oh god, Cybertruck culture is just incel culture applied to a different topic. different groups, maybe, but the same culture.

Why are we OK with thick folding phones, but not with thick no-folds?

i think by “we” you mean the manufacturers? AFAICT they just gave away the game: the push for thin phones was more from the supply side than the demand side. not saying people don’t generally prefer thin phones – just that the preference is probably weaker than has been made out to be.

that said, i think it’s more fair to compare things like cubic volume and weight than just the thinness. a 1/2" thick full-size phone would be uncomfortable in my pocket, whereas a 1/2" thick wallet-sized phone might actually be more comfortable than a traditional smartphone.

Orion won’t make its way into the hands of consumers

not for you though (unless you’re a Meta employee).

but yeah good hardware is good hardware and if i could just use it as a display for any other device i have i would totally use it around the home: following a recipe without having to shuffle my phone and the ingredients; running a lengthy command over ssh and doing chores while i wait, without having to check my phone every couple of minutes to see when it’s done…

those things all rely on the software though. will they open it up as a dumb wireless display/terminal, or not? if they don’t, it’s kinda dead to me no matter how great the hardware is…

to challenge free will is to challenge the idea of the self. if the universe is mechanistic, and you within it are equally mechanistic, then you can’t point at your mechanism and say “i stand apart from the world.” you are literally but a part of the larger whole.

morality could be compatible with determinism. the most compatible moral frameworks seems to be a type of universalism, which on the surface resembles altruism. there’s nothing special about ‘you’, so you’d never trade someone else’s well-being to make your own better (it’s a nonsensical exchange, like building a house and then selling it to yourself). when confronting determinism, why do people gravitate toward defeatism instead of this more optimistic conclusion?

i switched all my devices to UTC about a year ago when a surprise DST transition caught me in a pissy mood.

it’s fairly internalized by now. i don’t think it’s that much harder than developing an intuition for both Celcuis and Fahreinheit temperatures. sometimes i’ll glance at the clock while at a friend’s house and it says 09:00 and i do a double-take because “how is it already going-to-bed time?” before i realize it meant 9PM local time, not 09:00 UTC (1AM local).

but it’s the things you don’t think about that make it difficult. set your phone to UTC and 24hr time. first thing you’ll notice is that every weather app blissfully ignores your settings, because they’re showing you weather for a specific place, and assume you care about the time local to that place. second thing you’ll notice is that half your IM apps are going to actually be using AM/PM still. they’ll even mix AM/PM with 24hr within the same app. you read “message received 11:20” and it could mean like 3 different things.

not to mention all the physical stuff: car clocks, oven/microwave clocks, … a lot of these in the US don’t even give an option for 24hr time, and “11:20 PM UTC” is just so cursed.