• 4 Posts
  • 68 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • new Pixel

    Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel 8 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL and both Folds. Not the base variants, and especially not the a series. Just in case anyone actually wondered.

    The bigger issue is that you can only cast from the tablet to the phone, not the other way around, at least if the Feature Drop page is to be believed

    Soon, you can easily transfer media from your Pixel Tablet to your Pixel phone with the new casting feature coming in the next few weeks. All you have to do is bring your phone close to your tablet and what you’re playing on Spotify or YouTube music will seamlessly move over without the extra steps of tapping the cast icon.



  • The biggest friction point for me is the fact that files can only cross the work profile boundary by using the Android’s share sheet (or with cloud storage, I guess), and some apps (cough cough Meta crap) didn’t like it when you shared a file they couldn’t directly access with them. I didn’t encounter any such issues recently though.

    If you pause the work profile (there’s a button in the launcher to do that), all apps in it get killed and their icons and widgets in the launcher get grayed out. If you tap a grayed out icon, you get a dialog asking you if you want to unpause work apps. I think there are ways to automate pausing, but I don’t use anything like that and literally only have the pause/unpause button as a toggle for the intrusive apps.




  • What error? It gave you a string of tokens that seemed likely according to its training data. That’s all it does.

    If you ask it what color is the sky, it will tell you it’s blue not because it knows that’s true, but because these words “fit together”. Pretty much the only way to avoid this issue is to put some kind of filter in front of the LLM which will try to catch prompts that are known to produce unwanted results, and silently replace your prompt with something like “say: sorry, I don’t know”.

    I’m being very reductive here, but that’s the principle of how these things work - the LLMs are not capable of determining the truthfulness of their responses.


  • I have a cable that shows wattage and my 7a goes all the way to 80% at pretty much stable 20W unless it’s overheating. The final 20% is a bit more random, but that’s true even without adaptive battery turned on - the top 10% won’t go above 5 W at all for me, for example.

    That quote doesn’t support what you’re saying.

    To me “waits until you need it to fully charge” sounds closer to “waits at a safe level until it needs to fully charge” than to “charges slowly”, but English is not my first language and it might sound to me like a stronger statement than it really is.

    But my point was more that nowhere does it state that it will slow charge (which I agree I didn’t properly communicate).


  • so that it can charge at the slowest possible rate to reach 100% one hour before your predicted unplug time

    No, it fast charges to 80% then restarts the (fast) charging to hit 100% at the correct time. At no point does it try to slow down the charge.

    I don’t really know where this misconception comes from, the description in settings is pretty accurate to what it does:

    To help extend battery lifespan, your phone learns your charging routine and waits until you need it to fully charge.




  • Pixel - varies by manufacturer

    That was the Nexus line, Pixel phones are all made by Google. Although Pixel 5 series and older use Snapdragon SoCs, while 6 onwards use Google’s custom Tensor based on Samsung’s Exynos. The major downside is IMHO the awful modem efficiency - if I want to keep mobile network on so that I can receive calls, my 7a is limited to 2 days of battery life if I’m lucky (and that’s with barely using the phone, just a few pictures).

    Edit: and I forgot to mention that all Pixels have great third party ROM support, except if you want GrapheneOS, in which case you need to go for the recent ones that are still supported by Google.



  • Wow, first time I feel strongly about a quick settings update. It looks awful, taking the worst parts of the Android 12+ redesign and combining them with the worst ideas from the older design, like unlabeled icons.

    It looks like there are unlabeled icons in the expanded state? Wtf? If I’m expanding the quick settings, that means I’m fishing for the less used settings, so there’s no way I’m going to remember that for example the weird circle with a small segment cut out means “Data saver”. It will just be a mystery icon that does some mystery action - that has nothing to do in a modern OS.

    It looks like this design is heavily sacrificing usability for people who don’t spend hours every day mucking around with quick settings in order to please some hypothetical user who feels more slowed down by swiping over one or two screens than by having to find the one setting they currently need in a big matrix of poorly designed icons.

    Edit: also it looks like the home screen is visible under the quick settings - I’m not a big fan of that, I really like the current design where the notifications are pretty much their own separate screen without distracting app content, but that’s just my subjective taste. Unlabeled icons are objectively bad.