I don't think so either, as a native English speaker, I originally read this as my server now has phone capabilities, not my phone is now being used as a server.

I don't think it is, I'm also the latter and happened to assume the opposite. The article was exactly what I expected from the title.

I mean, turning a server rack into a phone just isn't something that makes any sense, so it didn't seem like a valid option to consider. I've thrown it at a few LLMs now to see what happens and they also make the same assumption with no extra info, that it's a server now being hosted on a phone. That's the statistics talking. It's very unlikely to be the opposite.

that title might be easier to parse, but it's less poetic and less attention grabbing

In that case it would still be more clear to say “my phone is my server now”.

The current title is just a bad English construction. Not a big deal and absolutely forgivable since I don’t expect everyone to know perfect English.

Yes, I think that’s a rewording of what I said. As you point out, the word “server” in the title refers to a role, not to a particular device. But that role is, for the writer, something that is already known, so it comes first.

This theme-followed-by-rheme is only a tendency, not a hard and fast rule. In casual conversation, people do tend to structure their sentences that way without even thinking about it. In writing or translation, though, a sentence might need to contain a lot of different elements and, in the process of arranging them, a writer might put the rheme before the theme. Readers might think the resulting sentence seems a bit awkward, but they probably won’t be able to pin down the reason. This “My server is a phone now” title was an exception, because (as the comments below show) some people were confused enough to remark on it.

It's like saying "my server is now white", a common thing people would say roughly a hundred years ago.

Me too.

This cliche of "only on hackernews people say interesting stuff" must die.

Accusing someone of click baiting to excuse your own ignorance. Hawker News?

It would be nice if servers had a small touch screen, since they cost nothing in comparison.

Like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ5MA685ApE ?

To me, "my server is now..." implies there was some server, it used to do server things, but now it has been repurposed to do something else.

When I read the title, I literally thought "wow, I've seen a lot of people make servers out of old unused phones, but this is the first time I've heard someone make a phone out of an old unused server!"

A phone is my server now.

> By saying "my server is now ..." implies a change

Except the original title is "my server is a phone now", not "my server is now...".

That's surprising to me. It's been a standard feature on laptops for 20 years.

Edit: Or I should say, it was 20 years ago. Maybe modern stuff is worse, but my M2 MacBook Air and Framework 13 Intel Core both power on without a battery.

This is true but lithium-ion batteries degrade even while not being charged or discharged, and this is worse at the extremes of the state of charge (including fully charged), and at higher temperature (and often a plugged in device is on constantly and therefore spends more time at a high temperature than it normally would), so it's still not great for the battery. A lot of devices have a mode where the batter is kept at a lower state of charge if it's been plugged in for a while to try to reduce this.

Some phones bypass the battery when plugged in, but not all do. I know it's advertised as a feature of some gaming phones because graphics-intensive gaming is one use case where you'd want to use the phone heavily while plugged in.

AFAIK this is rarity in smartphones and most are charged through battery, which is why those few which have it advertise their direct/bypass charging feature

> It will probably destroy this battery very quickly.

'Very quickly' seems to be measured in decades from what I see

Most people I know have their laptop docked, either near-permanently at home or taking it between home and a desk with dock (so it's nearly always plugged in when in use)

The 'servers' I've had were all old laptops - yes, with battery (don't have to buy a separate UPS if one is already included). I've now also had two non-server laptops that were plugged into power pretty much all the time. I treated my first laptop perfectly: taking out the battery anytime I'd be in a classroom for several hours and it was already full enough (you know, back when sliding out your battery was possible in the first place), but I'm not noticing any faster degradation on the systems I treat poorly. I'll activate the 80% cap function where it exists (that is, in the latest phones and my work laptop's UEFI config panel), but the evidence of it being helpful has yet to materialize

I have read that studies show that charging to 100% causes degradation and I trust those more than random people's anecdotes (and I'm a random person), but I'm starting to wonder if I've maybe just misunderstood the study results. Maybe it's like how smoking increases your chance for some cancers but you might also be fine in the end. I see people with plenty of much younger and better-treated batteries that can't sustain literally 30 seconds of use whereas mine are reasonably close to the new state (some haven't had many charge cycles, just sat at a stressy high voltage all the time, which was indeed supposed to destroy them), and I don't know how to explain that otherwise

What you can do, with some extra steps, is have Home Assistant installed (and have a Home Assistant server, I guess!) on the phone and use a smart power switch that's also associated with Home Assistant.

