Why are we OK with thick folding phones, but not with thick no-folds?

i think by “we” you mean the manufacturers? AFAICT they just gave away the game: the push for thin phones was more from the supply side than the demand side. not saying people don’t generally prefer thin phones – just that the preference is probably weaker than has been made out to be.

that said, i think it’s more fair to compare things like cubic volume and weight than just the thinness. a 1/2" thick full-size phone would be uncomfortable in my pocket, whereas a 1/2" thick wallet-sized phone might actually be more comfortable than a traditional smartphone.

Orion won’t make its way into the hands of consumers

not for you though (unless you’re a Meta employee).

but yeah good hardware is good hardware and if i could just use it as a display for any other device i have i would totally use it around the home: following a recipe without having to shuffle my phone and the ingredients; running a lengthy command over ssh and doing chores while i wait, without having to check my phone every couple of minutes to see when it’s done…

those things all rely on the software though. will they open it up as a dumb wireless display/terminal, or not? if they don’t, it’s kinda dead to me no matter how great the hardware is…

nixpkgs already has infrastructure to compile to wasi the same way you compile to other platforms like arm, darwin (macOS), musl, etc.

nix-build -A pkgsCross.wasi32.$pkg

i haven’t found any $pkg there that actually builds though. coreutils depends on posix stuff, busybox tries to include a non-existent netdb.h file. even hello barfs inside i think some autotools-generated wrapper around fcntl.

i don’t understand enough about wasm to know if it really is reasonable to think of it as a “system” the same was x86_64-linux or aarch64-multiplatform is a “system”, but if so i’d love the equivalent of this blog post showing how to use (or fix) the wasi32 system!