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Android devices include a developer options menu, accessible after tapping the Build Number field seven times in Settings > About, that lets users adjust animation speeds. Within this menu, setting the Window animation scale, Transition animation scale and Animator duration scale to 0.5x makes system animations play twice as fast, a feature that has existed since Android 4.0.
Samsung outlines several built-in options for Galaxy users to extend battery life, including keeping software updated, placing rarely used apps into deep sleep via Settings > Battery > Background usage limits, and enabling Power savings to restrict background data use. The guidance also highlights Battery protection, which lets users cap charging between 80 and 95 percent instead of always charging to full.
Organizational psychologist Dr. André Martin has published a book titled 'Collective Confidence: The Winning Formula of the World's Best Teams,' offering guidance on building resilient teams. He shares five key insights drawn from the book on how teams can perform well under pressure.
Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 lacks High Performance Memory, certain video codecs, and Matrix cores for AI graphics that were present on last year's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. These capabilities are instead reserved for the pricier Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, which also gets 50% more local memory for on-device AI models than the standard Gen 6.
DBOS engineers debugging a Postgres-backed queue system found that SELECT DISTINCT was their most expensive query, even though it appeared simplest. They discovered that Postgres always scans every row matching a query's predicates when computing DISTINCT values, regardless of indexing or how few unique values exist, making it a poor fit for finding active partitions in a queue workload.
Starbucks Coffee Company announced it will close about 250 stores across North America this week. The company said the closures target locations where financial performance or the in-store customer experience fell short of expectations.
Anthropic engineers spent a two-week sprint in August optimizing four core user journeys in claude.ai and the Claude desktop app, which together account for 95% of user activity. Measured at the 75th percentile, load time for a fresh claude.ai page dropped from 3.1 seconds to 0.55 seconds, new Claude Code sessions went from 0.8 to 0.3 seconds, and Claude Cowork cloud sessions improved from 2.6 to 0.73 seconds, with a 3.1x average speedup across 13 measurements.
Beats has launched the Beats 360, a redesigned headphone with fully removable ear cups that twist off to swap between two cushion types: a knit fabric built for workouts and a plush option for everyday listening. Each earpiece runs independently with its own battery and processing chip instead of a wired connection through the headband, and extra cushion kits cost $50.
Analysis of over a decade of workplace survey data finds that although employees still privately identify as optimists, they are increasingly reluctant to express that optimism openly at work. The trend signals a shift in workplace culture where positive outlooks are being suppressed rather than shared with colleagues.
Testing by Bilibili channel Homolab found that the 1TB iPhone 18 Pro Max, which uses QLC NAND, suffers major performance drops compared to the 512GB TLC-based iPhone 18 Pro. Once its SLC and secondary TLC caches are exhausted, sustained writes fall to about 79.4 MB/s and can dip as low as 25.6 MB/s, worsening to just 1.1 MB/s once the drive is 60% full.
A developer testing an AI model at maximum effort settings found that most requests produced little or no chain-of-thought reasoning tokens. Even when extended reasoning occurred, it fell well short of the levels seen in the model's published benchmark results.
xAI released Grok 4.7, a new model built on a larger base and trained with a longer reinforcement learning run focused on lengthy, difficult tasks. The model improves self-verification and long-context handling, and is natively tuned for the Grok Bot harness to boost conversational and knowledge-work performance. It ships at the same pricing and speed as Grok 4.6.