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Comment by oliwarner | Hacker News Reader

Would STLs for parts fix this? We could legislate that buying a product gets you personal access to design files for the purpose of repair or enhancement.

Having full service sheets for electronics, and physical design files would make all but the most compact electronics user-serviceable, at no direct cost to manufacturers.

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Also, IP laws should only apply when they are of benefit to society as a whole. So if you have a patent on a part you no longer produce, well, that doesn't benefit society so your patent is done.

That sounds like the "open source" argument, and I doubt it'll do any good[1]; don't forget that we used to be able to repair all sorts of things without the original design drawings, and we should still be able to for non-software things. The real problem is that the majority of people are gradually losing the skills to do so.

Watch machinist channels on YouTube and you'll see those skills in action.

[1] What open source has done is created a whole generation of developers who have never heard of disassembly or binary patching techniques, which depending on the situation can be much simpler and easier than trying to figure out how to compile the source code (and not change anything else). It has effectively produced learned helplessness in the absence of source code.

Skills move with job prospects and the fact is there isn't enough heavy machinery (manufacturing, farming, etc) to support the mass training of fine-machinists. Much of the work there is has to complete against replacements. The same is true in software development, electronics.

And I think the same is true in software development. The languages and performance we have allow the majority of developers to focus on bigger problems. That wasn't the case 30 years ago. It's just following the money. Source availability and APIs do mean we have to hack less interop but that came because that's what the market demanded.

This is how it used to be. When you bought a computer you got a full circuit diagram with it so you could understand how it works. All appliances were like this, and some still are, but the fancier it is the less likely. My stove has a sticker on the back describing how the coils are wired up so a technician can service it better. There's no reason we can't mandate this even if our circuit boards and physical mechanisms are more complicated. It's clearly a net benefit for society.

I'm a fan of this mentality. (Though I'd be happier if the government gets a copy of all designs that are mass produced.) I recently had a 10 year old TV die on me and I was 90% sure that I just needed to swap the power supply. If I'd had some more info I could have tested things on my benchtop before trying to track down an identical replacement board. (Though those options were a bit dubious as well.)

> I recently had a 10 year old TV die on me and I was 90% sure that I just needed to swap the power supply.

If it was the power supply and there was no burnt smell, you should have spent 30m replacing all the caps on it. There is very little else in a power supply that dies.

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