Another entry into the Encyclopedia of ‘what could possibly go wrong’.
Captures everything you’ve seen on your Mac and iPhone and makes it searchable with AI. Your colleagues will wonder how you do it all.
I will wonder why you did it at all?
To be fair, I haven’t read their ToCs. In fact I don’t even know if there are any. I just wonder how many people will do as they ask without thinking things through.
@JohnPhilpin I’ve actually been trying this out on my Mac. They do say all recordings stay on the Mac and all the magic happens on-device. Hence it works only on Apple silicon. I was thinking about trying the iOS version but have to still read up on how it works.
BTW they’ve a private Slack channel if you install it. They’re quite responsive on there and other users share tips.
@rom I have wanted my own ai to look at my written world and extract themes and ideas for the future ,, not sure if this is it … but
@JohnPhilpin @rom That’s exactly it. I’m discovering plenty of use cases. It also does a summary of your virtual meetings if you give it access to mic and sound. It doesn’t show up in your meeting as an AI bot so may (or not?) want to let the other people know.
@pratik just installed on Mac - it seems to be about what you do now - and are going forward with - not about analyzing what you already have?
@JohnPhilpin Nope. You’re right. It won’t scan your local drive (perhaps a good thing?) but track your activity going forward including things you write in MS Word or Drafts. You can exclude apps (1Password, etc.) from tracking.
@pratik yup - all that is good - i was expecting it to be able to point at a folder in dropbox (e.g. where my blot lives) and do something interesting. If only going forward - not going to be a great deal of help I think. #Thinking
@JohnPhilpin Well now @pratik ... I just joined the Rewind Slack channel - and ..... Jacob Gorban is part of the team - do I have that right @jacob ?
@JohnPhilpin That’s a good suggestion for the Slack channel. They may be planning on it or may be completely outside how they perceive their product
@JohnPhilpin After a couple days of use, Ask Rewind - tell me how I spent the last 24 hours in 30/60 min increments. Be prepared to have your mind blown.
@pratik is it just me … but if I was malicious and installed rewind on to someone else’s computer and then came back after a week to … or even wrote a script to send me … 🤯
@JohnPhilpin Yes, you can but then if you have access to installing any system-level software on someone’s machine, that person has already lost the privacy battle.
@pratik I was more in the insidious world of spouses who on the face of it trust each other ... But in fact don’t.
@JohnPhilpin What is the artificially intelligent algorithm doing? How is this more than just an exercise in image labeling screenshots?
@jacob important information .. just nice to see a friendly face for a change when logging into a slack
@JohnPhilpin hehe. Yea, must be surprising coming to a smallish private Slack and finding a familiar face. I like the app. It’s not perfect but they iterate rather quickly. Still missing some usability stuff to make it more useful but it’s certainly an interesting product that can be helpful at times.
@JohnPhilpin Boarding a plane now. I’ll try to send you some of my results although can be private info. Yes, they’re creating summaries from screenshots. Effectively, Rewind acts somewhat like Apple’s Time Machine.
@pratik thanks for sharing - and this morning I accidentally discovered what was wrong - and you were right ... 🤯
@pratik not at all .. I use bartender to hide most of those little icons top right on the screen. When installing rewind … it never told me it was putting one up there .. and I never saw it because bartender hid it … was in bartender for another reason this morning … and discovered the thing I was missing.
@JohnPhilpin Haha! I wish Bartender told you what it is hiding. I'm glad things are working for you now. I'm trying to get other Rewind users to share the prompts they use. Sometimes I don't know what to ask for until I'm sure it can do that or sometimes I don't even think of things its capable of.
Rewind is clever - no doubt - but not sure I have a personal use case to spend money on it. Meanwhile - I have never before had this alert from CleanMyMac.
Time to call it quits and move on?
// @pratik
@JohnPhilpin I just paid for a month and wanna give it a try. But yeah, it doesn’t seem like a fit for your use. BTW I hope you have a Apple Silicon Mac
@JohnPhilpin I got the same message on my laptop so I guess it's not worth it on a mobile device. Still testing the iOS one but it may not be as much of a battery hog coz it only monitors Safari.
@JohnPhilpin Unless it processes the images to lift out the text and then processes the text with some chatty AI (in which case I'm not sure how one would go about looking at bank accounts, etc. while some random program is snapping and processing screenshots on their server), I don't see what more it could do than label images (which is a pretty easy trick, that is actually what I had my neural network doing to detect chord patterns in music, the thumbnails are a gallery of the notebook I was using).
@Moondeer it does do more than that … once I found the correct prompt screen … you can also set it up to ignore specific apps and sites that you set.
It’s also all in your Mac.
@pratik time to uninstall Rewind.
massive battery drain
summaries like ...
You had a Zoom meeting, as indicated by the screen capture showing the Zoom interface. The meeting ended at some point, but the specific details of the meeting, such as the participants and the topics discussed, are not available.
... leave me a tad underwhelmed
it doesn’t do what I really want
i don’t really have a use case for it
@JohnPhilpin Not that this is exactly the same thing but Timing is pretty good, apart from the subscribe only-ness of it, for keeping track of what you're up to. No AI afaict, just keeps receipts of all your activity, which you can then aggregate and report against as need demands.
@bkryer thankyou. what I am really looking for is to be able to point an AI at an URL or set of folders on a hard drive and ask it to make sense of it ... summarize if you will - and then go from there.
@JohnPhilpin I think the last few interations of osx feature a summarize action, which may be scriptable, but text only afaik. I have a softspot for DevonThink for desktop analysis. It does alot of all of the above in one place and alot more besides. The alot more besides may be just distraction for you, but there is a free version to try...
@bkryer thanks - I have tried devonthink a couple of times in the past and for whatever reason - it just doesn’t click.
