I miss blinkenlights on smartphones. They went out of style circa 2015, and now all you get is the screen turning on momentarily, or some variant of a dim always-on view that wastes battery.

FYI Annihilation novel has the same premise and setup as the movie, but is quite different plot-wise. It’s more emotional, introspective, and has very vivid imagery. Much different from what I usually read, but I loved it.

AFAIK as close as you can get is PinePhone or Librem5. But both have pretty poor battery life, an IPS display (technically could be OLED at the expense of even more battery consumption), and pretty jank camera (drivers for good cameras are proprietary, and a lot of modern smartphones rely on postprocessing for quality too).

Don’t get me wrong, PinePhone made fantastic progress in 6 years, but your experience may vary (some people use it as a daily smartphone, some as a dumb phone, others are just turned off immediately)

I am curious if there have been studies on how much the slowness/delayed response of the device improves the attention span. (Since the distraction urge cannot be instantly satisfied)

Anecdotally, I find it very easy to get distracted when clicking on app takes fewer than a few seconds to start. When I test-drove the PinePhone, I felt I was much less distracted because bringing up the browser takes good 5-10 seconds, so I would only do that with a specific goal in mind.

Any details on the technology? “Beaming phone signals” doesn’t tell anyone much. Would this require a proprietary antenna (thus new, flagship-only models after a few years, like iPhone 15 with its emergency satellite calls) for whatever protocol Starlink uses (unless there is some unified ground-to-satellite protocol by now)?

Satellite phones aren’t new, but are expensive for obvious reasons.

Second-hand experience from many years ago when Starlink first rolled out: my friend has a cabin in the Appalachians, outside any cell service, so Starlink sounds great for that. However, Starlink site says there is “no coverage” for that area. Yes, somehow, no coverage for a satellite service. The nearest area with coverage was a town with already-decent 4G. And most large US cities had coverage too. So our inside “conspiracy theory” was that Starlink resells 5G/4G modems for hipsters.

Have no idea if the situation changed since then.

Time Management: The Game

Probably the most valuable IRL skill you can learn in a game. Or you can just chill and fish for a whole year, no one’s gonna judge you.

FYI, there are Gemini search engines:

Kennedy

Totally Legit Gemini Search

Proxies started getting blocked (by some auth-account methods) last year, but libreddit/redlib dev was able to outsmart them multiple times. Now it seems like reddit is blocking IPs (and/or IP ranges). Running redlib from a residential IP still works, but I would not expect it to work from a VPS.

I don’t watch a lot of youtube, but DuckDuckGo browser (on Android and Windows, at least) has a Duck Player that removes all of the cruft around videos and is private afaik.

Other than with language models, this has already happened: Take a look at apps such as Merlin Bird ID (identifies birds fairly well by sound and somewhat okay visually), WhoBird (identifies birds by sound, ) Seek (visually identifies plants, fungi, insects, and animals). All of them work offline. IMO these are much better uses of ML than spammer-friendly text generation.

Here are a few other interesting green automotive startups that didn’t make it:

• Sono Motors’ Sion: Compact EV with solar panels, power sharing, intended to be easily repairable and included a detail manual. They had prototypes but never went to production. Now the company does niche solar applications.
• Workhorse: Series Hybrid (think Chevy Volt) Pickup truck with onboard power for tools etc (was announced around or even before Rivian). Was a very pragmatic idea IMO. Later sort-of resold to Lordstown. Now company does some other things, like drones.
• Lordstown Motors’ Endurance: EV Pickup Truck with hub motors. Made a few hundred, but they have been dragging it out long enough for Ford to make electric pickups. And the idea wasn’t too original even when it was announced.