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Francisco Tolmasky (@tolmasky@mastodon.social)
@tolmasky
Haven’t had the chance to comment on this yet, but I think this (like full self driving) represents an unfortunate technology trend where we ignore totally feasible “boring” solutions to problems in order to instead pursue wild and/or ahead-of-their-time risky solutions.🧵
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Dan Siroker
@dsiroker
Today we are launching Rewind: the search engine for your life rewind.ai It’s a macOS app that enables you to find anything you’ve seen, said, or heard. We’re also announcing that we’ve raised $10m at a $75m valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz. (1/23)
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Francisco Tolmasky (@tolmasky@mastodon.social)
@tolmasky
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@tolmasky
Let me begin by saying that I am exactly the target market for this. This problem plagues me every single day, I am always thinking about it, I constantly complain that I shouldn’t have to organize *anything* on a computer, and we’ve failed as a field by requiring people to do so
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Francisco Tolmasky (@tolmasky@mastodon.social)
@tolmasky
The current problem isn’t *just* that things are hard to find, it’s that tech goes *out of its way* to make things *hard* to find. E.g, Chrome unconditionally deletes history old than 90 days, with no setting to change that, Why? It’s a list of text URLs!
superuser.com
Is there a way to view Google Chrome browsing history past three months ago?
I'm trying to find a page I looked at months ago but it looks like it's disappeared off the face of the planet. I thought I would have better luck looking through my Google Chrome browsing history,...
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Francisco Tolmasky (@tolmasky@mastodon.social)
@tolmasky
Similarly, Messages on iOS is notoriously worse to search than AOL Instant Messenger! Back then my entire message history autosaved & organized by date on my HD. 20 years ago(!) I considered it a solved problem to find a link someone messaged me. Today I consider it impossible.
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Francisco Tolmasky (@tolmasky@mastodon.social)
@tolmasky
I have many more examples below of this absurd user-hostile behavior that has somehow become the norm, but suffice it to say, I think a lot of this “it’s hard to find things” problem is self-inflicted & not some “essentially hard” problem that requires boiling the oceans to solve
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Francisco Tolmasky (@tolmasky@mastodon.social)
@tolmasky
The biggest UX paradigm shift in the last 20 years was to reinterpret all human-computer interactions as disposable. Once upon a time, sending a link was a huge signal that it’s important. Today, it’s the same as throwing it in the garbage. Everything is ephemeral, nothing lasts. twitter.com/tolmasky/statu…
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Francisco Tolmasky (@tolmasky@mastodon.social)
@tolmasky
Again, it reminds of FSD. I get the distinct impression when I’m in a Tesla that no one there cares much about quality of life improvements for the (human) driver because they seem to have a (repeatedly proven false) belief that FSD is right around the corner, so why bother?
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Francisco Tolmasky (@tolmasky@mastodon.social)
@tolmasky
Whether it’s lacking increasingly standard features like “Birds Eye View,” or dropping ultrasonic sensors, the answer is always the same: “Oh, AI is getting so good that we won’t even need that soon.” OK… Maybe? But I’m driving the car TODAY! And it’s not good enough TODAY!
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Francisco Tolmasky (@tolmasky@mastodon.social)
@tolmasky
Rewind feels the same. Betting on AI & cheap storage & handwavy privacy promises, just to find a text message from 3 days ago. Sure, this is the “full” solution to the search problem, but are my only 2 options really “record my whole life” or “delete history older than 90 days”?
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Francisco Tolmasky (@tolmasky@mastodon.social)
@tolmasky
For the record, a counter-argument to what I’ve said here is that things like VMs fall in same category. In theory we shouldn’t need “over-engineered” solutions like computers inside computers to keep things safe, we should “just” stop accidentally introducing vulnerabilities.
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Francisco Tolmasky (@tolmasky@mastodon.social)
@tolmasky
But of course that’s an impossible (distributed?) ask. So you could perhaps point to VMs as a case study in why “over the top” full solutions, even if ahead of their time, are worth pursuing. But there’s a few key differences that IMO make approaches like Rewind distinct from VMs
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Francisco Tolmasky (@tolmasky@mastodon.social)
@tolmasky
First off, security deals with *active* adversarial actors. The problem isn’t just that humans are bad programmers, it’s that there are also people trying to exploit that. So the need for a “full” solution is urgent and immediate. This both justifies it *and* pushes it to improve
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Francisco Tolmasky (@tolmasky@mastodon.social)
@tolmasky
Secondly, security is “subtractive”. Adding a vulnerable library/program *decreases* overall security. Thus the need for something above it all. I’d argue that data management is “additive”. If *some* programs were made easier to search, your overall experience becomes better.
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Francisco Tolmasky (@tolmasky@mastodon.social)
@tolmasky
And most importantly, VMs actually delivered! We’ve been pretending FSD is a finished feature (and thus using it as an excuse to not go other features) for YEARS. This ties into another unfortunate technology trend: the forever transition/beta.
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Francisco Tolmasky (@tolmasky@mastodon.social)
@tolmasky
We used to make fun of web companies for excusing unfinished software by calling it “beta”, but mac & iOS have developed a worryingly similar habit of excuses that I call the “forever transition”: every deficiency is waved away as a “temporary” setback in a larger master plan.
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Francisco Tolmasky (@tolmasky@mastodon.social)
@tolmasky
Rewind feels like it’s on track for the forever beta. It’d be one thing if it “embraced” its experimental status (e.g. was open source), but it wants it both ways: major unanswered questions (technical & conceptual: privacy/security/pricing), yet asks you to hand your life to it
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