hersh

I was thinking that it sounded about right, until I read beyond the headline:

Its value is approximately one hour, or half an hour for a one-way trip.

WHAT. I thought he meant one hour each way!

Are there any cities where that is the norm??? I've had sub-30 commutes in my life, and it felt like the height of luxury.

I had a 1.5 hour (one way) commute for a while, and I was burned the fuck out after a year of that. It takes a toll on your health.

To elaborate on this a little, you can use Flatseal to specify which directories a Flatpak app can have access to directly. For example, in a music player that stores the path of your music library, you'd want to use Flatseal to be sure it has direct access to that folder. This is similar to GrapheneOS's storage scopes.

Aside from that, apps can also call on a file picker that lets you choose any file/folder on your system, and flatpak then creates a virtual path to bridge to that file/folder without exposing the entire rest of the filesystem. This is nice for one-time open/save commands, but doesn't work for apps that need persistent access to a specific directory like in the music player example. This is similar to Android's file provider API.

I don't recall off the top of my head what flatpak apps have access to by default. Some subset of the home folder, I think?

But here’s the really funky bit. If you ask Claude how it got the correct answer of 95, it will apparently tell you, “I added the ones (6+9=15), carried the 1, then added the 10s (3+5+1=9), resulting in 95.” But that actually only reflects common answers in its training data as to how the sum might be completed, as opposed to what it actually did.

This is not surprising. LLMs are not designed to have any introspection capabilities.

Introspection could probably be tacked onto existing architectures in a few different ways, but as far as I know nobody's done it yet. It will be interesting to see how that might change LLM behavior.

I refer you to #7 on Bruce Tognazzini's evergreen top ten list of design bugs.

https://www.asktog.com/Bughouse/10MostWantedDesignBugs.html

I'm not sure what the exact model is, but it's probably from the Performa or Power Mac 5000 or 6000 series. It's low-res so it's hard to read, but the text next to the floppy drive says "PowerPC", referring to the CPU family used in Macs in that era.

The screen looks like Mac OS 8. It's so low-rest that it's kind of hard to tell, but the menu bar at the top of the screen is clearly from Mac OS. Could be 7.5, but I'm guessing 8 since that's what's shown in the web browser.

I think the left screen is showing Windows. Again, super low-res, but those look like Windows 95/98's blue window title bars and gray task bar at the bottom.

Same.

That was probably the intention. X-Files was at its height of popularity around this time (assuming 1997 by the Mac model and OS 8).

I don't have a Palma, but I have a Book Go 6, which looks like it has similar display tech. So I think I can answer some of your questions.

The backlight can go all the way off, to the point where it is invisible in a dark room. You can also adjust the backlight color temperature.

Typing is bad, but I've never spent time optimizing it. I would guess that the responsiveness on the Palma might be higher. I also never tried it in high-speed mode, which is much more responsive but has worse ghosting and generally worse image quality. For my use case (99% just reading) I don't mind the slow response time.

It's possible to access the normal Android settings, though I just picked up my Boox Go and I can't actually figure out how. I know I've done it before somehow. The Boox settings app has a VPN section, but I don't see DNS options. Pretty sure you can do this though.

One thing I want to point out is that the Palma is not technically a phone. It's a wi-fi device, so it will not make calls or send SMS. You would be limited to internet-based messaging apps like Signal or Telegram. I can't speak to how smoothly those run.

There are also a couple proper phones (with SIM cards) with similar display tech coming out this year. See:

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/6/24335983/tcl-60-xe-nxtpaper-e-ink-specs-ces

https://liliputing.com/the-minimal-phone-is-now-shipping-e-ink-phone-with-a-qwerty-keyboard/

Oh huh. I didn't know there even was a video. Perhaps my ad/tracker blockers cut it.

Just found a hands-on CNET video: https://www.cnet.com/videos/at-ces-2025-tcl-debuts-new-tcl-60-phone-with-e-ink-display/

Never used TCL's "Nxtpaper" so not totally sure how it compares.

TCL is releasing a new phone later this year with a toggle-able e-ink mode. So you can use it with in full color when you want, and switch to e-ink when you want. It's in a more conventional aspect ratio so apps will look more "normal". I can say from experience with my Boox e-reader that a lot of apps do not work well in 4:3.

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/6/24335983/tcl-60-xe-nxtpaper-e-ink-specs-ces

Might be my next phone if the CPU and software is not awful (big if).

It's insane that this is even legal.

I've never actually tried it, but I think you could use BTRFS subvolumes to multiboot without partitioning the physical space.

And then maybe even use deduplication across subvolumes?

That's pretty much what I do, yeah. On my computer or phone, I split an epub into individual text files for each chapter using pandoc (or similar tools). Then after I read each chapter, I upload it into my summarizer, and perhaps ask some pointed questions.

It's important to use a tool that stays confined to the context of the provided file. My first test when trying such a tool is to ask it a general-knowledge question that's not related to the file. The correct answer is something along the lines of "the text does not provide that information", not an answer that it pulled out of thin air (whether it's correct or not).