Why is this sad? I’m having a hard time understanding the thought you are communicating. It seems cool that a CTO had fun and that motivated him to enable ADB for everyone?
Just that the default reality is the hardware you buy belonging to someone else, who only really sold you a license to use the hardware on limited terms until the manufacturer drops support
People within Meta have been campaigning for this for _years_; even people as high up as John Carmack were pushing for open bootloaders on deprecated hardware (and he achieved that on the Go headset, but not as a general policy)
Because the idea that something this obvious occurred to the CTO first is very, very unlikely. What is more probable was that leadership ignored people who disagreed until the CTO convinced himself it was a good idea and went ahead with it.
Because it could’ve just as easily never happened despite how simple of a feature it is to enable. That happens all the time. Tons of “useless” tech out there that can be made useful with 5min of effort but the incentives aren’t there, so they end up in landfills.
The default position should be trying to make devices useful as long as possible, even if they want to qualify it with “so long as it’s sufficiently reasonable to do so.”
Ideally the workers. But failing that, legislation would probably be a good thing to at least try to reduce e-waste from closed, discarded devices. Like, if a device line is at its end of line from the company, then they might as well make it open for the community. They're not supporting it anymore, after all, but someone might want to.
Would such legislation be perfect for dealing with these kinds of things? Of course not, but it would be better.
Who are these workers? Who should be listened to if there are opposite views?
What if recycle these devices causes more waste elsewhere? says the devices have to be heavier, using more materials. Also, more legislation mean more bureaucracy, less efficiency in general. Who is to say there is no waste in that?
I'm not against legislation when it makes sense. But "..Of course not, but it would be better"? It's always easy to speak from the comfort of HN.
I feel like this is reducing the problem to a simpler one. Of course you'd expert larger product decisions to be made by a technical leader. The problem here is that devices being locked down is something being fought against, repairability is a big topic for discussion, and some companies even try to play into it pretty hard, like Framework and seemingly Valve.
Yet, to this Meta CTO, this wasn't really a concern until he vibecoded something and decided everyone should be able to have this fun. It say's something about his (and probably other people in his position) awareness of public opinion and discussion.
Even sadder. Turns out all we needed to not have our old devices locked down was the CTO having some fun
Why is this sad? I’m having a hard time understanding the thought you are communicating. It seems cool that a CTO had fun and that motivated him to enable ADB for everyone?
Just that the default reality is the hardware you buy belonging to someone else, who only really sold you a license to use the hardware on limited terms until the manufacturer drops support
This generalizes to “good news is bad news because things must be bad by default for good things to be news”
as other has said, it is sad that it took that a CTO had fun to open it up, and not the rest of the public discourse about things like this.
I'm happy he had fun and all for him making decisions based on it. But it shouldn't have taken this.
Why didn’t it occur to someone that this would be fun to do within the CTO having to realize this
Why didn't it occur to someone without occurring to someone first?
People within Meta have been campaigning for this for _years_; even people as high up as John Carmack were pushing for open bootloaders on deprecated hardware (and he achieved that on the Go headset, but not as a general policy)
Because the idea that something this obvious occurred to the CTO first is very, very unlikely. What is more probable was that leadership ignored people who disagreed until the CTO convinced himself it was a good idea and went ahead with it.
Because it could’ve just as easily never happened despite how simple of a feature it is to enable. That happens all the time. Tons of “useless” tech out there that can be made useful with 5min of effort but the incentives aren’t there, so they end up in landfills.
The default position should be trying to make devices useful as long as possible, even if they want to qualify it with “so long as it’s sufficiently reasonable to do so.”
It shouldn’t be left to the whim of a C-suite denizen.
If the leadership of a company aren't the right people to make decisions about what that company does, who is?
Are you advocating for legislation? How would that work?
Ideally the workers. But failing that, legislation would probably be a good thing to at least try to reduce e-waste from closed, discarded devices. Like, if a device line is at its end of line from the company, then they might as well make it open for the community. They're not supporting it anymore, after all, but someone might want to.
Would such legislation be perfect for dealing with these kinds of things? Of course not, but it would be better.
Who are these workers? Who should be listened to if there are opposite views?
What if recycle these devices causes more waste elsewhere? says the devices have to be heavier, using more materials. Also, more legislation mean more bureaucracy, less efficiency in general. Who is to say there is no waste in that?
I'm not against legislation when it makes sense. But "..Of course not, but it would be better"? It's always easy to speak from the comfort of HN.
*all we needed was the technical leader of the company that produced the product to...
the same could be said for pretty much any change or update rolled out by any of these companies.
I feel like this is reducing the problem to a simpler one. Of course you'd expert larger product decisions to be made by a technical leader. The problem here is that devices being locked down is something being fought against, repairability is a big topic for discussion, and some companies even try to play into it pretty hard, like Framework and seemingly Valve.
Yet, to this Meta CTO, this wasn't really a concern until he vibecoded something and decided everyone should be able to have this fun. It say's something about his (and probably other people in his position) awareness of public opinion and discussion.