These are awesome and I would absolutely embrace the upgradeability and open standards fully if they had the devices I use: a rugged laptop (rain, snow, drop, etc proof, covered ports, washable like my Getacs) with upgradable, fully Linux compatible hardware would be awesome. My trackpad and touch screen are both generic mice according to Linux.

Then, pls, make a phablet with optional LTE/baseband (or none, not a phone at all). Short range radios, but zero base band, otherwise a rugged, reliable, durable, upgradable phone-like form factor, super extra bonus points for interchangeable camera modules. Double extra bonus points for easily removed/swapped battery. Add a LoRa radio instead of LTE, why not?

There have been a few projects to make a good Linux phone and while the PinePhone is impressive engineering, it falls short of being a usable replacement for a flagship phone. There's a solid market for brick/tank phones and they have plenty of room to provide usable, all day battery capacity for a Linux device but the current collection from vendors like Blackview, as nice as they are with very useful features like thermal imagers or NIR illumination/sensors and excellent durability are all Android Certified and the Droidocalypse is going to effectively brick them all in September.

Any aggregation of radioactive elements is inherently dangerous, always, no matter what safeguards, simply as a material that is hazardous to health. Most radioactive hazards associated with fissile materials represent health risks with atypically, even for poisonous elements, pernicious qualities. Not many people would be sanguine with health-impacting quantities of fissile materials in their environment, unlike say, lead or arsenic, both quite awful but a whole different scale of awful.

Any intentional aggregation of fissile material is intrinsically a risk to human health and safety. Nuclear advocates (many of whom would qualify as frothing fanbois) dismiss such concerns claiming they know of a "safe" reactor design, some of which are quite clever and are, indeed, intrinsically quite safe when operated correctly. Such fanbois will sometimes make the entirely valid point that the rate of death from even older reactor designs is way below the mortality rate induced by burning coal (true) and that nuclear power is much less carbon intensive than fossil fuels (also true).

There are compelling arguments about a diversity of sources, above the reliability of fissile power, about the longevity of investments, and about immunity to a range of possible weather (storms, extended rain) or geopolitical constraints (international fuel shipments), all of which (and more) have merit and should be considered carefully.

I consider four counter arguments that should be considered when contemplating the relative merit of fissile power generation over other methods:

1) Current advanced nuclear power plants have a projected LCOE of $0.11/kWh (DOE) standard new at $0.118-$0.192/kWh (lazard) while solar currently runs $0.05-$0.06/kWh (lazard) and $0.086 (NREL) for battery-backed 24/7 solar, declining to $0.047/kWh by 2050 (NREL). The economic justification for nuclear power is weak in all but a few geographic locations occupied by humans.

2) Uranium is a finite resource, the cost of which is rising and currently $86.8/kg (tradingeconomics). The total proven proven reserves are sufficient for about 2 years of total human consumption in standard light water fission reactors. Breeders and advanced systems have significantly different total reserve values, but such systems come with significant risks, either in proliferation (breeders) or technological (advanced reactor designs). While it is an entertaining speculative argument to discuss technologies that might extend fuel supplies, solar panels and storage (PSH or grid-scale battery) are well proven and widely available today.

3) National security policy: defense against external antagonist: any centralized civilian facility is a target and nuclear reactors, even intrinsically safe ones, are a particularly tempting target. While containment structures are designed to be robust against, for example, the impact of a large passenger aircraft, they are not robust against "bunker buster" style munitions. Consider the consequences of a relatively trivial drone impact with the Chernobyl sarcophagus. As these sorts of attacks are democratized by the proliferation of low cost, long range, difficult to attribute munitions they will inevitably become more common and the only practical mitigation is decentralization. While nanoreactors such as the Zeus (1-20 MW) might make targeting more difficult, they're still vastly more expensive than a few more drones making them juicy asymmetric targets for any NSAG and proliferate the next concern:

