Notices by Marco Arment (marcoarment@mastodon.social)

Twitter used to be really fun, too.

The bar is always fun at 9 PM.

But that bar never stops serving, and more people just keep coming in the door.

Just wait until 4 AM.
https://hachyderm.io/@callin/113510753807513632

"I deactivated both my personal account and my app's account from Twitter two years ago, which significantly improved productivity and morale, reduced distractions and PR risks, and hasn't had any noticeable effect on my reach or business metrics.”
https://mastodon.social/@sandofsky/113487634886845014

The remaining Trump voters will NEVER change their minds. It has the psychology of a religion, so trying to argue with or persuade them otherwise is like attacking someone's religion. Walls go up, defenses activate, and discussion ends.

They deserve none of your time or attention.

We don't need them. There are FAR more liberals!

This election will be decided by how many liberals (1) turn out, and (2) vote for Harris (not some third-party waste).

GET OUT THE VOTE! https://onefoottsunami.com/2024/11/05/vote-for-kamala-harris/

Modern Substrings in Swift
A Story in Two Acts

This should be easy!

return s[0..<4]

[X] 'subscript(_:)' is unavailable: cannot subscript String with an integer range, use a String.Index range instead.

AAAHHHH DAMN IT HOW DO I DO THIS AGAIN (furiously Stack Overflows)

- Act 2 -
are you serious, is this really the solution

return s[s.startIndex..<s.index(s.startIndex, offsetBy: 4)]

[X] Cannot convert return expression of type 'Substring' to return type 'String'

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Google continues to shit all over the web unless you sign into a Google account and let them (further) track you everywhere you go.

Just as Apple believes everything on the iPhone is theirs, Google believes the entire web is theirs — a much greater offense to me, and one that shows absolutely no respect for anyone else's property, attention, or privacy.

Vision Pro has been out for two months, and the only new immersive content from Apple so far is a five-minute sports-highlight video from MLS games that happened last year.

I'm not sure what I expected for such a low-volume product… I guess I assumed Apple would be putting out much more content for it.

https://sixcolors.com/post/2024/03/apples-immersive-mls-highlight-reel-debuts-later-today/

If I ran a website that supported Google-account login, I'd be pretty pissed at how they're suddenly putting up an obnoxious overlay over my site's layout.

Why is this not bothering more people? Does anyone give a shit about their websites anymore?

Does Google?

Never buy anything from Dyson's website.

Never, ever, ever, ever.

Been fighting with them to resolve a duplicate order (from their website crashing) since Black Friday. They've had the return since January 4. I still don't have a refund. (Just filed a chargeback. I hate doing that.)

I've lost HOURS to this. I've never seen a company with such poor basic service.

A social network’s best days are not when we’re using it mostly to talk about another social network.

ok look I know this is really stupid and pedantic, but come on, we’ve had 26 years to learn this

It's Wi-Fi

not Wifi or WiFi or wifi or wi fi

Wi-Fi. Hyphenated. Both words capitalized.

thank you for coming to my ted talk

(while you're here, “log in" is two words when being used as a verb… your login button or link should not say "login”, because the action they take is to "log in”)

This new Slack redesign is great if you hate screen space, clarity, contrast, ease of use, information hierarchy, messages, channels, and communication

@TechConnectify Probably right, but I wonder if fast-charging most EVs is actually too cheap for this to matter — at least for people on long trips who usually charge at home.

For those customers, the experience of the charger and its location — how nice/convenient it is to spend 30 minutes there — is probably more important than whether the electricity costs $15 or $12.

Of course, the bigger the battery, or the more you use DC fast-charging, the more a price difference starts to matter.

@TechConnectify I've gone to a lot of NY-region Superchargers over the years, and some EA chargers recently. Tesla has a significant leg up around here, but they still vary a lot.

What I always want is a travel plaza with multiple options on how I spend my time and what/whether I eat, and a bathroom I can use without feeling obligated to stay or spend money.

What we often get is a mall/Target/Walmart parking lot, or a sit-down restaurant's parking lot with nothing else in walking distance.

@TechConnectify Obviously, I don't represent everyone, but I'd MUCH rather stop at a nice travel plaza on the side of the highway than drive 3 miles out of the way to a Wal-Mart, even if the charge at the travel plaza costs an extra $5 or whatever.

Can we please pronounce it “ten”

Linode/Akamai has notified me that they're forcing an offline migration of one of my primary databases within 48 hours.

In the middle of a week.

It'll cause ~8 hours of complete Overcast downtime if I don't bring up a new instance and migrate everything over myself by then.

And this server costs 20% more than it did a year ago.

The Akamai acquisition of Linode has not improved anything for Linode's customers, as far as I can tell. So far, we're just paying more for equal or worse service.

America was founded on the promise of freedom and equal rights for all.

In reality, this has always been unevenly applied. Freedom is a constant battle, and everyone’s rights are FAR from equal.

The most American thing we can do is to keep pushing hard for freedom, liberty, and truly equal rights for EVERYONE.

"If you are a subscriber to either Tweetbot or Twitterrific, I beseech you to decline these prorated refunds. It’s a couple of bucks for you, but in the aggregate, this amounts to an existential sum of *already booked revenue* for these two companies, both exemplars of the indie iOS and Mac community.

"Reinstall the app if you’ve already deleted it. Tap that ‘I Don’t Need a Refund’ button and feel good about it. We have a month. Spread the word.”

– @gruber

https://daringfireball.net/2023/03/tweetbot_and_twitterrific_face_the_cliff

VERY good read about the path Twitter is now on. It's not "our" favorite bar anymore.

Highly recommended:

https://tracks.ranea.org/post/701656528790470656/twitter-failure-modes-and-your-favorite-bar