HN user
Product Manager by day. Living in Hong Kong. Non-work time split between family, running, and projects. All opinions definitely my own and not necessarily reflective of nor endorsed by employer, family, pets or anyone else on this planet.
Reminds me a lot of my old Nokia 525 with windows. Great form factor for running and hiking. If this one got GPS I would buy it. But it's up against excellent full function phones like bluebox and veelo from China which make stunningly good small phones.
I really like the thinking of openness behind this device. Could be great as a pocketable "notice board" getting info on a schedule from mobile and "posting" to a pub on device for me to look at when I feel like it and react to messages on my schedule.
Great for kids to get started. Saves to SD so you don't fill your mobile storage with 12,000 beach photos from last holiday. Cheaper to lose/replace than ifone.
I still have a LUMIX camera 10+ years for instant pics when travelling. Smaller than my wallet.
Mojo not good enough?
So now the speculation can start as to which company they will acquire first.
100% agree with this. The whole "influencer" industry (let's be honest it's about manipulating you) is peak enshitification.
I quit twitter cos it became a cesspool. IG needs aggressive curation and keeping notifications off. Even bluesky became rage bait. And only watch a few channels of YouTube thru FreeTube.
Maybe I just old grumpy geek but after nearly 2 decades of social media I've yet to find the "social" part. It is in the main a bucket into which anyone can vomit their media and hysteria du jour.
It was a good experiment but it's done.
Pieces has promise if they can come up with a curation process that matches the ideals of their platform. I truly hope it works out because part of me wants there to be a place online for people to share publicly without fear of doxing or advertising.
We could remove 100% of world AI supply and humanity would not be worse off. It is still additive and in areas of generally indeterminate value except in hype.
Reasoning and RAG is amazing already and is a productivity gain but I'm yet to be convinced GenAI is anything but a slop machine.
#startflamingmenow
Love it !
Straight out of China playbook. Every SIM must be registered with government issued/recognised ID. Yes combats fraud. Yes means govt can track you thru IMEI 24x7 anywhere in the world.
This is gorgeous. Makes me feel like I'm picking up an old news sheet. Forces me to read slowly from which I then enjoy the reading much more it's like difference of drinking a fine wine from a glass instead of a straw in the wine bottle.
Kudos to the author.
Agree. Should be legally required for all web hosted pictures to be AI poisoned except with explicit verifiable opt out. Same for text.
Needs some institution with many geek supporters and or large tools, like Wikipedia or EFF to wage a campaign of scanning the web for materials used without permission and then loading the courts with cases of probable non-consensual usage. May not change billionaire behaviour but perhaps will change consumer behaviour.
Retirement is an artificial modern construct to create jobs. People are supposed to be active until they die. Hobbies are just a replacement activity. I have no intention of retiring (over 60 already). I work in tech and learning new skills and my income feeds and houses my family and pays for my running shoes.
As other commenters have noted folk in some places don't have anything but work. That is a global social issue that needs addressing first.
The issue is chip production in Korea and possibly Taiwan. And that's where vast amounts of US chip inventory comes from. How to buildout AI capacity if can't source memory chips? This exposes another risk to the high AI valuations which are underpinning market valuations.
The article is timely as it suggests yet another unconsidered risk factor of this war - USA could destroy its own stock market. Or Iran could accelerate that with one missile. I like to think the US military know this hence obsession with missile destruction but it is reasonable based on recent behaviour to assume that the MAGA overlords can't even spell bromine nevermind understand the risk.
FWIW my Dad taught me how to type at 4yo on a huge Imperial typewriter. My spelling took an enormous leap in capability in a few weeks. Primary school teachers were amazed at the words I could spell correctly. (Didn't help my handwriting though which was still like intoxicated chicken scratch on a good day).
When I did tertiary studies in programming there wasn't AI but we did our programming exams in pencil and paper. The "beneficial" prep we had and I had since high school was using punch cards. And 24h turnaround time for compiles. That really makes you think. And you learn how to desk check even thousand line programs. Intense focus, structuring for readability (to catch typos) and simplicity (catch logic errors) helped enormously. Was not unusual to change hundred lines of code and submit knowing that it wouldn't compile but will throw up the other errors I couldn't find. Our exams would give us 4-6 attempts for clean compile AND correct output. The only space where I experience same challenge now (40+ yrs later) is embedded code. Desktops and web stuff have LSPs and dynamic reloads and interpreted code (not a thing for me when learning) with instant feedback.
