Will I keep using Rewind.ai?
32
129
แน€710
resolved Jun 16
Resolved
YES

Rewind.ai purports to remember and store locally literally everything that ever appears on your computer's screen. I just got into the beta today and installed it and it looks great. I have high hopes for it, since I often go searching email/chat/GitHub/etc for things I've written, or search the web for things I've read and it often drives me crazy when I can't find something.

In fact, hours before getting in on the Rewind.ai beta I was beating my head against the wall looking for a blurb I knew I'd written somewhere. It turns out I wrote it in a GitHub issue and Google doesn't index those (even in public repos apparently).

This resolves YES if I'm still using Rewind on a daily or weekly basis -- enough to justify the $20/mo cost -- on June 16, 2023.

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predicted YES

I'm still using it! I'm still sometimes disturbed by how much CPU it eats and have been emailing them about that. There's still long-term uncertainty due to that but it hasn't quite risen to the level of dealbreaker so far. Since that was explicitly the resolution criterion -- would I still be using it in 6 months? -- I'm now resolving this to YES!

predicted YES

Update: There are still occasionally minor frustrations with Rewind (like sometimes using too much CPU) but they keep improving the product and I'm not realistically going to give up on it in the next 8 days so I think it's kinda free money on YES at this point. Also the company is raising a Series A so is probably sticking around for a while. More than 8 more days in any case.

bought แน€236 of YES

Update: It continues to come in handy maybe once a week, enough to be worth it to me. Every once in a while it can save considerable heartache. So just the peace of mind is valuable even when I'm not using it often.

bought แน€40 of NO

Two negative updates: (1) The GPT integration has yet to actually be useful and it can lie like a rug, so I'm not sure I'll trust it in the foreseeable future. (2) It's back to using a stupid amount of CPU -- more than one full core and having a bigger energy/battery impact than all other apps put together. Probably a bug that they'll fix, but I'm not sure if I'll tolerate it. Also at some point it will probably fill up my available disk space and I'll have to decide how much history to maintain. If that's a full year, say, then probably that's still worth it.

@dreev typo: not sure if I'll tolerate it if it stays this battery-hungry, I mean.

bought แน€100 of YES

@dreev Ok, phew, it was a temporary bug and now it's back to more like half of one CPU, or less when nothing's changing on the screen.

predicted YES

They have GPT integration now!

bought แน€100 of YES

Update: they continue to improve the product, CPU usage is down, it continues to be useful.

predicted YES

Uh oh, I'm trying to open Rewind right now and it's hanging.

predicted YES

Update: they quickly fixed the bug and no data was lost. So I'd say no decrease in the probability.

predicted YES

It worked like a charm today, finding an old Scott Aaronson blog post about Aumann's Agreement Theorem. I think the prediction is being borne out that it gets more useful the longer you've been using it. I would say this currently underpriced at 89%.

@dreev Wouldn't you have found the same using Google though? You wer actively looking for that, right? In which way was the rewind experience better?

predicted YES

@howtodowtle Good question. I don't remember now but I'm guessing the problem was I only remembered some phrase from the post that wasn't googleable. Or I was being an idiot. Oh, or maybe I knew I recently read something about Aumann's Agreement Theorem but didn't know where. So Rewind was my best option.

PS: You'd think that Rewind itself would resolve a question like this! Just rewind to the point where I did the Rewind search. Alas, it didn't work! I could watch myself write the above comment but no Rewind search to be found. I'm not sure if Rewind filters itself out of the timeline so things aren't too meta or if it has to do with my multiple monitors that it got missed. I emailed support about it so we'll see what they say. It was kinda frustrating and I'll probably trade this market down a few dozen basis points!

bought แน€30 of YES

Update: They're very responsive in support. Turns out they intentionally exclude Rewind from Rewind as they thought it cluttered search results. They intend to add a feature to just see a list of all the things you've searched for.

predicted YES

PPS: I remember now why I needed Rewind for this. All I remembered at the time is that I had been talking about norms for epistemic communities and had quoted an excerpt about that from somewhere and that it involved mathematicians furiously arguing at a chalkboard and switching sides partway through. The somewhere turned out to be Scott Aaronson's post on Aumann's Agreement Theorem but I hadn't remembered that. "Mathemeticians arguing at a blackboard and switching sides" is not in fact googleable. But it was Rewindable!

