This is me. I don't need or want a folding phablet (remember those?) but I'd love to be able to fold my normal Pixel in half like a clamshell phone from the 2000s. It would protect the screen and make it slip into a pocket much easier.

Never going to happen, though. Most phone manufacturers aren't interested in what people *want*, proven by the fact that we *still* don't have a thicker phone with a larger battery that doesn't need a case to avoid slipping out of your hands and smashing on the ground. They make what they think they can sell for a premium to people who have more money (or debt) than sense. For example, this new foldable iPad.

The only slim hope I have here is if a handful of more active Democratic progressives get elected to Congress, they can effect some needed changes to rules, controls, and laws used to check the executive branch. The Tea Party and Freedom Caucus showed what a small group of determined (if crazy) Republicans can do to disrupt Congress -- I think a similar approach, if made by people with a noble cause, could start the ball rolling on positive changes.

Trump and his Republicans bootlickers have spent the last 10 years highlighting all of the weak points and seams in our government, so fixing and securing them shouldn't be impossible.

But yeah, probably not.

Well, there is the hope with new elections the executive will be disciplined (whether that is better or worse, who can say) and Trump can spend the remainder of days hounded by lawsuits.

Better get cracking on it now though before this becomes the new norm.

Even though it seems like this should be obvious, it absolutely hasn't been tested yet. I guarantee you that Trump will pardon himself and his entire family, for any past or possible future crimes, before he leaves office.

Given the current makeup of SCOTUS and their previous ruling about presidential immunity, I think we can guess how that decision will go.

And yet even with all of that they lost in 2024. Golly, what a conundrum.

I like the idea of "mystery ballots" though. Sounds fun.

This has nothing to do with people ineligible to vote, but I'm sure you know that.

The question is - what about brown-skinned people or people with a "funny accent" who are eligible to vote, but who don't want to risk getting harassed or detained for hours or days without cause (or, god-forbid, shot in the head for exercising their Constitutional rights)? How many of them will decide that voting is just not worth the risk?

Using ICE and other forms of federal threat is about creating chilling effects to change the political makeup of who is voting, not preventing illegal votes from being cast. It's basically gerrymandering via jackbooted thugs.

I hadn't even thought about this but now their resistance to enabling contactless or allowing other payment apps makes a lot more sense. Scumbags.

I like WinCo and shop there when I can (also far enough away to be a special trip). The stores sometimes have a K-Mart feel to them (poor upkeep, minimal customer support, that kind of thing) but they are very often cheaper and carry less popular products, and their deli and bulk foods offer a lot of unique stuff. Produce is usually better than Walmart but less consistently good than Kroger (which sucks at everything else).

That said, I can't imagine Walmart dropping credit cards. Too many people have abandoned every other way to pay these days.

Does this mean they will finally enable contactless credit cards on their POS terminals? They've refused to do it for years, requiring people to insert the chip into the reader, as an attempt to push people into using the Walmart app for payments.

Drives me fucking insane. Half the terminals have screwed up chip contacts in them requiring gymnastics to get it to read the chip and it's so much slower than contactless processing. I've started intentionally failing the chip read twice so I can just swipe my card instead. Pretty sure it costs Walmart extra processing fees and is actually faster.

While 100 Mbps is enough for probably the majority of users, it doesn't mean we shouldn't set goals to make things better in the future. Honestly, this feels like the US in microcosm for the last 15-20 years -- "good enough" has become the national motto. Fuel efficiency, electrification, wages, housing, and yes, Internet speeds. It is the fundamental reason that China has positioned itself to eclipse the US in almost every technological measure (though at least we still have our free speech, god, and guns [but this same Brendan Carr asshat is working hard on eliminating that first one too]).

Plus, I'd wager that more than half of the people out there with gigabit speeds are still using some equipment that's limited to megabit speeds somewhere in the chain - a router, switch, cable, ethernet card, or shitty wifi. I've seen that plenty of times (including to myself when Comcast bumped speeds up a few years ago and I was still using an older modem). Unless they do a speed test, they'll never notice the missing bandwidth.

Maybe it was the same with you, and why you didn't notice a difference with Starlink. Are you sure all your equipment was even capable of gigabit? :)

The problem with this argument, from the shop's point of view, is that the UK is in the middle of a shoplifting epidemic. The policing resources simply aren't there to deal with small scale (or even flagrant and much larger scale) shoplifting. It now seems to be rare for police officers to attend reports of shoplifting at all. And so effectively shoplifting becomes legalised, which is obviously hurting the big chain stores financially and potentially devastating for smaller shops.

Shops are trying to find some way to respond to this to protect themselves. They typically tell staff, even security staff, not to get physical with shoplifters as they walk out, not least because the risk of something worse happening and the business becoming liable for it is significant. But then the shoplifters know this and some of them will just walk in and openly empty a shelf into a bag and walk out again without paying because they know no-one will try to stop them.

Shops also know that our court system is completely overwhelmed at the moment and there is little chance of bringing any successful civil action to recover damages from shoplifters who aren't even being arrested by the police and put through the criminal justice system.

So what do they have left? Basically, they're trying to spot the "usual suspects" and refuse them entry in the first place, which is a less risky proposition in terms of potential for physical violence and quite effective because a lot of shoplifting is done by the same people, or they're trying to make it more physically difficult to steal goods, for example by using locking systems or keeping high value items behind counters where customers can't just pick them up. But these systems aren't perfect, far from it, and what we're discussing here today is one of the significant problems.

Obviously this kind of technology can have very bad consequences, as we see here. I don't think it should be used if it's not highly reliable, given the potential harm done in cases where it gets something wrong. But I do have some sympathy with the shops who are looking for something -- anything -- to reduce the threat they're facing because the rule of law has failed in retail settings.

On the contrary, I think most of your comment is as relevant as ever. A carefully designed UI is still better for almost any specific task than what "agents" will produce. It will probably be more efficient to describe what you want precisely enough to get it right. It will not be undermined by problems like non-repeatability, non-determinism and hallucinations that are inherent in LLM-backed agents.

Agents can be quite effective at getting something that seems about right, as long as you don't care too much about the details. And of course they get there much quicker than doing it manually as a human. This is useful for some tasks, and why they have become popular.

Unfortunately, it turns out that for many of the things we really care about, "about right" doesn't cut it. Right now, today, the software industry is already being overwhelmed by AI slop. It's hard to believe, but it's still only been a few months since agentic development processes arrived on the scene. And yet after just those few months of management trying to replace real developers with agents, we can see the slow-motion train wreck happening right before our eyes. And in return, where are the new applications that radically improve on what we had before thanks to all this added "productivity"? If this tech is going to change the world as the AI tech bros and the sycophantic CxOs kneeling at their feet would have us believe, where's my flying car?

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of AI-generated cybersecurity nightmares...

It is. The fact that our dominant desktop operating systems are still using security models from last century is probably the #2 disaster of modern tech security, coming in just behind so much software with potential security implications still being written in languages like C and C++ at #1. And the understandable yet still deeply regrettable reason for both disasters is the same: momentum.

I normally connect to all online conference calls via their web UIs. At least then it takes both a screw-up in the communications system and a screw-up in a browser security sandbox that is independently developed to allow something like an RCE or data leakage vulnerability to be exploited.

People have called me crazy for not wanting to install native apps from the likes of Microsoft, Google and Zoom in the modern era of remote working, but every now and then, there's another story like this one that reminds me why I am extremely careful about what native software I install on anything these days.

What, specifically, do you mean by "personal Windows installations"?

Are you suggesting that any business of any size should only ever use Enterprise editions of Windows?