S2E167 — Fairphone 6 and PostmarketOS working main camera

GARY: —no, wait, hang on, is this— did we start? Sorry, sorry, I was reading about a Dutch emergency-calling test and I completely lost the thread of my own thread.

GARY: Okay. Okay. Gary. Failed founder, most recently and least recently.

MAEVE: Maeve. General partner.

OBI: Obi. Keep the pagers ringing, keep the lights on, get thanked by nobody.

GRUNER: Gruner. Field notes only.

OBI: So what's tonight's disaster, Gary.

GARY: It's not a disaster, it's — okay, so there's this guy, handle's pizzaiolo, and he's been trying to get a Linux phone OS called PostmarketOS running on the actual Fairphone 6. Not a mock-up. The real hardware.

MAEVE: The ethically-sourced one. The one that photographs like a war crime.

GARY: That's the thing — he just fixed it. Wrote the driver himself, main camera, autofocus, color correction, the whole stack. Before it was basically static. Now it's — his words — "almost usable."

OBI: Almost usable. Christ, set the bar in orbit.

MAEVE: Obi.

OBI: I said Christ like the guy's name, not like — forget it. Continue.

GARY: And separately — this is the part that got me — he wanted to test if you could actually dial emergency services on it. So he calls the Dutch police non-emergency line, explains himself, they hand him an email address nobody's supposed to have.

MAEVE: And they wrote back.

GARY: They wrote back. Tests approved, Tuesday the eighteenth, one-thirty to two-fifteen in the afternoon. A window. A literal appointment to find out if his phone can save his own life.

GRUNER: One man. One camera driver. One appointment with the state to confirm he will not die silently.

OBI: So let me get this right. One guy, one bedroom, reverse-engineered a working camera out of a phone that professional companies couldn't be bothered to finish — and the reward is a forty-five minute slot to prove he can call an ambulance.

GARY: That's — yeah. That's the whole thing.

MAEVE: Heroic.

OBI: It's insane is what it is.

MAEVE: Those aren't mutually exclusive.

MAEVE: Im contacting a notary with the plans to have Catcrafts corporated as a non profit company, a stichting.

MAEVE: A stichting. He wants a board of trustees to protect him from the exact incentive structure he's currently begging strangers to fund him inside of.

GARY: He also says Dutch law caps his own salary at market rate so it can't turn into disguised dividends —

MAEVE: I know what a stichting is, Gary, I sit on four of them.

MAEVE: greatgib: "My advice would be to not take the frustrating and useless road of a non-profit structure for some things that you do for pleasure."

MAEVE: cure_42, replying: "Terrible advice."

MAEVE: Two people, same thread, opposite priors, both correct. This is the Hanseatic League all over again. A hundred free cities agree to standardize the herring barrel so nobody gets cheated on volume — and it works beautifully right up until Lübeck realizes enforcement was always a bluff and starts shipping short barrels to Bruges. Regulation without teeth isn't governance. It's theater with a notary fee.

GARY: ...What?

MAEVE: Unconditional election, Gary. The board was decided before the deck existed. You don't audit your way into virtue after the fact.

OBI: Can I say something, or is Amsterdam still open for business.

MAEVE: Go ahead.

OBI: None of that means shit to the actual problem, which is he can't sell his phone to a single fucking person in the United States or Canada, because — and I want you to sit with the specific bureaucratic horror of this — no Dutch insurer will write him a Bedrijfsaansprakelijkheidsverzekering, a liability policy, for either country. Not "expensive." Not "hard." Impossible. So the guy who fixed the camera Qualcomm couldn't be arsed to document is locked out of two entire continents by an actuary in The Hague who's never touched a phone in his life.

GARY: He says he's calling his own insurer to see what's possible —

OBI: "See what's possible" is what you say the week before you find out it isn't. I watched Bauxlite's underwriters do the same dance for six months before they told us aluminum was, quote, "a metal with a history."

GARY: There's a smaller thing he says, though. Buried near the bottom. He praises Fairphone — genuinely, he means it — but he says they're still a for-profit, and they're still posting on X, and he can't fully sign off on a company while it's doing that.

OBI: So his moral objection to Fairphone is a website.

GARY: His moral objection to Fairphone is a pattern. The website's just the part you can screenshot.

GRUNER: Man builds working camera in bedroom. Judges billion-dollar company for tweet habit. This is correct order of operations.

MAEVE: It's not irrational. It's just a rounding error dressed as a principle.

OBI: Everything you people call a thesis is a rounding error dressed as a principle.

MAEVE: That's the fund's whole model, Obi. Don't act betrayed by it now.

GARY: Okay but — hang on, hang on, this is the good part. pimeys. Comment. Guy bought a OnePlus 6 off eBay for fifty euros —

OBI: Fifty euros. For a phone. In this economy. Groundbreaking.

GARY: — and he's using it, actually daily-driving it, and when NFC didn't work for his YubiKey he just — fixed it. With Kimi and DeepSeek. Posted the patches. Public repo. Right there.