4) National security police: defense against extremist state takeover or occupation: "safe" nuclear reactors assume operation remains in the hands of moderately responsible, reasonable people, an assumption not supported by recent history. There is no fission design that does not rely on a concentration of fissile material, intrinsically radioactive. There is no such concentration that cannot be widely dispersed with a properly engineered application of conventional high explosives. Every nuclear reactor, anywhere in the world, is a pre-emplaced nuclear munition. To quote the (poor) AI transcription of Serhii Plokhy from the Economist's Intelligence podcast https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2026/04/24/an-explosion-still-echoing-chernobyl-at-40 "The taboo on the occupation and military attacks on nuclear sites that existed before 2022 had been broken. It is gone. Now, the war in Ukraine is the war of drones more and more. And the non-nuclear country. Can very easily go nuclear by attacking somebody's nuclear facilities like nuclear power plants." Chernobyl is occupied, Zaporizhzhia is occupied, the Ukrainians got close to taking Kursk; if an occupying force is forced out, might they be tempted to salt the earth they're forced to leave with fissile debris? Might one of the many political parties animated by an Armageddonist eschatology consider a nuclear reactor an inexpensive and readily available doomsday munition, a sort of clarion call to whatever deity they are waiting for? Even if they're wrong about the level of doom a conventional detonation of a fissile core might achieve, the consequences would be far more lasting and terrifying than a fuel depot or even grid-scale lithium battery fire.

Renaldo noted that the essence of food trucks is market place agility. If you can roll a burrito you can vibe code .

Where are the power plants for these?

This is pure passive aggressive grey beard Linux snobbery masquerading as thoughtful commentary

Apple is bsd Unix and has a complete set of Unix tools. Apple knows there customers needs probably better than any maker and you never were going to be one.

The whole point of this is it's inexpensive. Ic you desire more power it's not for you

There's no phone in this model
So we can't talk at all

Yeah but radio ads are generic and not 2 way conversations. They are not an asking what you are saying and twisting it towards explaining why you need product X.

It will be as reliable as asking a used car salesman for advice. Somehow it's gonna be advice about how a car would for me

the core challenge of renewable energy is it's inconstancy. Physical batteries are a bandaid and long distance grids are a council of despair. The real solution for reliable renewable energy is to just build out four or five times the peak load. Then when it's cloudy or not windy you still have way more power than you need to supply the peak load. But of course this has the problem that you just spent four of five times as much capital. And that's a non-starter. But the easy, though bad solution, to this is bitcoin batteries. Just mine bitcoin with the excess and shut off the mining when it's cloudy .

Now along some AI. What a match made in heaven. A completely portable task. Move the calculation to whatever data center currently has power whether it's Norway or Texas. You can soak up all that excess renwable power. Plus there's plenty of non-real time batch jobs you can run that can adapt. For example training.

Perfect.

Shame the US decided to lose the AI power race by nixing renewables

HA. The whole point of being retro is the hipster aspect of being cooler. But no one can be cool if they are not socially observed as being cool. It's the tree falling in the forest. You are only cool if people know you are cool. Affectations of retro style require humble bragging.

I really need to get some self discipline. As much as I try I keep checking Reddit. I loath myself. The only good thing to happen in the last few years was Elon buying twitter. That made getting unhooked on that time waste easy. But Reddit became my methadone.

I've resolved that I'm going to start hitting you tube for educational videos. Gonna learn Lie Group theory!

The problem is Trump. Everyday I have to see what fresh hell he's caused. Life was so placid when we had Biden or Obama or George Bush. Like them or loathe them it wasn't insanity.

Despite impressive results, submarines cannot swim.

I too, call for a ban on time travel.

Let's consider history and debt. The economies of the world have passed through several stages. Prior to the gold standard things could only scale so far before it failed. The gold standard reintroduced stability and fostered even more international trade. The principle of the gold standard was to maintain the peg of a currency to gold. This worked really well up till world war one. Its weaknesses had started to become carat before that where the need for currency expansion could not be satisfied till the next unpredictable gold rush discovery. As a result under capitalized banks became at risk and eventually their were crises that led into world war 1 and utterly failed after it leading to the great depression

We got out of the Great Depression largely in part ti temporary suspension of the gold standard.
A new way of pegging currency emerged with the Brettin woods agreement. All countries would peg to the us dollars and use treasuries as the medium of international money transfer not gold. The us would remain on the gold standard because it could afford to buy gold with all those treasury purchases.

But eventually this too saturated and limited growth. Under Nixon the us left the good standard.

The goal of the fed central bank was not to maintain the dollar per se since the dollar stood alone as the international benchmark. But instead the goal of the Fed was to curb inflation and curb unemployment. The weakness is the Fed only can use monetary policy not fiscal policy. As a result those two goals are in conflict since they cannot be decoupled with a single point of control ( monetary policy without fiscal policy)

But somehow we've done a great job using that system.

