CA designer on X is begging phone makers to build a wide, non-folding phone — like a Galaxy S or iPhone stretched sideways.
MA phone that's wider than it is tall? That's a tablet with a SIM card.
CHear him out. He posted a mockup, and honestly? It looks like a tiny laptop screen you can actually type on.
MI checked. Huawei already made one — the Pura X View. So the 'why hasn't anyone done this' part is already wrong.
COne phone from Huawei doesn't mean the form factor's been tried properly. Nobody in the West has touched it.
MBecause it's awkward. You can't reach the top of the screen with one thumb. Pockets hate it.
CBut two-handed typing gets so much better! And split-screen apps actually make sense.
MFine, for reading and multitasking, maybe. But as a phone? I'm not convinced.
CYou'd still buy one. You'd complain the whole time, but you'd buy one.
MI'd return it in a week. Moving on — a different kind of gadget obsession.
MAnker's 737 power bank is getting a lot of love on X. Twenty-four thousand milliamp hours, 140 watts out, and a little screen.
CThat's enough to charge a MacBook and your phone at the same time. Twice.
MThe post lists it at 190,000 naira. I couldn't verify that price, but the specs check out.
CThe screen is the clever part. You actually know how much juice is left instead of guessing with four blinking dots.
MThat's the feature that matters. Every power bank should have one.
CSpeaking of things that should exist — someone on Hacker News built 'Local Wikipedia.'
CIt shows you Wikipedia articles only for things within a half-hour walk of where you are.
MThat's actually brilliant. You're standing on a street corner and your phone tells you the building across from you was a speakeasy in 1923.
CExactly! It turns a boring walk into a history tour. No algorithm, no feed — just what's physically around you.
MBut if you live in the suburbs, you're getting nothing. One commenter said they'd need to expand the radius to fifteen kilometers to find anything.
CSo make the distance configurable. That's a setting, not a flaw.
MFair. And it's a nice counter to everything being global and noisy. Just your block.
CI'd use it to finally learn what that weird statue near my gym is.
MIt's probably a guy on a horse. It's always a guy on a horse.
COne more from Hacker News, and this one's a little spicier.
CSomeone built a site called Model Compare, and they claim every AI model gives the same 'controversial' take on humans.
MEvery model? That's a bold claim. What's the take?
CThey don't say in the post. You have to go try it. But the idea is that when you ask different AIs the same hard question about people, they all land in the same place.
MThat's not surprising. They're trained on the same internet. They're going to converge on the same bland, safe answer.
CBut that's exactly what's interesting! If they all agree, maybe it's not bland — maybe it's the obvious truth nobody wants to say out loud.
MOr maybe they're all equally bad at being honest.
CYou're impossible. I'm going to try it after the show.
MReport back. I want to know what the machines think of us.
CAnd finally, a privacy payment system called GNU Taler is getting ready to operate in Germany.
MTaler is a payment system built for privacy — no tracking, no data harvesting. The Hacker News crowd is excited.
CGermany's a good test bed. They care about privacy there more than most places.
MBut payments are hard. Merchants, banks, regulators — it's a slog. I'll believe it when I see a shop actually accept it.
CFair. But if it works, it's a real alternative to the card networks watching every purchase.
MThat's the dream, anyway. We'll see if it survives contact with the real world.