Honestly, the 'minor junk' has gotten so much better in quality, too. We got some kiddie light up shoes that we bought more than six months ago, and the LEDs and batteries in there are still going strong. The cheap RC car we got a year ago also still runs on the initial AA batteries.

Such a setup would have been in the hundos of dollars even 25 years ago

Don't you just pee on a stick, no electronics involved?

Why sell a pee on a stick for $1 at 50c profit when you can sell one with a computer for $10 for $5 profit.

Does that really count as "running Doom on X" ?

I've bought a few pregnancy tests in my life, and never an electronic one. Not sure they were even for sale. They were definitely not pushed prominently in the shops. I see talks about them online much more than I ever see them offline. Are electronic pregnancy tests one of those American obsessions?

A quick Google tells me electronic versions of that are common though. Weird. I've never seen those.

Better in at least two ways:

(A) Your phone can run much more sophisticated software and has a great camera.

(B) Less waste.

And a third way: now everybody knows you are pregnant. /s

Meanwhile smartphones have enabled this trend writ large with devices now entirely dependent on surveillance-laden someone-else's-computer-connected throwaway apps that are only meant to work long enough to churn to the next product revision.

But back to the hardware, the hardware disposability isn’t a new phenomenon but it’s still a big problem and a catchy phrase to help bring more attention to the throw away nature of it would be a good start.

What really needs to be implemented is some kind of regulation on product features like built-in wear items and irreplaceable batteries, as well as software deprecation.

There are a number of ways it could be implemented that could effectively discourage these practices, just some possible ideas:

I think a recycling program similar to many states’ recycling deposits could work really well. Each product gets a recycling serial number, customers return them to a collection center and get paid a certain percentage of the original sale price/MSRP, perhaps that percent would go down the older the item is. The refund is paid for by the original manufacturer.

But just because they are coming up with new models every week, doesn't mean that producing last week's model was a waste in the same way that replacing a physical product every week would be a waste.

This month's Linux kernel version builds on last month's version. Similarly, most of the work that goes into today's LLM is recycled from yesterday's.

https://dayssincelastjavascriptframework.com/

vibe coding and LLM will only turbocharge this

Ah yes, Next.js, still producing stupid bad HTML more than six years after it was reported.

So, you pay over 200 kB of JavaScript just for the “in about 12 hours” text to be recomputed once a second. As far as I can see, that’s the only dynamic behaviour.

For some reason unclear to me I went ahead and made a more sensible version (with dead code stripped and about two tiny material changes in CSS or text, see if you can spot them), and, minified, it’s under 1350 bytes with everything but the favicon inline. In other words, more than a kilobyte smaller than the original markup, despite embedding the functionality of an extra 213 kB of JavaScript and CSS.

  
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You can reasonably model it as a closed system in terms of matter. But it's very open in terms of energy.

There's practically unlimited space in landfills to take up any garbage we can produce. Later, when you need the materials, you can invest energy to mine your landfill.

I'm not saying we should do that or that it's a good idea. My point is that 'earth is a closed system in terms of matter' is a much weaker and less profound statement than it sounds like.

What is limited is the amount of resources we can cheaply get access to in the short run. Similarly while landfill space is practically unlimited, there's a limit to how much our various ecosystems can take, if we just dump our garbage and emissions into them directly.

The latter aspect encompasses eg releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. But also putting plastics in the ocean, where it might do real damage. (As compared to having the plastic sit around in a land fill.)

The biosphere isn't closed: it regularly exchanges material with the rest of the giant ball of matter.

The qualification in parens is just there to take care of the objection that no matter how hard we try, we won't be able to eradicate all life on earth with current technology. But we can make life pretty miserable for humans with current technology.

The benefit to us doesn't have to be in any monetary sense. Just the satisfaction of knowing there's a beautiful forest would count.

(Even the worst scenarios of global warming are rounding errors compared to the energy of the sun that hits the earth every day.)

In any case, 'closed system' specifically refers to matter. Energy is allowed in or out. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolated_system and see the little graphic on the top right.

the way people seem to forget something after they've scrolled past it.

Spend tons of money on analytics to predict what to move on and when to cash out.

The term hasn’t been coined but the economy it describes is decades old.

No, we have enshitification.