These things are a pain to use. Especially the cheap ones require more force than you’d expect and occasionally get stuck. They make a good clean cut but it’s so slow and awkward that if you were wanting to do vandalism they’re impractical relative to a reciprocating saw or better yet portable band saw.

I also wouldn’t underestimate the power of spray paint, even though it’s simple to fix it’s still expensive when the contract specifics all the maintenance must be done by flock themselves.

4" screen and 16MB flash is a joke. Ebooks are small, but not that small. Considering how many used, end of life Kindles there are out there stuck on old easily jailbroken firmware, I don’t see why anyone would ever choose this as an alternative. The software for jailbroken Kindles is incredibly mature and at the point of “just works”. E-ink technology hasn’t progressed much in the past ten years, so you really don’t miss out on anything by buying a $30 used one.

Edit: just realized it has micro SD support. So my storage concerns are invalid. It’s still incredibly clunky looking though, a 1cm thick device with only a 4" screen sure is something. My eyes probably couldn’t handle it even with the largest font.

Even if too expensive for FOSS devs the mega corps relying on their software will still be able to afford them to run their own security testing, feeding the bug reports back to the project. And with time the hardware and models are only getting more efficient (for a comparable performance level).

Also swimsuit based. Although he wasn’t using any PEDs he was (mostly) using a type of swimsuit which is not allowed in more traditional competitions.

Truly a horrible song, it’s more like a 20 second loop. It plays nonstop all day at every location. Given that it’s already annoying to customers I can’t imagine how tortuous it must be for Mixue employees. It’s certainly an interesting branding tactic, and I’m surprised it’s effective.

To be fair China has their equivalent of the NHTSA with more or less comparable tests. US crash tests are particularly bad and still assume a sedan when everyone drives SUVs/light trucks now. Even mini vans in China are smaller than the majority of American SUVs.

The government subsidy is the bigger reason for why the West generally blocks or heavily tariffs the import of Chinese cars. It’s just not fair competition (though there’s also an argument of it being a good thing for us to let them subsidize our imports of lithium)

As someone who has spent time in both I really don’t think it’s as different as people make it out to be. The only real differences are that cars aren’t so common, people have less money, and multigenerational households are more common. But even the small cities are far healthier than rural America from what I’ve seen of both. They have much more consistent access to health care, mostly ride scooters or walk places encouraging a healthy lifestyle, and are far from starving.

That’s the PolyMatter YouTube channel’s logo. They’ve been around with this logo for many years, and have quite a good back catalog of quality videos.

Projectivy is incredible. I took a while to try it because I didn’t have any real problems with Google’s launcher besides the ads, but the jellyfin and smarttube integration make it so much better than I realized.

The prices for tech on Taobao in China and in the US are nearly identical for the vast majority of tech items. So much is excluded from the tariffs that it’s silly they even exist on paper. There are indeed some newer items only available there, but they’re rarely on the affordable end of pricing.

Laptops and computer hardware in particular surprise me. I was hoping to get a new Huawei or Xiaomi laptop the last time I was in China since I got my parents a Huawei I’ve been jealous of in the US several years before they were banned. Absolutely nothing I could find on Taobao or in store was comparable value even to computers from Dell/HP/Lenovo.

Depending on how you use your phone this concern may not be as big as you think, flip phones spend the vast majority of time with the screen closed and protected. My partner got a 2024 Razr and has been using it daily for 1.5yr without any scratches or other screen related issues (there’s some expected slowness from the clunky MTK processor of course). I was skeptical of the durability at the time but for $450 with an 18mo warranty including accidental damage figured it was worth the risk. The technology is much more mature than I realized.

All my friends who have one rave about the reliability. I can’t get one on principle. They’re all at the mercy of Bambu’s closed source firmware which means you’re always only one automatic update away from a required subscription.

I haven’t seen $20/lb brisket anywhere since COVID regardless of how nice the restaurant. But I’m also far too cheap to eat BBQ unless my work is paying for it or I have visitors from out of town.

There are so many, you can get a good overview of them just by taking rideshare in China. The intense rideshare competition between drivers means that you’re pretty much guaranteed to get an EV just because they’re cheaper to run. Roewe is the most common brand for this in my experience, but there’s significant variety especially by region.

This process pretty much summarizes why I’m scared to try changing companies lately. Presumably these measures are to make sure you’re not cheating with AI, but then if you get the job they expect you to use AI.

I like in-person interviews most, they totally resolve the trust concerns. And to other engineers interviewing you using fewer MS products is typically viewed as a good thing. But getting to the in-person part is difficult in this market even if you’re willing to put up with all their spyware from what I hear.

This isn’t letting you control when the “shifting” happens. It’s just cutting the power for a small period at preset speeds like an automatic transmission ICE.

I suspect that they’d be more hands off than you may expect (if they chose to keep that IP at all). The sovereign wealth fund is first and foremost interested in growing their investment value. And this has only been further cemented as MBS has continued to stripped wahabists of power to the point that they have almost no state involvement anymore.

Not the case for me, I’ll typically spend a solid week or two tweaking things after I initially set it up to get all the hardware working perfectly, then never touch the configuration again even as things slowly start breaking with updates.

Although they use milk, they consider egg a meat. They treat their cows like gods, so if you’re vegan only for the reasons of animal suffering then I’d argue being vegetarian in India is philosophically identical

There’s no alternative that won’t have major limitations. I predict it’ll just be more like going back to the days of jailbreaking to install unsigned apps. Unfortunately AOSP is already pretty much unusable without Google services installed for the vast majority of apps.