"Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." — Voltaire, Questions sur les Miracles, 1765
The current political climate in the United States is certainly stress testing this axiom.
Ivory for iOS
tapbots.com
About Non Sequiturs
Non Sequiturs is the personal blog of Michael Argentini.
I'm a software developer and Managing Partner for Fynydd and Blue Sequoyah Technologies, the project lead for Coursabi, and Āthepedia founder. I also have several nerdy open source projects on Github.
I'd describe myself as an Oxford comma advocate, autodidact, aspiring polymath, and boffin, with a mechanical keyboard addiction. You can also find me on Mastodon.
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The iOS-ification of macOS
Apple's decision to make #macOS look and feel more like #iOS is aspirational, certainly. If users could seamlessly switch between operating systems and retain muscle memory it would be a big win. It's no wonder that #Apple decided to do this with macOS 13 #Ventura.
But in practice, Apple's zeal for consolidation has created some real problems for users. In many cases it feels like one step forward and two steps back. I can see how iOS power users may welcome most of the changes to macOS, but that position smacks of Stockholm Syndrome to me.
One of the best examples of this is the redesigned System Settings, which is a mess. I've given it months to “grow on me” and it has… like a fungal infection. The settings are (dis)organized into a single column of top-level categories in a seemingly random order. Devices running macOS have wide screens, so restricting the top-level categories to a single narrow column is an artificial limitation. And it can’t be remedied by resizing the System Settings window because only its height can be changed.
And the organization? macOS has a much deeper and more broad collection of settings than iOS. So as difficult as specific iOS settings can be to find on an iPhone, it’s near impossible on a Mac. And making it worse is the fact that some settings have been organized out of existence, spread out into disparate, counterintuitive categories. Want to tune all your power and sleep settings? You may have to explore a dozen settings categories to find them when they could have been put into an “Energy” category or something similar. Luckily there is a search feature. Without it I’m sure users would be surrounding the Apple Campus with pitchforks and torches.
Also part of this convergence initiative is the Apple decision to make physical keyboards work more like the iOS virtual keyboard, which changes contextually. The difference is that the iOS keyboard changes in appearance so you can infer what's expected. This means that, for example, sometimes you can use the delete key to remove characters to the right of your cursor, and sometimes you can't. It's like an infuriating game. And now when you press and hold an alphanumeric key it no longer repeats, in favor of a popup with extended characters (e.g. foreign characters with accents and ligatures). I suppose that’s handy for people who write in a foreign language. But you would assume that it would be an option, not a change to the original default key behavior. Your keyboard isn’t broken. Apple made it better #YOUREWELCOME.
How will narrow AI technologies like #ChatGPT, #StableDiffusion, and others, affect jobs in the next decade and beyond? Will it replace human workers? No. It's more likely that humans using narrow #AI tools will replace other humans who do not.
Every tech company is trying to come up with an AI strategy for 2023. We already know the answer: tack “AI powered” next to every existing product feature or service offering name.
Twitter's revocation of third party app access to its APIs, without notice or explanation, is another nail in the coffin for #ElonMusk's favorite toy. On a brighter note, the makers of my favorite #Twitter app, #Tweetbot, are already working on a new Mastodon iOS app named #Ivory.
StackOverflow is toxic. Their posting policies are like EULAs and most of the time their moderation policies only bar future participation or reward negative engagements. The result is a community of trolls who appear to be looking to either insult people or to find any policy loophole to justify a refusal to help.
Go to https://stackoverflow.com and ask a reasonable question to see for yourself.
Only a study involving the dairy industry would come to the conclusion that it’s a great idea to hide the expiration date on milk cartons.
Consumers embrace milk carton QR codes, may cut food waste
phys.org
No, Denzel Washington, the devil didn't “get ahold of” Will Smith at the Oscars. He was just as asshole. No supernatural forces are required to be an asshole.
$9,600 + $960/year for a single domain #Umbraco deployment tool makes it clear that a post-acquisition Umbraco has no plans to support indie developers and small businesses.
Facebook doesn’t need section 230 changed. They can stop prioritizing inflammatory content at any time of their choosing.
Apple announced lossless audio for #Apple Music and has no headphones that can play the lossless music.
Apparently there are idiots that claim unvaccinated women who are in proximity to vaccinated people suffer miscarriages. There are also idiots who believe those idiots.
Voting in NJ was a great experience. Ballot was mailed to us automatically. Clear directions. No postage required. Signature verification. Dropped off at ballot box (could have mailed too). If every state did this the voting participation would be off the charts.
If social media platforms just added a pay tier with no ads we’d be rid of most of the political interference and other genuine fake news.
The pandemic is NOT over. We have NOT recovered. We have more people dying every day now than when this all started. We have over 10% unemployment. And small businesses need financial support until a vaccine has given us herd immunity. This, my friends, is a shit show.
We should simply judge words and deeds without attaching ourselves to people or parties. It’s liberating to be critical of leadership without the umbilical relationship they so desperately want us to have.
As citizens our base thinking on our political leaders like POTUS should simply be “our President did a great thing when he signed prison reform” or “our President is killing people by threatening to pull school funding if kids don’t return in the fall.”
Still wondering why I have to explicitly run things as Administrator when I’m logged into #Windows as an administrator.
Before you complain about businesses forcing you to wear a face mask for health reasons, in most cases they’ve been forcing you to wear a shirt and shoes for no reason other than propriety, and no one cared.
So you can go to a specialist after your health insurance tells you it’s covered and no referrals are necessary, and the insurance company can still refuse to pay if the diagnosis isn’t “covered”. But yeah, people love their health insurance and don’t want single payer why?
Does anyone else think it’s weird that a veterinarian can save a cow’s life and then eat a steak for dinner?
It’s interesting that the people who think violent video games are bad seem to forget that prior to that kids would play cowboys and indians with cap guns, re-enacting the slaughter of native Americans.
Walmart pulls in-store displays for violent video games but keeps selling guns because dumb people believe that helps.
Watching a commercial for that digital exercise mirror and I realized that all it really has to do is show you a picture of someone good-looking.
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About Non Sequiturs
Non Sequiturs is the personal blog of Michael Argentini.
I'm a software developer and Managing Partner for Fynydd and Blue Sequoyah Technologies, the project lead for Coursabi, and Āthepedia founder. I also have several nerdy open source projects on Github.
I'd describe myself as an Oxford comma advocate, autodidact, aspiring polymath, and boffin, with a mechanical keyboard addiction. You can also find me on Mastodon.
