I'm told China is a *big* market for folding phones, something like half of the global market for foldables is there. I don't know why, maybe they all like showing off when riding on public transport or something?

I'm not the target market, but "da kids" are. They don't talk on the phone by holding it up to their ear, they put it on speaker and then sort of hold it horizontally and shout into it (in the rare times they actually make a call rather than text). I could imagine such users liking the idea of having the phone app (eg. whatsapp) on the left hand side of the screen, with chatgpt or a browser or whatever on the right hand side. Then they can text message while they talk, and get the script of what they want to say from chatgpt all at once. Not impossible to do with a rectangular phone of course, but easier on a foldable.

FWIW, the little video of the person opening it, and it showing a version of the front screen on the inside one as it opens is really clever. By man oh man, the prices are just scary - walking around with >$2000 in your pocket all the time...? Not good...

($2000 is the entry level, with no sales tax. If you want a bit more storage (and you probably do), then you're ratcheting up to $2500 pretty quickly, or even over 3K if you're insane)

FWIW, Linkedin is *much* better/less bad when set to "recent posts" rather than "most relevant":

1) You see posts in time order, so older stuff is lower down. If there's a reaction to something, this (sort of) makes sense (or at least, you can make sense of it, even if it's upside down)
2) You don't see bullshit from people you have no interest in, just because other people seem to like their stuff
3) If you visit twice in a short time, there's not much new stuff to look at - that's a natural self-limiter to time spend 'doom scrolling'

That last point is the bit they don't like - they want $site to look new and fresh every time you visit. The thing is, there just isn't enough content in the world to make that genuinely useful, so they have to show you bullshit instead. They make money out of it, you don't. I think it's okay if they lose out on this point.

The story goes that the chinese get tokens via armies of fake accounts, stolen credentials, stolen credit cards or whatever else. They then resell those tokens in China for pennies. Users get their AI through a broker, who sends their request to OpenAI/Anthropic/etc via whichever one of their accounts has some spare tokens in it and then returns the response the the user.

Supposedly, it's the reason why deepseek and others have to have such a massive free tier - it's not to get the west hooked (although that's a side benefit), it's that if they charged even a small amount of money, it'd price them out of being able to sell anything to anyone against the american services.

I'm fully sold on Qwant now - it's been my go-to on all my devices for months, and I've got to say, it's just better.

It does still sometimes seem to push youtube more than I'd like, but the AI answers are brief and don't get in the way (and are often quite useful), but most of all the results you get actually stand a a chance of being useful. They don't seem to be so blatantly lead by how big the company is, and seem to actually include pages with the search terms you asked for (if you can imagine such a thing!)

All in all, Qwant seems to be google without the layers of "business" piled on top of it.

For what it's worth, London Black Cab Drivers (broadly regarded as something of a 'gold standard' for such things) will never take you across london by crossing the river twice. The river does bend around quite sharply, and for a few journeys it makes absolute sense, but they won't do it because people, being thicker than two short planks, complain that the driver is taking them the "long way", when actually they are keeping it as short as possible.

These days with GPS maps and such like, I suspect thick people have offloaded even more of their thinking to their phone apps, so maybe nowadays things are different, I don't know.

As for this story, I'd expect them to find me the quickest route, taking traffic into account. I don't know how these journeys are charged, but in the UK, it's per mile and per minute - that is, you get charged for sitting in traffic, as well as zipping down a trunk road. As such, I suspect most people would prefer the quickest route, given that it's highly unlikely to be materially much longer than the shortest route.

I shouldn't worry, either you can't get in, or you can't get out, since Teslas also have the death-trap-door-handles that don't open in an emergency.

Honestly, it's getting to the point I'd have to think twice about going in a Tesla. Already it's a concern if a taxi shows up and I've got to put my kids in the back seats.

Same here - S1 is all I'm having. When ebay runs out of replacements, then we'll buy something else, but it won't be Sonos.

I also note there are a few open source products that do a nice job of controlling Sonos now (and can blend S1 and S2 together), so we might not even need the S1 app much longer. We might need a hub, but actually that's an advantage because at least it won't forget about speakers or be so slow to start up like the Sonos app.

