Crashing Clockwise #560: ‘I Don’t Like It When I’m Disappointed’
Jumping into Clockwise, “the tech podcast that uses half an hourglass for timekeeping”, with my own answers and opinions that no one asked for.
Mikah Sargent: Assuming that you use a voice-based virtual assistant, what are the one or two features that you know you can rely on?
Despite having a site called “HeyDingus”, I don’t actually invoke Siri with its wake phrase all that often.
But keeping with the trend here, when I do use Siri, I’m also a big timer boy, particularly with our kitchen HomePod while cooking. My second most common use case is probably starting workouts on my watch. The list of options in the Workout app is extensive, so rather than find the app, scroll through to ‘Outdoor Run’ and then adjust its parameters for a distance or timed run, it’s so much faster to say “Hey Siri, start a 3-mile outdoor run”. CarPlay is the other place where Siri gets uses, but usually that’s just through the voice prompts it gives to respond to texts while I’m driving.
As a side note, my wife uses Siri quite often for adjusting smart lights in our house, while I tend to use the physical buttons I’ve set up, or Control Center, to turn things on and off. I had bet it would have been the opposite.
Lisa Schmeiser: If you had unilateral power to impose legislation regarding internet activity, what edict are we all now living under?
I’m surprised no one else brought this up, but my edict would be to bring about strict data privacy laws regarding the collection and sale of personal data online. With a large part of the TikTok ban being related to what kind of data can be harvested by that app and potentially be used for nefarious purposes, I think the general public would get behind such a law. It’s not just TikTok though, data brokering gives terrible incentives to apps and websites of all kinds to hoover up as much as they can about their users so that they can make a buck selling it to the highest bidder. Let’s get some protections going.
Dan Moren: Will Apple’s new Passwords app in their newest platforms change how you store, fill and manage, and use passwords?
Unfortunately, I don’t think so. In fact, I’ve been testing iCloud Passwords for most of the last year and, I have to say, it doesn’t work as smoothly as 1Password has for me in the past. In addition to filling passwords into log in fields across apps and the web, it turns out I look up a bunch of data that I’ve stored in 1Password, and doing that in iCloud Passwords has been a pain. Having a separate app is a major improvement (you can use it split-view now!), but it doesn’t yet cover all the use cases I have.
If I were starting from scratch without any habits formed around storing credentials, I think the Passwords app would be sufficient — and I’ll certainly recommend it to most folks — but I think I’m headed back to 1Password until Passwords gets a little more full-featured.
mb bischoff: How comfortable are you telling an LLM your most intimate thoughts, and will that change with Apple Intelligence when more on-device models are used?
See above for the data privacy laws that I’d like to see enacted, I’m not very comfortable putting any sort of personal or intimate stuff into an LLM chatbot text field. I do use them, but usually for coding help, assistance with rewording specific sentences, or Q&A. I’ve not yet uploaded my own documents or data (besides the occasional photo to get help with alt text, but I’m sharing those photos to the web anyway).
But if I want to use Apple Intelligence, that will necessarily change because it basically is only used for personal context situations. For it to be of any use, I’ll need to be okay with it churning through all the data on my device.
It all comes down to trust. Very few, if any, of the companies with LLM products have earned my trust when it comes to user privacy. But Apple has, and I know that they’ve gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure that they can’t end up with all that intimate knowledge about me on their servers. On-device (and Private Cloud Compute) help me rest easy in that regard.
Bonus Topic: Do you enjoy rollercoasters?
When I was young, I hated them. Then a switch flipped and I loved them. Now, though, I’m not as keen about them again. There are a number of theme park rides that I’d like to try, mostly because I’m interested in their “story” while riding, but I no longer seek out the biggest, fastest, loopiest rides anymore.
Overtime Topic: How many email accounts do you actively maintain?
Thankfully, just two*. My work one, which is though Microsoft 365, and my personal iCloud address. That had an asterisk because I do have a number of Custom Email Domains set up with iCloud, and they work great. I also created a family alias address that sends emails to both my wife and I that we use for shared streaming services or anything else that we should both get updates for. Luckily, my email app of choice, Spark, plays nicely with both those custom domains and aliases. I occasionally have to jump into Apple Mail when something doesn’t render right, but most of the time it’s just Spark and those “two” accounts that hold my email life together.