Notes on AI, tools, and tech.
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
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
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
The first batch ships this month. The company says it can zap a mosquito in 0.003 seconds. And honestly? I’m not sure if I’m terrified or impressed. Let me back up. This runs into the same wall Xiaomi hits in the US, incidentally. The phones are perfectly legal, you just can’t buy one. What the … Read more