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by dkonofalski 1643 days ago
It's not a "No True Scotsman" because I'm using their definition of "Scottsman". If someone wants to be able to have full control of what goes on the display, outside of the OS, then they have to have a hardware I/O controller on a Mac. Their only argument is that they were OK with what the OS was putting on there because it didn't affect their specific use case. It's only an issue because they don't like what the OS is doing now. It's great if people got lucky in the past and never ran into an OS prompt or an alert from an app (looking at you, Steam) but that doesn't change the fact that the situation is currently the same as it was before Monterey. Anyone who's saying that a dot in the corner makes it "unusable" has to admit that anything else would have also made it unusable yet they chose to continue without managing the I/O of the device and didn't care.
2 comments

You're all over this thread trying to gaslight people into believing a constant dot is somehow the same a rare chance at an OS notification that you forgot to disable. People plug there mac directly into shit and that worked fine; now it doesn't end of story.
> now it doesn't

For an incredibly small set of people who are both professional enough for this to be an issue but also not professional enough to spend a hundred bucks on a device specifically meant for this purpose.

If you're going to claim gaslighting, then maybe actually include the intricacy that you seem to have missed there.

It continues to work fine for the vast majority of people.

No. You're describing a different setup when you suggest that hardware. Read the post again, "plugging the mac directly into shit" is broken now (for people that are using their microphone).
> for people that are using their microphone and are outputting video that they want undisturbed

Let's call a spade a spade. You're blowing it way out of proportion while in reality it's an issue that impacts an incredibly small fraction of the userbase.

I never said it affected a large fraction of mac users. I'm not blowing anything out of proportion.

Your post above was also only talking about those people with mic input and video output, so it shouldn't be a problem that I did the same.

Also it's not just video, it's basically anyone "plugging their mac into shit" for professional output purposes. Could be video, could be a powerpoint, could be a software demo.

Woah! Someone learned a new word and then used it incorrectly!

It's not about OS notifications that you forgot to disable. It's anything that the OS wants to display. Notifications and alerts were just an easy example because everyone knows what they are.

People can still plug their shit in and it'll "work fine". If they're recording audio, they'll see a little dot. If they want control of what shows up on the display, there are answer for that. Pretending like that hasn't always been the case is misguided.

> looking at you, Steam

I really don't believe anyone running Steam on their video computer is worried enough or even serious about reliability to use a dedicated video playback card. Sure it would be nice if everyone used a dedicated card, but it's 100x more important that those people stop running Steam... unless maybe if they're pro game streamers or something.

Also, even Steam requires extra permissions on Mac to display the overlays you mention.

I only mentioned Steam because I've had an experience where that happened to someone. They were running some game (similar to Jackbox but it wasn't that) for a conference and were just outputting the display and the Steam update prompt showed up on top of the display. It wasn't a big deal, it was just an example that summed up exactly the types of things I'm talking about.

And no, this wasn't a Steam overlay. It was a prompt to restart the Steam app to complete some update. That does not need additional permissions.