Side note: Our new car has Sonos branded speakers in it - and they're pretty average. They're better than the generic crap you get in cheap cars, but they're not actually that good at full spectrum reproduction (even though there are 3 separate sounders). They've got a nice bit of sub though - no so much that it annoys the neighbours, but enough to let you know it's there.

> My roof is from 2008 and will probably need to be replaced in 5-7 years

You only get 25-30 years from a roof? Holy crap - you need a better builder. We re-roofed our place because the tiles from 1930 were coming apart - although we could have patched it up and kept it going for another 10-20 if we really wanted to. I'd expect my roof to say up longer than the house at this point (the likelihood that someone will knock the house down and build something else here is higher than it staying as it is for another 100 years).

> because no poles were permitted, which means that I'm stuck with FTTC and then copper. ...agreed, but not for the reasons you think. You can't have fibre because Openreach are a bunch of twats. They've taken at least 30 years to get around to fibre-ing up neighbourhoods. They could have had (at least) FTTC 20 years ago, but chose not to. The regulator has been pretty persistent, and has threatened them with breakups from BT several times, every time they've cried off saying it would harm consumers, bla bla, and then failed to do anything useful, which actually has harmed consumers.

Only recently, did the regulator finally get them to actually act (maybe 3 years ago?). Where I live, it it weren't for trees, I could see the telephone exchange at the end of my street (no poles in the way, we don't have any on my street). We got fibre last year. Suddenly it wasn't so hard for Openreach to actually do it. Funny that.

That they could now make some money by recycling their copper is great for them. Maybe it'll motivate them to actually finish the job and full fibre places like your house. Apparently getting rid of the phone lines and all that goes with it wasn't enough, maybe this is?

Side note: We relaid our driveway a couple of years back. I put a load of conduits underneath specifically so Openreach could put their fibre in (and I could do some electrical too). It still took them 3 sets of people in three separate visits to do it - although the last lot were pretty decent. They found the cable tray across my garage ceiling and just put the box thing in my cabinet rather than screwing it to the wall. Part laziness, part helpfulness, but they ended up doing a nice job.

In my experience, the problem of long-running agent tasks is that they sort of end up chasing their tails too much. That is, you ask for something, it goes off and fails to do it, so googles up solutions, it then goes down some more rabbit holes, googles some more, fails to do something that's required for the main task, then goes off trying to solve for that, etc etc. When this happens, a quick "stop" and a new prompt limiting the scope of what's being asked for usually does the trick. Then you do 5 more smaller jobs and you're done.

The same sort of thing happens if you give it a to-do list of tasks that somewhat (or completely) depend on each other. The 'drift' from the first is amplified by the second, and so on. By the time it's got to the end, it's done something very different than you asked for.

To date, I haven't yet found a way to say "do this but don't be a dick about it, if you can't do it, just stop and I'll help you". But then stopping and asking for help would mean it's no longer a long-running job that I could happily leave to run overnight. It won't be a lot of use if it stops to ask me something 5 minutes after I've left it.

So I'll pick "capable" and "economical", because if they can fix those two, then you can actually leave them running without them "going off on one". In some sense, that's the governance piece, although not rigorously enough to placate even the most lenient compliance officer.

> and say this sounds like a very good thing, on the surface

Indeed. It's a curated set of open source libraries that you can use if you want to. They're curated, so they won't contain the latest supply chain attacks, and will have security fixes in them where needed. Use what you want, whenever you like and know that you're going to be 'safe' to do so. Pretty good, right?

That's how it's "spun", but the reality is slightly different. Likely it'll be old versions with fixes back ported, which will mean you won't be able to use the latest of anything, because those things all need later versions of this stuff. Likely you'll also *have* to use these specific versions to get support from Broadcom, so you can't avoid paying them for access to their walled garden if you intend to do something you need their support for (support you'll pay for separately, by the way).

The reality will be that you'll have to use an old kernel version, old versions of just about anything else you need, and if you're using *anything* not in their locked down walled garden, you'll be on the hook for providing security fixes and whatnot. You won't be able to rely on the FOSS project fixing the issues for you, because you won't be able to use the latest versions that contain those fixes.

