SOULFLY98

. I personally think that a lot of this could be resolved by turning display brightness levels down, but people like what they like.

It's the opposite: turn the brighness on an OLED display to 100% and the eyestrain ends because the flickering goes away. Pulse width modulation is used for dimming OLED displays -- that means turning the screen off and on again in a very quick manner -- to simulate a darker screen. It's fast enough for your brain to think it's a dimmer screen, but slow enough that the muscles in your eyes still react to the sudden on/off again flashing, which results in eyestrain and headaches. A lot of cheap OLED panels flicker at only 240Hz at anything below 100% brightness, resulting in eyestrain. Chinese phones have gotten around this by using things like DC dimming (lowering the voltage to the diodes) or increasing the rate of the flicker to greater than 1KHz (called high frequency pwm dimming), which is fast enough that your eye muscles don't notice the flicker.

It's enough of an issue that Apple followed suit, having just moved to high frequency pwm dimming as a "new" feature on the iPhone 17 last month. They call the feature "Display Pulse Smoothing" and describe it as:

"Disables pulse width modulation to provide a different way to dim the OLED display, which can create a smoother display output at low brightness levels. Disabling PWM may affect low brightness display performance under certain conditions."

Note that the pwm flicker rate is different than the refresh rate, which has to do with how quickly things are drawn on the screen.

How it relates to e-ink, I do not know. About a decade ago, most e-ink e-readers got backlights and I remember buying the then newest Nook that had a backlight. I would read before going to bed, and as I closed my eyes, I would see flashing light in the outline of the Nook, like a residual effect of screen flicker. I am on a Kobo Libra 2 now and no longer have this flickering issue.

Regarding the Boox, this is a form factor that I've always wanted for an e-reader, to use on public transit. I think it's a fine size for my kids as well. But I'll wait and see after launch if the current version is discounted and get it from Taobao.

There is a national law called in China called PIPL, modeled after the GDPR, that limits what companies can do with the private data collected about individuals.

Outside of California, not much exists in the USA to protect privacy.

I'm not going to pretend that either country is not authoritarian. But a lot of the narrative about China is just propaganda. Here at least I can bicycle safely to work, take an electric car if I need a taxi, not worry about medical bankruptcy from a hospital stay, and not be deported because we are brown or worry that my kids will get shot at school.

Ask me ten years ago and this was a different answer. But conditions change (in both countries), we must adapt, so here we are.

Maybe my perspective is skewed because I live in Beijing and spent most of my life in the USA, but I think the US is worse on privacy.

Yeah when doorbells sell your facial recognition to the USG just because you walked by someone's house, when your wifi password is stored by Google or Microsoft or Apple and sold for profit, when every company under the sun has been breached with no financial or legal repercussion, when everyone is complicit at selling your information while censoring your speech based on Trump's whims, who cares about privacy? China privacy fears? If China wanted your information, they would just buy it from the American companies you "trust" who are selling it on the open market.

When American cars are being recalled because the engines are dying under 20k miles (Chevy V8) and $50k "rugged" vehicles come with plastic oil pans (Ford Bronco), and nobody domestic makes reasonably sized sedans any more, and our only good electric vehicle maker turned out to be run by a fascist, why would you ever buy an American vehicle?

Sounds like the pragmatic thing is to buy a Chinese electric vehicle at half the price of an American vehicle and it will last twice as long. So now the narrative begins to keep them banned, just like they did to Tiktok and Huawei phones.

No, but it is in the 2024 iPad Pro.

Fairphone 4 with PostmarketOS?

I love this.

Even a Raspberry Pi Zero is going to be faster than some of the physical beasts that served us pages back in the late 90's and early 2000's and they will run on just the tiniest drip of electricity.

Oh look a western article about China doing something and not casting doubt on it with the phrase "BUT AT WHAT COST?"

Carbon offsets are like net carbs. It's just bullshit to make people feel like they are doing something.

I deleted TikTok a few days ago and I had lots of videos there. Lots of fond memories and even met some people on the platform and found my barber on that app. But it's going to be another Instagram because the content curators all think the same and promote the same ideology and try to incite people over the same false narratives.

This is going to be like when Fox bought MySpace.

Hah! I actually removed the second comment because it got a little derisive. But I'll stand by my premise that Americans want/need bigger cars and handling was never an important thing in American car culture.