The problem you point out has been known in the Linux community for literally decades and is the reason why Red Hat Linux was created and any company can, right know, get an Enterprise version of it with an Enterprise support contract.

That said, over the years I worked in seriously large multinational companies which used Linux and other open source products like Apache extensively on the server side (pretty much all such machines had it) so at least on the server side things did change massively from back in the day when companies would get Sun servers with SunOS or IBM server with Minix rather than generic server PCs with Linux due to that rationale you stated.

In fact, it has also become a common thing in much smaller companies, though maybe not the small and micro-sized ones.

The reality on the ground at least on the server side and for infrastructure software is that companies did find a way to deal with the problem of not being able to get support contracts from many of the OSS apps makers, and did so either by just paying some company specialized in supporting it or by having their own developers - after all, it’s exactly the thing with OSS that any developer can change it hence you’re not limited to paying for support from a specific company that makes the software.

And once the barrier to payment is that low, well, microtransactions in games naturally follow.

• “Tap your card now for a character boost for this boss fight”

I have a Samsung tablet which I bought years ago. It’s was full of unremovable useless software and after a maybe 4 year of updates it was unusable because each version just took more and more space to the point that eventually it would fit maybe 2 or 3 applications on top of what came with it and nothing more.

To give it new life I had to install a non-official version of LineageOS compile by some random guy which has problems and will even crash once in a while, and even then it’s better than using the original Samsung version of Android in it.

More recent Samsung tablets and phones can’t even be bootloader unlocked to install an alternative to the Android they ship.

I’m not interest in from companies whose products are are activelly managed to force customers to buy replacements for perfectly good hardware.

We trully live in an Age of Technological Devolution.

And Environmental Devolution.

And Political Devolution.

And Economic Devolution.

But the richer have never before been this rich.

IMHO, people who buy smart fridges from Samsung deserve this shit.

It’s extremelly hard to get a TV which isn’t smart nowadays, but that’s not the case (yet) for fridges.

Or selling data about who is in that kitchen and when which it obtained using a mic and a speaker plus some basic echo-location tech or some other intrusive shit like that, or maybe just selling info on what you buy and when.

It doesn’t matter.

If they vibe code their software, even the most stupidly stable parts of the code that once made nobody should touch, ever, like say the part that decides when to turn on the compressor to reach the desired temperature, can be changed by the code generator everytime they decide to add a totally unrelated feature, and end up with bugs, possibly the stupidest shit imaginable of the “nobody would ever make this mistake” kind.

If they can push fresh firmware into it externally, they can fuck up ANYTHING at ANY TIME. It’s the ability of replacing the code in it at any time that’s the problem - if firmware can be updated by the manufactures at any time your food and your health (if you end up eating food that spoiled without you noticing) has a constantly active risk vector which is linked to the quality of the software development process of that manufacturer.

If shit isn’t exposed to the Net, shit doesn’t need firmware updates for security reasons and if a user wants to update the firmware to get some new feature then they will do it willingly in their own time, knowing that the firmware was updated and thus much more likely to notice things not working properly (and much less likely to keep on doing firmware updates in the future if the software development process of the device maker is shit and their firmware updates keep fucking up their devices).

The reason is that companies when they make “smart” products throw everything and the kitchen sink into it in order to justify the higher price of that version of their product - their remote control app needs to look like it does lots of things so that it feels like it’s actually worth it, hence it’s filled with needless crap just to make it look feature-rich.

It’s a business and marketing reason rather than a technical or user requirements reason.

The fridge itself only activates the compressor when it determines it needs it (typically based on a termostat and the temperature you chose for it) so in a digital fridge that would part of its software since the “desired temperature” setting is itself from some kind of digital input rather than a hardware knob, and in a “Smart” Fridge it makes sense that value can also come from the outside (likely a smart phone app).

I mean, setting the desired temperature ss a stupid near-zero-value feature (how often are you away from the fridge and actually need to change that setting), but designers of smart shit throw all kinds of meaningless crap into it in order to justify the higher price for “smarts” - feature-wise those things are a mile wide and an inch deep.

So it makes sense that a firmware update for the fridge would include the whole code, including the part that just decides when to activate the compressor and hence that even such basic functionality can be hit by a such a bug, even if only indirectly - in a properly managed code base, it’s perfectly possibly that the code that activates the compressor itself based on the temperature setting is stable as fuck and never gets updated but the code upstream that sets the target temp from commands sent from a smartphone has been changed and is setting a stupid value, whilst if the thing is vibe coded all bets are off and even the most stable “there have been no feature changes here in 2 decades” areas of the code which only an idiot would touch can very well be changed by the code generator and now have bugs.

Trully what people really need in their lives are additional risk factors for their peace and quiet in exchange for little or no value.

