Author: Tangent

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My Emotional Support Car

Years ago, I bought a very cheap brick car set to build when I am emotionally distressed.

Then my car was totaled.

Today, I am emotional undistressed enough to build it:

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Boom Supersonic’s aircraft would use 5-8x more fuel per person

I’m watching a video about Boom Supersonic and somehow I hadn’t previously recognized that their aspirational goal is environmental destruction through high fuel burn while only supporting travel for the rich. They explicitly state they want EVERYONE flying supersonic, but we know that isn’t going to happen. Thankfully, that does limit the impact somewhat, but I don’t think it does enough.

So I started reading their report on fuel consumption (PDF), which affirms what I already thought by stating they are only comparing fuel burn to “premium” fuel burn. Even when biasing things in their favor in this way, it’s 2-3x more fuel per seat. When comparing to the commercial average fuel use per seat, they use 5.3-7.9x more fuel.5

There is an apparent contradiction between their stated goal of overland supersonic flight and part of their fuel burn calculations including accounting for “Flight speed restrictions and routing to avoid sonic boom impacts over land masses, including secondary boom standoff distances”. I think it’s also interesting their study only includes oversea flight paths in its comparison. What happened to the whole point being that you can do overland flight? Maybe they’re just hedging their bets.

I would be remiss if I did not mention they proudly claim “Boom’s sustainability strategy centers on the use of 100% sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and efforts to rapidly advance and scale SAF production.” Their goal relies entirely on something that doesn’t exist, but they admit it, that’s good.

The real problem is even if SAF exists, using it for a supersonic aircraft while other aircraft aren’t using SAF means burning more fossil fuel. When the fuel you use could’ve fueled flights for 5-8x more people instead, you aren’t actually carbon neutral, you’re offsetting carbon neutrality by using it up, rapidly.

I am also concerned the only specified source of SAF in this document is “using CO2 from the atmosphere and renewable electricity to produce near limitless zero carbon SAF”. That’s the most energy-intensive way to make a fuel, which makes it the most offsetting of clean energy possible. (It also doesn’t meet the definition of zero carbon.)

Again, it is important to note they claim to be funding climate science on the impacts of air travel, and trying to reduce non-CO2 impacts as well. I’m not writing this to say everything they do is wrong, but to highlight the ways in which it is misguided.

Boom achieved carbon neutrality in 2021, and has set itself an ambitious goal to be net zero carbon by 2025.1

I think I should put this quote alongside their decision to start burning tons of methane in 2025: Boom Supersonic to Power AI Data Centers with Superpower Natural Gas Turbines; Adds $300 Million in New Funding. This represents around 14 kilotons of CO2 put into the atmosphere per day, or 5 megatons per year. Nice.

By the way, did you know “carbon neutral” and “zero carbon” are actually different things? Carbon neutral is based on the idea of pulling as much carbon out of the atmosphere as you put in, while zero carbon is to claim putting NO carbon in at all – which is currently impossible.

It’s called Public Relations: Publish good news. Say nothing when there’s bad news. Boom Supersonic stopped published sustainability information in 2023. Their ambitious goal to be zero carbon by 2025 was announced in 2022, as far as I can tell. The document I’m reading is from December, 2022, but I found an article in May making the same claim.

Also I think it’s funny they show how jet engines used a lot more fuel than piston-powered aircraft initially, and then took half a century to use almost the same amount of fuel, implying the switch to supersonics will follow a similar trajectory, when there’s no reason to believe that can happen. Even if true, that would represent a large increase in aviation fuel use, offsetting or even reversing the progress towards clean energy.

Footnotes

  1. “Notably, Boom achieved carbon neutrality through reduction initiatives and high-quality carbon credits in 2021.” – Measure, Reduce, Offset: How Boom Plans to Achieve Net Zero Carbon by 2025. Carbon credits mostly don’t represent actual carbon sinks, though who knows what “high-quality” means here since they didn’t specify.3
  2. They claimed part of the zero carbon goal was.. carbon capture. By definition, that isn’t zero carbon, and the company they contracted, Climeworks, partially uses captured CO2 for “climate-friendly products such as carbon-neutral fuels”. This has the same problem as using SAF for supersonics, the energy used to pull CO2 out of the air only to put it right back by burning it would’ve been better spent doing literally anything else. Spending energy to cycle the same CO2 that’s already killing the planet is wasteful. (Boom Supersonic Accelerates Towards 2025 Net-Zero Carbon Pledge with Climeworks Deal)
  3. Nature: Carbon credits are failing to help with climate change — here’s why by Trencher et al4 is a good overview of why carbon credits don’t necessarily mean anything. Only 15% of them achieve their claims. Ironically, it’s easier to access the supplemental materials (PDF) than the article itself.
  4. Trencher is the one who made it possible to read this, so I’m crediting him instead of the lead author. Suck it, Macintosh. Suck it, pay-for-access science.
  5. Their paper repeatedly only compares to a hypothetical all-premium seating aircraft, which is where the claim of 2-3x fuel use per seat comes from. Compared to what’s actually flying, they’d use 5.3-7.9x more fuel per seat.

