes proprietary as possible, with the real aim being to milk people out of putting down more cash to replace stuff. Dell is especially notorious for this crap.
See also: planned obsolence, often by cost cutting using cheap garbage components, ensuring you’ll have to replace stuff more quickly. This used to be more common on motherboards and other components than it is now, which is part of what led to the whole capacitor plague debacle way back and killed at least Abit, but it’s still super common with consumer electronics.
I have been following right to repair news for past few years focusing on battery replacement by user. This year has been the quietest in terms of news reported (excluding iPhone 16 news). This is the first proper news (even if it is op-ed) after this arstechnica piece.
deadgirlrevvy@reddit
I spent some time in the Electrical Engineering subreddit a while back. I commented on how today's EE's don't even get any lab time with hands on experience and how that lack of experience is GLARINGLY obvious in their designs. I was shocked by the pushback when I mentioned repairability and common sense design. They basically tried to tar a feather me for even mentioning such heresy. The repair problem is systemic and a direct result of how shitty EE's education is now. "Back in my day" we learned hands on and lab time was half of the education process. New EE's cannot even do the most basic aspects of tech work. They design things on paper and CAD without ever touching something as simple a potentiometer (seriously some guy was bitching that he had never even touched one before and now had to do so in his new job. Things have to change at the source (education) as well, before Right to Repair will ever matter.
ranixon@reddit
Wait, universities in USA doesn't have labs en Electric Engineering courses?
deadgirlrevvy@reddit
Apparently not. They qctually seemed angered at the entire concept of actually going hands on (How dare I suggest they get their hands dirty..). It boggles the mind, doesn't it? And it explains a LOT about why modern devices are such a shit show.
ranixon@reddit
This is shocking. Here in Argentina there is a lot of push to have more lab practice, in the new curricullum in my university incorporated more labs. Every course, except math, has at least two labs. We don't really solder unless you are doing the final proyect or you are in the robotics club, but we use educational kits (either made in house or bought), instruments like multimeter, oscilloscopes, signal generators, etc. Bassically, out most important problem is founds and time. How do you do a EE course without using real instrument? You just simulate everything and nothing more?
Don't be confused, I understand seeing this as a job. I'm also studying EE because I consider it more as a job (I will not live by doing music or comics because I want to do whatever the fuck I want there without worring about if it sells or not), but is something I will like to work. But, my point still stands, how you can be a proper professional without knowing touching anything?
deadgirlrevvy@reddit
From what I saw in that subreddit, yeah that's exactly how things are now. All theoretical and simulation work, no hands on at all. I cannot conceive of how you learn a damned thing about a subject like electronics without ever touching a resistor or circuit board. That's akin to a mechanic that's never turned a wrench or a cook that's never chopped onions. Just pure insanity.
SoylentRox@reddit
Umm auto mechanics have cursed car designers since the model T. It depends on the product but when you draw up the requirements, repairability is often fairly low on the list.
Ultimately the design constraints that matter are what makes the company the most money. If you are selling city buses or long haul commercial trucks, you know your customers are sophisticated enough to check repairability and will remember if you screwed them in a prior vehicle lineage. Military radios same idea, those will be repairable.
But smartphones? What matters is being able to swap the battery and for repair shops to be able to swap the other major parts. Otherwise glue away.
pppjurac@reddit
Except that "special" models that tend to explode during stay in Middle East?
NeptuneKun@reddit
How do you make slick solid waterproof smartphone which is easy to repair? Also, "right" to repair is bs, you can buy or not buy the product.
AstroNaut765@reddit
The sad truth is: people don't care about repairability.
Only idea how to popularize movement is to say "stuff that can be repaired tends to lose value less", maybe in weaker economy this will matter.
ranixon@reddit
In first world maybe, in the third world we more or less we care because not always you can repair something that suddenly got broken, the problem is that spare parts are normally kit genuine so it still brake after a few months.
And stuff is generally developed thinking in developed countries that doesn't care about repairing thing.
a60v@reddit
They don't care (or even think) about repair until the device actually needs to be repaired. Then, they get angry that they bought a $1k paperweight. Which is their own fault.
Tiflotin@reddit
This is not by choice it is the fact that most people alive today never knew anything different. They did not exist when things were easily repairable.
AstroNaut765@reddit
This is not a new problem.
I can go on and on with examples, but the real iceberg was limited access to documentation like schematics. Imho it started getting bad somewhere around 2005.
