Linked List: March 27, 2023

Monday, 27 March 2023

Cabel Sasser:

We all know that Apple has nice built-in password management in macOS and iOS. But very, very few people know that Apple’s passwords can also:

Autofill any 2FA verification codes, which you easily can add by scanning QR codes!

Keep a “Notes” field where you can add extra data, like 2FA backup codes, for each password!

Import passwords exported from another app, like 1Password!

(And it all syncs across your devices, for free?!)

Very few people know these things because Apple tucks all of their important password features away in weird little Settings panels, instead of in a Proper Real App. I think this is a mistake.

Passwords are productivity, not preferences.

I understand the tension within Apple on this front. iOS already has so many apps that many people complain about how many apps are in the system, so Apple is very conservative about adding new apps. But password management is really important, and Apple’s password/security team has done an outstanding job over the years building a reliable trustworthy system. Effectively, there already is an Apple Passwords “app”, but it’s buried inside Settings. There are a lot of nerds who don’t even know that Apple’s built-in password manager can handle 2FA verification codes, because people have a totally reasonable assumption that Settings, as sprawling as it is, only contains ... settings. Not features.

So count me in with Sasser: Apple should break these features out into a discrete Passwords app, and they should launch a marketing campaign to raise awareness of it. I’ve been using the built-in password management in iOS and MacOS (and iCloud for syncing) for years, and last summer I switched all of my 2FA verification codes to it too. It’s a great system, especially if you use Safari as your web browser. But the biggest reason it isn’t used more is that zillions of people don’t even know it’s there.

If Tips is worth a standalone app, surely Passwords is too.

(As a postscript, it’s also possible that you know this feature exists within Settings, but don’t know that it offers full import and export options, because those commands are tucked away in a “···” menu. You can import from, say, 1Password, and export everything back to 1Password.)

Apple TV+ ‘Friday Night Baseball’, Season 2 ★

Apple Newsroom:

This season, “Friday Night Baseball” welcomes an exceptional group of broadcast talent to the announcer booths, including Wayne Randazzo (play-by-play), Dontrelle Willis (analyst), Heidi Watney (sideline reporter), Alex Faust (play-by-play), Ryan Spilborghs (analyst), and Tricia Whitaker (sideline reporter). Game assignments for announcers will be shared on a weekly basis.

That’s a completely different lineup of broadcasters from last year. But the biggest change from last year is that the games aren’t going to be made available free-of-charge — you’ll need an active TV+ subscription to watch. That’s not surprising, but it’s worth noting.

“Friday Night Baseball” will be produced by MLB Network’s Emmy Award-winning production team in partnership with Apple, bringing viewers an unparalleled viewing experience. Each game will feature state-of-the-art cameras to present vivid live-action shots, and offer immersive sound in 5.1 with Spatial Audio enabled. “Friday Night Baseball” will again utilize drone cameras for beautiful aerial stadium shots, as well as player mics and field-level mics to immerse fans in the gameplay and stadium atmosphere. Fans in the U.S. and Canada will also have the option to listen to the audio of the home and away teams’ local radio broadcasts during “Friday Night Baseball” games.

On that last point, here’s Jason Snell:

One of the biggest complaints people had last year about Friday Night Baseball — and let’s be honest, it’s a complaint about any sport with a strong local announcer base that’s then broadcast to a single national audience using a neutral set of announcers — is that people couldn’t hear the voices they knew and loved while watching the game. Apple has addressed this issue by letting users switch over to audio from home or away radio broadcasts. (This is also a feature of Apple’s MLS streaming package, though right now I believe it’s home radio only.)

Years ago I tried getting this experience manually: when the Yankees were playing on national TV, I’d turn the sound off on my TV and listen the Yankees’ radio announcers (John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman) via the MLB app on my phone. It was so tricky to get the timing just right that I gave up on it. Having it as a perfectly-synced option for Friday Night Baseball is a breakthrough feature.

