cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/28133646

The war goes on, and so does the global energy crisis. In fact, I believe that prices of oil futures remain too low given how much spot prices will need to rise to resolve the shortages that will hit once oil supplies that were shipped before the Strait of Hormuz was closed are exhausted.

But a better future is coming, despite Donald Trump’s assault on renewable energy as he tries to drag us back into the fossil fuel past. Regardless of Trump’s chest-thumping, America is not the world. We account for only 15 percent of global energy consumption, compared with China’s 28 percent. And the rest of the world is moving rapidly to renewables, thanks to a technological revolution in solar power, wind power, and, less visibly, batteries.

So let me take an optimism break and talk about why batteries may save the world.

The decline in battery prices has been incredible. It’s like nothing anyone has ever seen before. Big, strong men with tears in their eyes come up to me and say, “Sir, have you seen the progress in batteries?”

Why does this matter?

[ … ]

Furthermore, we’ve seen rapid progress in all components of the green energy transformation, even though their underlying technologies have little in common. Solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries are very different, yet all have seen revolutionary improvements. This strongly suggests that the whole renewable energy complex is experiencing a virtuous circle: ever-growing use leads to falling costs and falling costs lead to ever-growing use.

[ … ]

So although we are now in the midst of a severe energy crisis that could easily go on for many months, this too shall pass. A better, cheaper, cleaner energy future is on the way, and not even Trump can stop it.

The war goes on, and so does the global energy crisis. In fact, I believe that prices of oil futures remain too low given how much spot prices will need to rise to resolve the shortages that will hit once oil supplies that were shipped before the Strait of Hormuz was closed are exhausted.

But a better future is coming, despite Donald Trump’s assault on renewable energy as he tries to drag us back into the fossil fuel past. Regardless of Trump’s chest-thumping, America is not the world. We account for only 15 percent of global energy consumption, compared with China’s 28 percent. And the rest of the world is moving rapidly to renewables, thanks to a technological revolution in solar power, wind power, and, less visibly, batteries.

So let me take an optimism break and talk about why batteries may save the world.

The decline in battery prices has been incredible. It’s like nothing anyone has ever seen before. Big, strong men with tears in their eyes come up to me and say, “Sir, have you seen the progress in batteries?”:

[ … ] [ … ]

So although we are now in the midst of a severe energy crisis that could easily go on for many months, this too shall pass. A better, cheaper, cleaner energy future is on the way, and not even Trump can stop it.

If you have technical problems, try this link.

On the kernel security list we’ve seen a huge bump of reports. We were between 2 and 3 per week maybe two years ago, then reached probably 10 a week over the last year with the only difference being only AI slop, and now since the beginning of the year we’re around 5-10 per day depending on the days (fridays and tuesdays seem the worst). Now most of these reports are correct, to the point that we had to bring in more maintainers to help us.

Something I’m predicting is that at least it will change the approach to security fixes: [ … ] software that used to follow the “release-then-go-back-to-cave” model will have to change to start dealing with maintenance for real, or to just stop being proposed to the world as the ultimate-tool-for-this-and-that because every piece of software becomes a target.

[ … ]

Overall I think we’re going to see a much higher quality of software, ironically around the same level than before 2000 when the net became usable by everyone to download fixes. When the software had to be pressed to CDs or written to millions of floppies, it had to survive an amazing quantity of tests that are mostly neglected nowadays since updates are easy to distribute. But before this happens, we have to experience a huge mess that might last for a few years to come! Interesting times…

On Wednesday, NASA will attempt to send four astronauts around the moon on a mission called Artemis II. This will be second flight of NASA’s SLS rocket, and the first time the 20-year-old Orion capsule flies with people on board.

The trouble is that the heat shield on Orion blows chunks. Not in some figurative, pejorative sense, but in the sense that when NASA flew this exact mission in 2022, large pieces of material blew out of Orion’s heat shield during re-entry, leaving divots. Large bolts embedded in the heat shield also partially eroded and melted through.

[…]

All of this was kind of preposterous. As the YouTuber Eager Space has pointed out, if a commercial crew capsule (SpaceX Dragon or Boeing Starliner) returned to Earth with the kind of damage seen on Orion, NASA would insist on a redesign and an unmanned test flight to validate it. But the agency does not hold its flagship program to the high standard it demands from commercial crew, even though the same astronaut lives are at stake.

Nor was it lost on observers that the tools and models NASA used to arrive at its new analysis were the same ones that had failed to predict the spalling problem in the first place. While the agency was able to work backwards from flight data to induce flaking in a test coupon of Avcoat, they had no way of predicting how the full-size heat shield would behave in the new flight conditions it would experience on Artemis II.