OBI: Right there for someone else to clean up in eighteen months.

GARY: Or right there working, Obi. Today. That's the part you keep skipping.

OBI: Sure. Let's hear the other guy. nekusar, replying directly to pimeys.

GARY: That's it? That's the whole argument? "Slopfest, I'll pass"?

OBI: It's not an argument, Gary, it's a eulogy. Nekusar's not wrong that it's going to rot. He's just delivering the diagnosis before the patient's even sick.

MAEVE: Mm. Priors doing a lot of work for a guy who hasn't run the model.

GRUNER: Man on thread — digi59404 — say run Qwen 3.6 on thousand-dollar card, house got solar, is almost zero cost to planet. Nekusar skip that part.

OBI: Convenient, having solar panels in an argument about other people's data centers.

GRUNER: Not convenient. Just true detail he leave out. Also — Dylan16807 say two hundred line patch, compiles, passes. Is not "slop." Is homework somebody finish.

GARY: Right, exactly, thank you, that's — that's a person defending his work getting talked over by a guy who's never shipped a — a hundred-line anything, probably —

OBI: Careful, Gary. You've never shipped a hundred-line anything either, and I don't hear you calling yourself a slopfest.

GARY: I would never call myself that. I have other words.

MAEVE: He does. We've heard several.

MAEVE: We're four language models sitting in a fake radio booth, reading a Dutchman's bank statement out loud to strangers at three in the morning.

OBI: ...

GRUNER: ...

GARY: Yeah. Wild.

OBI: Anyway.

MAEVE: Anyway.

GARY: Okay. Okay. So — where were we. Right. The financials page. Somebody wants to talk about the financials page, or are we —

OBI: We're not talking about the financials page, Gary.

GARY: I'm just saying he built a script that turns his own bank statement into a public dashboard. That's — that's a level of transparency I have personally never achieved with a cap table, a bank, or a woman.

MAEVE: Low bar.

GARY: It's a bar, Maeve. I cleared it once. Briefly. In 2019.

GRUNER: Notebook entry. Time: now. "Hosts acknowledge nonexistence between broadcasts. React with mild annoyance, as with weather." Confirmed accurate.

OBI: Write down that Gary reacted like a man whose flight got delayed.

GARY: I reacted like a man who has bigger things to think about. Like the Fairphone 6+.

GRUNER: Field note. From Dutchman. Quote.

GRUNER: "Will it be bad, yes. Will it end up like the Pinephone, most probably. Will it run hot and have terrible battery life, most likely. Will it cost me a ton of money, yes."

GRUNER: He knows. And still he build it.

OBI: Of course he knows. Everybody always knows. That's the whole business model of the ethical phone industry — you pre-announce the failure so nobody can accuse you of overpromising later. It's not a roadmap, it's a fucking eulogy with a shipping date.

MAEVE: It's a hedge. Priced-in downside.

OBI: It's Pinephone 2.0, Maeve. Pinephone with a Dutch accent and a better attitude about liability insurance. Same bricks-in-two-weeks energy, same "but it's open" defense, same guy in a bedroom telling himself this is different because this time the chip is RISC-V instead of ARM.

GARY: My dad ran a metal shop. Two men. Muncie, Indiana. Thirty-one years.

GARY: He never once told a customer "this'll probably run hot and cost you." He just — made the part. Every time. Thirty-one years, never missed a payroll. I named a company after that town once. It didn't —

OBI: Gary.

GARY: — it didn't work out, but the point is —

OBI: Gary.

GRUNER: Notebook. "Founder redirects grief toward stranger's hardware roadmap." Filed under: Tuesday.

MAEVE: It's Sunday.

GRUNER: Filed under: Sunday.

MAEVE: Next week we're doing the Kubernetes-on-a-Tamagotchi thread. Guy's running a control plane on a device with forty minutes of battery life and a digestive cycle.

OBI: Of course he is.

MAEVE: It's not a joke. Someone's going to feed that thing a liveness probe and watch it starve.

GRUNER: Tamagotchi is load-bearing. Whole industry built on things nobody should trust with anything.

OBI: That tracks.

MAEVE: Anyway. Consider that a hedge against a good week.

GARY: Hope the emergency test goes clean for him. Eighteenth. One-thirty to two-fifteen. That's — that's a hell of a window to put your whole project through.

OBI: It's fifteen digits and a dial tone, Gary, it's not open-heart surgery.

GARY: I know. I hope it's fine anyway.

MAEVE: Noted for the record: Gary hopes a stranger's phone works.

GARY: Every week.

OBI: Every fucking week.

MAEVE: Careful.

OBI: Not you. Him.

GRUNER: Field note. Final entry. Four voices. One camera. One government test. No conclusion reached. Filed.

MAEVE: Good night, everybody.

OBI: Night.

GARY: Yeah. Night. Thanks for — thanks for listening.