Bonus factoid, via Jayson Stark at The Athletic (paywalled, but here’s an archive link just in case you need it):

The only other change this season involves games televised by MLB Network and Apple TV+. For those games, viewers will get a live look at MLB’s replay center. And if a replay decision in those games warrants more explanation, a former umpire, such as Brian Gorman or Dale Scott, will explain the verdict — while doing their best and most eloquent imitations of former NFL and college basketball official Gene Steratore.

A few years ago, at the invitation of the MLB Advanced Media team, I got to see the replay center in New York. I wasn’t allowed to go in the room, but could see inside through large windows. It’d be fun to see it during games, and it’s a great idea to have former umpires available to explain these verdicts. That’s worked out well for the NFL.

Tad Friend’s 2016 Profile of Sam Altman for The New Yorker ★

I remember reading and enjoying this profile of Sam Altman that was published in The New Yorker in October 2016, but I stumbled across it again over the weekend, and read it with new eyes. When published, Altman was running Y Combinator, and the profile largely focuses on that. But OpenAI — then new and mysterious — was mentioned quite a bit, and those are the bits that struck me now:

A.I. technology hardly seems almighty yet. After Microsoft launched a chatbot, called Tay, bullying Twitter users quickly taught it to tweet such remarks as “gas the kikes race war now”; the recently released “Daddy’s Car,” the first pop song created by software, sounds like the Beatles, if the Beatles were cyborgs. But, Musk told me, “just because you don’t see killer robots marching down the street doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be concerned.” Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana serve millions as aides-de-camp, and simultaneous-translation and self-driving technologies are now taken for granted. Y Combinator has even begun using an A.I. bot, Hal9000, to help it sift admission applications: the bot’s neural net trains itself by assessing previous applications and those companies’ outcomes. “What’s it looking for?” I asked Altman. “I have no idea,” he replied. “That’s the unsettling thing about neural networks — you have no idea what they’re doing, and they can’t tell you.”

OpenAI’s immediate goals, announced in June, include a household robot able to set and clear a table. One longer-term goal is to build a general A.I. system that can pass the Turing test — can convince people, by the way it reasons and reacts, that it is human. Yet Altman believes that a true general A.I. should do more than deceive; it should create, discovering a property of quantum physics or devising a new art form simply to gratify its own itch to know and to make. While many A.I. researchers were correcting errors by telling their systems, “That’s a dog, not a cat,” OpenAI was focussed on having its system teach itself how things work. “Like a baby does?” I asked Altman. “The thing people forget about human babies is that they take years to learn anything interesting,” he said. “If A.I. researchers were developing an algorithm and stumbled across the one for a human baby, they’d get bored watching it, decide it wasn’t working, and shut it down.”

To my mind, OpenAI’s GPT chat passes the Turing test. Artificial general intelligence is nascent, to be sure, but it’s no longer in the future. It’s the present.

Apple Watch as a Post-Steve-Jobs Product ★

Two weeks ago I wrote a column in response to a Financial Times story about Apple’s forthcoming AR headset, and one objection I raised was the FT’s claim that “The headset will be Apple’s first new computing platform to have been developed entirely under his leadership. The iPhone, iPad and even Watch were all originally conceived under Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs, who died in 2011.”

I called it a retcon to give Jobs credit for it. Here’s a piece that backs it up, a behind-the-scenes profile by Brad Stone and Adam Satariano for Bloomberg Businessweek back in September 2014, published just after Apple unveiled the Apple Watch at the keynote event for the iPhone 6:

With an Apple Watch wrapped around his hand brass-knuckle style, Ive reveals that the project was conceived in his lab three years ago, shortly after Jobs’s death and before “wearables” became a buzzword in Silicon Valley. “It’s probably one of the most difficult projects I have ever worked on,” he says. There are numerous reasons for this — the complexity of the engineering, the need for new physical interactions between the watch and the human body — but the one most pertinent to Ive is that the Apple Watch is the first Apple product that looks more like the past than the future. The company invited a series of watch historians to Cupertino to speak, including French author Dominique Fléchon, an expert in antique timepieces. Fléchon says only that the “discussion included the philosophy of instruments for measuring time” and notes that the Apple Watch may not be as timeless as some classic Swiss watches: “The evolution of the technologies will render very quickly the Apple Watch obsolete,” he says.