For a mobile device, I'm not sure I would let that much data stack up unique to the device. Pictures/video I would try to do backups on a PC before it got to that.
None of it is unique to the device — I have backups of everything — but I still want the photos and videos on the new phone.
As long as some little bitch keeps modding down my factual posts
Well I shared the thread including your thought with Grok, and it said this:
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Here’s my actual, unbiased take on the technical debate (no Elon worship, no green hype, just physics and engineering reality as of 2025).
The original Slashdot skeptic is repeating a criticism that was 100% correct for the classic 1970s–2000s “hot dry rock” (HDR) projects (Los Alamos, Rosemanowes, Soultz 2000s era, etc.). Those really were conduction-limited. You drilled two wells a few hundred meters apart into 200–250 C granite, fracked a small volume, and watched the reservoir cool in months because heat was only replenishing by slow conduction through intact rock ( 2–3 W/mK). The recoverable fraction was tiny, and the impedance kept rising. That’s why HDR basically died commercially for 20 years.
Superhot / supercritical geothermal (400–450 C target, aiming for >500 C) is genuinely trying to escape that trap, and the physics does allow it—if everything works. Here’s why the critique no longer fully applies:
Energy density jumps by ~10× once you cross the critical point (374 C, 221 bar).
A kilogram of supercritical water at 500 C and 300 bar carries roughly 2,800–3,000 kJ/kg of usable enthalpy, versus ~300 kJ/kg for 250 C liquid water steam conversion in conventional geothermal. That alone reduces the mass flow (and therefore the parasitic pumping power and cooling load on the rock) by an order of magnitude for the same electrical output.
Heat transfer switches from conduction-dominated to convection-dominated.
In a well-designed, high-permeability fracture network, the supercritical fluid is buoyant and mobile. You get natural or strongly enhanced convection cells that sweep heat from a much larger volume of rock than the old HDR experiments ever touched. Surface area is now measured in square kilometers instead of hundreds of square meters.
Heat recharge rate in volcanic settings is completely different.
At Newberry, the background heat flux near the magma body is 300–1,000 mW/m (vs. ~80 mW/m continental average). Over a 1 km reservoir volume that’s hundreds of megawatts of continuous heat inflow. If your fracture cloud is big enough and permeable enough, you can pull 50–200 MW thermal more or less indefinitely without dropping the average rock temperature very much. (Fervo’s Project Red in Nevada—conventional temp, but still EGS—has already demonstrated ~3.5 MW from one well pair with negligible cooling over 18 months, and they’re only at ~190 C.)
Real remaining risks that the skeptic would be right to highlight:
Can you actually create and maintain a large, high-permeability fracture network at 500+ C and 10–20 km depth (or even 4–6 km near volcanoes) without it short-circuiting or sealing up with mineral precipitation? We don’t have field proof yet at those conditions.
Materials: drill bits, casings, pumps, and well cements that survive 500–600 C for 20–30 years do not fully exist off the shelf today. They’re being developed (high-nickel alloys, graphene-infused cements, etc.), but it’s expensive and unproven at scale.
Induced seismicity near an active volcano is non-trivial. Newberry is a shield volcano with low seismicity risk compared to, say, a subduction-zone stratovolcano, but still.
Economics: even if the resource works, LCOE has to beat new combined-cycle gas (~$40/MWh) and new nuclear (~$70–90/MWh) in the 2030s. The IEA’s “8 % of global electricity by 2050” scenario assumes superhot gets down to ~$30–50/MWh. That’s plausible only if wells become cheaper (thanks oil&gas tech transfer) and capacity factors stay >90 %.
Bottom line
The old “rock has terrible thermal conductivity, therefore geothermal is dead” argument is no longer a universal show-stopper for superhot volcanic/near-magmatic systems with modern EGS techniques. The physics really does flip in your favor above ~400–450 C. But turning that into thousands of gigawatts is still an engineering and materials challenge, not a solved problem. Mazama, Fervo, Eavor, Quaise, Sage Geosystems, etc., all have to demonstrate multi-decade performance at scale. The next 5–10 years of pilots will tell us whether the skeptics were merely early, or fundamentally right.
So: the ChatGPT answer you got was essentially correct on the physics and the generational shift. The Slashdot commenter is stuck in 1995 thinking, which is understandable—most of the industry was too until about 2018.
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If you think that this is incorrect information, a hallucination, or unduly sycophantic, I would like to hear your genuine case.
All the extraneous bullshit Microsoft added to the start menu is always lurking in memory for performance reasons.
Fear of facts is a sign of cowardice
School issued devices often don't permit installing arbitrary apps, only those on the approved list.
Most iPhone owners didn't buy them outright. They got them "free" with their plan. Consequently out in the real world I commonly see people with old iPhones with cracked screens. They can't afford to replace them, we don't have an Apple store anywhere near here, etc.