But now the international system has again scaled to a new problem which is deficit spending is reaching a point where debt service is a burden.

The next evolution of this is well known. It was beta tested in The depression when the us both went off the gold standard briefly but also excersized both monetary policy abs fiscal policy in concert.

The approach is called modern monetary theory. It has its critics but critics fixate on sound bite summaries of mmt and really fail to grasp that actually it not only can work but has worked in all the instances it has been tried ( us, Italy, Venezuela all recovered from crises under mmt approaches)

The fact that Europe is having problems is in fact due to the euro not allowing fiscal policy since states can't control their own money supply any longer.

The Fed not true problem with mmt is tgat one cannot actually trust politicians to conduct proper discipline in fiscal policy. That has to be solved before it can be implemented. What allowed its implementation in the past was the automatic and not political and transient spending needed to meet crises like the Great Depression. But to do it outside of unemployment periods is dangerous unless it can be done by an apolitical entity -- something similar to the Fed but with different powers and madates.

In any case the bottom line is this, under mmt a debt equal to your gdp is not a bad thing! No need to panic.

The economies of the world have passed through several stages. Prior to the gold standard things could only scale so far before it failed. The gold standard reintroduced stability and fostered even more international trade. The principle of the gold standard was to maintain the peg of a currency to gold. This worked really well up till world war one. Its weaknesses had started to become carat before that where the need for currency expansion could not be satisfied till the next unpredictable gold rush discovery. As a result under capitalized banks became at risk and eventually their were crises that led into world war 1 and utterly failed after it leading to the great depression

We got out of the Great Depression largely in part ti temporary suspension of the gold standard.
A new way of pegging currency emerged with the Brettin woods agreement. All countries would peg to the us dollars and use treasuries as the medium of international money transfer not gold. The us would remain on the gold standard because it could afford to buy gold with all those treasury purchases.

But eventually this too saturated and limited growth. Under Nixon the us left the good standard.

The goal of the fed central bank was not to maintain the dollar per se since the dollar stood alone as the international benchmark. But instead the goal of the Fed was to curb inflation and curb unemployment. The weakness is the Fed only can use monetary policy not fiscal policy. As a result those two goals are in conflict since they cannot be decoupled with a single point of control ( monetary policy without fiscal policy)

But somehow we've done a great job using that system.

But now the international system has again scaled to a new problem which is deficit spending is reaching a point where debt service is a burden.

The next evolution of this is well known. It was beta tested in The depression when the us both went off the gold standard briefly but also excersized both monetary policy abs fiscal policy in concert.

The approach is called modern monetary theory. It has its critics but critics fixate on sound bite summaries of mmt and really fail to grasp that actually it not only can work but has worked in all the instances it has been tried ( us, Italy, Venezuela all recovered from crises under mmt approaches)

The fact that Europe is having problems is in fact due to the euro not allowing fiscal policy since states can't control their own money supply any longer.

The Fed not true problem with mmt is tgat one cannot actually trust politicians to conduct proper discipline in fiscal policy. That has to be solved before it can be implemented. What allowed its implementation in the past was the automatic and not political and transient spending needed to meet crises like the Great Depression. But to do it outside of unemployment periods is dangerous unless it can be done by an apolitical entity -- something similar to the Fed but with different powers and madates.

In any case the bottom line is this, under mmt a debt equal to your gdp is not a bad thing! No need to panic.

I concur. The unemployment rate is about 4% and even the more padded U6 unemployment rate is below 5%
Those are normal.
Under condition when unemployment rates are normal the primary job of the federal reserve is to bring down inflation. It's not simply a good idea. It's their mandate

The fact that there are more jobseekers than jobs is also close to normal. There's always a mismatch between jobs and jobseekers.

It may well be that those jobs are demotions or involve moving etc..

So the Fed has done everthing correctly.

But now they are on toes because we have the immigrant labor leaving and hightarrufs.

While those might increase the number of jobs available it might not fund takers. And both will cause supply side inflation. Simultaneously extending the tax cuts and the debt ceiling means the high rate of pumping debt into the economy will continue.

So the Fed is in an uncharted territory . It could mean high inflation is coming. Most likely. But it could mean a recession. You love the rate in opposite directions there! Most likely is both: stagflation. Which is awful. We did the stagflation experiment in the early 70s and tried both spending into it and later raising interest rates sky high. Only the latter worked.

Fed is exactly doing the right Thing by being watchful