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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • SMS, iMessage and now RCS have been working well for me and I’ve been (primarily) using iPhones for the past 8 years now.

    The Messages app shows what type of message (iMessage/SMS/RCS) you’re about to send in the text field and displays which (sent or received) messages are what as well.

    One thing I could see going wrong is that a given phone number is registered with iMessage and it hasn’t been disabled after switching to an Android phone for example.

    Another (imo more likely) thing is that if it’s using RCS, some carriers don’t seem to work too well with it as of now. iOS seems to have implemented the base standard, while Google added proprietary extensions to said “standard” in Android, like end-to-end encryption. I never had issues sending or receiving RCS messages from/to Android devices, but there might be some hiccups for some people as RCS - even though it’s called a “standard” - isn’t really standardized.

    Not sure what’s so insane from Apple’s side about any of that.








  • The main thing (by far) degrading a battery is charging cycles. After 7 years with say 1,500 cycles most batteries will have degraded far beyond “80%” (which is always just an estimate from the electronics anyway). Yes, you can help it a bit by limiting charging rate, heat and limit the min/max %, but it’s not going to be a night and day difference. After 7 years with daily use, you’re going to want to swap the battery, if not for capacity reduction then for safety issues.


  • Technically, wired charging degrades the battery less than wireless charging, mainly because of the excessive heat generated by the latter. The same way slower wired charging generates less heat. Lower and upper charging limits also help (the tighter the better).

    But I personally don’t bother with it. In my experience, battery degradation and longevity mostly comes down to the “battery lottery”, comparable to the “silicon lottery” where some CPUs overclock/undervolt better than others. I’ve had phone batteries mostly charged with a slow wired charger degrade earlier and more compared to almost exclusively wireless charging others. No battery is an exact verbatim copy of another one. Heck, I had a 2 month old battery die on me after just ~20 cycles once. It happens.

    Sure, on average you might get a bit more life out of your batteries, but in my opinion it’s not worth it.

    The way I see it with charging limits is that sure, your battery might degrade 5% more over the span of 2 years when always charging it to 100% (all numbers here are just wild estimates and, again, depend on your individual battery). But when you limit charging to 80% for example, you get 20% less capacity from the get go. Unless of course you know exactly on what days you need 100% charge and plan your charging ahead of time that way.

    Something I personally could never be bothered with. I want to use my device without having to think about it. If that means having to swap out the battery one year earlier, then so be it.




  • I always hear power efficiency as an argument that ARM chips are magically better at, but Ryzen AI 300 and Intel Core Ultra 200V series seem to be very competitive with Qualcomm’s offering. It’s hard to compare 1:1 as the same chip in different laptops can be configured very differently in terms of TDP and power curves and the efficiency “sweet spots” aren’t the same for all these different chips. Core Ultra 200V is also awaiting more thorough testing, but it seems to be right up there with the Snapdragon.

    I honestly found the Snapdragon X very underwhelming after all that marketing of how much better it was than Apple’s M3 and Intel’s and AMD’s offerings. By the time the Snapdragon was actually available in end-user products, AMD’s and Intel’s competing generations were right around the corner and we’ve also seen a vastly improved M4 chip (although only in an iPad so far, so meh). Add to that the issues that you’ll encounter because while Windows’ x86 to ARM translation layer has certainly improved, it’s nowhere near as seamless as what Apple did.





  • Best case is that the model used to generate this content was originally trained by data from Wikipedia so it “just” generates a worse, hallucinated “variant” of the original information. Goes to show how stupid this idea is.

    Imagine this in a loop: AI trained by Wikipedia that then alters content on Wikipedia, which in turn gets picked up by the next model trained. It would just get worse and worse, similar to how converting the same video over and over again yields continuously worse results.



  • Even at early bird pricing (39,-€) I’d rather get a cable that has the specs I need.

    This seems to do a little bit more than simply list the specs (show shorted pins and whatnot), but it doesn’t do any kind of load testing (tests like does sending 240 watts over the wire somehow interfere with the data transfer).

    Most of the cables that I have lying around are USB 2.0 100 watts PD, as that’s what most devices come with that have a cable in the box. For other cables I know what they’re capable of because I read the spec sheet before purchasing them.

    This might be useful to shops who sell refurbished phones that want to quickly check whether used USB-C cables are still good, but I don’t see why anyone would want this for personal use.