You don’t have to be a random space blogger to find all this fishy. The most energetic voice of public dissent has been heat shield expert and Shuttle astronaut Charles Camarda, the former Director of Engineering at Johnson Space Center. Aghast at what he saw as a repeat of the motivated reasoning that had led to the loss of Columbia and Challenger, Camarda began making noise both inside and outside the agency, believing that astronauts’ lives were at stake.

In a show of openness, NASA invited Camarda and two journalists to attend a briefing on the heat shield in January of 2026, and gave him limited access to some research materials that have not been made public. But the experience only deepened Camarda’s distress, and he ended up publishing a cri de coeur that I encourage everyone to read in full.

Fascinating read.

On Wednesday, NASA will attempt to send four astronauts around the moon on a mission called Artemis II. This will be second flight of NASA’s SLS rocket, and the first time the 20-year-old Orion capsule flies with people on board.

The trouble is that the heat shield on Orion blows chunks. Not in some figurative, pejorative sense, but in the sense that when NASA flew this exact mission in 2022, large pieces of material blew out of Orion’s heat shield during re-entry, leaving divots. Large bolts embedded in the heat shield also partially eroded and melted through.

[…]

All of this was kind of preposterous. As the YouTuber Eager Space has pointed out, if a commercial crew capsule (SpaceX Dragon or Boeing Starliner) returned to Earth with the kind of damage seen on Orion, NASA would insist on a redesign and an unmanned test flight to validate it. But the agency does not hold its flagship program to the high standard it demands from commercial crew, even though the same astronaut lives are at stake.

Nor was it lost on observers that the tools and models NASA used to arrive at its new analysis were the same ones that had failed to predict the spalling problem in the first place. While the agency was able to work backwards from flight data to induce flaking in a test coupon of Avcoat, they had no way of predicting how the full-size heat shield would behave in the new flight conditions it would experience on Artemis II.

You don’t have to be a random space blogger to find all this fishy. The most energetic voice of public dissent has been heat shield expert and Shuttle astronaut Charles Camarda, the former Director of Engineering at Johnson Space Center. Aghast at what he saw as a repeat of the motivated reasoning that had led to the loss of Columbia and Challenger, Camarda began making noise both inside and outside the agency, believing that astronauts’ lives were at stake.

In a show of openness, NASA invited Camarda and two journalists to attend a briefing on the heat shield in January of 2026, and gave him limited access to some research materials that have not been made public. But the experience only deepened Camarda’s distress, and he ended up publishing a cri de coeur that I encourage everyone to read in full.

Fascinating read.

[…] Coding agents are now also introduced to production codebases. After 12 months, we are now beginning to see the effects of all that “progress”. Here’s my current view.

[…]

All of this compounds into an unrecoverable mess of complexity. The exact same mess you find in human-made enterprise codebases. Those arrive at that state because the pain is distributed over a massive amount of people. The individual suffering doesn’t pass the threshold of “I need to fix this”. The individual might not even have the means to fix things. And organizations have super high pain tolerance. But human-made enterprise codebases take years to get there. The organization slowly evolves along with the complexity in a demented kind of synergy and learns how to deal with it.

With agents and a team of 2 humans, you can get to that complexity within weeks.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/44022276

Jolla may not be a household name, but for more than a decade the Finnish company has positioned its Linux-based Sailfish OS as an alternative to the mobile software duopoly that is Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.

Now, 13 years since it tried to cut through the market with the Jolla Phone—a device which remarkably received software updates through 2020—it’s back with a successor of the same name.

This time, the company is positioning its handset as the “European phone.” This bit of marketing caters to the growing distrust in US digital services and platforms that has arisen since Big Tech sidled up to the second Trump administration.

The new Jolla Phone (pronounced “Yolla”) costs €649, mimics the Scandinavian design of the original, and has secured more than 10,000 preorders since its preview in December 2025. Those orders are expected to begin shipping at the end of June. At Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona this week, the company divulged more details about the phone’s hardware.

Alt Android

Jolla has had a turbulent history. After the company floundered the launch of its Jolla Tablet in 2015, it nearly went bankrupt and pivoted to licensing Sailfish OS to automotive companies and governments, including Russia. After the invasion of Ukraine, Jolla had to cut ties with Russia, and a corporate restructuring meant that Jolla’s assets were acquired by the company’s former management under a new company called Jollyboys.

It got back into the smartphone game in 2024 with the Jolla C2 Community Phone, made in collaboration with a local Turkish company, and it was this experience that gave Jolla the courage to jump back into the hardware business with the new Jolla Phone. Unlike the C2, this device is completely assembled in Salo, Finland, where Nokia phones were manufactured more than a decade ago.

