Sure. I’m not saying it’s a drop-in replacement, just that it has a number of applications. A simple digital watch or even a bare bones IOT device (with periodic serial signaling) could work well with it. You’d essentially set it up once and you’ll forget it’s still there many years later.

Maybe, but I think you’re overselling the EU a bit. Yeah, there have been some high profile changes (in terms of stuff that makes the media), but I wonder how much that actually matters.

The EU hasn’t really ever been a big importer of US goods anyway, at least not for decades. The biggest importers of US products are Mexico, China, and Canada. The US imports a fair amount from the EU, so if they retaliate with tariffs of their own, the US will just buy less from them, which will hurt the EU more than the US.

The US will have a bunch of negatives in the short term too, but I guess we’ll see if those are permanent or just represent a shifting in trade partners.

They probably won’t, but I guess we’ll see. Trump is certainly playing with fire here, and that doesn’t make me feel great as an American.

Why not?

A CR2032 has 235 mAh, which I believe Casio watches use, and their batteries last 5-7 years. So, if we divide that out, that’s something like 5-6 microamps (235 mAh / 5 years / 365 years / 24 hours * 1000 = 5.36… microamps). Converting this to watts @ 3v: 15-18 microwatts.

I think that math is correct (this question reaches a similar conclusion), and it leaves some headroom as well.

If you remove RF from the equation (Bluetooth, WiFi, etc) and custom build the chip, you can get some very low power draws. If all you’re doing is sampling temps or something, you could send an update periodically over serial or something and fit under 100microwatts or so. You could probably even do RF if you have a large enough cap and send once it charges.

That’s definitely in the ballpark though. Surely they could cut 25% power draw to support a 50 year battery.

Should be plenty for watches and IOT devices.

As does Proton.

I went with Tuta though.

rapist culture

Louis Rossmann fan?

I agree with most of that.

The thing is, other countries don’t want to see a slowdown in trade, so there’s absolutely a chance that they’ll be more willing to make deals with the US in exchange for reduced tariffs. In the short term (again, like you said, could be years), there will be reduced demand, which will hurt markets, and I wouldn’t be surprised if conservatives get slammed in elections in the next 2-3 years since the pain will likely still be fresh. I don’t trust Trump to actually make those deals though, especially since so many other countries seem to hate him.

We’ll see though. It’s going to suck if he sticks to his guns and keeps tariffs going in his apparent plan to revitalize US industrial capacity. I’m not sure why we want that, but that seems to be what he wants.

That’s true if all other things were equal, but they’re not. The US is the largest economy in the world, based on GDP, so it has a lot more weight to swing around than others. So theoretically, the US should have more leverage than smaller countries.

That said, I don’t think the US has enough leverage to get away with this. Retaliatory tariffs will come and the net result is that trade in all regions will suffer. When you tax something, you get less of it…

The US might be able to get some leverage if we had an economist in power w/ strong diplomacy skills, but we have Trump.

Look at the money supply compared to inflation. Inflation went up due to supply shocks, central banks printed money as supply shocks eased, and we’re left with stable, higher prices.

If central banks didn’t print money during the inflationary period, we would’ve seen a period of deflation as prices returned roughly to where they were.

Seriously, look up the numbers. Here’s UK money supply, for example.

Bankruptcy is a strategy at the corporate level.

egress costs, which is their true and much sneakier vendor lock in trap.

Absolutely. That’s basically Oracle’a db strategy.

Things like this are why I’ll never use AWS, even if I get to a scale where it makes sense. I value the ability to switch to a different provider or self-host with my own hardware.

the only answer is government regulation

Ideally the market is competitive enough that regulation isn’t needed. But maybe that ship has sailed.

I agree with regulations like Net Neutrality, so I guess it would depend on how it’s worded. I’m just worried massive players like AWS would find ways to abuse any regulations we try to make to exclude others.