I’m just happy that I’m moving in the very opposite direction, avoiding externally controlled computing devices like the plague and instead having my own stuff when I actually need some smarts on my stuff (which, at the moment, is mainly my TV media player).

We’ve recently had some big brownouts in the city and country I live in and those made me keenly aware of risks to my peace and quiet (for example, electronic payments don’t work if there’s no power, so if you don’t have actual cash on hand things can get pretty tricky) and nowadays there are way too many unnecessary dependencies on external entities in exchange for little, none or even negative value for us (don’t get me started on Smart TVs) - it’s long been the case that a big utility provider going down would be quite a pain in the arse, but nowadays lots of people’s risk exposure profile is so stupidly wide that “random company turning to vibe coding and sooner or later forcefully pushing an update that bricks your ‘smart’ device” or leaves your home network and digital devices one it wide open for people wanting to steal financial info from it, are maybe one of the biggest risks.

Por qué no los dos?

The makers of both Orange Pi and Banana Pi have been around for years, over a decade at least for Orange Pi.

In fact in my experience SBC makers tend to be quite stable, possibly because those thinks are a lot more technically complex than, say, an electric kettle.

Well, I went for an N100 myself (and recommended it) because of its low power consumption (it has a 15W TDR), which makes it a good choice for an always on device which is how I operate my Mini-PC because it’s also my home NAS.

That range of CPUs was design to consumer less power and most x86 CPUs consumer significantly more power than this.

We’re all supposed to believe that the rich are rich because of their own merit and the poor are poor because of their own lack of merit, so that we don’t force the rich contribute more to the public pot so that the poor aren’t poor.

So the relentless propaganda we’re bombarded with in the media is that the rich are great and amazing people who got to were they are due to their hard work and intelligence (notice how Bill Gate’s mother who was a member of the board of IBM was never mentioned in the press when talking about “his” success with Microsoft) whom we should all look up to whilst in the last couple of decades we’ve been seeing more and more in the rightwing press stories about how the poor are lazy and dependent on benefits (aka social security if in America).

The poor aren’t the ones who own TV Channels, Newspapers and (in countries that have that) end up in the boards of publicly owned TV Channels and Newspapers.

The EU Commission is nominated, not elected, with only confirmation votes in the EU Parliament for members other than its head.

Unsurprisingly, this executive organ whose members are chosen behind closed doors and not even by the democratically elected representatives of EU citizens has long been the most corrupt part of the EU, often pretty much selling the EU to large foreign companies known for giving non-executive board memberships and millionaire “consultancy” gigs to retired politicians.

The purpose of a Law is what it does, not what its proponents loudly claim it’s meant to do.

We don’t live in a meritocratic society, especially at the higher levels.

Right mommy, right daddy, right school, knowing the right people, right way of talking - that’s far more important to end up a CEO than competence.

Well, yeah, the problem with LLMs in a professional context is exactly that the second order effects of using them are so bad that they wipe out the direct effect gains (the time saving in creating the text).

It’s fine for entertainment if all you want is to be distracted for a while with some somewhat bland chewing-gum for the brain.

That’s my experience too.

That said at the higher end (Raspberry Pi 5) its actually cheaper to get a Mini-PC with a low-power intel chip like the N100 than a Pi and it’s more powerful, more extendable, more compatible, with a much better and well supported tech stack (because that’s an actual PC) and you get the whole device already, not just a board that you have to add the box and everything else to make a computer from.

Maybe at the level of the little SBCs the rp2350 is good value, but that stuff is more towards the embedded systems side (high end, though, beyond things like ESP32) than a general consumer computer.

Orange Pi, Banana Pi, plenty of other Chinese SBC makers who products don’t necessarilly have names ending in Pi. Tons of those in places like Aliexpress. You can even try a Risk-V architecture if you’re daring.

The problem is that their english language support is inferior, as is the software stack, plus the ecosystem is a lot smaller so there’s a lot less info on those from other people out there. That said, as far as I can tell all of them have at least one Linux distro (at the very least ARMbian), some having more distros.

Still, it would be fine if all you want is a small computer with HDMI to turn it into a media player using Linux and something like Kodi.

Alternativelly, just get a Mini-PC with a low power intel chip like the N100 - which is actually cheaper than a Raspberri Pi 5 whilst being more powerful and with better peripheral compatibility since it has a PC architecture - and put the Linux with Kodi in it. Sure, it uses more power because it’s not ARM, but not actually that much more (15w vs 8w for a Pi, if I remember it correctly).

Raspberri Pi devices are maybe twice the price of other devices with equivalent hardware, which means that the low-end low-power Mini-PCs are cheaper and yet more powerful and compatible than the high end Pi.

I have a mini PC just like that at home working as a TV Media Player (which a nice remote control and everything) and I even use it as a home server and home nas (remotelly controlled via web interfaces and SSH) since it’s has far more power than needed for just being a media player.