618: A Polyamorous Situationship

It's time for episode 618 of the Clockwise Podcast from Relay, recorded Wednesday, August 13th, 2025. Clockwise, four people, four tech topics, 30 minutes. Welcome back to Clockwise, the tech podcast where we race against the clock, but always finish in a tie. I am one of your hosts. My name is Micah Sargent, and I am joined across the internet by my good pal, my dear friend.

The guy who writes books and you read them, it's Dan the Man Morin. How you doing, Dan? I'm doing okay. I felt that that introductory line was very, it had a depth to it. Honestly, it felt I had to really think, well, we always end in a tie. What does that say? about us and about life nowhere you know what we don't have time to deal with that let's keep going yes ponder while i get going by introducing our awesome guests

To my left, editor-in-chief at NoJitter, it's the wonderful Lisa Schmeiser. Hello, Lisa. Hello. Thank you so much for having me back on. And to my left, it is screensaver developer, professional book reviewer. And Glasgow tour guide. It's the one and only James Thompson. Hello, James. Welcome. Hello. I was going to do a gag here about suing clockwise to feature me more prominently. But instead, I'd just like to say that Lisa's newsletter is always a fun read and you should.

Oh, you guys are so sweet. Thank you. It's a mutual admiration society of clockwise. Please do wait until after the episode to read the newsletter because it is difficult to read and listen to people talking at the same time. Now, you all know. how this works for topics, just 30 minutes. And mine for you is this.

I would just love to hear about your display setup. Are you a multi-display person? Do you prefer to use one? And then how do you kind of handle windowing an organization, particularly if you're a single display person? Lisa, let's start with you. I suspect I may be the only single display person here. I suspect you all can disabuse me of that in a moment. I currently have my laptop. I keep it on a beautiful little stand.

by a company called rain um it's the rain design eye level two it's got a little slider so you can change the angle and find the most flattering camera desktop angle and the way i handle windowing is by getting aggressively minimalist. Everything gets reduced until it's time to work on it. This way, like right now, I just have my browser windows open, because I'm talking to you all my emails minimize my text editors minimize everything else is minimized. And

When I'm done, I'll close my browser window. I'll look at the beautiful photo of the Pacific Tide courtesy of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. And then I'll open whatever app I'm working on next. Well, Lisa, good news. I'm here to disabuse you. I am a single display person. I have an Apple Studio display. It's on a VESA mount ARM. And because of my, I have somewhat small, limited desk space. And I've got a couple of mic booms here for podcast stuff.

Too much of that, like, I think it just gets too crowded. Sometimes, on occasion, I will have my iPad here and be doing a separate thing on my iPad while I'm working on the main computer. I never got into the multi-display lifestyle, and so...

So in order to handle windowing, I predominantly use a lot of spaces. And so I use that for like specific tasks when I want to focus on things. I go through every once in a while and make sure I don't have like, oh, I left that window open from three days ago. I don't really need that. James, what about...

But you, you have surely 17,000 displays. Well, you've been in this office. I have been, that's true. Well, I'm in something of a polyamorous situationship with my various displays. Most of the time...

I just have the one main 27-inch Apple Studio display, which is sitting directly on top of my Mac Studio. That's typically... enough for all my day-to-day kind of development needs um but i do also have a second 24 inch screen which is mounted on an arm and at this point it is exclusively switched on and moved into position only when I am playing D&D for TPK and I'm in charge of the streaming.

I need that whole extra display just to show all the various apps and my character sheets and things like that while everything else runs on the main screen. I could, in theory, use it while I was doing real work, but I think I just don't like having to turn my head. And I'm happy to use basic window management to keep everything going in the one place. I do also have multiple screens in the sense of the multiple devices of a laptop, which is...

usually showing on my email and social media, and I don't have that on my big computer. But I do try and leave that in the other room when I'm actually trying to get things done. In theory, I could also sit there with my Vision Pro on and have that super wide display thing, but I don't want to wear the glass facehugger for long periods of time.

