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As someone who's tinkered with flashing linux into tablets I can 100% vouch for this. Fun to tinker with. A nightmare to use for real
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And a firmware that is maintained and automatically updated.
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Yes, the terms "kernel" or "security updates" don't exist in the article at all.

Everything without upstream kernel support is inherently vulnerable.

This is why most phones are unfortunately not general purpose computers. They don't run the software you want, but only work on closed binary blobs hardcoded against specific kernel versions.

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If only we had some magical software that could compile the vanilla Linux kernel, diff it with the vendor kernel, reverse engineer the differences and patch the original sources for you while you sleep...
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I’m out of the loop on this sort of workflow. I guess this is referencing the LLMs super reverse engineering capabilities. They are impressive but how much would that sort of task cost? There isn’t a ton of headroom if we’re going to beat a Pi, right? I mean they aren’t super cheap anymore, but you also have to factor in the phone.
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You can reverse quite a large program on a Claude $100 sub if you already have one lying around. I have to assume it's cheaper if you have the sources of a kernel that's 99.99% the same.

In the long run I also imagine this sort of thing being something someone does once per phone model and uploads it.

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Often enough for those android devices you already have the sources for most components but only compatible with some age old android kernel and it's "just" porting it and poking around. LLMs are quite good at this.
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Have you done this successfully? Would appreciate any notes/prompts you could share
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i'm not them, but i'm doing it right now. it's going well. i'll probably write and post something about it soon (in one or two weeks, because the phone's still being ported (the phone is already very functional, but i want to port more things)).
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Yeah like its a weird article idea where the pi is expensive compared to an old phone which you have for free. But that doesn't make the used phone cheaper. You can just as well say why use an expensive PI when I have an old computer with a 1680ti and 12 gigs of ram. Like yeah okay but what does that have to do with Pi? Entirely different device classes imo
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Or what about an old Pi?
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Why get an expensive Pi when I have an old free Pi? My issue is with the expensive qualifier. Anything is expensive compared to something you have lying around for free.

If you want to compare the expensive factor, at least use some kind of cost to compare like the price of a used phone etc or the cost of a basic server to see how they differ.

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> Yeah like its a weird article idea where the pi is expensive compared to an old phone which you have for free. But that doesn't make the used phone cheaper.

Perhaps not in the first world reality you live in, where you can buy a rpi 4 for a couple of bucks. But in third world countries they aren't readily available, and usually the imported prices exceed that of a decent PC.

You can find an old used phone for almost half the price that is still good enough for many daily processing tasks.

> You can just as well say why use an expensive PI when I have an old computer with a 1680ti and 12 gigs of ram.

That is a logical fallacy. A high end PC and an old used phone that you can buy in Ebay are in entirely different price ranges.

> Like yeah okay but what does that have to do with Pi? Entirely different device classes imo

Entirely different device classes, yeah, but both can execute the very same functions. The difference is one is much cheaper and you get 2x the processing power than the "more specialized" other. You can use both as local llm, serv ers, home automation... and even GPIO if you expose some wires from the phone.

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1. I don't live in the "first world". I own a pi 4 and have a couple of cellphones.

2. Again, "cheaper" is a valid qualifier if you compare costs. Phones vrs pi is not what I am talking about, free vrs second hand (not free) is what I am talking about. Something cannot be cheaper than free so comparing costs is kind of weird.

Sorry for any offense this semantic may have caused.

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The article only talked about buying used phones, not using phones you already have.
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You're correct but they did lay out the table oddly because the first line has the price for the Pi but not the phone, which made it look like it was assuming they already had the phone.
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There is also a high chance you already have an old phone that's nearly worthless to resell
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