To me it seems they’re behaving (driving? riding?..) in a very surprising/unsafe manner on the road. Admittedly I’m from a country with a completely different driving culture. Do people just ride scooters like that in China?

Also, there’s this interesting legal question of who is responsible when one of those things crashes into a car or a pedestrian.

Other than that, this is cool as heck and I want my bicycle to do the same now.

For example, in the US, Samsung has had locked bootloaders on all its phones since the Galaxy S7.

Yikes. While shopping for a new phone last year I was under the impression that at least in the European market they still allow you to unlock the bootloader, even on the latest models. The catch is that there’s pretty much no third-party Android distros that work with the phones, because they don’t release drivers or kernel patches and people have to scrape them from first-party OS images, which sounds horrible.

You can (on most Android phones) run an Android fork that doesn’t have Google services running and gets software and updates from elsewhere, e.g. GrapheneOS. Can’t do that with an iPhone. I get that you’re still ultimately dependent on Google to continue Android development and make security updates, but it’s way less of a dependency. And yes, GNU-ish Linux on phones would be awesome.

Both iPhones and MacBooks (to a lesser extent) rely on US services provided by Apple. They (techically) can execute arbitrary code on your devices if you have auto-update enabled (and probably even if not). They’re almost definitely spying on you, your habits, your decisions etc.

The article is very light on details, but the numbers don’t seem to check out at all. Back-of-the napkin math (assuming a square 1km × 1km solar array and total sun luminosity of 3.83e26 W):

1 km ^ 2 * (3.83e26 W) / (4 * π * (1 AU) ^ 2) * 1 year to TWh ≈ 11.94 TW·h

This is a “measly” 12 TWh of TOTAL energy delivered to the array over a year - not accounting for solar panel efficiency losses (20-24%) or the elephant in the room of transmitting this energy back to earth. For context, China alone consumed around 39 PWh (39000 TWh) of energy from fossil fuels just over the course of one year, 2023. The entire world consumed 55 PWh (55000 TWh) of oil energy in 2023 alone. It’s not even comparable to the annual consumption of oil. If we consider the aforementioned factors, assuming 24% solar panel efficiency and an extremely generous 50% power transmission efficiency, we get:

1 km ^ 2 * (3.83e26 W) / (4 * π * (1 AU) ^ 2) * 24% * 50% ≈ 163.43 MW

Which is literally nothing on a national scale - it’s less than a percent of the Three Gorges Dam output.