This 'solution' works for a very particular sort of business that makes a very particular sort of product, and charges in a very particular way for it all. Most people probably don't *want* any products like that, nor do they *want* to deal with businesses like that, or pay for things like that - but some will end up with no choice in the matter and will have to pay for it, and put up with the crappy service and support they get in return.

> Samsung has had their own store integrated into all their phones/tablets for a loooong time. ...where it's been roundly ignored by anyone with half a brain. The last thing the rest of us need is them trying to put it on non-samsung phones.

It's news because:

1) Reddit is shown to be heavy-handed (probably not especially new information to many people, but hey)
2) That the European laws designed to level the playing field between ordinary user and mega corps aren't working properly. $mega_corp is essentially half-arsing the responses they're legally required to give. If that catches the eye of the authorities, then it could mean mega fines to $mega_corp.

Mega fines are kinda useful to know about, even if you're not in the EU. Those fines have altered the behaviour of quite a few mega corps in recent years - not as much as some would have liked, I'm sure, but it's happened anyway. Sometimes we see $mega_corps trying to maliciously comply or whatever, which has ramifications for users everywhere. Say nothing of the business impact of receiving a huge fine (and the EU does tend to extract enough money that it makes the C-suite sit up and take notice, rather than write it off as a cost of doing business).

I know some here are saying "just get a new account at move on" - a reasonable view to take _if you're a powerless and unmotivated individual_. The EU tries to empower its people, so that doesn't apply quite so cleanly as it might in other places.

So yeah, not news about such and such a particle can be used to blast alzheimers out of taxi drivers brains or whatever, but at tech-adjacent at the very least.

Agreed - for anyone beyond home users, switching involves switching *everything*, not just a couple of laptops. You need to switch your people, the management of the laptops and all of the compliance over. If you also need to switch Office/Libreoffice/Google Docs and Outlook/Apple Mail/Gmail then you've got even more work to do.

I'd love Linux to be the answer here, but I'm not sure it is. I'd say you're probably best moving from Windows to Mac - a lot of people really hate macs, so there's that problem to overcome, but at least you can still get all the management and compliance tools (jamf or whatever). It's going to be a big project to redesign laptops to match all the stuff you've got in AD GPOs. Things get worse if you're going to dump Office too - and then you've got a load of user support to do as well. Again, the people doing it are going to need to know a bit about macs and windows - that's not as easy to find as a windows admin.

If you are already a mac shop, then the jump to linux is probably easier because at least you're aware of what a computer could/should actually be. It's still going to be a big job though.

IMHO, the costs are pretty big - and probably grow exponentially with the number of users you have. It's probably best done bit by bit - get the developers and techies off windows and onto macs. Then let anyone else have a mac if they want one. Then start prizing windows off the Stockholmers bit by bit.

The UK has the same, but mistakes do still happen - but they're usually found and dealt with pretty quick, not least because the make, model and colour of the vehicle are listed alongside the registration. It's possible there are two silver audi q4s with the number plates AB72ABC and AB12ABC (or AB22ABC, etc), but it's pretty unlikely (I don't know for sure, but I wonder if the DVLA who hand out the plates deliberately avoid such things?).

We also have a lot of ANPR (plate recognition) - you may consider it a surveillance problem, and it probably is, but the point being that our plates are getting read *a lot*, and yet somehow, we don't seem to have problems. The police don't use any private systems either. You do get private ones for car parks or whatever, but the cops don't routinely use them.

As for the cops, we're sorted there too. Ours will physically check the vehicle before even stopping anyone (seems like a basic task, can't imagine how anyone's getting this bit wrong?). Then they keep their dogs under control and ask "were you in the vicinity of XYZ between 7 and 7.30 last night?". Only if you're a "yes" for absolutely all of it will they do any arresting. Oh, and if you're the driver, you're even free to get out of the vehicle to talk to them - they won't shoot you for standing up. They don't publish your name after arrest either, so you can be arrested, let go and (probably) just go back to work - because of course, you're innocent until a judge decides otherwise. A "small" problem of mistaken identity or whatever doesn't immediately turn into a "ruin your life" kind of problem.

Our cops definitely have their problems - I mean some monumentally terrible problems, but it feels like we're way ahead on this sort of thing.