Notes on AI, tools, and tech.
Pierce Allen 
In March, Canada started taking Chinese electric cars at a 6.1% tariff, with room for 49,000 of them a year. The US rate is still 100%, stacked on a 2.5% base duty. Same cars. Same continent. One open door. Start with where these cars already are. BYD sold 557,000 battery electric passenger vehicles worldwide in … Read more
DeepSeek’s official Harness desktop app is nearly ready. Run V4.1 Flash daily? Then this is the client worth waiting for. Here is the state of it. A few days ago people noticed a desktop client branch inside the DeepSeek Harness repository. Compiling it yourself was the only way to run it. Now the main branch … Read more
The apps you have probably never opened There is a quiet gap between what Americans think is happening in AI and what is actually happening. In the US, the names are ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Midjourney. In much of the rest of the world, a different set of apps leads. Most of them come from … Read more
Three companies, seventy-two hours In early September 2026, three companies showed a new foldable phone. All inside the same week. Huawei, Xiaomi, and Apple. And each one is aimed at a different buyer. Huawei went first, on September 7, with the Mate XT2. It starts around $2,800. Xiaomi followed the same evening with the 18 … Read more
What “in-house” actually means here The Huawei Mate 90 series launched in China this September. The line everyone repeats is that it is the most self-contained flagship on the market. That sounds like marketing until you look at what is actually inside. The processor is Huawei’s own Kirin 9050. The operating system is HarmonyOS 7, … Read more
A Codex session that ends well and one that ends in a mess start the same way. Same model, same repo, same person. The difference shows up a week later. That gap is not about prompts. It is about how you set the project up before any code exists, and how you hand work to … Read more
iOS 27 is out for the iPhone 11 and newer. Apple says apps open up to 30% faster. Here’s what actually changed, and who should wait. iOS 27 landed on Monday, September 14. The build number is 24A437. The download runs about 8GB. It ships for the same device list as iOS 26: anything from … Read more
A design task that runs $1.61 on GPT-6 Astra costs about 2.3 cents on DeepSeek’s new model. Same brief, same output, one bill sixty times smaller. That single number is the whole pitch. DeepSeek widened that gap on purpose, and it did it three days after teaching its chatbot to talk out loud. Vision is … Read more
Ask a friend in the US to name the biggest phone brands in the world. You’ll hear Apple, Samsung, maybe Google, maybe Motorola. What you almost never hear is Xiaomi, which is strange, because by shipment numbers Xiaomi is the third-largest phone maker on the planet. It outsells almost everyone, and a typical American has … Read more
I was eating cereal at my desk when it occurred to me that I’d opened WorkBuddy eleven times yesterday and finished none of the tasks I’d opened it for. I’ve been messing with WorkBuddy for a few days now. The official goal was to build myself a cleaner workbench. The actual result, looking back, is … Read more