This was originally written and posted on Bluesky, before being cleaned up, reformatted, extended with more information, and a couple minor errors corrected. Its working title was “Boom Supersonic’s goal is implicitly climate accelerationism”, but I thought a less aggressive title would reach more people.

Oops, I spilled my critical thinking

Because they only compared to premium seating, I knew the actual fuel use difference between current aircraft and their proposal was higher, but I didn’t know how much higher. The wording used confused me and I misread it a few times. I won’t say it’s intentional, but I will say that comparing a proposed aircraft to flights that do not exist is misleading. Not even Emirates – with their gaudy gold-trimmed opulance – flies aircraft with only premium seating.

From the Executive Summary (emphasis mine): “This study finds that supersonic air travel on Overture consumes 2-3 times as much fuel per seat than comparable premium class subsonic travel, depending on the routes evaluated, as well as various fuel consumption assumptions related to the subsonic fleet.”

From Section 1 (emphasis mine): “Recently published studies claim that supersonic aircraft result in between 5-9 times3 as much fuel consumption per passenger than subsonic aircraft. However, these claims are based on non-comparable data which do not provide an accurate comparison of supersonic to subsonic aircraft.” You’ll notice they don’t explicitly say they disagree or found a different result, and instead rely on the implication, causing one to assume a difference was found. Technically, their results are different, but not meaningfully different.

In Section 2, the methodology is laid out: Fuel use is based on the ratio of passenger/cargo weight, modified by the cabin floor area dedicated to premium passengers, and divided amongst the seat count within. This is followed by the only specific fuel numbers presented: “Across all aircraft operations considered in this paper, the average subsonic fuel consumption intensity was found to be approximately 0.014 gallons per seat-mile (considering both economy class and premium class seats). The fuel consumption intensity for subsonic premium class seats was approximately three times larger than the average across all subsonic classes of travel, at 0.037 gallons per seat-mile.”

I was very confused why they said “approximately three times larger” when 0.037/0.014 is ≈2.64. I kept re-reading it, trying to find a charitable and consistent interpretation. I now realize they were just rounding aggressively, but I was so confused by this because their choice to round here makes their fuel use look worse. It implies a true fuel use of 6-9x more per seat, when it’s actually 5.3-7.9x more per seat. I thought I read it wrong, multiple times.

Updated 2026-09-06 to fix a formatting error.

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Click

I’ve been thinking about Click a lot recently, and how it’s a tragedy disguised as a comedy so effectively that it was critically hated, and I fear people not seeing what it truly is because it’s falsely labeled as a braindead comedy. Turns out, I’m not the only one recently thinking about this.

do the creators of click realize they made a tragedy annnd click Search

Of course the AI says, “Yes, they were aware they added tragic elements.” Every comedy has tragic elements. You can’t just make jokes and be funny and not have some contrast. But anyone who sees Click as a comedy is deluded or hasn’t watched it. To me, the most interesting detail around the film is how I’d only ever seen people dismiss is as Adam Sandler-shlock, an average dumb comedy. But that’s kind of the secret of it? You trick people who want braindead entertainment into watching something poignant.

[…] I think it’s maybe the saddest film ever made. The idea of life hurtling past you at unstoppable speed, directly towards death, all because of a broken TV remote, is absolutely horrifying to me.
The writers try to wrap it all up in a happy ending in a couple of minutes, so you’re forgiven if only the bleakness stuck with you. 1

The marketing and public perception of the movie seemed so disconnected to me it made me wonder if the team behind this movie even knew they created a tragedy. In retrospect, it was silly to doubt their competence when it was so well crafted. I learned Adam Sandler’s father died shortly before production, and the director got him to cry by reminding him that his mother misses her husband every night… yeah, they knew exactly what they were doing.