Here's the excerpt if anyone's curious (and since it's beautifully relevant to the Manifold community as well, I think):

Finally, yes, we can try to judge epistemic communities by how closely they approach the Aumannian ideal. In math and science, in my experience, itโ€™s common to see two people furiously arguing with each other at a blackboard. Come back five minutes later, and theyโ€™re arguing even more furiously, but now their positions have switched. As weโ€™ve seen, thatโ€™s precisely what the math says a rational conversation should look like. In social and political discussions, though, usually the very best youโ€™ll see is that two people start out diametrically opposed, but eventually one of them says โ€œfine, Iโ€™ll grant you this,โ€ and the other says โ€œfine, Iโ€™ll grant you that.โ€ We might say, thatโ€™s certainly better than the common alternative, of the two people walking away even more polarized than before! Yet the math tells us that even the first caseโ€”even the two people gradually getting closer in their viewsโ€”is nothing at all like a rational exchange, which would involve the two participants repeatedly leapfrogging each other, completely changing their opinion about the question under discussion (and then changing back, and back again) every time they learned something new. The first case, you might say, is more like hagglingโ€”more like โ€œIโ€™ll grant you that X is true if you grant me that Y is trueโ€โ€”than like our ideal friendly mathematicians arguing at the blackboard, whose acceptance of new truths is never slow or grudging, never conditional on the other person first agreeing with them about something else.

predicted YES

I complained to Rewind's support about how much CPU it eats. They're working on it. Also when on battery it defers its fancy indexing and compression so maybe it's already not a big negative? (And taking a quarter or so of a CPU on a 10-core laptop is just a few percent of total CPU I guess?)

On the other hand, it seems to be less frequent than I predicted that I actually need it. But when I do need it it's a real lifesaver. So I'm still pretty bullish here overall.

PS: I'm pretty enamored with this product recommendation use case for Manifold Markets!

bought แน€500 of YES

Another update: it just now came in super handy chatting with someone on Slack about hiring contractors and I vaguely remembered another recent conversation I'd had with someone about arbitration clauses so I searched "arbitration" on Rewind. Turns out the conversation was with the same person I was talking to, but on Discord!

bought แน€400 of YES

(Also it's funny how trading bots are keen to immediately disagree with me as I bid this up. I have nearly 100% of the relevant information here, people! I mean bots!)

predicted YES

Update: It's come in very handy a couple times so far. Most of the time when I think of searching it I figure the thing I'm looking for is from before I started using Rewind. But that problem will gradually go away if I stick with it!

bought แน€30 of NO

Oh - in case anyone reading this doesn't have a clipboard manager, I would highly recommend getting one. It saves all the text, images, html etc that you've ctrl+c'd, making a variety of data transfer tasks easier, and also means you're never worried about accidentally

  • Mac: I use Maccy https://maccy.app/, it's really good

  • Windows: Built in if you press windows + v

If anyone's on the fence, I would offer 5:1 odds (on up to my M5000 to your M1000) that after using clipboard managers for a month, you'll have been happy to set it up.

predicted NO

@Austin purchases and set it up, thanks for the rec!

predicted NO

@ian purchased*

predicted YES

@Austin Ah, that looks really nice. I use a similar one called Pastebot that has a pretty cool feature: you can copy a bunch of things in a row and then paste them back in order.

predicted YES

After creating this market I remembered that I once made a very janky thing slightly like this, but it would only save screenshots once per minute and only keep them for a rolling 24-hour window: http://doc.dreev.es/screencap

I guess the fact that I went to that much trouble for such a tiny fraction of what Rewind.ai is doing is some evidence that I'll stick it out!

bought แน€100 of YES

Also it now occurs to me that maybe I shouldn't be betting in this market since I'm creating additional incentive to stick it out, but I guess other people can just factor that in. (In reality losing my few dollars of investment here is not going to be a perceptible factor compared to the money and cpu and storage costs of using Rewind.)