What do you mean “now”? Google Photos has had a photo editing feature for a very long time now

The package name is visible in App info, no need to install anything - just long press the app icon, pick App info and scroll down to version

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.

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.

Google Drive app -> New (in the bottom right corner) -> Scan. It’s not supposed to be a part of the camera app, that’s just a useful shortcut.

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.

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)

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).

Even Linux is slowly moving to an immutable system like Android. It is simply the best approach for an OS that non-technically-inclined people use - it’s much harder to screw up beyond repair by accident - and clearly the future of operating systems (well, future for Linux at least, mobile platforms and maybe macOS are already there).

My two cents: the only time I had an issue with Btrfs, it refused to mount without using a FS repair tool (and was fine afterwards, and I knew which files needed to be checked for possible corruption). When I had an issue with ext4, I didn’t know about it until I tried to access an old file and it was 0 bytes - a completely silent corruption I found out probably months after it actually happened.

Both filesystems failed, but one at least notified me about it, while the second just “pretended” everything was fine while it ate my data.