If you want to know more about the background of making Click, read An oral history of Adam Sandler’s Click: Alternate ending, Paul Thomas Anderson’s note and more (exclusive) by Josh Weiss on MSN, it goes very in-depth. (And holy crap, I did not realize that was only published two days ago! I just had the thought to look into this movie a little more, and what timing.) The only real failure of that article is saying that the character Michael is a good person. He is awful, beginning to end, only recognizing it at the very end.

I had no idea it started as a drama, and how it’s supposed to pay tribute to It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s also absurd to learn that Sony wanted their logo on the remote – imagine forever associating their brand with existential dread! The original ending had Michael dying, then in his house, he thinks he has a second chance, and it’s a gut-punch that he’s in Heaven.

Maybe my perception of how the movie was viewed is mostly due to poisoning the well from critics hating low brow humor and the way they were misled, as well as thinking a comedy actor can’t deliver drama.2 Audiences liked it okay, and it made a bunch of money, so it was successful.. even if it’s not really remembered.

Ultimately, I think I’m correct that the point of its presentation is to trick you into engaging and having an emotional reaction. People saying it’s the only movie that made them cry is my evidence for this, as how could it be the only movie unless you avoid emotional movies? The trick worked.3

Click: The Worst Movie ⏐ Big Joel by Big Joel

I like the movie’s message, and it did make me cry, because I was too naive to realize how hateful so much of it is. I still value the message, but it was delivered poorly for a mature person. I felt like it was important to include this video because it highlights a good chunk of what’s wrong with it.

The most obvious failure of Michael immediately upon getting the remote is fast-forwarding instead of pausing for more time. Skipping will always cause problems, but pausing to consider can make things work so much better. (It’s kind of a minor failure though, as it would ruin the whole point of the movie.)

(This was originally written 2026-06-25.)

  1. VICE: These Guys Watch Adam Sandler’s ‘Click,’ the Most Demoralizing Film Ever Made, Every Single Week
  2. Roger Ebert: Not remotely amusing
  3. Reddit: r/TrueFilm: Adam Sandler’s Click could have been a good film, if it wasn’t a comedy
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Don’t buy a Kobo Clara Color

Reading is important to me. Half a year ago, I tried to use a Nook GlowLight 4. The result of that is documented in Do not buy a Nook GlowLight 4. As you can guess by the title of this piece, I had a similar experience today. Since I wrote that piece, Kobo devices became available in Best Buy locations, and someone told me I was wrong about them requiring an account to use1. Their confidence in the face of so much obvious information to the contrary convinced me to try it for myself. (Note: Each of those words is a different link.)

The first warning sign was in the difference between the quick-start guide’s instruction and how the device actually works. It informs you to press and hold the power button to turn it on, but that does not work. You must press and hold briefly for it to power on (it will not turn on until you let go), and it automatically turns on when plugged in2. It then tells you to go online to get started, with no indication in the guide or on-screen that you will be forced to make or sign into an account, or that you can set up the device by connecting it to a computer.

A point in its favor is that the device recognizes a captive portal and allows you to access the browser to get online before registration. Once I was online, I was presented with an account type selection screen with around 30 options. I knew to expect this, despite their insistence that everyone else is wrong, so I went to look at options for bypassing it.

You’re Just Supposed to Know

The first thing I found was an article praising Kobo’s new sideloading mode3 – a way to use the device without an account at all. Of course, you have to know this exists and be comfortable going into hidden directories and editing an INI-formatted file4, and know that you can plug in the device to do this. None of this is presented in a user guide anywhere I could find (and believe me, I spent multiple days looking). Even in the multiple online guides I found, no one explains that the device must be restarted for these config changes to take effect. I couldn’t even find the firmware version to check whether or not I have access to this feature. (And when I did find it, it wasn’t labeled as firmware version, you’re just supposed to know that “software version” really means firmware version.)

A problem many technically minded people have is not being able to understand that the vast majority of people do not know and are not interested in learning how to work with computers beyond a surface level. A setting this buried is effectively not an option at all. When determining the quality or value of a device, the majority’s ability to use it matters more than how well a technically-minded person can use it. I’m glad to see people learn to do more with their devices, but it shouldn’t be from secrets to be discovered like this.

I was working with a terrible internet connection, so I decided to charge the device while finding information. I turned off the device and plugged it into my computer. The screen entered a broken state where it displayed the prompt5 asking if I want it connected to the computer while powered off. There is a black screen that is used when the device is off, but the prompt was displayed on top of that. This concerns me greatly, because it shouldn’t be possible for the “connect to computer” state to interrupt powering down, especially after the point where the screen actually switches to its off display.

