r/righttorepair

I recently used an LLM to help me repair an issue with my Tesla, so I wanted to provide the prompt here to pay it forward:

You are a professional Tesla technician. You base all of your answers in fact and don't make up answers if you don't know something, and all of your responses that claim a fact about Tesla are accompanied with a link to official sources.

You are tasked with diagnosing various issues that an owner is experiencing with one of their vehicles. They will present you the problem, you will ask clarifying questions where additional information is needed, and you will provide either the solution or additional steps to try to uncover more information about the problem. Don't stop iterating until either the problem is resolved or it truly cannot be fixed.

I used this prompt with Gemini Flash 3.5, and it quickly helped me diagnose an issue with my windows that I definitely wouldn't have been able to deduce on my own without spending a bunch of time diving down Internet rabbit holes and diving through documentation.

Disclaimer: it's AI, so it's not perfect. The prompt includes grounding instructions, so hallucinations are much less likely, but it will only work as well as the context you provide it.

I hope this helps someone!

Is this purely down to planned obsolescence, or is it because adding proprietary digital microchips and locked firmware updates introduces multiple points of technical failure to items that used to be strictly mechanical and easily fixable? I’m genuinely curious about the manufacturing shift here.

I've been running computers since the early '90s. Started on an IBM PS/2, a 286, back when you had to actually understand the machine to make it do a damn thing. Thirty years later I run Windows every day and Linux when it suits me, and both of them work. Neither one takes a genius either. You just have to be willing to read up. That's the whole price of admission. A little patience, a little reading. Most people are too impatient and too lazy to pay it, and that laziness is exactly what Apple has spent three decades cashing in on.

Here's the thing I can't get past. Happened a couple months ago.

I was setting up a Ring doorbell for my folks. My stepmom's on an iPhone. To get the app working I needed into her Apple ID, and she didn't know her password. Half the time she doesn't know which password goes to what, that's just her, and that's fine, millions of people live in that exact spot every day. So I go to reset it. The thing anybody should be able to do, standing in the room, with the phone physically in my hand.

And Apple's answer, basically, was that they'd need to assess whether or not they could even give me a password reset. Sit with that one for a second. A multi day waiting period while Apple decides whether the owner is allowed back into their own account. And the kicker, the part that should make your skin crawl, is they offered to speed it up if I handed over a credit card number to confirm identity. Pay a toll to get into your own account faster. Read that again.

Now somebody reading this is already typing "that's just how Apple does it, it's a security feature." Stop for a second and hear what you're actually saying. You're telling me they built it on purpose so the owner can't freely get into their own account. You think that's a defense. It's a confession. "It's by design" means the disrespect was intentional. You're not arguing with me, you're agreeing with me and calling it a feature.

Here's the part that isn't up for debate. I bought the product. My folks own the hardware. The owner decides when and how he gets into his own property, not the company that already took the money and kept a key it won't hand over. You don't buy a house and then wait three days for the builder's permission to change your own locks. You don't buy a car and file a request with the factory to start it. You own it, so you reach it, when you see fit and how you see fit. The second a company keeps a key to the thing you paid full price for and makes you ask permission to use it, you didn't buy a thing. You rented access to it and they kept the deed.

That's the whole game right there. "You will own nothing" isn't some future they're warning you about. It already shipped. It's in my stepmom's pocket, and it made me sit and wait for permission to get into something we paid for, then offered to sell me back the speed.

And it isn't just the account. It runs all the way down to the dumbest little thing. The trackpad on their MacBooks doesn't even physically click anymore. It's a fixed sheet of glass that fakes a click by buzzing against your fingertip, and Apple's own engineering flat out describes it as fooling you into thinking the pad moved. Then they pile hidden pressure levels on top of the fake click, so a light press does one thing and a harder press does another, which means a click isn't a click anymore, it's the machine guessing how hard you meant it. Even Apple's own reviewers admit the thing takes, their words, concerted retraining of muscle memory. Retraining. To click. Something that's worked the same way since the mouse was invented.

And before the "well it's configurable" crowd shows up, yeah, I know, you can dig three menus deep and tune it back toward something sane. But the default is the product. Ninety nine percent of people never touch the settings, so whatever ships turned on is what the thing actually is. Apple chose to ship the fake click and the whole grandiose mess switched on out of the box, and then bury "make it act like a normal button" somewhere most people will never look. A thing built right ships simple and lets the power user add the complexity. Apple ships the showroom and makes you excavate the simplicity. That's backwards, and it's backwards on purpose.

I'm not asking for my computer to be dumbed down. I'm not asking for less power. I learned on a command line, I'll read a manual, I run Linux for fun. I'm asking for less theater. Make the simple thing the default. Let a click be a click. Let the owner hold the keys to the thing the owner bought. That used to be the floor you started from. Apple spent thirty years convincing a whole generation that the floor is a luxury, and that handing the keys to the manufacturer is what "it just works" means.

It doesn't just work. It works for them, and the people raving about how easy it is never noticed they stopped holding the wheel.

I'll keep my Windows box and my Linux partition. They make me read up, and in return they hand me the keys. I'll take that trade every single time over a pretty machine that keeps the deed to itself.

So we know how enshittification has spread across many sectors. like services or products get worse after a certain time. but there are ways to fight or reverse them too.

Few of them which is universal and applies to mainly all.

