Notices by Matt Birchler (matt@isfeeling.social)

Bending the knee, $1 million at a time https://birchtree.me/blog/bending-the-knee-1-million-at-a-time/

X Premium Plus now costs well more than running my own damn Mastodon server https://birchtree.me/blog/x-premium-plus-now-costs-well-more-than-running-my-own-damn-mastodon-server/

I’ve gotten used to the new Photos app and don’t mind it much, but I will say I haven’t heard a single person in my offline life say they like it. Most seem to not like it and others don’t have a big opinion of it. https://www.threads.net/@thisistechtoday/post/DDCu2v-RdJk

This is actually it, this is the best analogy for using apps on the Vision Pro in my opinion: it feels similar to using apps on the Apple TV.

Given this analogy, is it any surprise that the seeming most popular things to do with the Vision Pro are watching movies and using a Mac? The first is literally replicating a TV and the other is doing the real computing interactions on a Mac.

Marco goes on to say that much like how the Apple TV and Apple Watch *can* be more general purpose computers, in both cases we learned pretty quickly that they worked better as specialized devices for a couple tasks. I think it’s too soon to say with confidence, but he wonders if this is what will happen with the Vision Pro as well.

American Idiot really hit me in 2004 as I was in a personal, political transformation, and it hits 20 years later too.

"American Idiot 2" on the cover of this reissue is almost too on the nose today.

You’ll all be very proud of me. At work someone was prepping a slide deck and needed some images. They fought with ChatGPT for hours to get something good, but it all looked terrible. They brought me in, I made them some graphics in like 10 minutes that looked so much better, and they were super happy.

When it comes to AI-generated images in your presentations, just say no ✌️

RE: my recent blog post about the timer and alarm UIs being opposite and confusing, Apple has addressed this in watchOS by giving them different interfaces when they’re going off.

Not saying this is perfect, but I’ve never heard someone say they get confused by what to do with these UIs.

I’m telling you, Apple’s doing something to push away a real chunk of their most enthusiastic supporters.

https://birchtree.me/blog/is-this-the-slow-decline-of-the-apple-cult/

I’ve heard this story before https://birchtree.me/blog/ive-heard-this-story-before/

If passkeys fizzle out, it’s 100% going to be because they demo well but implementations are all over the place and in most cases it’s more confusing than existing solutions.

I love passkeys in theory, and when they work they’re great, but good lord they drive me crazy too. https://mastodon.social/@harshil/113000977815926245

NVIDIA is consuming a lifetime of YouTube per day and they probably aren’t even paying for Premium! https://birchtree.me/blog/nvidia-is-consuming-a-lifetime-of-youtube-per-day-and-they-probably-arent-even-paying-for-premium/

I'm loath to link to Twitter, but reposting this as my only real comment on the whole situation that you've probably seen already.

https://x.com/chelsieomfg/status/1819070342159098292

Severance was more expensive to produce than Game of Thrones https://birchtree.me/blog/severance-was-more-expensive-to-produce-than-game-of-thrones/

PSA if you have a bug with an app, especially an indie app, you can often privately message the person who makes the app on social media with your issue rather than publicly complaining about the bug. They'll probably be happy you helped them find it!

Report your bugs, don't make them engagement bait :snake_salute:

Ah, the emails you get when you have a blog.

My honest feelings about the Vision Pro after nearly 5 months https://birchtree.me/blog/my-honest-feelings-about-the-vision-pro-after-nearly-5-months/

What happens when you defederate a server https://birchtree.me/blog/what-happens-when-you-defederate-a-server/

#Passkeys truly are the new lock in for password managers. I'm trying to be a good citizen and use passkeys wherever I can, but now I can't properly try other password managers without needing to create dozens of new keys. I'm trying Proton Pass now, and it's a major pain.

Extrapolate this out to a world where passkeys are the norm and effectively all of my accounts authenticate this way, and moving your data becomes impossible. :dumpster:

I know the FIDO Alliance and passkey enthusiasts will say that the passkey standard isn't built to lock users in, and migrating them should be possible.

That's well and good, but we're several years into this and zero of the major players support this. Whether you use Apple, Google, 1Password, or anything else, your passkeys are locked to those accounts today. maybe you can move in a few years, but you can't now. Yay.