Prefacing with: Yes yes yes, we know, you hate AI. You are truly unique and that joke about removing all previous instructions is just as funny today as it was two years ago.
Moving on.
I… honestly thought this was a joke while watching the youtube video. That said, I think this is simultaneously an excellent use of the fuzzy search/human language capabilities of LLMs AND has absolutely no good use case? And I am very wary of the input training data.
For the first part? There is a lot of value in being able to communicate what is broken without actually being an expert. That is honestly a big personal use of chatgpt et al for me. List symptoms as I understand it and then get that translated into domain expert language so I can know what terms to search.
But… I question the audience for that. How many people who can only say “sound don’t work” are going to be comfortable jamming spudgers into seams and working on technically live electronics because the battery is ten layers deep? The youtube video uses an example of not being able to find the oil filter after taking the plate off and… I would very much suggest paying to get that replaced if you are in a situation like that since you can cause a LOT of long term issues with your car if you screw that up.
Which has always been the dirty secret of Right To Repair. The vast majority of what those activists are asking for… aren’t for the end user. It is for the repair shops. End users are not going to be swapping out their mac heat sinks or whatever because that requires special tools and a lot of expertise. But repair shops have done that for decades. And, in theory, that will be cheaper for the end user. In practice… there are a lot of reasons to know how to change your own oil filter, if you catch my drift.
And this is VERY much targeted at that end user.
And the last part is the training data. I’ve used a LOT of the ifixit guides over the years. Some are good. Some are… better than nothing. There are a lot of cases where I would have loved to get more detail on an intermediate step. But… where is that detail coming from?
So… yeah.
This is a pretty great use case for AI. Instruction manuals exist for almost every product online, so models would be trained on them. Most tech is very similar to each other, so in the context of hardware repair, it should be a reasonable tool.
I feel like iFixit has always talked out of both sides of their mouth. It’s one of those situations where it becomes clearer over longer and longer timescales.
They are a business, not a non-profit organization.
God dammit iFixIt WHY? I liked you.
RIP iFixit, you were great, had a good run.
Oh that’s great your device is wrecked.
Let’s fix it right now: Have you tried turning it off then on again ?
Of course wish I coud F myself. I will give you the definitive solution, with guaranteed results : put it in rice.
I wouldn’t mind having the free tier in a local model form…
Prefacing with: Yes yes yes, we know, you hate AI
“URH SO WE DU IT ANYWAYHS! HURHURHURHURUURHURUHRH”
Fuck you, iFixit.
That’s a post body text written by OP you goofball
To be clear:
EVERYONE should have a cheap set of electronics screwdriver bits (and the ifixit kit is really nice. So are the much cheaper knockoffs from the same factories. Up to you if you care). And having basic soldering skills and knowing when you can get away with heat shrink connectors is a really useful skill. You’ll be repairing the headphones the dog ripped off your desk in no time and save yourself a lot of money.
But when you are listening to people tlak about how this cell phone needs to be repairable or how you NEED to have the DAC be a separate board so it can be removed and replaced? Same with demanding chip diagrams for that SOC in your laptop. Ask yourself: How likely is it that you will EVER do a repair like that? How often do you actually hold onto hardware? And how much do you trust the guy with a shop in the mall to not scam you on this?
I am generally a strong supporter of Right To Repair, even when it is something I, as a consumer, am never going to even consider doing. But it is also worth remembering that a lot of the “this is horrible because it is all computers” is still rooted in racism and xenophobia. And it is always worth looking at what a repair actually will cost versus buying a new one.
For example. Last year my dishwasher failed. I did some diagnostics, did some very deep cleans, and even opened it up. And I mostly narrowed it down to a failure in one of three parts. I looked up the price of those parts and… they were all most of the cost of a dishwasher on their own. And if I paid a professional to replace them, it would be well over the price of a new dishwasher. So… I could try and get lucky and replace the right one, by myself, on the first try… or I could just buy a new dishwasher during a holiday sale. And… damn I love my new dishwasher.
What about horrible computers is rooted in xenophobia (and racism which is a form of xenophobia)?
Much of it goes back to the 60s-80s when Western factories were largely outdated and realizing that East Asian factories were rapidly outpacing them and able to offer better products for MUCH cheaper. Rather than acknowledge they had become complacent and didn’t want to train their worekrs they instead focused on “made in America” bullshit and insisting that that new vacuum was no longer repairable. And… mostly that boils down to the idea that if you have vacuum tube transistors you can replace them easily whereas you can’t replace a transistor on a single chip.
But, as we have learned in the intervening decades, you can… just replace the board. And many of those evil computers in cars actually drastically increased repairability/maintainability because you can actually tune many aspects with a computer and get VERY useful data out of the sensors.
Because the reality is that you can make an SOC device that is INCREDIBLY repairable by focusing on how you do chip layout and what modules can be repaired. And you can make a multi-board setup that is immensely unrepairable by locking down parts with effectively DRM. And… there are also times where it actually does make sense to lock down/register those parts just like there are times it actually does make sense to glue the fuck out of that assembly.
But that is nuance. And nuance is for women and The Gays™. So buy American and purchase a radio that you can repair until the day you die! And then buy a new radio next year.
Oh, Im in northern europe and made in Japan / Taiwan / Korea / China (except lately for the last one) never had any such connotations. I remember Japan and West Germany/Germany as high standard. Still got some West Germany workshop tools I inherited from grandpa, and those might be made to US standards due to US influence in the german reconstruction effort.
Made in the US items was uncommon as I grew up, only item I remember being made there was a frustrating us clock radio as a child due to it never keeping time right (possible by using the mains frequency as time keeper rather than a crystal). I am born late 80s.
Western Europe had an “advantage” in that, for whatever reason, many of their factories were rebuilt in the 1950s or later. So a lot of the tooling was closer to Japan (who ALSO weirdly had to rebuild a lot of factories in the back half of the 20th…) and China (who were more or less industrializing during that period). But all the jokes about the electrical system in (Western) European cars being a mess is “truth in television” due to having a lot of the tooling but not the expertise.
