• lechekaflan@lemmy.worldOP
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    10 hours ago

    Yeah, and one would get more gold by panning sand from a river somewhere in West Papua.

    Destroying several tons of ewaste to get at almost nothing.

    • Justifier@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      Go look up what happens to wannabe prospectors operating without license, at least in the USoA

      Heck even the videos of gold/gem/geode prospectors I’ve watched make odd offhand comments about sicking police on tresspassers

    • fonix232@fedia.io
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      9 hours ago

      You’re presuming that all that ewaste is actually still usable - but in many cases the parts are discarded not because they’re old but because they’re broken.

      Are you suggesting that we hold onto old, broken crap just because you can’t bear to see recycling in progress?

      • lechekaflan@lemmy.worldOP
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        9 hours ago

        I mean the futility of mining for gold in ewaste. The scrappers have gone through older processors, and now they’re getting the later processors from some 10-15 years ago that have much less gold.

        • fonix232@fedia.io
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          7 hours ago

          So, again, what should happen with ewaste? should we just chuck it in landfill?

          it might have less gold, but recycling is recycling, you got to use as much of the raw material that went in as you can, precisely to reduce the waste itself.

          as for CPUs from 10-15 years ago… see if it was some proprietary system from the 70s-90s that’s impossible to emulate and only a handful units remain, I’d understand your outrage. But we’re talking about CPUs from the height of the computer boom, the true internet era, when even the least common model is available in the number of millions TODAY… That’s no longer a retro system you’re restoring, you’re literally upset about low performance, high power use hardware that has better alternative today, being recycled. Which has to be the stupidest thing I’ve read today…

          Like, quite literally, architectures and hardware design changed so little since 2010-2015. Aside from RISC-V making a comeback, it’s pretty much been linear predicted improvements on all fronts. Gone are the days of experimenting with architectural changes, experimental platforms that are super unique, and so on. Literally any game or software you can think of when it comes to a 10-15 year old device can run on today’s devices because we kinda plateaued around 2016-2018 at most, and compatibility hasn’t really shifted in any major way. Apple went for ARM instead of x86, but Rosetta is still there, so even ancient Mac apps work. Literally anything you could do on hardware from 10-15 years ago, you can do on modern hardware the exact same way, but more performant and using less resources.

          So what kind of “retro preservation” are you doing exactly?

        • PumaStoleMyBluff@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          What’s the alternative? Throw it in a landfill? Keep it carefully organized in a massive clean-room warehouse with hundreds of thousands of shelves?