I really liked the OpenAI short keynote, especially the few jabs at Google. What OpenAI is doing is simply mind-blowing. I’m still trying to wrap my head around all this. What isn’t clear, though, is as a paying member of ChatGPT, why would I continue to subscribe if I don’t use the live translation? One last thing: Siri looks like a prehistoric bot. Apple has to do something about this, and fast.

VMware is no longer synonym of IT innovations. Now, it has because the new Microsoft of the nineties: it is about licensing costs and tricks. Let me elaborate a little bit more.

The EU is going after Apple and Google and Meta these days with fierce energy and determination. It’s all good¹. But what is currently happening right now in IT world with the Broadcom merger with VMware is absolutely criminal². Broadcom is doing some massive cleanup in the VMware house and the the list of SKU who was completely replaced with new bundles and licensing mode. For many big organisations (governmental for example), subscriptions price are simply going sky high. Many government agencies are now facing something like 3 to 10 times what they used to pay for about the same features set. It is criminal and if anything, this is something that should be looked into with more scrutiny. It is one thing that a bank is paying much more for something, but when it comes to government services, it is tax payers money. That’s quite different. We have to call it out publicly.

I wish we would talk about this more in the general press, not only in the tech field.

From what I’m reading and seeing, the AI Pin and Rabbit R1 are terrible devices for potentially great AI use cases, while the Apple Vision Pro is a technology marvel device with weak use cases. The former are probably DOA because they risk lacking funding to keep the show going, while Apple’s massive resources might save the Apple Vision Pro from a complete failure.

This morning, my wife picked up her iPhone and tried to unlock it¹. She couldn’t after a few try². She tried a few times with a slight variation, but the iPhone refused to unlock itself, now showing a 15-minute delay on the lock screen. Her passcode is a complex one as per corporate security rules. She knows it by heart, she told me. She doesn’t know what to do, and she is in deep doubt now. Eventually, she asked me for help, but I told her I cannot do much about it³.

At first, I thought it was the infamous Apple ID being locked out, but it’s not the case. As a reminder: the passcode used to unlock your iPhone has little to do with your Apple ID. But, when using 2FA, the iPhone is required to get access to the Apple ID and must be unlocked for this to work. Maybe this is why people think they are both linked together. It’s not the case.

As I finish writing this up, my wife tried again to unlock her iPhone and it worked. All is good now. But it’s a reminder that, for most people, security is hard. It’s hard to experience. It’s hard to explain. It’s hard to get over it.

Microsoft 365 or Office 365, if you prefer, is so overrated. Microsoft is the master of selling licenses but when it comes down to doing real serious collaborative work with Teams and the rest of the software suite it falls apart really quickly. For example: trying to collaborated on a Word document, creating comments and assigning a task toi someone… nobody knows really where the task is actually saved! And no one seems to get a notification… or nobody cares to look at the activity tab in Teams because it is so overwhelming! Oh and don’t get me started with Microsoft Loop, a pale copycat of Notion. And should we talk about Visio? I prefer not.

I’m so fed up of working in an IT field where everyone is short sighted with Microsoft. I mean, there are so much more powerful collaborative apps out there.

/rantoff

I’m a bit late to the game but I just read the announcement by Ghost about their ActivityPub support that is coming to their platform. I find this development super exciting; one of my site is on Ghost. Having people subscribe to my content via their favorite Mastodon client is super cool. But what is cooler is that people will be able to reply to my articles right from here on Micro.blog and get their reply published right under my articles, just like on Micro.blog. I think this is a good way to offer a reduced friction experience compared to having to log in to post a reply, which is the standard way to interact with a Ghost blog post. Can’t wait to see this coming this year.

Today, I’ll bring my camera to the office¹, as I’m declaring myself as the official photographer for the two-day yearly sales kickoff event. I’ll take photos of humans, which is not my cup of tea, but I need to try it more and get out of my comfort zone. Usually my problem while photographing humans is anticipation and timing. Some people are very good at it, but I’m not. So, I need to practice. Comfort zones are killing creativity and learning.

I’ve been discussing a lot about design in general with my wife recently regarding our home improvement project. Design is hard. The process of redesigning a 3D space (a room, a bathroom) is not trivial but I think we should always try to start from a minimalistic concept from which we can build on step by step later. Also, not everyone has the same ability to visualize something in 3D without first seeing it for real, even with 3D computer assisted design. It will be a long journey.

1. Today, I wanted to try something different and write this post on Micro.blog instead of Scribbles. Since the Micro.blog editor is so far behind Scribbles’, I’m using Ulysses for this experiment. Sadly, people won’t be able to reply using a contact form because my blog on Micro.blog doesn’t offer one. In any case, say hello@numericcitizen.me!
2. Today is a special day—video recording day! I’m excited to share more about my creator dashboard, a project I’ve been passionately building in Craft.
3. I’ve been editing photos with Photomator recently and discovered that for some photos, Photomator would create a sidecar file which is more than 100 MB in size, while for other photos, the sidecar file is only around a hundred kilobytes, under similar editing workflows.
4. I find Grammarly to be overly iterative when suggesting corrections. After applying a suggestion, it will iterate and suggest something else that it could have figured out in the first place. They are transitioning to AI, and I think it will help. Oh, and Grammarly considers markdown formatting marks to be corrected.
5. Yesterday, after watching this video, I wondered if I should switch to FinalCut Pro for my video production. There are things that I find super cool and useful in FCP that I don’t have in Screenflow like Gling.ai.
6. It took me 22 minutes to write this post.
7. Maybe I could alternate between Scribbles and Micro.blog for this /Now post. What do you think? Don’t miss previous /Now posts on Scribbles.
8. This is a photo that I processed yesterday night. A better version will soon be available on my Glass page, though.

The image shows a black and white photograph of a modern building with a curved corner, featuring reflective windows and tiled façade, set against a backdrop of a sky with scattered clouds.

Now that I’m no longer in Adobe’s ecosystem for my photo processing needs, I depend on Photomator and Synology Photos. I need to create an optimized workflow: upload photos to Synology¹, browse and tag the pictures I want to process using Synology Photos tags, then edit them in Photomator. This is the last is a challenge: RAW images need to be converted to a DNG format², and then edited in Photomator before exporting the end results in JPEG. I need to download RAW images manually out of Synology Photos then import them in Photomator for processing. Processed images should then be imported into Apple Photos for easy access.