Using it as a laptop? In theory, a 10" screen thin and light laptop with the guts in the base instead of the screen is a better design. There aren’t very many of those to be had, especially not for $90 on Ebay.

Watching videos during taxi, takeoff, and landing? The alternative is paying attention to the safety briefing. I think I won’t.

Surface Go 2.

It wasn’t a Linux tablet when it first arrived, but that was easy to fix.

Most models are just PCs. The cameras in my Surface Go 2 don’t work out of the box on Linux, but everything else is fine.

The power supplies for those things showed up dirt cheap on Ebay at a time when 2A+ USB power supplies were premium items. I bought a bunch of them.

As the owner of a proper Linux tablet, tablets are for combining with keyboards for use as small laptops.

They’re also good for watching videos during taxi, takeoff, and landing during which laptop use is forbidden.

That means if Google’s verification system gets widely adopted, browsing the web could become a headache.

Using a phone to scan a QR code in order to access a website on my desktop is a headache even if it has no dependencies in particular.

I enjoyed being able to safely ride my bike the 8 miles to school

Aside from the risk of the authorities treating it as child neglect, do you believe this would be less safe to do now? If so, why?

It seems very unlikely to me that the model itself has a list of banned words, and much more likely that a purported list is hallucinated.

If they did want to have a simple list like that, it would probably go in the harness rather than the model, and the model wouldn’t have been trained on it, nor would a reasonably designed harness provide it to the model. Legitimate use cases, such as asking the model for a list of abusive words for use as a first pass in a filtering system could get tripped up.

As a test, I asked Perplexity to generate such a list. It did a bad job, including such words as abuse, hate, and threat which are far more likely to be innocuous than abusive. It did also include some highly offensive slurs that one would expect on any banned words list.

Yes, but there were ways to discourage tinkering like using uncommon or proprietary fasteners. They were rarely employed. The digital equivalents are common.

Basically nothing else in our society works this way. Basically nothing has changeable firmware.

A whole lot of important things used to run on mechanical control systems. Someone with a modicum of mechanical talent and a box of simple hand tools could disassemble most of them and figure out how they work. Repairs were generally possible, and if original parts weren’t available, there was a good chance of being able to improvise something in a home workshop or by paying a local machine shop. Modifications were also possible.

Making everything with a computer in it locked down and proprietary was a choice.

Though it obviously varies by jurisdiction, the typical rule is that the dead person’s debts have to be paid before their heirs can inherit their assets. If they didn’t have significant assets then there is no remaining person or legal entity to collect the fine from. Modern legal systems do not hold family members responsible for fines owed by their dead relatives.

I think we probably agree on the fundamentals here: it’s the power and speed that should be a regulatory distinction.

That’s not e-bike versus e-motorcycle exactly. It doesn’t matter what the form factor or control mechanism is. If it’s fast and powerful, you can’t ride it on bike paths and need a driver’s license to take it on the road.

How should one distinguish them? Pedals are the obvious way, but they don’t have anything to do with safety. A bike could have pedals and go 200 km/h.

An adult in half decent physical shape can hit 45 km/h on level ground for a short time on a 9 year old midrange racing bike. Source: I own a 9 year old midrange racing bike.

A professional can sustain that speed.

Yeah, now every “desktop app” is a shitty website that bundles its own copy of chromium. Progress!

“It’s a piece of shit, it’s unusable” like the guy in the video says.

He doesn’t say anything like that. He points out the notice it shows on first use saying it’s unfinished and soliciting bug reports, then ends by acknowledging they’re working for free and it’s a work in progress. Despite the comedic tone, that’s an accurate assessment; PostmarketOS is currently suitable for hobbyists and developers only.

In the middle he tries several times to make a phone call and never succeeds. If anybody is treating this as a serious review to decide whether they should use the same setup around the time the video was published, “unusable” might indeed be a reasonable conclusion, assuming they want to make phone calls on their phone.

People shouldn’t joke about Linux phones because somebody might not get the joke?

On the other hand, there’s a truth underlying the joke: Linux phones are only really ready for a narrow set of users. I say that as a partial member of that set: I have PostmarketOS installed on a phone. It’s fun to play with, but I wouldn’t like to use it an my main phone yet. I hope it gets there some day.

The intention is to mock everything in tech. He mostly mocks big tech, but nothing is immune.

The channel description says

SAMTIME is probably the only channel on the internet not smelling the farts of the big tech companies! From Apple to Samsung, Huawei to OnePlus, we make fun of everyone and tell it like it is (aaand maybe exaggerate just a little if it’s funny).

and that seems about right from the handful of videos I’ve watched. He spends a lot more time mocking big tech firms than poking fun at Linux.

Android was out for at least five years before Safetynet was a thing. I’m surprised people weren’t louder in their objections to that then.