How am I organized, you ask? Well, bold of you to assume that I am in any way organized. Everything runs in the same space, windows overlapping, chaos threatening to erupt at any moment. There's a lot of... stabbing of command H and option clicking on the desktop to hide apps. Window management style I established decades ago and refused to change. Typically, I'm only really using a handful of apps at the same time, usually Xcode and whatever it is I'm developing, so I don't need that much.

I am a multi-display person. I have three displays right now, two that are the same size, and then one that's a smaller one, it's the Elgato prompter. However, when I was regularly going into an office, I would take my MacBook Air with me, and I was very much a spaces guy. So, yeah, I...

Am not aggressively minimal when it comes to this. If it's not in front of my face, much like a toddler, it doesn't exist. So thank you all for your answers on that. Let's go to our next topic, which comes from Lisa.

Right. So AOL is planning to end its dial-up internet service in September, a move that only affects the North American audience because the rest of the world has moved on. It's a relic of the early days of the World Wide Web. love to hear from all of you what is another long time component of the early web that you feel should be sunsetted like what would you like to see just go away uh first let's pour one out by making a sad modem noise beep beep Uh, anyway, um...

This is a good question. The first thing that came to mind to me was the HTTP protocol, the unsecured. That's such a good idea, Dan. We've moved towards it. HTTPS is much more prevalent than it used to be. Getting security... certificates is far easier and free if you go over the folks that lets encrypt a thing that used to be very expensive and very difficult to do

And it kind of feels to me like there's really very little excuse in this day and age to not have support for HTTPS at least on your web server. So we should continue. Shun! Shun the unencrypted HTTP connection. That's what I say. James, what about you? I think the obvious choice is comments.

That was my second one. I don't think people should be able to respond to anything you post on the internet anymore. And we'll just have to keep all those terrible thoughts and feelings inside of themselves. Have we as a society gained anything at all by allowing Meowgeddon420XXX to tell us what they think of our squirrel photos? I would argue no.

Does reading the comments underneath the contentious news story help us feel better about the state of society? Again, no. Just ban comments entirely, completely across the board. Make your own posts all you like. Write your squirrel hate manifesto. i can't stop you but just leave the rest of us out of it um i know it seemed like a good idea at the time to let folk chat with one another across the world and build communities of like-minded people but on reflection

Turns out that was a terrible plan and we really shouldn't have done that. They warned us with the Tower of Babel. Yeah. While we're at it, let's stop people sharing photos and videos entirely and audio. Okay. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Unformatted uppercase text from now on. And this is why I'm going in the reverse of that, which is to say, I would get rid of email.

Goodbye email. I love it. Here are multiple. I need it. Here are some reasons why. One, ugh. But two. That's right. Two, more importantly. One of the main ways that people get all of their stuff hacked is because their email gets hacked. No email? No worries, because that wouldn't be a problem. Also, did I mention, ugh, it's just, I get so much email and so little of it actually matters. Lisa? Why don't you round us out here? So I really love your plan for Zero Inbox. Yeah!

Zero inboxes. Period. I actually, I kind of want to try to see if like overall global productivity rises. I would completely get rid of bots, like just lose the ability to have any sort of bot anywhere on the internet. Oh, is it a bot that corrects your spelling? Gone. Is it a bot that auto posts comments under stories? Gone. Is it a bot that crawls web traffic and jukes the stats on a story so that it pops up on Google more effectively? Gone. Does it automate a website process? Gone.

I want an internet that is made up of nothing but streaming content. like this wonderful podcast. Of course, yeah. Reaction GIFs and old Usenet posts that you have to know how to... That's it. All right. We have reached halftime here on Clockwise. We've reached something. Sorry, I was reading... my email. And I want to remind you all about our awesome swag at clockwise.social. When you head to clockwise.social, you will see awesome swag like hat and shirt.

and a phone case and sticker and other items that are super cool and you should own them. And we think you'll love them. And when you. purchase those items, you are helping to support the work we do here on the show. So please head to clockwise.social, check it out, consider making a purchase there. And we thank you. All right, we are back from halftime. And that means it's time for

dan's topic hello it's time for my topic ios 26 ipad os 26 mac os 26 stands out for some new shortcuts functionality including automation on the mac and integration with some of those Apple intelligence features, including direct access to the language models. I'm curious to know if any of these features appeal to you. Do you do much automation on your devices or is this uncharted territory for you? James, lead us off. Well, I mean, the short answer is no and no, but that makes for...