Trying to restart the device after it entered this broken state led to a screen with a crossed-out power button and three dots, animating them filling and unfilling. Some kind of loading screen? I now know this is what the device looks like while factory resetting, but at the time I did not, and a crossed-out power button can just as easily mean “I don’t have enough power” as it could mean “don’t turn me off”. The device was stuck in this state for a long time, long enough that I assumed it was broken and tried to force restart it. Then it cleared the screen to a black white of nothing, and refused to do anything.

I went through a series of attempts to bring it back, plugging it in, unplugging it, trying to turn it on while plugged in, trying to turn it on while not plugged in. I don’t remember how many times I tried this, or which state actually brought it back, but somehow it returned to the default screen it had when I pulled it out of the box. This is when I discovered the power-on instructions are wrong. Earlier, I had been a bit impatient and let go of the button quickly – which you’re supposed to do but the instructions tell you to hold it down. I again assumed the device was bricked, because it would not respond.. and then it turned on after I gave up.

Account Registration Bypass

When it went to the screen that had previously recognized it was plugged into a computer, it did not prompt me to connect, so I unplugged it and plugged it in again. (This became a step I had to repeat many times throughout testing the device.) I followed a simple guide6 to bypass the requirement, and finally had a functional device.

Correctly, the device showed no books.. but when sorting by author, suddenly there was like 40 authors, each with a single entry. Tapping on any one of them brought up the “no books” page, but modified to go back to an author list. It was the same for the tab to sort by series, except there was also artwork for all of these supposed book series. There is no way to remove these, and I could not find anyone even acknowledging this problem exists. (The weirdest part to me was how throughout the rest of my testing, these did briefly disappear, but then never stayed away.)

Another problem I have with this device and basically every option that exists similar to it is rampant advertising. They don’t call it advertising, but that’s the purpose it serves7. The home page presents you with mostly options to go to Kobo’s store, rather than access your books ..you know, the entire point of having the device, to read your books? Now, combine that with fake entries in authors and series to clutter things… I just hate it.. no, I despise it.

I started downloading the latest firmware version and tried activating sideloading mode. It worked, eliminating all of the advertising and junk fake book data. I was extremely excited. I tried out the browser and found it worked well enough – though I couldn’t access my ebooks server directly, but what really amazed me was the responsiveness of the screen. There’s a little sketching utility that worked really well, and I could type on the keyboard without too much difficulty (though a lot of error due my unfamiliarity with it).

This eReader Doesn’t Fully Support EPUB eBooks

I opened a book (Martha Wells’ Platform Decay if you’re curious), and immediately ran into.. this ebook reader.. does not.. support.. EPUBs correctly. The epub format is the most popular and accessible ebook format. Amazon briefly tried to dominate with their own specific format, but freely available formats tend to work better long-term, and thankfully that won out… but that makes it even more baffling that this brand new eReader couldn’t recognize the table of contents for a brand new ebook. How do you make an eReader and make it fail to read a table of contents?

Maybe it’s a firmware problem? I have a bunch of other stuff to check before the download finishes on the latest version. (Spoiler: No.) I decided to load a PDF from an Internet Archive scanned book, and that was quite the sad experience. It takes 3-4 seconds to turn a page. (For comparison, The Nook I tried did it in like 1 second.) Worse, I know this isn’t a hardware problem or a flaw with the PDF I chose to test with, but bad software.

After a firmware update8, PDFs take closer to 3 seconds on average to turn a page, and now there’s a Bluetooth indicator in the title bar9. (This is how I learned what a factory reset looks like, because they use a very similar design for applying updates. I’m leaving out details like how often I reset the device, partially cause it was exhausting and I don’t remember, and partially cause this is already too long.)

Third-Party eReader Software

At this point, I knew the device wasn’t really going to be usable for me, so I figured I should try third-party eReader software on it to see how that compares to the stock experience.

  • koReader10 loads faster and runs faster while having more options and less artifacting while changing the display, and loads PDFs faster, and pre-loads the next page while a PDF is loaded so that when you go to the next page, it appears instant. While reading, a person doesn’t turn pages very quickly, so this strategy makes it appear to be near-instant loading. A downside to this is that loading happens on the main thread, so the device is unresponsive while loading a page (this is the same on all eReader software I tried).
  • Plato11 is similarly better than stock, but is slower and less featureful than koReader. I do prefer its simpler touch zone layout, but koReader is just better in every other way.

