aquasync's comments

On: Google Pixel 4a's old firmware is gone, trapping users on buggy battery update

[aquasync]

Thanks for the info! My pixel has already applied the update unfortunately - any ideas if switching to lineageos is still helpful in that case?

They’re not offering the free battery replacement in Aus otherwise I’d do that - hard to be sure that getting a new battery in a local repair shop wouldn’t be similarly affected by the new limits (presumably some sort of blacklist on serial numbers?).

[sangnoir → aquasync]

Installing Lineage should help battery life. @marcan[1] dissected the new update and puts the blames an overlay in the new kernel that changed the charge voltage.

1. https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/113914172433692339

[chasil → sangnoir]

What the hey, let's do it...

Random Google engineer on personal machine trashes Pixel 4a batteries in GPL violation

https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/113914172433692339

[chasil → sangnoir]

"So... this was built by a random engineer on their personal machine."

How did this random engineer command that all previous firmware images be taken offline?

Alternate ROMs look much safer right now.

Should this be submitted to HN separately?

[chasil → aquasync]

The new battery behavior is probably just some POSIX userspace process running under Linux, or perhaps some kernel tweak.

The whole of userspace will be replaced when LineageOS reformats all of the partitions.

It is possible that the new battery behavior has been injected into some deeper part of the hardware, but LineageOS is unlikely to make that worse.

On: Run System Commands in Ruby – When to use which methods to run shell commands

[aquasync]

While the article says that backticks don't provide access to the exit status, you can retrieve it with $?.exitstatus.

On: Generalizing Support for Functional OOP in R

[aquasync]

R's evaluation of arguments is lazy, so while not at the level of Haskell it feels like a lazy language to me. Try eg:

  f = function(x) { print('hello'); x }
  f(print('world'))

X is not evaluated in f until referenced. Indeed if you remove x from f, world is not printed.