Carighan

Carighan, 25 days ago

And wow is it bad.

The thing can’t even do basic things the Assistant did, and it replaces it if you let it. No smart control at all.

Sigh. Best look into Home Assistant, finally.

Carighan, 1 month ago

Yeah but in this case that’s where this should have started. 😅

Carighan, 1 month ago

Had to think of this xkcd of course. 😅

Carighan, 1 month ago

This is just shutting down an already outdated API. Devs should be moving off of it, and now it has a year out set for full removal instead of just being deprecated.

Carighan, 1 month ago

I still don’t quite get why some people are defending manufacturers which remove the headphone jack on their phones…

Not defending, just utterly couldn’t care either way. 🤷

Carighan, 2 months ago

Probably because of lagging behind in something they need to adopt from the mainline Firefox. Just checked in Firefox beta and I can access all of those sites perfectly fine.

Carighan, 2 months ago

I dunno, people seem to have a real hard-on for pissing over Fairphone, in a totally weird way. And this travelled over from Reddit. And I know the majority of /r/android has long been Samsung fanbois, but sometimes it gets ridiculous. 😅

Back to the actual topic at hand, wow they’re chunkers. Ouff. Since I have a comparatively small head these would look pretty weird on me I imagine. But OTOH, damn is it impressive to build earbuds - a device usually filled with glue - with a user-replaceable battery. I kinda want to support them assuming I need new headphones any time soon.

Carighan, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I hope these people don’t find out that the Framework 16 notebook got rid of an on-board headphone jack and moved to a USB-C adapter as well. There might be riots.

Can’t you still buy a headphone jack, though? Which to me is actually cool. Consistency, the more modular the better.

Fuck, I have a Samsung phone (from work, not actually mine but private use permitted) and Fairbuds XL. I use products from both companies on a daily basis. Which camp to I have to join now?

Ah, I’m sorry to inform you but the company shill police is on their way. You will be re-indoctrinated, probably for Apple.

Carighan, 2 months ago

Because the entire point of fairphone is to not do those sorts of things.

That’s not their point, as their website makes pretty damn clear. They state their goals openly, and pretty clearly.

Carighan, 2 months ago

Why would I throw away my perfectly good bluetooth headphones just because a phone removes the audio jack? 🤔

Carighan, 2 months ago

Oh the phoenix is pretty!

Carighan, 3 months ago

A feature that I didn’t even know existed, and frankly I would not know what to use it for. Eh. 🤷

Carighan, 4 months ago

The catch:

After intermittently disappearing from all current Pixel phones, the option to take Photo Spheres is back on Pixels that previously supported the feature. This means that Google’s latest phones, the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro, are still left without the beloved functionality, but at least it’s back on the Pixel 7 series and older.

Carighan, 4 months ago

A better comparison would be that your coffee maker’s RGB light no longer supports a specific off-shade of pink.

Carighan, 4 months ago

Yeah, and it’s almost like that is still an ongoing thing hence it’s quite understandable that Gemini is severly unfinished and broken for now.

Carighan, 4 months ago

Whatever that app was. 🤷 Google does so much country-specific and A/B stuff, it’s impossible to even know what their ecosystem is.

Carighan, 4 months ago

To be fair, to some degree this is exactly the use case stochastic parrots (the thing we call ‘AI’ as a buzzword) can truly excel at:

• Interpeting the bullshit we stammer out when we try to give a verbal command while totally not adhering to any reliable command structure.
• Formulating a reply that sounds like fairly natural language despite how inane the sources used might be.

So yeah, we’re finally at a real use case. Gimme! And from briefly trying it, Gemini is better at figuring things out from impresice input than Assistant was.

Make no mistake, it’s ultimately the same backend. They just swapped the processing layer between audio-to-text parsing and running inputs from them (and again on the way back). Sadly no Google Now smartness at all, we’ve lost that forever. But hey, at least this improves stuff.

Carighan, 4 months ago

Ah, I think the wording confuses it.