Very cool podcast. Moving on. Historically, I mean, I've used AppleScript and I've used Keyboard Maestro by Peter Lewis to do like basic alternation and stuff. I haven't really got into using shortcuts on any platform, if I'm honest. I think I'm suffering from automation on Wii. Shortcuts feels like a very brittle way of automating things compared to just writing code or scripts or whatever.

really don't enjoy the editor when you're building out much more complicated tasks um now this is certainly a skill issue on my part if i put time into learning it i could get better but i just don't want to The new automation stuff seems cool and people have been asking for it for ages, but I don't think I'm any more likely to use it than I did.

As for Apple Intelligence, I do kind of dislike the way we all just seem to get over the fact that generative AI models still hallucinate like mad and are not in any way intelligent and shouldn't be used to make key decisions and also were.

generally built on top of stolen works. The local models that Apple provides are pretty basic, and I don't want to pass my personal data over to OpenAI, so not going to be using them either. So I'm glad to have finally found the line where I can be grumpy about new technology. I've been wanting to have a simple little thing where I highlight a time that I'm typing and then do a thing that said what do you want to convert it to and then it would do that right in the moment.

So this morning I was working on that shortcut and I got it all put together and I was in a text edit document and I was able to get it to work. However, in messages, for some reason, it won't work, which is the place where I want it to work. I just go back to my wonderful world of text expander and keyboard maestro. Yeah, I do find myself doing a lot of automation, but not with shortcuts. Hardly ever do I use shortcuts. Lisa, what about you? I'm a fan of automation in theory.

Because I think it can be great if you have a lot of highly structured, consistent, repetitive tasks as part of your job. Or if you know that you're going to be home at 515 every day, boom, garage door opens, whatever. In practice, anytime I've tried automating something, I feel like I spend more time debugging it or... fixing it when something invariably breaks with an update than getting any significant friction-free time savings from it. Again, one monitor, no automation. Why am I here?

You're here because we value your input. Look, I won't say that I don't have similar feelings to many of you about this. Maybe I'm just a slightly damaged person who always has hope that things can get better. I use shortcuts a lot. Is it something robust and trustworthy? No. Is it got at least a good editor experience? No, it doesn't have that. But it is, I mean... Is it fun and cool? Sometimes.

Sometimes. I think that there are some interesting things. I have definitely found it helpful to do some stuff and create some workflows and some very simple automations at times to handle things. And when it works, it's really nice. A lot of times it doesn't work. You spend a lot of time trying to figure out why.

it doesn't work and you know anybody who does any sort of programming i'm sure runs into that very same scenario um But there's, as it stands, there is little other way to, you know, effectively automate things on your Mac without turning to like a whole ton of tools. I certainly like the idea of having a centralized built-in automation system. Obviously, Apple's tried this multiple times before. We had AppleScript. We had Automator. Now we have shortcuts.

I remain optimistic that maybe shortcuts will find its footing eventually. I think that the Apple Intelligence stuff they added... Specifically, the use model action is really interesting. I've used it in a workflow to do something that just frankly was not possible before to parse, you know, text and have it come up with, hey, I need you to recognize these types of data.

in this text document. There's no way to do that because, you know, you might have a document that, like, for me, it was receipts. I was parsing receipts for, like, the expenses. And those could look like anything. And there's no way to effectively do a pattern matching thing for me to like, okay, it might look like this or it might look like this.

