Point the ticket using the value of a cryptocurrency.

First they have to integrate Google Meet with it so they can have three Meet clients.

My best guess is that I know one of them uses Facebook. Apple phones. Facebook, Uber, and a few others have had pretty deep access to APIs not accessible to other software companies. Sometimes they’re caught like when Uber was caught using a screen scraping API. Sometimes they aren’t. The other guess that glues it together is that Facebook has indeed scraped audio to text for a long time. It was almost 10 years ago that I had the EE conversation.

Google and Meta pay Apple money to gain access to their user metrics. It’s likely symbiotic relationships. Facebook once had hooks directly in iOS. Likewise, the little mic/video indicators the OS displays when they are “active” are completely software-controlled and can be overridden.

At a time, I worked at a company that had(has) deep access to other aspects of iOS. Apple always required the source code is available to them so they could inspect it. I doubt that has changed. It also means they would be complicit. External tools wouldn’t really be able to figure this out. For someone to black-box this they’d need a jailbroken iPhone and some specialized tooling or MITM decryption capabilities.

Not to sound hyperbolic, I’m connecting dots with no evidence, it’s pure speculation. The compute seems to be there and with no regulation in source code, anything goes, if you want money bad enough. Especially with the mad dash every tech company has been on for the last 20ish years to harvest everything they can, ever since smartphones became powerful and commonplace enough.

It’s surprisingly easy to use adtech without voice and make a connection to serve a targeted ad. Had a friend ask me about what I was drinking. They were on my guest wifi network. They searched for it. Next day, I’m getting ads because of geoIP pinned my IP address as having an interest.

Also had someone that lives off the grid with no active network or devices watch a DVD of a movie and the entirety of their Internet connectivity was two cell phones in the room. They started seeing things related to the movie. They’re older and not constantly on their phones. The phones just sit somewhere in the room.

Had a discussion with some tech friends a few years back and remarked that keeping awake to do this would take a lot of power. The EE mentioned running audio recording would take basically nothing. I expanded from there, the device uploads audio for off-phone translation to text, or queues batch jobs to process locally when power is high enough or on charger. Etc.

It is 100% probable that code runs on phones and just ships off amalgamated text frequency charts or entire conversations and the user won’t even notice the battery dent.

That being said, I can’t find even in the greediest capitalist money-claw that the person giving a go would not think, “well, I can’t trust my own device anymore…” and maybe go: “yeah, I shouldn’t do this.” Maybe I’m too optimistic though.

Certs have existed a long time, are never implemented correctly, and the expiration cycle that is supposed to bolster security just causes pain as a result.

Certs should just be redesigned to have a kill switch. CRLs were supposed to handle that, but are rarely implemented or implemented correctly.

Certs are also used in so many places where they may not be suited to the task, but because they exist, they’ve become the de-facto standard.

A temporal expiration system seems flawed from the beginning anyway. What, you don’t trust your system anymore just because time has passed? Time is always passing. Are we all secretly racist against clocks now?

Have you seen how American corps code? 80% is GM release ready to go.

Made a joke when 6x CD-ROM drives came out that 6 in German is sechs. Sechs drive, sex drive, hurr-durr.

I was in middle school.

LLMs have improved my education, work life, and general knowledge search. I get more time to spend living my life and less trying to find one dude’s stacked change post from 2009 that fixed my problem.

They allow me to access information the way I learn and operate in a way that textbooks, college education, video courses, or online classes have never allowed me to do in my entire life.

That being said, the general AI buzz and buzzwords need to die, the real positives need to be celebrated.

Really curious to see how the modem stacks up, but I also guess reviewers given demo devices were told to not talk about or play down the modem performance, rather than fix the problem.

Hold on now, let us not start using logic when referring to computer programming here. It’s all magic and bumbling around on a keyboard.

I’d like another choice, both platforms have become terrible metric-collecting, dark-pattern-infused data-harvesting trash. (iPhone users, don’t believe the commercials claiming privacy.)

Because they love and believe their corporate daddies they so worship, especially in the US.

IIRC, Threema’s crypto algo is a patchwork cluster of copypasta and prayers.

GPT is selectively useful. It’s also, as of the last few weeks dumb as a bag of bricks. Dumber than usual. 4 and 4o are messed up. 4 mini is an idiot. Not sure how they broke them, but it started roughly around the time of the assassination attempt. Not sure if it was a national security request or a mere coincidence, but just the same.

I’m even seeing 4o make comically dumb and stubborn programming mistakes lately, like:

GPT: “I totally escaped that character”

Me: “no, it’s the same as your previous response.”

GPT: “Oh, sorry, here is the corrected code.” replies with same code again.

I canceled my sub.

I know how it is. Used to work on phone chipsets. That being said, I have no idea how pixel 8 is doing this, but likely the Bluetooth chipset has a mode it can go into to behave like AirTags and just pulse out a BTLE beacon occasionally with both the main OS and sub-OSes turned off and power just being trickled to VCC on the BT chip.