Timers are set for a duration. Alarms are set for a time. Which makes sense btw, you can’t set an egg timer to 9:15 either, you set it for, say, 21 minutes (if it’s 8:54 right now). And you don’t set your alarm clock for “in 6 hours”, you set it for 8:00.

It’s a bit arbitrary, but this is exactly where I feel models such as Gemini or ChatGPT can actually improve things, because they can more readily leap from the keyword “timer” expecting a duration to that you actually meant “alarm” from the rest of the input, you just said timer instead.

Carighan, 4 months ago

I was about to say the dumb and backwards part was not having basic stuff like encryption in the standard. 🤷

Carighan, 4 months ago

That’s pretty neat, especially the reduced need to get to the top of the screen to change mode of transportation when looking for directions.

Carighan, 4 months ago

Living in a large enough city, I can say I sometimes do get influences by public transport vs bicycle vs car times. But I also think it’s to get people to consider non-caroptions more.

Carighan, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

How do you mean? New apps release daily. But they’ve become so normal that only very rarely is one newsworthy.

But also, how many new apps do you need? And… why do you need them? Do you not have apps for all your use cases already?

Carighan, 5 months ago

I just want my Google Now back. It was so smart by comparison to Assistant or all the other modern “AI” crap. It didn’t try to write me a funny text, instead it contextually pulled actually useful information up so that when I get the idea to look at my phone for something, hey!, it’s already there!

The craziest thing was my trip to the UK back in the days. In order, it did the following:

• The evening before it asked me whether I want to be woken up a bit earlier (20 minutes) as the weather was expected to be very bad.
• It reminded me to pack an umbrella in the morning.
• When it had decided that my movement mode was driving (I had taken a taxi), it popped up that I needed to go to Terminal 2 at the airport (they have separate areas for dropping off passengers).
• Once at the terminal, my ticket + it’s QR code was persistent on the screen.
• It also had a persistent notification with the boarding gate + the current expected time (there was a slightly delay, hence I noticed).
• When I arrived at Heathrow, it offered on-foot navigation to the coach area.
• When I got closer, the coach ticket + it’s QR was persistent on the screen.
• Once in the coach it offered me information that the weather at my destination was expected to be sunny. And when I would probably arrive, of course.

For-fucking-hell Google, that’s exactly how I need a phone to assist me during a trip! I don’t need some shitty voice interaction or long flowing texts made up of filler words and wrong facts. I need contextual information that fits the fucking context! Google Now was insanely smart. It also did lots of little things, like when I got somewhere with a car, parked it, then walked off a bit, if I then sat down for a long time when the phone was moved again (say… when you get up out of the Restaurant!) the parked position would pop up. Smarts. Not useful very often, but smarts.

Carighan, 5 months ago

OSMand

I’ll be honest, as much as I love how well it does, it’s still leagues behind Google Maps. Would I be fine if Google Maps were to shut down? Sure. Just like how in theory, Apple Maps on DDG serves as a usable map system on the desktop. In reality, I see no reason not to use a competitor as superior as Google Maps, as long as I can. This isn’t a Chrome-vs-Firefox situation where in many regards Firefox is the superior choice even on features, Google Maps is, for all it’s woes, incredibly ahead of the competition.

Which makes sense: It’s used so broadly, and can accumulate so much data about how people move about, it has access to a host of knowledge about motion and movement that other map system cannot match, be it out of choice or not. With OSMAnd+ it’s a choice of course, but even if that weren’t the case they just lack that ability. They cannot know how right now foot traffic in a certain area of downtown is quite slow due to a demonstration just having ended and a lot of people moving through a few adjacent streets back to the main train station. Google Maps can. Because like 75% of people in that crowd have it on their phones and enabled.

Carighan, 5 months ago

The vast majority of the world no longer uses SMS, so I doubt it’s a problem the average customer has to worry about much.

Carighan, 5 months ago

Not in the slightest, as the main S-series has long left the price segment I consider valid for an everyday-use device like a smartphone.

