A year from now I might pirate a torrent of this POS and then never watch it. Better that than swapping respiratory infections with complete strangers while sitting through 30 minutes of laser-sharp booming advertisements for the low-low price of $43.

After looking at the trailer I completely agree. AI generated or not, it looks like utter drek. I think I'd rather pore over the NAND flash recovered from a junked car in Poland (as described in the previous article) than sit through a screening of this turd.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E-94-100 in the Zenbook A16 UX3607 has lower CineBench and GeekBench scores than the M5 Pro in a 2026 MacBook Pro by 20% or more. The GPU comparison is even more stark, with the X2 coming in at half the performance of the M5. At the same time, the X2 consumes more than twice the power to do the same amount of work. While Qualcomm Snapdragon has improved, it's still a considerable distance behind Apple Silicon.

I wonder if the word clanker might be related to the word clacker, coined by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling in their novel The Difference Engine? The novel imagines an alternative Victorian-era history where Charles Babbage's mechanical difference engine is successful, giving rise to a mechanical computer revolution in the mid-19th century. A clacker is a programmer, the word deriving from the sound that mechanical computing machines made in operation.

A clanker could be the degenerate sound that AI-generated code would make running on a mechanical computer.

Important point. Firefox performance has never been an issue for me, but the ability to block ads and tracking is. Chrome may have better scores on performance benchmarks, but the fact that Google is an advertising company that will happily collect and sell my data any way they can, makes any benchmark wins moot. Put simply, it's not in Google's best interests to protect my privacy or allow me to shield myself for advertisements, so it's not in my best interests to trust Chrome.

Windows 11 has been 100% SNAFU since its inception. Copilot is just the icing on the cake, the cherry on top, or the chef's kiss if you like. People are just sick and fed up with the direction that Microsoft has taken with their flagship OS, and will naturally direct their anger at the most readily identifiable aspect of that direction. To be fair, Copilot is probably no worse technically than other LLM offerings, it's just that Microsoft has seen fit to shoehorn it every-fucking-where they can, whether or not it fits a purpose.

As the Firesign Theatre said so many years ago, "A power so great, it can only be used for good, or evil."

Pretty much sums up the entire social-media/AI/surveillance hellscape the tech bros have gifted, errr, grifted us with.

That knocks Jupiter right off my bucket list of places to visit.

If I had points handy, I'd mod you up.

Web views opens up a window from inside an app through which very bad things can happen, whether driven by an AI app generator or not.

One has to wonder how this could have happened inadvertently. Breathtaking incompetence might be a better description. Just sayin'.

Superapp... Superapp...
With beauty and grace,
fast as can be
watch it flying through the air.
It travels in space,
or under the sea,
and it can journey anywhere.

Superapp... Superapp...
It travels on land,
or roams the skies,
through the heavens' mighty rage
It's Mercury-manned,
and everyone cries,
"it's the marvel of the age!"

Superapp... Superapp... SUPERAPP!

The very last thing I'm going to do is share my goals, feelings, or inspiration with Google. Fuck that. Hard.

The PIO on the RP2040/RP2350 is pretty phenomenal. The RP2350 adds an HSTX module that enables doing some pretty impressive video tricks. One of the things I really like about these parts is their ability to stitch multiple peripherals together (think SRAM->DMA->HSTX,) making it possible to drive HDMI video without involving a CPU core. The RP2350 is rated at 150 MHz, but it can be safely pushed 2x or more. There are some impressive examples floating around, like a fully functional emulator for the original Mac.

If we're talking Pi Pico devices, I'd pick the RP2350. At runtime, you get your choice between dual ARM or dual RISC-V cores running at 150 MHz. The downside of these parts (RP2040/RP2350) vs. ESP is that you'll need to add an external Flash memory, external PSRAM, and external WiFi/BLE radio.