Hard Pass

EDIT: This happened back in 2025. Will leave as I’m sure I’m not the only one that didn’t know, but I saw it on hacker news and didn’t realize it was a year old. My bad.

In an odd approach to trying to improve customer tech support, HP allegedly implemented mandatory, 15-minute wait times for people calling the vendor for help with their computers and printers in certain geographies.

Callers from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Ireland, and Italy were met with the forced holding periods, The Register reported on Thursday. The publication cited internal communications it saw from February 18 that reportedly said the wait times aimed to “influence customers to increase their adoption of digital self-solve, as a faster way to address their support question. This involves inserting a message of high call volumes, to expect a delay in connecting to an agent and offering digital self-solve solutions as an alternative.”

Reuters said the phone is codenamed Transformer

AI integration is a “key focus” of Transformer, per Reuters’ sources, who said that Amazon wants the phone to drive usage of Amazon’s AI products

It’s unclear why Amazon thinks now is a good time to get back into phones. Even potentially low prices may not be enough to convince people to buy.

You ARE looking forward to this, right?

My wife's religious family didn't appreciate the group text I sent them all, well under the influence last night.

This appears to be an actual car...

Alberta's separatist sentiment has resurged in recent months amid the Trump administration's comments about the province's future, coupled with economic and political tensions with the Canadian government. Andrew Chang explains what it would actually take to grant sovereignty to a Canadian province, and why it's so difficult to achieve.

Rising gasoline prices are already starting to bite U.S. household ​finances and Americans overwhelmingly expect fuel costs will keep climbing as Donald Trump's war with Iran crimps ‌global oil supplies, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found.

Some 55% of respondents in the Tuesday-through-Thursday poll said their household finances had taken at least "somewhat" of a hit from the increases in gas prices. Among those seeing an impact, 21% said their finances were affected "a great deal."

The average price of gasoline ​in America has surged by nearly a dollar per gallon since February 28 when the U.S. and Israel ​attacked Iran, prompting Iranian counterstrikes on the energy installations of U.S. allies and the effective closure ⁠by Iran of the Strait of Hormuz, which carries one-fifth of the global oil supply.

The economic risk is so dire ​that the Trump administration has mulled deploying thousands of additional U.S. troops to ensure safe passage of oil tankers through the ​strait, an endeavor some officials have warned might require deploying U.S. troops to Iran's shoreline.

Source