Carighan, 5 months ago

That’s so wild to me.

I can’t imagine going iOS. I absolutely cannot. My sister recently switched to an iPhone, and everyone told her that’s stupid, and she hates it, but she has to because her daughter’s school has only iPads and the whole parental control doesn’t work very well in that regard. I wonder whether it’s largely via such avenues that Apple gets a foothold and then due to their utterly closed ecosystem design they can spread throughout families and groups of friends once in. I know they target students heavily for macbooks for example.

Carighan, 5 months ago

What are non-dismissable notifications? Or more specifically, why would I want those?

Carighan, 5 months ago

That sounds like a weird way to get around battery optimizations without having to ask the user to explicitly do that for this app? I mean there is a mechanic for that already via disabling battery optimizations, far as I understand it.

Carighan, 5 months ago

Interesting, on my Fairphone I’ve never noticed an issue using Nova.

Carighan, 5 months ago

Geezus. This is what unchecked markets due to poor streets and tunnels. 😟

Carighan, 5 months ago

Interesting that the author is apparently young enough that the Auto UI for phones was the oldest driving UI they can remember.

Carighan, 5 months ago

Yeah but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

Carighan, 5 months ago

Wow, they’re neutering it quite a bit. And sure, most of these were hyper-niche, but that’s a long list of niche stuff to stop supporting.

Carighan, 5 months ago

Yep same. I set my alarm in the evening, I set a lot of timers while working in the kitchen, and I fill in my shopping list while going through stuff in the pantry.

Sometimes I let it play some background noise, pause/resume music or a video, and I have a routine that reminds me of things during work days. That’s it. And it works well enough for that, but eh, still annoying that they now took both the smartness of Google Now and the sheer broad applicability of Assistant away.

Carighan, 5 months ago

These are always the most interesting competition.

And the reactions to it are just as fascinating as the results. Wow do people struggle hard when their 100megapixel sensor doesn’t beat a 16megapixel Pixel. 😅

Carighan, 6 months ago

I mean, now that the UI has been absolutely ruined and it takes 1-2 extra taps for ~everything, “it’s finally on the right path”.

Fuck modern app design, tbh. And worse that by now people seem to embrace this space-wasting time-wasting nonsense that has become modern “standards” of UI/UX.

Carighan, 6 months ago

Cortana is from 2014, VS Code from 2015.

Carighan, 6 months ago

The point exactly. Google does not do successful branding, it’s against some internal mandate apparently.

Carighan, 6 months ago

Read more than the headline before you post, tbh.

(edit)
Changed this because to be fair, if English isn’t your primary language you might be unaware that you can lose a court case, not only profits or market share. The word is used in a lot of contexts.

Carighan, 6 months ago

Uh, that’s how it is generally done? And it works independent of device. Did Apple manage to make this “theirs” in the US?! Because I remember this is a very old Android 2/4 level tech where you exchange contact info by “bumping” fists with your phone in them. 😅 It was dropped by Google and eventually evolved into this I suppose.

Though I will also say that most people would intuitively distrust swiping their phone over another phone. They expect a dedicated payment terminal otherwise it feels like someone trying to steal their card data.

Carighan, 6 months ago

And to be fair, it’d be cool if these - comparatively small - changes happen. But using transit routing frequently here, I have no real complaints with it. It works fine.

Carighan, 6 months ago

It’s also weird because that was the whole idea of the smartphone app economy, after all. Have a specialized app for every purposes, then install the apps you want and hence the use cases you want to cover.

I don’t even mind Spotify having podcasts and music, just that it should be Spotify Music and Spotify Podcasts.

Carighan, 10 months ago

Imagine if we had this - physically tiny - and established standard how we could let the user add extra storage space to their small electronic devices.

I don’t know, maybe SanDisk could develop something like this, some Micro format storage device. That’s not a bad name, is it? Something with Micro, and SanDisk? Yeah, someone should create that!