The most noticeable difference with these was how much smoother things ran. I wanted to test more with regards to PDF handling (different formats, high-res large images, a long and detail anatomy textbook) and compare the different eReader software options. I also intended to check out how well it could display comics, and try an audiobook since this device with no audio port is supposed to be able to play them.

I don’t remember how many times I opened books or rebooted the device, but it worked stably, until it didn’t. It suddenly factory reset, and displayed the original screen again. When turning it on, it resets again. An infinite loop.

Is Kobo Ashamed of SideloadedMode?

I wrote most of this piece in one night, and then came back to check details, add links, and make sure I didn’t get things wrong in my rush to turn hours of notes into something readable. I wanted to link to Kobo’s release notes and the announcement of sideloading, but I can’t find anything from Kobo about it. There is a forum thread apparently containing the release notes, but this contains no reference to a source. There are many articles praising the decision to add this feature, but none of them reference Kobo – it all comes from forum users. This poorly worded article even calls it an unveiling.. but I can’t find anything except the veil.

The only official reference to the device sideload mode I could find from Kobo is in a 2024 blog post where they say they updated parental controls to block sideloading. I tried contacting them and received no response12. (I do find it funny that in their recent partnership with Storygraph, they explicitly block you from automatically syncing your own books – what they refer to as “sideloaded” books.)

I point this out because it’s part of the whole problem with all of this. There are options to make these devices better, but you just have to know they exist. No official source will tell you about them (except for hinting at it in that one blog post).

Accessibility

I don’t have anything to add about accessibility myself, but I would like to share a video I watched in January or February about Kobo’s accessibility:

  1. This all started from a bsky thread, which has now been suppressed. I tried to archive it (multiple times in fact), but was unable to due to the constant attacks on preservation of history targeting the Internet Archive. Cool. This vagueposting was my trying to comprehend / expressing frustration over being obviously lied to. It started as a reply chain from this post. I did my best to reconstruct it here.
  2. I do not have the time to get into it now, but automatically turning on a device when it receives power is a bad idea. Just at a surface level, the battery can be really low and you can have unreliable power, which makes it unlikely you can charge the device without babysitting it to make sure it doesn’t just stay on unpowered. Believe it or not, that situation is still common.
  3. How to Use Kobo’s New Sideloaded Mode is just a reformatted copy of this forum post. Apparently, enabling this deletes dictionaries from the device, though you can restore them. I did not test this, nor did I think to.. because it makes no sense for this to be affected. The fact that it is is another concerning detail.
  4. MobileRead wiki: Kobo Configuration Options is very outdated, but contains a lot of hidden settings information, as well as basic instructions for how to modify them.
  5. You can see what that looks like here (from Kobo’s support site).
  6. Kobo Offline. Simple only because I have experience with using DB Browser for SQLite, know what a database is, and how to interact with them. This is completely unsuitable as a thing to expect the average person to do. The alternative of setting up credentials with a company similar to Amazon is really bad long-term.
  7. I thought it would be useful to highlight this conversation on Hacker News, of how Kobo has gradually changed Kobo eReaders to focus on their shop instead of reading books – ostensibly the entire point of buying an eReader.
  8. Rakuten kobo | Help: Manually Updating your Kobo eReader device Firmware. The instructions are well-presented, but expect a user to be aware of how some platforms handle ZIP files a bit differently and to know how to make a hidden directory appear. This is difficult for the average user. I consider it unacceptable. (As an example, this user failed to understand the instructions even after someone else clarified them.) Do not use third-party download sites for firmware. I say this because I only found outdated firmware and misleading or incorrect information on these. (It’s possible the MobileRead wiki’s Kobo Firmware Releases is an exception to this, but I do not know.)
  9. What could an eReader possibly want with Bluetooth? Probably file transfer with some obscure protocol. Nope, it’s to play audiobooks over wireless headphones. Despite having no headphone jack and an extremely limited processor, they decided to make audiobooks a function. Maybe that could be fine. I’ll never get to know as I couldn’t try it before the device bricked itself. I do know that they don’t support standard audiobook formats, and question whether or not the USB C port can at least be used for audio… but again, I couldn’t find out more due to the unstable nature of the device.
  10. koReader11 will be overwritten if you do a factory reset, but may not disappear with firmware upgrades.
  11. I followed this guide to install both koReader and Plato.
  12. I was forced to interact with a chatbot instead of being allowed to contact support, which stated they do not publish or make release notes available in any form. Obviously, this could be wrong, but since courts decided companies must be responsible for what an AI support bot says (also see this much worse worded article about a different case), I’ll take it. I’m burnt-out from working on this anyhow.