Lots of skills from those old days that have been lost/ignored in the pretence of productivity.
I'm waiting for the man to make a laptop case out of concrete. That will be truly brutalist!
That's the one I've been using for a while. Nice to have something so clean in this age of slop.
Brilliant in every possible way. Fortran was first language I learnt at high school in its "PORTRAN" variant.
As Someone who has spent decades working with teams around the world with varying levels of English from native to none, these are good guidelines. I would add to try and talk using the simplest and least ambiguous words you can. Breathe. And use shorter sentences.
I also have non English speaking family members so I get to improve everyday. And yes I make mistakes every day but 99% avoidable and the rest I just accept and move on. Multicultural and multilingual teams are a joy not a test so enjoy them when you have the chance. Might surprise yourself how much you will learn about people and communications and build a new level of self awareness in the process.
My 2c.
If you self assemble take great care with the buttons! Otherwise a great reliable device. Bought myself one as "reward". But broke the left lower push button. On board contact still works so it's usable. ESP so comes with wifi&BT goodness built in.
Second that. Have had one for 2 years and it's brilliant. Haven't yet tried to build any app for it. But it runs a month for me on single charge. I use it for travel or when out for day trips with family.
This is wonderful news. As a "mail carrier" for US govt they should be made a branch of Post Service and then under Trump benevolent guidance and DOGE goals the department can be cut down to 3 people and a laptop. Billions in Gov subsidies saved right there. Done. Make it so.
In the 80s I worked on BPCS, an early ERP system, and yes it was coded in RPG2, and RPG3. Mind blowingly hard to understand the source code but I credit my efforts then with later finding AWK so easy and logical. IBM had also just brought out the baby System36 which looked like a PC beige box but was actually a minified s/36 if I recall correctly. Didn't sell well. Then there was RPG for DOS which I heard of but didn't use.
If the authors client had been using an RPG accounting system for 40 years then it might be BPCS and there were tools out there to convert RPG to other less traumatic languages.
But fascinating article nonetheless and brought back memories of being an apps programmer. I also remember those dongles. Really fun when you had multiple apps with their own dongles and only one port.
Please share as I would like to see what you have built.
What I like about this is that ides of a catalog which is what most business systems have in the form of their records and objects. Giving an AI accessible structure to this gets AI into the realm of the various 4GLs back in late 90s which made user created forms so much easier. Anybody remember that Informix 4GL for building simple apps from the db schema?
Reality bites. JS devs have tried to use JS for everything and found limits. It isn't a one language to rule the all. Welcome back to the world of needing the right tools for the job.
As a lifelong procrastinator this article reads like "that other Napoleon" aka Eisenhower and his "delegate" for anything neither important nor urgent. I use it when I'm one of several recipients in emails To: address.
Other responders have also talked about Google inbox which I never used but even those of use locked away in enterprise fiefdoms with Outlook can make use of pinned messages (same as starting in Google Inbox) and recently also can be reminded about emails. I use both combined with the approach of trying to clear my inbox as close to zero unread each day as possible. I do same to slack messages as well. For all "messages" I ruthlessly delete or archive anything not needing action and with no legal or revenue impact.
THats how I manage the torrent of comms. Need to improve my work on larger items to start earlier and produce in smaller chunks.
For keeping track of all my work I used Obsidian with tasks and tags and put due dates on all. Helps me see what is due for each "project".
My 2c.
Unihertz Titan 2 https://www.unihertz.com/ Which I plan on buying next when iPhone dies.
Glad I wasn't the only one to suspect AI slop. The language is too self promoting and vacuous in parts. Just doesn't feel like a human wrote it to me.
Great article. I think of AI when considering where and how to use as Automated Intelligence and when thinking about risk AI can also mean Accelerated Incompetence. Which end of this scale you end up on depends on taking the hype or systems thinking approach to the opportunity/problem being addressed.