Edit: apologies, didn’t mean to sound so curt. Tl;dr: I know how bootloaders run to allow battery charge while off, not sure how pixel 8 is doing their magic-to-be but have a good theory.

That’s the bootloader. It boots when power is connected. It’s limited in functionality.

Apple has different design tradeoffs, they use smaller camera modules than Samsung, at least compared to the last few Samsung models, for example. They also tend to use smaller batteries, and charge them slower, requiring less cooling components. They also design more of their components in-house than other manufacturers, allowing them more efficient use of space. Their RF also tends to be inferior to Samsung, trading antenna design for space. Apple also uses inferior cooling solutions, relying on software thermal throttling to cut down on the physical size of the device. The whole trade-off of what can be fit in that smaller space is something each manufacturer has to make per model.

Optical zoom will always be superior to digital from the perspective of getting focused light onto a sensor, it’s just science. Digital methods will indeed continue to improve, I’ll leave most of that philosophical debate to those more passionate about camera tech, however. They’re definitely leveraging the new coprocessor to enable better image processing, in the same way Google leveraged their ML coprocessor to improve pictures out of Pixels a few generations back. Companies think software processing of images can “work around” image quality that requires physical hardware. (Look at Samsung Moongate.) It results in images that may end up being visually pleasing, but as for image quality, that’s debatable. (Zoom in on a Samsung zoomed picture of a pine tree for example, the way it tries to contrast/filter/process the branches makes them look like some 1990s Photoshop unsharp mask filter job meant for newsprint.)

Good conversation.

It can’t have faster charging because it lacks the space to dissipate the thermal energy to stop it from catching on fire. If it did support 45W on paper, it would still charge slower to prevent thermal runaway. The “Ultra” models have thermal cooling systems that rival laptop computers just short of active cooling fans.

It can’t have UWB because it’s too small for the 30,000 antennae they have to jam in the phone. 4x+ for cellular, then GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, Wireless charging, NFC, and on and on.

These phones, especially Samsung, jam so much technology in such a small package. We’re brushing up against the laws of physics.

And lets not even talk about then also expecting good cellular reception when on your lower cellular bands. Take 700MHz for example, an ideal 1/2 wavelength antenna would have to be 21cm/8.2in tall, so they have to use fractional wavelengths that further degrade performance potential, again, due to physics. (While still also supporting the fractional wavelengths of 30 other bands.) The plus and ultra models at least have space to approach more usable antennae for better reception. The tiny phones (and watches) don’t really have a chance.

Now, Google’s software feature nonsense, and the way handset manufacturers manipulate price for a few cents worth of storage increase are both downright criminal. However, the telephoto lens thing again goes back to space and reality. Telephoto cameras take up a ton of space. Look at a teardown of the S22 Ultra to see how big the camera modules are.

That’s actually an annoying point I recently observed though. The S24 ultra has a lower zoom telephoto camera than either the S22 Ultra or S23 Ultra. I think they’re trying to make up the difference with “AI” instead of real sensor/glass. Maybe it’ll get rid of the camera rattle though.

It can’t have faster charging because it lacks the space to dissipate the thermal energy to stop it from catching on fire. If it did support 45W on paper, it would still charge slower to prevent thermal runaway. The “Ultra” models have thermal cooling systems that rival laptop computers just short of active cooling fans.

It can’t have UWB because it’s too small for the 30,000 antennae they have to jam in the phone. 4x for cellular, then GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, Wireless charging, NFC, and on and on.

These phones, especially Samsung, jam so much technology in such a small package. We’re brushing up against the laws of physics.

And lets not even talk about then also expecting good cellular reception when on your lower cellular bands. Take 700MHz for example, an ideal 1/2 wavelength antenna would have to be 21cm/8.2in tall, so they have to use fractional wavelengths that further degrade performance potential, again, due to physics. (While still also supporting the fractional wavelengths of 30 other bands.) The plus and ultra models at least have space to approach more usable antennae for better reception. The tiny phones (and watches) don’t really have a chance.

Now, Google’s software feature nonsense, and the way handset manufacturers manipulate price for a few cents worth of storage increase are both downright criminal. However, the telephoto lens thing again goes back to space and reality. Telephoto cameras take up a ton of space. Look at a teardown of the S22 Ultra to see how big the camera modules are.

That’s actually an annoying point I recently observed though. The S24 ultra has a lower resolution 10x camera than either the S22 Ultra or S23 Ultra. I think they’re trying to make up the difference with “AI” instead of real sensor/glass. Maybe it’ll get rid of the camera rattle though.

I’ve driven through worse in a 1980s manual pickup with bald tires. It wasn’t pretty driving, but the truck didn’t get stuck either.

Edit: Not that I’m trying to show bravado or anything. Whole state was closed down in a state of emergency and my retail boss said I had to come in, and in 'mericuh you can’t lose your job! Kudos all go to the bald tire truck. Nobody should ever try this.