The tariff revenues are needed to cover the tax cuts for the wealthy instituted at the same time, so no.
"An employer can only pay the workers what their output is worth, so if your industry is producing things that are difficult to sell, then you're not going to get a good paying job"
You're blaming the victim. If the employer's plan doesn't include paying a reasonable wage then their plan is crap and they need to go out of business so that someone with a better plan can succeed them.
"The experience of Detroit should be a warning to those who believe that this economic law can be avoided; the car makers sold the same stuff year after year whilst Japanese and German producers made ever better stuff."
That's not because they couldn't do better. They chose not to and depended on regulatory capture instead, preventing others from bringing more superior products to the market. Again it's the employer's fault and no one else's.
Caldera Linux was first released in 1997, which is 28 years ago. Slackware Linux goes back 32 years. Red Hat Linux was 30 years ago now. Hard to believe. I first used Red Hat 5.1 28 years ago during the libc to glibc transition. KDE 1.0 came out about that same time and was a huge leap forward in Linux desktop usability for new users. Also StarOffice 5. Memory lane.
Thank you for your reply. I can agree not all premium phone users are on the upgrade treadmill. I also bought what was billed as a flagship for its time, but it's 4 years old now and I'm not really feeling the need to upgrade to something newer. My impression was upgrading wasn't such a pain if you had a device that was recent and in high demand still as carriers seem to love running promos with trade-ins, and only mainstream makes/models tend to be eligible.
Transferring a terabyte of data from one phone to another takes the better part of an hour even at real-world USB 3 speeds.
There's only 2 reasons to have a new piece of hardware rather than make this an app on your phone:
1)It adds new sensors that your phone doesn't have (yet) that will enable new functionality. This won't be the case, as there's no usecase for it
2)It adds a new IO methods that aren't possible on the phone. AR goggles might do this. An AI assistant doesn't, it's all audio and voice.
This is basically just going to be replacable with a bluetooth microphone paired to an app on your phone. Which means nobody is going to buy it- even if they can actually find a usecase people want AI for (doubtful).
The greater good...for who?
People who aren't you, but who are near you. They also matter. We all know quite well you don't care about those people, as you've let us know on numerous occasions, but they do matter.
- Owners of flagship devices concerned with their image and having the latest tech would be more likely to replace devices more often to get access to the latest gear, perhaps handing the old device down to a spouse or child if they aren't getting a trade-in credit for it.
Counterpoint: My phone history includes:
Assuming I keep the 15 Pro for 3 years (the prior minimum), that's 4.75 years average. I also buy the device with the largest capacity, and always wish it were bigger. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't increase capacity quickly enough for upgrading to help with that.
- Owners of cheap phones more focused on value. Top end features are nice but a luxury for something that has core essential functions for them (acting as a communication device). They lack the disposable income to replace devices as quickly, and wish to get the most return (usable life) for their purchase. They are more likely to keep a device until it becomes unusable (damaged, obsolete on mobile network, etc).
Upgrading is expensive and it is a pain in the a**. So there are multiple reasons to keep a device until it dies. Some people who buy flagship phones have the same concerns.
The main difference is that flagship phones typically get security updates for five to seven years. Low-end phones are often previous generation hardware that is still for sale, and may get security updates for as little as one year from the date of purchase. So unless you're willing to put your entire life at risk by using a phone that has gaping security holes, low-end phones are often false economy, purchased by people who see the price tag and are too broke to afford a better one, who then end up paying for replacement after replacement at a higher rate because they can't afford a phone that will actually last five or six years.
So I would expect low-end phones to get junked every couple of years, and for high-end phones to get junked when support is dropped, assuming that the owners know that the phone is no longer supported, and the rest of them just end up in a giant botnet, and they replace their phones because they're bogged down with malware a few months to a year after they go out of support.
The Android vs. iPhone angle can be more of a toss-up. I would expect the iPhone group to be more on the image/latest-tech group, but iOS devices are generally longer-supported at the OS level, so there is less need to update to stay on a device getting patches. But the Android group might care less about being on a device still getting patches.
iPhone users keep their phones longer than Android users, on average. 61% of iPhone users have owned their phone for more than 2 years, versus just 43% of Android users.
So patch availability does appear to have a significant impact on how long people keep their devices.
Maybe, maybe not. However given that we know who the poster is and what he has contributed to the Arduino community, I would give what he says a lot more weight than what you say!
Although I do have to ask him, would it be okay if Qualcom took Arduino in the direction you've taken Teensy, with a proprietary, closed-source,and un-clone-able boot loader to prevent clones of the new Arduino boards? I'm quite torn on that one.
Neckties strangle clear thinking. -- Lin Yutang
