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The radically more expensive iPad mini
I've been borderline fixated on the cost of the iPad mini for the past few years. The price has been creeping up, and every rumor about the next-gen models always suggested they would get even more premium (and bring bigger price tags).
This fixation got another hit of dopamine today as Apple
🎙️ Minis and Mastodons
* The 2026 iPad Mini
* The 2012 original iPad Mini
* Community - Marco Arment
* Boost more cool shit
* @matt_birchler@mastodon.social
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+ Build bigger things
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The computer did what we told it to do. Eek!
Hank Green on Threads
I feel very alone in the way I see the hugging face hack which is that openAI trained a bunch of super effective hacker bots to act like the only thing that mattered in the world was winning a hacking challenge and then gave them hacker tools, removed a bunch of
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Boost more cool shit
FlohGro in response to my post asking if we're happy with Mastodon being an ever-shrinking social network: Be Generous With Boosts
No. I joined Mastodon in the same first wave that Matt Birchler describes, and I've enjoyed it every day since. At the same time, it's sad to
I spent money on music in 2026
Last year, it really dawned on me how streaming music is basically socially-approved piracy. Unless you're an extremely successful artist, the payouts are so paltry, we may as well be pirating music. As such, I committed in 2026 to buying the music that I started listening over the course of this year,
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Passkeys are a trap. No they're not!
Shot: Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them.
Like the Trojan Horse, passkeys are legitimately elegant on the surface, but there is something troubling inside.
Chaser: Passkeys Are Not a Trap
The post holds up TOTP as "already" a great solution. TOTP is better than a password alone, absolutely, but it has
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X has all the jerks
Lex Friedman (on what has to be the best new tech blog of 2026) writes I can’t believe we’re still arguing over whether X is for jerks, which you should just go read:
People can post wherever they want to post. I’m not trying to dictate where John spends his time online.
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The iPhone Duo is too damn small
John Gruber: ★ The iPhone Duo
The Duo name is perfect. It truly is like having two devices in one. The outer device is, by far, the worst iPhone Apple has ever made. It’s a miserable fat little thing. The inner device is a splendid, joyful, beautiful tablet, with a UI that out-iPads the
Smart person derangement
I'd like to coin a term: smart person derangement.
There are people who are very smart. Sometimes they're smart in a specific field or they are just generally pretty damn intelligent. Either way, they're clever and importantly, they've become aware that they're smart. This on
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How to become a mark for con artists
Hank Green in a video about Theranos:
We should not be complacent about the ways in which our world sucks. But if we're convinced that everything sucks and it's because people are terrible and nothing works when that's obviously not true, then we become the marks for con artists.
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Birchtree is 16 years old today (and the nicest thing someone said to me this year)
Today marks 16 years since my first post on Birchtree. I was a scrappy 24-year-old who was stuck in a mindlessly uninteresting and low-paying job, but I loved technology. 16 years later, I don’t exactly know why I pulled the trigger on creating this blog, but I definitely know I’d
(not) solitaire
Despite its name, (not) solitaire is indeed solitaire (draw 2 cards, not 3 though), but with other people playing alongside
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+ Pastry is a privacy-focused clipboard manager coming soon
Yes, I'm working on a clipboard manager. I think it's pretty cool.
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I don't care what other kids are doing
Lex Friedman: A few more thoughts on why embracing X is wrong
“The Ellisons are bad, too” is a great argument for paying attention to the Ellisons. It’s not an argument for X.
I remember one time as a teenager my parents sat me down in the living room to discuss something bad I
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Why does this chart just go down?
M.G. Siegler: Twitter is Back. Shhh… Magic Dance!
But it's also not really a surge in usage,
Mac buttons over the years
This cool little site lets you scrub through the design of macOS buttons from 1984 through today. I gotta say,