The phone's battery can be reported to Home Assistant, where an automation can be triggered to turn off power to the phone when the battery gets above a certain percentage and turned back on when it goes below.

Not the best solution, but certainly an alternative from messing around with trying to get the phone to work without a battery.

Couldn't you just have it charging on a time-regulated supply e.g. smart plug?

You could throw the phone in an ammo canister, if the wifi AP is close enough. When I was building hobby quadcopters, which requires several ~half-pound batteries that are a chemistry optimized for maximum power density, a lot of guys recommended steel ammo cans for battery storage.

> but it's a lot less annoying to just accept a small risk of a house fire.

Agree! But do get one or two of those "small automatic fire extinguisher" or whatever they are, that you can attach on stuff, for electrical panels and what not, and put right next to it together with a traditional fire alarm, and you're good to go :)

How many phones have you tested this with?

Hmmh. My Samsung Galaxy S4 doesn't boot w/o battery. Not sure, whether early in the boot process the presence of a battery is tested or whether there just isn't enough juice.

A further example of how stunningly naive this was: they wanted (external NMEA) GPS connected to it (and Bluetooth beacons when indoors, which had to be created for the project) so people could publish their real time location.

Modern dell desktops (like 8th gen+) idle around 10W. Raspberry pi isn’t saving much

also factoring in spare hardware. most people have more spare phones than PCs.

My server is an extremely quiet Xeon workstation: unlike 1U servers, workstation are typically quiet. The good thing with a Xeon workstation is that it supports ECC RAM only and there are plenty used. For there's no market for used Xeon systems, so you can find stuff like 22-cores / 44-threads CPUs for $25 or something.

Some mod Xeon systems to use regular PC PSU like Be Quiet! ones and Noctua fans, etc. but my HP Z440 workstation is so quiet already I didn't need to.

In my case it's an headless server and is sits between the vacuum cleaner and the cat's food: there are literally only two cables connected to it, the power cable and the ethernet cable.

I can live with the footprint of one tower.

I run many VMs and containers inside those VMs: Git server, pastebin, NAS, containerized/VM-isolated AI agents, etc. but I don't need it to be up 24/7. I basically only need those when I'm working. So electricity usage ain't a big concern to me as it's more like running 8/7.

I don't feel like I'm commuting in a pickup truck: I feel like I have the perfect machine for the task.

> I tried really hard to get it on 32GB but sadly the motherboard only has two slots and only supports 8GB DDR3 modules.

Buy a refurbished Xeon workstation with DDR4 RAM. If you're in the US or China they're basically free and if you're in the EU, they aren't too pricey (like you can definitely find ones for less than 200 EUR). Slap your double NVMe expansion card, your two NVMEs and your 3 3.5" spinning rust in it. If the workstation doesn't come with a Xeon with lots of cores, just buy one on eBay for $25.

What's the idle draw on that?

This reminded me about the recent Google blog post where they made a server farm out of a bunch of old phones:

"Prior to deployment, smartphones must be processed to remove all but the motherboard, which contains the core compute functionality. Note that the motherboard is responsible for the largest fraction of embodied carbon (approximately 50% based on internal carbon footprinting assessments), so this effort targets the most impactful components."

And they accomplished the author's first goal to run real GNU/Linux on the phones.

https://research.google/blog/a-low-carbon-computing-platform...

The new AGI goalpost will be "able to deploy Linux on everyone's old phone with drivers for all the hardware ".

Phones won't work without batteries. You need to make some hardware changes for them to keep working, it's not trivial.

What does "burn out" mean?

Doesn't the CPU throttle if the phone gets too hot?

Or maybe some parts like the eMMC aren't spec'd for things like constant logging?

Every system like that I've ever used has three fundamental problems:

1) It's optimized for the restaurant first, and the patrons second or not at all, and it shows.

