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Whoever decided to use dark patterns at to trick users into activating backup on photos while just trying to browse their Pixel just added to my chaos pile today.
  • The first few generations that were sold with the promise of unlimited photo backups still get that deal - if you find an old Pixel / Pixel XL and use it to upload your photos, they will not count towards your storage. A few more models then get unlimited uploads in "high" quality, and everything since I think Pixel 5 is completely out of luck.

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    A warning about locked devices (F you Verizon)
  • As far as I know, bootloader locks are done by the manufaturer not by the provider.

    Verizon requires the phones they sell to NOT have the ability to unlock the bootloader. That's why there are separate factory images for Verizon Pixels.

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    Android 16 will help you click better social media photos in low light conditions
  • That indeed is a Bluetooth feature that supposedly makes audio quality better by only lowering the volume using the actual speaker driver instead of doing it digitally and potentially throwing away some quiet sounds. In theory, doing it this way is always better and should be preferred. In practice, many devices handle it terribly.

    If you want to turn the feature off, you can enable developer options on your phone (settings -> About phone -> tap Build number a bunch of times) and turn off absolute volume. That will give you back software volume control with fine-grained adjustments.

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    Google picks a MediaTek modem for the Pixel 10 series
  • The CPU is still Google's Tensor, and the modem on current Pixels is already a blackbox that custom ROMs interact with using binary blobs ripped from the official ROM. There isn't much that could get worse with this change.

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    Coming soon – offline speech recognition on your phone
  • Indeed, try switching your smartphone to airplane mode and see how far your voice commands get you.

    Did that (or rather disabled mobile data and WiFi, because airplane mode would still keep the WiFi on), and then I dictated this sentence after the parentheses. So Google's voice input works offline just fine.

    Or do they mean something like a smart assistant? In that case fair, but it's not like it will work with text input either.

    It is true, however, that Google Translate doesn't do offline voice translation even if the language you're trying to translate from is downloaded for system-wide voice recognition.

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    Diamonds can now be created from scratch in the lab in just 15 minutes
  • Don't be ridiculous - this is a lab environment, they can faithfully recreate the suffering as long as the ethics committee doesn't get notified.

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    Why are we still fighting smartphone bloatware in 2025?
  • That sounds like Xiaomi. The best price to performance ratio of any OEM, but at the cost of terrible software and this... experience... when you want to get rid of it.

    Worth noting that not all OEMs are like this.

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    How fast are Linux pipes anyway?
  • That's a reasonable per-core size, and it doesn't make much sense to add all the cores up if your goal is to fit your data within L2 (like in the article)

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    FOSSIL: A complete Git alternative
  • Please don't pretend as if OpenSource Devs don't constantly complain about pesky PRs😅

    <i>I</i>'ve <u>seen</u> much <b><u>more</u> complaints</b> about <a href="https://0.0.0.0/random_img.tiff">people</a> constantly <marquee>demanding</marquee> their specific <h1>annoyances</h1> to be fixed without ever <i>submitting <u>a single <b>line of code</b></u></i>. <i>Maintainers</i> are pretty much <b>universally</b> welcoming to code <h2>contributions</h2> <br><br><br><br><br><br>

    I soooo hope this does something funky with someone's Lemmy client

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    Google Pixel 6, 7, and Fold will officially get two more years of Android OS updates
  • Maybe the management hasn't decided on the exact promises they're willing to make? Also there's two years left before it becomes important, while previously there was always a generation going out of support within a year.

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    Linux Patches Would Allow RISC-V To Use A 64K Page Size
  • That's more of a storage thing, RAM does a lot smaller transfers - for example a DDR5 memory has two independent 32bit (4 byte) channels with a minimum of 16 transfers in a single "operation", so it does 64 bytes at once (or more). And CPUs don't waste memory bandwidth than transferring more than absolutely necessary, as memory is often the bottleneck even without writing full pages.

    The page size is relevant for memory protection (where the CPU will stop the program execution and give control back to the operating system if said program tries to do something it's not allowed to do with the memory) and virtual memory (which is part of the same thing, but they are two theoretically independent concepts). The operating system needs to make a table describing what memory the program has what kind of access to, and with bigger pages the table can be much smaller (at the cost of wasting space if the program needs only a little bit of memory of a given kind).

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    No NAT November: My Month Without IPv4
  • There's no inherent guarantee that a router has a firewall configured properly, or has it enabled.

    If it's not an enterprise router (where you sometimes start with a blank configuration), it most definitely does have a firewall blocking incoming traffic by default.

    In the deployments you're seeing, are ISPs handing out /120 blocks to each router?

    /120 is not enough for IPv6 to reasonably work. It kinda requires the smallest block to be /64, otherwise half the cool stuff about IPv6 breaks. So you should get something between /48 and /64 (the recommendation for ISPs is /56 for residential users so they can subdivide their network to 256 other networks, and /48 as default commercial allocation).

    Does that require the ISP to have access to alter your home router, or do customers configure the DHCP themselves (which seems unlikely to scale)?

    There is DHCPv6, but it's not really an important part of a network like DHCP for v4 networks. IIRC Android doesn't even support it. IPv6 uses Router Advertisement (RA) to tell devices what prefix they're in (and a few things that were originally DHCP options, like the preferred DNS servers), and the devices then pick their own address using the SLAAC mechanism (originally it was derived from the MAC address, but nowadays should be a random number). RA supports "multilayer" networks where each following router further subdivides the prefix it got.

    If you want a static address (for example for a server), you can either configure it manually on the device (using tokenized addresses, i.e. "static local part with dynamic prefix"), or use a DHCPv6 server to assign the address (in which case the RA responses from your router need to indicate that there is a DHCPv6 server on the network).

    Also, you talked about the fc00::/7 (or its locally managed half, fd00::/8) prefix as a proof that NAT is used with IPv6, but... There's absolutely nothing stopping you from having both a globally routable address and a local only address at the same time. IPv6 already requires you to have at least two addresses when you connect to any network - a link local address and whatever other address you get assigned (btw IPv4 never prevented you from doing the same thing, it just wasn't directly encouraged and wasn't widely used, and DHCP didn't support handing out multiple addresses unlike RA).

    You can even get a security "improvement" over the claimed scenario with NAT with this - if you don't assign a global address to a node, then not only will it be unreachable from the internet, it will also be unable to connect to the internet itself while being reachable from your network without any issues. "Air gapping" (I know, I know... but people use this term for "no internet" now) for folks afraid of firewalls!

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    New oven and they lock the air fryer functionality behind wifi.
  • I would hope it's a special, heavy-duty kind at least.

    I've seen an expensive microwave with a capacitive touch panel right above the door (and the door was the classic oven style, so attached by the bottom edge). If you ever had a phone with crappy moisture detection, you know where this is going.

    You put your food in the microwave. Turn it on and let it heat the food up. Open the door, take the food out and close the door again. Congratulations, your microwave has probably just turned itself back on, because it detected the humid hot air rising from the briefly opened door as you touching the screen. And because most of the touch screen is "touchable", there's a pretty good chance this gust of humid air can successfully pick a cooking/heating mode and confirm it.

    The microwave randomly navigating its own touch screen happened pretty much every time, passing all the menus and turning on was successful about 10% of the time.

    In short, I wouldn't expect a microwave interface to have any thought put into it.

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    New Pixel market data suggests Google's victory lap will have to wait
  • This is referring to the recent news about Google gaining huge market share. This new drop simply means there was no dramatic change and last month's data was flawed.

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