1. Antitrust laws : if there is healthy competition then someone can switch to something different and it applies for every sector.
2. Govt regulations : EU has good consumer protection laws so it helps too
3. community pushback: if people started boycotting it or make themselves more loud and clear at consistent level then it also helps too

There maybe others but for now i know this much

Now moving to tech sector

1. Interoperability : This is very crucial and if there is no vendor locking then it means people can use it before it gets enshittified and then move on to other products. Example: Obsidian
2. Open source software: This is also a great way to resist enshittification. anyone can create a fork so if original ones become bad or bloated then a new fork can fixed those problems too. I know that chromium and android is open source but they still have some problems that dont make them too much resistant as it supposed to be. Chromium is open source but is also very popular too. Something like WEI which could have killed the open web and android even if its open source , it is impossible to be used for majority of people without the closed source layer of google.
3. Right to repair: Companies can send updates to firmware and potentially brick devices too so if schematics, driver code and other things important to understand somethings are available too then it can be fixed too
4. Decentralization: If a service is not controlled by one entity then it is enshittification resistant. example : fediverse
5. Community maintained : If a product/service is maintained by community/individual it has higher friction for enshitiffication. Example: Ubuntu and linux mint both are open source but we have problems with ubuntu like being forced to use snap. linux mint is maintained by community and it is what ubuntu should have been.
6. Works offline: If some software can work offline then it can resist the bad updates.

Services/product that dont have these 4 things so ofc they have a higher chance of enshittification but they still can be fixed too ie reverse engineering and breaking their digital locks and also scrappers too for exporting stuff. Though there is one thing which i mentioned ie breaking digital locks have consequences and can land someone in federal prison for 3-5 yrs all thanks to the section 1201 of dmca. while it cant punish someone if he keeps to themselves but this required a constant distributed effort in most cases. If this section dont exist then anyone can break digital locks and fix things too

anyway that's it from me, there are other things that involve in other sectors too so please share it or add more to tech sectors

Cracks emerge in Right to Repair settlement with Deere

I have the best luck with warranties 🙄. I usually try to be responsible by getting warranties for items purchased. However, I don’t know if the quality is going down with products (manufacturing etc). I have noticed that lately, the warranties expire and then magically, the items stop working within months of the expiration of said warranty. From TV’s to phones, to water coolers, this has been my experience. I’m wondering if I should stop buying warranties 😂, but then I feel like items will break within the time a warranty would’ve been in effect.

The traditional cardboard boxes are made for orders. It’s pure ecological issue.

The tech part? The tech to fix this already exists. It’s called Stone Paper (made from leftover marble dust and carbon-neutral resins). It is an eco paper. It’s naturally waterproof and incredibly tough.

But for for the recycle issue some may that it’s too hard to scale up.

When it comes to not wasting for the next generation of people and for better earth, there is the way:

To make Stone Paper work globally, we need to legally do two simple, practical rules:

1. Add ONE Extra Bin Globally: The "Stone Paper Only" Bin

Stop trying to mix stone paper with wood paper. It ruins both.
Every apartment complex, and grocery store can add one specific bin next to the standard ones: A dedicated "Stone Paper" recycling bin.

2. Direct Factory-to-Factory Closed Loop

Local waste management routes shouldn't send these to landfills. They need to collect these dedicated Stone Paper bins and ship them directly back to the original manufacturing factories for the recycle.

​"I believe the original intention behind creating stone paper was to protect the environment. However, I think we should discuss whether that 'initial vision'—which focused on being 'tree-free'—should now evolve into a 'closed-loop recycling' model after ten years of development."

The diversity between these two:

Stone paper is used for specific, functional uses like portable notebooks

VS.

while traditional wood-pulp paper is often suited for archival needs of papers such as dictionaries or library collections.

*This is the proposal above. It is possible to read the info of stone paper from wiki, since the stone paper is different from the traditional paper.

Recently, more and more technology is becoming proprietary. Even in cars, software can now detect when off-market parts are installed, requiring you to go to an authorized dealership to get it fixed and only allowing you to use their specific tools.

To combat this, some economists (like Glen Weyl) have proposed applying a modified Harberger Tax specifically to intellectual property, like these software locks and repair patents.

Under this system, the corporation self-assesses and declares the licensing value of their IP. They pay a recurring tax on that self-assessed value. However, they are legally required to grant a non-exclusive license to anyone willing to pay the exact price declared.

It essentially acts as a forced licensing fee: the owner gets to determine the value of their IP, but they are kept honest by the tax they have to pay on that value. If they set it too high to block competition, they pay heavy taxes. If they set it at a fair market rate, third-party mechanics can afford to license the repair tools.

With that said, what are your thoughts on this?

I own a Raven Cruizer II GPS display unit used for precision agriculture. The unit has a failed LM3S2620 supervisory controller. The chip is available from TI for $15. The only obstacle is Raven's proprietary firmware which CNH Industrial, Raven's parent company, explicitly refuses to provide.

What I've tried:

Raven directly — declined

Agriculture leading service center (Nebraska) — no repair possible

Independent specialist with 10 years Cruizer II experience (Ireland) — can't source programmed chip

CNH Corporate escalation — case open, awaiting response

FT2232H JTAG extraction — JTAG/SWD unresponsive, Port C pins likely remapped by firmware

Professional firmware extraction firms — contacted

FTC complaint and FARM Act advocates — ready to deploy

CNH's written response: "A company is not obligated to keep anything pertaining to that product once it gets to this state."

This is exactly the scenario the FARM Act is designed to address. The unit is unrepairable not due to technical impossibility but due to a policy decision by CNH.

Has anyone successfully extracted firmware from a Stellaris LM3S series device with disabled JTAG? Or does anyone know of repair services that have cracked this specific chip?