“Europeans want more European technology,” Sami Pienimäki, CEO of Jolla Mobile, tells WIRED. “People want to go away from Big Tech, and the other trend is that European people want sovereign tech—it makes it possible for our kind of company to have a position in the market.”

Building a smartphone from scratch was also much harder over a decade ago, but today, Pienimäki says the operation can be fairly lean without having to “pay too much up-front.”

The components are sourced from various vendors and countries. The MediaTek Dimensity 7100 5G chip hails from Taiwan; the 50-megapixel main and 13-megapixel ultrawide camera sensors are from Sony; the 8 or 12 GB of RAM is from SK Hynix in South Korea.

“There are Chinese components as well—we are totally open about it—but the key is that, as we compile the software ourselves and install it in Finland, we protect the integrity of the product,” Pienimäki says.

What makes Sailfish OS unique over competitors like GrapheneOS and e/OS is that it’s not based on the Android Open Source Project, but Linux. That means it has no ties to Google—no need for the company to “deGoogle” the software; meaning there’s a greater sense of sovereignty over the software (and now the hardware). Still, it’s able to run Android apps, though the implementation isn’t perfect. Another common criticism is that it’s not as secure as options like GrapheneOS, where every app is sandboxed.

There’s a good chance some Android apps on Sailfish OS will run into issues, which is why in the startup wizard the phone will ask if you want to install services like MicroG—open source software that can run Google services on devices that don’t have the Google Play Store, making it an easier on-ramp for folks coming from traditional smartphones without a technical background. You don’t even need to create a Sailfish OS account to use the Jolla Phone.

Jolla’s effort is hardly the first to push the anti–Big Tech narrative. A wave of other hardware and software companies offer a deGoogled experience, whether that’s Murena from France and its e/OS privacy-friendly operating system or the Canadian GrapheneOS, which just announced a partnership with Motorola. At CES earlier this year, the Swiss company Punkt also teamed up with ApostrophyOS to deploy its software on the new MC03 smartphone. Jolla is following a broader European trend of reducing reliance on US companies, like how French officials ditched Zoom for French-made video conference software earlier this year.

Murena CEO and founder Gaël Duval wrote in a statement emailed to WIRED that the company believes it has a different mission from the Jolla Phone as it’s trying to bring the existing mobile app ecosystem—minus the permanent data collection by Google and third-party trackers—without a learning curve for the average person. “We want to make privacy possible for the everyday person without the need for technical expertise or a development background,” he says.

The Phone

A common problem with these niche smartphones is that they inevitably end up costing a lot of money for the specs. Take the Light Phone III, for example, a fairly low-tech anti-smartphone that doesn’t enjoy the benefits of economies of scale, resulting in an outlandish $699 price. The Jolla Phone is in a similar boat, though the specs-to-value ratio is a little more respectable.

It’s powered by a midrange MediaTek Dimensity 7100 5G chip with 8 GB of RAM, 256 GB of storage, plus a microSD card slot and dual-SIM tray. There’s a 6.36-inch 1080p AMOLED screen, the two main cameras, and a 32-megapixel selfie shooter. The 5,500-mAh battery cell is fairly large considering the phone’s size, though the phone’s connectivity is a little dated, stuck with Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4.

Uniquely, the Jolla Phone brings back “The Other Half” functional rear covers from the original. These swappable back covers have pogo pins that interface with the phone, allowing people to create unique accessories like a second display on the back of the phone or even a keyboard attachment. There’s an Innovation Program where the community can cocreate functional covers together and 3D-print them. And yes, a removable rear cover means the Jolla Phone’s battery is user-replaceable.

Pienimäki says that while the device doesn’t have FCC approval, you can theoretically import it into the US, and it should work with the major US carriers, though compatibility is rarely a given. Jolla is considering a separate US launch, though right now it’s focusing on the European Union, the UK, Norway, and Switzerland.

Antti Saarnio, Jolla Group’s chairperson, reiterates that the Jolla Phone will be a niche product. “Most of the people using Android or iOS will not switch, but we should treat this as a stepping stone for something new,” Saarnio says. The “path to real volume” will come from the mobile market breaking down into new form factors, powered by artificial intelligence.

He’s likely referring to Jolla’s Mind2, a privacy-focused AI computer, which is still in active development. It plugs into a PC and connects Jolla’s AI assistant to apps like email and calendar locally—no cloud access required. The chatbot-like interface lets you ask it questions about your data, whether you’re fishing for something from an email or a private message. While the new Jolla Phone won’t have any AI capabilities at launch, Saarnio says an integration will be an option users can enable later this year.

Jolla has street cred for supporting its devices for a long time, but we’ll have to wait and see how the fresh hardware holds up and just how much the company has polished the Sailfish OS experience, especially since it’s much easier today to get started with a deGoogled Android alternative.