Its kind of annoying to have to be charging every other day.

I think I've only had to charge the xteink x4 a couple times since I got it in March. But that's the case for any non-android ereader.

I'd be happy if the boox lasted a week with 2-3ish hours of use a day.

its an involved process but that's always going to be that way on any e-reader that's not a kindle (or android based, where you can install the kindle app).

The official hardware (if you buy through their website or amazon) is not blocked. Only Aliexpress offerings.

But yes, they are coming with a FRONTlit option. Although it'll also have a touchscreen and no front buttons.

I'm hoping maybe in a year or so they make an actual successor with the same button layout, no touchscreen (or with a touchscreen but still with all the buttons) and a better chipset (though nothing major, what the X3 has is enough).

There's also fire.

Writing was very important, I'm not so sure about industrialization, maybe as modern men we might think that way. But human life was perfectly liveable and conceivable without it. Even writing. Big civilizations like the Inca empire didn't really have writing (although they had the quipu system for record keeping).

If there's a civilization collapse, we will still be doing fire and agriculture. We probably won't be doing industrialization and computers.

Most political work is not done for the population as a whole but for the own continuing of the political class and personal enrichment. Yes, sometimes these incentives align with the interests of the constituents. But if politics is about compromise and you have two groups with opposing views whose only common ground is "we are all politicians here" its most likely that a lot of the agreements are going to benefit the political class.

There's people arguing for sortition and sortition (at least as citizens assemblies, the way the OECD describes) tries to solve this problem. As people go into an assembly and don't have other incentives than to defend their own positions with regards to a certain topic of discussions. Its not a permanent body and that gets rid of some of the perverse incentives of politicians.

Of course, software that is in charge of things where people value security a lot, such as the software in airplanes, is much more scrutinized and adheres to better standards. This is the case precisely because when it goes bad people die in ways that attract a lot of attention.

You can't enforce those same policies on most consumer software because people consume it the same way they do food. You can have Michelin starred restaurants with the best practices but most people can't afford to eat there so instead they will buy hot dogs on the street.

The idea of "high quality hand crafted artisinal software" is closer to luxury products than it is to the engineering of planes, trains and bridges.

They're selling because people love to record other people, publicly, without shame. It's kind of like a go-pro, is the use case for these.

The creepers exist but they're not enough people to build a business around.

Its already not anthropic or openAI.

But there might still be some water in the well for the second one, there definitely won't be for the third one.

a usbc is so easy to come by, you're never going to have to wait for amazon to deliver the cable you need to charge this one device you own.

it lasts a day if youre reading all day, a couple days with lighter use. I couldn't finish a whole book on a single charge even if its a small book. Not at my reading speed anyway.

As a comparison, I've already read 3 books on the xteink x4 and still have 60% of battery left. So yeah, android is good but these things need much better batteries to compete.

only frontlight is possible.

but I really agree with you, I'd love to have a frontlight on it. That's literally all I'd wanted over the current device. No touchscreen necessary.

but between touchscreen + frontlight and neither, perhaps I'd be willing to have a touchscreen so long as the software is good (which something like crosspoint I'm sure would nail)

I've merged some working PRs onto my device and it's working great. I really needed a dictionary option because I like to quickly know the meaning of words as I read.

its fine. theres a few more things that could be nice (reading statistics for example) that other forks do have.

"Jalapeño" is such a bad name, having an "ñ" already makes it difficult and annoying to deal with in so many little ways. Good luck with that.

But also, theres the sort of "yes lets use Mexican related things because we're California" thought that I just really hate. I don't know, its like corporate Memphis to me. You see a product like this, you know it's an uppity califonia based firm that came up with it.

despite the ethics of it, business wise it pays for itself, and because of the complicated ethics of it Meta is the best biggest company for it too. Everyone hates meta, their own employees hate meta, who cares. It will probably make money.

not only that, but I think when a big platform comes into play it gets users from the other platforms easily. As the opportunities for market mismatch are abound being a smaller platform in the beginning.

anyway, I think this is a smart move by Meta. And I'm positive everyone in the gambling space is happy with it too, as Meta comes with a good lobbying effort.

this is reality, folks.

I think theyre absolutely needed. I can't afford 200 USD a month for personal use of coding AI, and I don't think such prices are reasonable for most of the world economy anyway. Not to mention US firms might be giving their employees a lot more than that.

It's increasingly feeling, to me, that theres a gap building up between haves and have nots. But then, we get news of these open weight models that are reasonably priced in inference with reasonable capabilities. Yes, they take maybe 6-9 months to get there, tbh, that's not a bad trade off at all.

Things might be fine in Australia and NZ right now, but as the hydric crisis deepens we might see a need for government to step up.

I think a problem is that, if you have a market-first approach you run the risk of the businesses growing so large and powerful that when you do need to intervene, it has become an impossible task. This happened with banking, it is happening with consulting in the UK and big tech in the US. Not to mention big pharma pretty much everywhere.

So I think its a very careful balance of carrot and stick that the government needs to have over its industries.

the failure is in converting regular people into actual ai product consumers. Companies are realising that the money is not in regular consumers but in enterprise and they are not considering grok as a serious alternative.

if anything, the name, the branding and the x/twitter affiliation has hurt adoption from money makers rather than help it.

so yes, people know it, but no one is willing to pay for it