But yeah, I don’t pitch switching at work, because I’m not in charge of infra or really involved with it at all. I’m a SWE, not a devOPs or IT tech, so if I’m touching anything in Cloudwatch other than looking at logs, something has gone horribly wrong.

And lots of it.

Just try mounting it, if you get bucked, try again.

We use AWS at work, and the “cutting costs” thing seems largely a way to further lock-in customers. They want you to build around their tools so the switching cost is high enough to not be worthwhile. Then again, I don’t work directly with billing (I’m a SWE, not in OPs), but what I’ve seen looks a lot higher than I would’ve guessed.

Idk, maybe it’s reasonable at scale, but it seems to get really expensive really fast.

I got an ASRock x370 board and it had fewer problems than other first gen Ryzen boards, was one of the first to support 5000 series CPUs, and it’s still working well in my NAS with no dead ports or anything.

They used to be one of the lowest quality boards, but they’ve earned my respect. My current motherboard (b550) is also ASRock and the only problem I had was the WiFi chip sucking on Linux (known issue, I replaced just the WiFi module and everything is golden). My wife has a Gigabyte board and it had some minor issues.

So yeah, ASRock is on my good list for now.

It’s a great article, actually click through and read it if you haven’t already.

My favorite example of truly effortless communication is a memory I have of my grandparents. At the breakfast table, my grandmother never had to ask for the butter – my grandfather always seemed to pass it to her automatically, because after 50+ years of marriage he just sensed that she was about to ask for it. It was like they were communicating telepathically.

That is the type of relationship I want to have with my computer!

The author’s point is that natural language is a slow way to communicate, and it’s not even our preferred way, so why are we pushing so hard for it?

One of the best productivity tools for me is my CLI shell, which predicts what I’m about to type based on what I’ve done in the past. There’s no AI here, just simple history search. It turns out i do the same thing a lot.

None of this is to say that LLMs aren’t great. I love LLMs. I use them all the time. In fact, I wrote this very essay with the help of an LLM.

The author argues that LLMs are an augmentation to existing tools, not a replacement. Just like the mouse didn’t replace the keyboard (my example), LLMs won’t replace existing workflows, it’ll merely help in the knowledge retrieval stage.

For this future to become an actual reality, AI needs to work at the OS level. It’s not meant to be an interface for a single tool, but an interface across tools.

This is where I partially disagree.

Yes, I think some level of AI makes sense at the OS layer, but its function should be to find the right tool, not to be a tool. For example, “open my budget” would know from context which file that is (family, company, client, etc), which program (GNUCash, Excel, or a URL in a browser), and then pass on context to the app-specific AI, which would know which part to open and be ready for context-relevant questions (is it payday? Was I just looking at concert tickets? Is someone’s birthday coming up?).

But even then, the usefulness of a system-wide AI is pretty limited. Most people can efficiently navigate to what they want. Indexes work well to find files (and full text search is feasible), file extensions work well to open the right application, and applications remembering what they were last doing is usually sufficient.

So I see it as more of an accessibility feature at the system level instead of an actual, useful system in itself. However, I really like the idea of different models passing context in some standard way to each other so I can seamlessly move between apps.

But I absolutely agree with the main point here: AI should be seen as an add-on, not a replacement.

Same. I still have my previous phone, but I don’t use it anymore because it’s insecure, not because it’s broken. I’m still using a laptop that’s even older precisely because it gets security updates since it runs Linux.

I’d absolutely lay a premium for longer support and it’s a large part of why I got a Pixel this time around, they advertise 7 years of support and I hope to hold them to that.

The thing is, I don’t really care about Android apps, and honestly supporting them probably adds a bunch of limitations since they have a lot of expectations on the system.

I just want an immutable base system w/ flatpaks, a basic dialer, a robust SMS/MMS app, Firefox, and good enough battery life (15 hours w/ moderate screen on time). Basically, openSUSE Aeon or Fedora Silverblue with phone-specific apps.

I’m happy to help port the various software I want to use, but I need the phone to work as a phone first.