2) Someone thinks "hey, we could sell ads on this", and now it's even more a piece of garbage. (This is also what happened with all the little kiosk-tablets on the tables at some restaurants. We just set them face-down on their screen and talk to a human.)

3) Most of them never anticipate unexpected problems. They might have an "order X" button, but they often don't even have a "call server" button. And when they do, it often doesn't work, because the other end isn't hooked up to something that gets people's attention.

The much lower-tech and more enjoyable solution I've seen used successfully many many times is a call button on the table. Press the button if you want service. Bonus if it has a "press this other button if you want to be left alone".

I always wondered how actually cheaper a QR menu is, compared for instance to an android tablet you set there or pass to the client so they order.

People immediately see the cost of a tablet, the issues with charging, building the app and updating the data, customers not understanding the interface etc.

Yet, they don't seem to grasp all of these are basically the same for a QR code: you're now maintaining an online service just for your restaurant. People still need to understand your site. You'll be dealing with their browser, extensions, languages etc. And you still need the QR code somewhere on the table, visible, explain that it needs to be scanned (by one person ? everyone ? do they need to keep the tab open ? etc.). These will all be costs, you pay either upfront by hiring experts to make the experience good, or on the go with crappy customer experience, your staff spending more time than needed working around the system and explaining it to your customers, and those not coming back.

There are super cheap and simplistic ways to deal with all of that, and I assume GP has seen many of these.

PS: The weirdest experience I ever had was someone at our table scanning the code, to copy/paste it on the browser on their personal profile (default was work browser). They missed a digit in the url params and ended up opening the order menu of a table at the other side of the restaurant, and just started ordering, then waiting for a pretty long time while the other table was dealing with the mess.

Notice that when someone grabs their phone, they're not just grabbing a web browser but also their personal entertainer. Besides chats, many people also have various apps trying to nudge them into engaging with it. I have never been in a restaurant without menu though, I just imagine that I'd end up on HN while contemplating what to pick out of sheer habit and muscle memory

Besides that, there are people who have no smartphone or an empty battery, can't use a smartphone (one of my grandparents can read a menu with a pocket magnifier, but a touchscreen phone is too cumbersome and so they don't know how to use that; another grandparent has memory issues and never learned how to use a smartphone), don't have signal (you need to provide WiFi), have an allergy and need to ask questions or ensure that some ingredient is really taken out, etc. I'm not against the option to order impersonally but a good kitchen communication system would go a lot deeper than slapping wetware with slopware

As a strictly opt-in system, with a corresponding default tip amount reduction of 50% (7.5%/9%/10%), I don’t see any issues :)

I don't think anyone over 30 around me likes that. At that point it's very close to door dashing but less convenient.

For whatever random reason, all the QR code menus where I live are implemented in a really, really shitty way: unresponsive, with huge latency, making it unnecessarily hard to make a choice. And good luck asking for a modification, like no mashed potatoes please or anything like that.

Not when I forget my phone in the car.

Having backup tablets on hand is a good hybrid.

> ... without having to flag down a server / waiter.

Using QR codes to not having to talk to a human and to "optimize" humans out of the loop in a restaurant sounds like a great scenario for an episode of black mirror.

QR code menus are one the shittiest experience people going to a restaurant to enjoy a meal can have.

> Do you not like this option?

The entire world fucking hates it. It's totally dumbfucktarded.

Sorry to be blunt.

It's not a concern untill the phone is bloated because of damaged battery. Also it can catch fire!

yeah but when the battery fails, you loose your "server".

i'm thinking more about long term.

Claude did the changes, I didn't do anything, I think it's was mostly recompiling with flags.

It's in the same category as Surf, which is the pain point in the article. It's relevant.

If you have a clown car already, know how it works, and it's magically cheaper to drive than regular cars and car prices are high then I don't see the issue with this.

Nothing Claude / Codex can't fix. I'd call this a skill issue tbh

On top of that, pmOS can work with non-mainline Linux, so with the Android kernel, which is somewhat guaranteed to have support for most / all the devices. You shouldn't use it if you care about security though, but that's a different matter