I just wanted to also suggest BetterMouse (https://better-mouse.com). SteerMouse is great, but it lacks the ability to map gestures to the thumb button on the MX Master mice. BetterMouse allows you to do that and has a UI thats a bit more understandable.
Thanks for this recommendation. I've tried SteerMouse and other alternatives in the past and haven't stuck with them (can't recall why exactly) but would dearly like to get away from Logitech's software.
When I go on Mastodon, half the posts there are bitching about 'how bad' X is. The engagement on posts is extremely poor as well. No one replies to anything.
As far as the problems people complain about on X, I don't see them. Twitter was always buggy at times, and that hasn't really changed. After the exodus of those who just can't stand Musk, I see far less political posts than I did in recent years, which is an improvement tbh. When I see something I don't want to see, I mute it or block the account, just like I always have.
The "explore" feed on mastodon.social is absolutely toxic because it shows the most boosted and favorited posts and unfortunately this is people angry at politics, people who get a thrill out of dehumanizing people, etc. There's a story that "two sides" drive each other crazy on Twitter but my take is that "one side" can conjure the presence of the other side and drive themselves every bit as crazy and there is that subculture on Mastodon.
I block the names of most Republican politicians and certain words used by people who aren't comfortable in their own skin and don't want me to be comfortable in mine. If I ever see angry words in an image (screenshot, image meme, whatever) I block the poster immediately.
Thus I get to meet the "silent majority" of nice and mature people on Mastodon. I've found my flower photos get a lot of engagement, though I wish there was more enthusiasm for my sports photos that I put more effort into. Here is my profile
> When I go on Mastodon, half the posts there are bitching about 'how bad' X is. The engagement on posts is extremely poor as well. No one replies to anything.
That's not my experience at all. Who are you following?
In my niche, Apple platform software development, the community has almost entirely migrated from Twitter to Mastodon, and it's now as active and thriving as ever.
IMO the Mastodon experience is even better than the Twitter experience was, because there are a lot fewer random trolls on Mastodon.
My little niche was the reason I originally joined Twitter back in 2008, so frankly, I don't really miss the millions of other people. I was never interested in following celebrities.
Yea mastodon has been totally incredible in my experience following mostly Swift developers. I’d also argue that the slightly higher barrier to entry is more of a feature than a bug since it inherently keeps low effort users out. Lastly I am old enough to remember early Reddit where it was very “technical and confusing” for a lot of people.
>When I go on Mastodon, half the posts there are bitching about 'how bad' X is.
Have you tried to follow different people? Wouldn't that solve this issue since 100% of mastodon posts in your feed are people you follow (unlike on twitter that has ads and such).
I call BS. Twitter was rock-solid for the approximately 8-year window bookmarked by retiring the failwhale and the disastrous Twitter Blue launch.
Twitter was the place people would go to complain about other platforms being down.I could rely on their availability dashboard, the UI was stable and there were no subsystem brownouts of the kind I'm seeing now (e.g. "Tweet not available" until you refresh several times)
My argument isn't that Twitter had 100% uptime: I consider outages to be on a different axes to general "bugginess" - which is why I stated that Twitter's status page mostly about service availability.
Twitter Spaces was buggy at times, but the core product had much better stability than it has now.
Siracusa's simpering, consoomer defensiveness for Apple has become intolerable. He seems unable to deal with the fact that his precious company's business practices are incompatible with his political/enviromental beliefs. Instead concocting this 'blue ocean' dream that Apple will switch back to user serviceable batteries, creating a new market where there competitors don't dare tread.
What?
There are still plenty of Android devices that have user serviceable batteries, but they don't sell as well because what the majority of users want is to minimize size and weight at any cost. The minority of geeks out there who think something like this is important doesn't move the needle. Apple (particularly under Tim Cook) only cares about maximizing profits. Their environmental schtick is merely dressing in front of the ruthless profit making machine at work.
Obviously Siracusa can't deal with the dissonance that his precious Apple doesn't care about the environment as much as he does. Thus typing up silly articles like this...
> they don't sell as well because what the majority of users want is [...]
I think in the current market we have no idea of what the majority of users want because there's no combination of all the available options.
The majority of users might value iOS more than any specific hardware feature. Second to that, they might value price and career rebates.
That makes fringe android phones failures irrelevant and would leave us with only random guesses on what people would want outside of what Apple and Sumsung is offering right now.
Exactly. Just because a company sells something doesn't mean the majority of users want it that way. I would love for Apple to sell a laptop akin to the 2006 MacBook and MacBook Pro but with modern components, complete with removable batteries as well as user-upgradeable RAM and storage. It doesn't need to replace the existing Apple laptop lineup; it could supplement it (let's call it the MacBook Pro Max or the MacBook Extreme or something to that effect). Of course, Apple doesn't sell this product, and so I have to choose between two compromises: dealing with non-replaceable components so I could use macOS, or dealing with Windows or Linux so I could use something like a Framework laptop. In other words, I must choose between macOS or user-serviceable laptops, and unless Apple experiences noticeable declines in sales, this won't change; in fact, even PC laptops have largely moved toward the Apple model; even many ThinkPads have soldered RAM these days.
What I feel is more remarkable than how long ago this all began, is how stable the choices I moved to have been. Fastmail has been amazing, Feedbin is still very solid, DuckDuckGo while not perfect is good enough while Google search results continue to get worse.
Other than occasionally needing to use GSuite when others share documents through it, I pretty rarely use anything by Google intentionally anymore.
It does seem like in the last several years, the quality of ThinkPads has declined as other business lines like Dell Latitude/Precision and HP EliteBook/ZBook have improved.