Strazdas1@reddit
As things get more complex, it gets harder to home repair. Add to that the hyperspecialization of people nowadays and you get people not understanding the need to repair.
Igor369@reddit
Remember how you could open the cover and swap battery in e.g. Sony Erricson K510i in like 5 seconds? I looked up how to change battery in my motorola one vision and almost got a stroke... the battery is FUCKING GLUED AND YOU CAN NOT REMOVE IT WITHOUT DEFORMING IT.
a60v@reddit
Yes, the current state of replaceable batteries in cell phones is pathetic. In the US market, there are three models with user-replaceable batteries: the Samsung Xcover 6, the Sonim XP10, and the TCL Ion X. That is it.
Strazdas1@reddit
I remmeber when i dropped my Trium phone (remmber those?) the battery would fall out. You could just place it back in and bam phone works again.
zacker150@reddit
Yes.
During those times, normies didn't take advantage of or care about it. They went to the T-Mobile/AT&T/Verizon store and had a retail associate install their SIM card for them.
Hakairoku@reddit
It doesn't help when YouTube is shadowbanning the shit out of Louis Rossmann.
Famous_Wolverine3203@reddit
Is this legit or just another conspiracy?
jaaval@reddit
Of course apple controls how apple parts can be imported.
Counterfeit here just means not bought from apple and apple didn’t sell them. So there were no option to buy parts that would not have violated trademark.
512165381@reddit
That's no true.
If somebody imports fake apple products then they can be confiscated.
If somebody import genuine apple products, even broken down, its no up to the government to decide whether they have licenses to import.
Companies import using the "grey market" all the time. For example companies import perfumes through "non-official" channels.
jaaval@reddit
That’s basically what I just said.
The government doesn’t really know if it’s real or not. What they need is official license information from the manufacturer that shows these specific parts have been manufactured with license. Without that it is assumed to not be real. So you can only get legally real parts from official channels. Which is apple.
Engineer_DS@reddit
100% Agreed. It's down to the logo/trademark bullshit and nothing to do with whether the parts are original or functional.
randomkidlol@reddit
its complete horseshit how a corporation can just designate refurbished OEM parts as counterfeit. talk about regulatory capture.
jaaval@reddit
It’s understandable that apple wants to limit parts that are not actually apple products from being imported with apple logos. But they also limit stuff that they themselves printed the logo on.
Strazdas1@reddit
The desire to avoid fake products is understandable, but it should also be weighed against the sociatal benefits too. If i visit another country, buy a product there and ship it to myself back home, im not doing anything wrong and yet in this case it would be illegal because of the trademark.
Hakairoku@reddit
Which is the point Louis Rossmann tries to keep on making, but people conveniently ignore.
It also doesn't explain Apple's practice of locking specific parts to the phones they were installed to so even if you buy another Apple phone to divest it for parts to fix one phone you currently have, the 2nd phone will still try to ping the part from the 1st phone as a counterfeit.
COMPUTER1313@reddit
Not surprised. I suspect part of the reason why Google stripped out the public dislike counter for Youtube was due to businesses' marketing that wanted to minimize any backlash over poorly received videos.
Strazdas1@reddit
the way they did it is very strange too. Because in the code of the site you can still see the dislike counts. They are still there, just not displayed. Thats what the addon reads. (for videos after that, it uses dislike count from addon users and then extrapolates it, so dont take it as gospel).
Scurro@reddit
I do not believe this is true.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/return-youtube-dislike/gebbhagfogifgggkldgodflihgfeippi?hl=en
Strazdas1@reddit
Its the "Archived dislike data" portion of your quote.
COMPUTER1313@reddit
Probably to just make the Karens of businesses shut up about the "dislike bombing" of their unpopular videos.
Hakairoku@reddit
No, it's purely about optics. Activision most likely made a fuss when Infinite Warfare's trailer racked up over 3m in dislikes and how that's too much negative PR that isn't even helping the brand at all. Columbia Pictures had the same problem a few years prior with Ghostbusters 2016, with Sony and Columbia probably being very disgruntled with how their movie trailer was received.
The removal of the dislike button to me ultimately shows who Youtube (and in extension, Google) are truly beholden too, and it ain't us.
VenditatioDelendaEst@reddit
That's what he said. The Karens of brands.
Strazdas1@reddit
Seems a lot like youtube. I know a few other examples of their haphazard fixes to "problems" that ended up doing more harm than good, but this is probably not a sub to talk about that.
Touchranger@reddit
That's not true though? From the extension's FAQ:
Hakairoku@reddit
Close, the two events that prompted Youtube to remove the dislike button was the insanely negative reception Ghostbusters (2016) and Call of Duty Infinite Warfare's trailers got (both were in the top 5 most disliked videos on Youtube, with GB (2016) holding the crown until CoD IW's trailer showed up).
It was done to appease corporations, but in the process, it's gotten bad actors to put up scammy DIY and fix videos online with the viewer having no means on knowing its overall reliability.
Shanix@reddit
Genuine question: why would 5 year old trailers be the main reasoning behind removing the dislike button? Not even Youtube is that slow.
Hakairoku@reddit
It's not Youtube being slow, it's advertisers pointing it out as a detriment on why they shouldn't be putting their promotional material on Youtube. Ghostbusters (2016)'s trailer in particular and how it got downvoted to hell was one of the factors of the movie's poor performance on its first week, alongside the movie just being actually bad.
Shanix@reddit
Right but why would they care? It was five years old at the time, no one cared about it.
I mean, if you believe media companies hold grudges like that, I guess it makes sense. It's very silly and not real, but in that fantasyland it makes sense.
Hakairoku@reddit
Grudges? The fuck are you talking about? it's about money. Google loses in haggling when companies bring up points like these, the Adpocalypse was driven by the same reason hence why alot of Youtubers are forced to censor swear words, since brands like Coca-Cola don't want to be associated with Youtubers that aren't family friendly.
Why would Sony, Columbia or Activision want to advertise on Youtube when the platform has videos that show metrics that are costing them heavily in terms of PR?
I never once brought up emotions or grudges in any of my points, if anyone's in "fantasyland" here, it's you.
Shanix@reddit
Okay, so explain to me how they lose money from dislikes on a trailer from five years ago. I don't need hard numbers, just the rough economics of how a movie that's already released on disc & been on sale and a game that's already received 99% of its lifetime revenue are so financially impacted by high-dislike trailers from five years ago.
Does it? Actually?
You've been very clear with your idea that Youtube removed dislikes after being pressured by companies for trailers with abnormally high dislikes years after they came out. That's what a grudge is. C'mon man, don't be silly.
VenditatioDelendaEst@reddit
/u/sysKin is failing to communicate, or you are failing to understand, that what he's talking about is that that incident served as an example of the kind of thing corporate customers would want to avoid. Imagine a steady drip, drip, drip of it coming up in negotiations over and over.
sysKin@reddit
advertising company puts trailer on youtube
youtubers collectively decide to downvote it and enjoy the dopamine hit of seeing the downvote number go up
news outlets all report on the phenomenon, citing the downvote number being bigger than last month's downvote number
advertising company is pissed at the negative PR from the trailer, and in particular some random executives at the company are probably trying to shift blame around to avoid getting fired
Youtube has only one purpose: make it maximally easy and safe for advertising executives to give them most money, at minimum effort.
nicuramar@reddit
You guys are just stating speculation as facts :p
PorchettaM@reddit
I doubt he's shadow banned, he's just gotten a lot less active.
If you listen to his rants from the past year or so he's mentioned wanting to scale down his public activity, due to some mix of personal circumstances and cynicism about the viability of RtR in the US. Looking at his channel now, his output has accordingly gone down drastically over the past ~3 months.
Specialist-Hat167@reddit
Not this nutjob
cathoderituals@reddit
Using the illusion of ‘competitive advantage’ by trying to make devices as inaccessible and sometimes proprietary as possible, with the real aim being to milk people out of putting down more cash to replace stuff. Dell is especially notorious for this crap.
See also: planned obsolence, often by cost cutting using cheap garbage components, ensuring you’ll have to replace stuff more quickly. This used to be more common on motherboards and other components than it is now, which is part of what led to the whole capacitor plague debacle way back and killed at least Abit, but it’s still super common with consumer electronics.
mb194dc@reddit
You can buy parts for non Apple stuff on ebay and it's easy to do or you can probably find local shop and pay them to.
hayek-sparrow@reddit (OP)
I have been following right to repair news for past few years focusing on battery replacement by user. This year has been the quietest in terms of news reported (excluding iPhone 16 news). This is the first proper news (even if it is op-ed) after this arstechnica piece.
I found some useful information from Right to Repair Europe youtube channel. Their latest video describes current state, and one of their other videos has some useful insights: The future of repair: EU regulation on phones and tablets unmasked [Starts at 4min:9sec]
TL;DR The state of user replaceable battery in flagship smartphones and tablets is still very unclear.