But being able to hand it to a model and be like, hey, can you find a currency, like an amount that got paid, a date, and figure out who I paid this to? And it's been surprisingly good at that. It's not perfect by any means, but it was surprisingly good. So...

I'm intrigued with this and interested in seeing how it continues to develop. But I do think the whole point of computers is to make things easier for us. And that is a place where it feels like automation should excel, even if it doesn't right now.

But thank you all for your thoughts. Let's go to our final topic, which comes from James. So YouTube are being criticized for plans to roll out age verification in the US based on an AI looking at what videos you've watched in the past. What do you think of this latest trend of age verification? And what's the best and worst way you can think of to do it? This isn't necessarily all bad. And the reason why is because...

There are multiple options to do age verification right now, right? And one of the main ways we've seen it done in the US in particular, and actually as we've started to see age verification roll out across the rest of the world. is random third-party companies saying, hey, look, we can do this for you. We can handle this for you. We are in many ways with this older model handing over all of this information to these third parties.

whose sole job is to collect this stuff. And you have to hope that they're going to get rid of it afterward. The alternative here, what Google is specifically doing in this YouTube case, and I think the important aspect of this is... They've made it very clear that they are doing no more than they have already done in terms of data collection.

Is that better than giving a random third-party scan of my ID? And then when that doesn't work, credit card. And then when that doesn't work, I have to upload a video of me saying, my name is Micah Sargent and I am this old and this is my date of birth. That's up to you to decide. I personally think that some of this automated stuff could be

better in terms of privacy, even though it could result in edge cases where someone has to truly prove their age in a different way. Before I begin, we have to acknowledge two basic truths about internet activity. and data collection in the US. And the first is that US citizens pretty much have no legal protection in terms of data collection, data privacy, what gets done with that data.

Companies get to own your data, put together profiles on you, make all sorts of life affecting decisions. And you don't have a right to pull your data. You don't have a right to that much anonymity. You don't have a right to contestant. You don't even have a right to. to know what companies are collecting. And then the second basic premise is that most companies in the US, it is easier for them to

clean up after a data breach than it is for them to spend the money to secure and protect your data in the first place. So when you realize that... Any data any company in the U.S. asks an Internet user for is probably going to be sold and or stolen. That sort of colors the whole age verification thing, especially when they're like, oh, just upload your passport or, oh, just upload, you know, make a credit card payment. What I think would be promising, because I'm not.

opposed to age verification. What I am opposed to is creating a huge digital trail that lets people, some of whom are good actors and some who are bad actors, I'm really opposed to the idea of everybody, of any sort of state agency or private company knowing everything you do online. Let's look to the French. I'm serious. I'm dead serious.

There's a researcher, let me see if I can remember the name, Olivier Blasey, who has been working with the French government and the proposed solution that they've been testing and working over there. for age verification is an intermediary service that kind of acts as a as a firewall and this way if you are online and you want to hit a website that requires age verification the intermediary

already has information and it's anonymized a little bit so that it's not tied to your activity. You can still surf the web. You can look for things that are sensitive and nobody is creating a record. I'd like that idea. I think if you were to have an intermediary that effectively creates a digital ID for you, yeah, there's there's room for exploitation and there always will be. But there's also room to create.

trust or there's room to say yeah we are a service that that that that that's an age verification that gives you a presumption of privacy or and um you could even sell it to families with look this is the thing we'll we'll we'll you know the same way you've got a password manager people pay for you can have an age verification manager that people pay for and then adjust the settings accordingly or use a bunch of presets but the the way a lot of the way

I've seen age verification work in some states in the U.S. because now there's age verification laws for different websites. I get so many heebie-jeebies and we're effectively setting up a bunch of highly conditional ways to access the internet and what to access depending on what state laws are in a wildly unregulated data environment. It's just a big mess. Yeah, I mean, I'd probably co-sign everything Lisa just said, which is very thorough and, you know.

I'm just going to be over here making snarky jokes about the fact that I let my kid watch YouTube videos on my account. So how old am I, YouTube? And so that's a challenge, though, because obviously that's going to totally screw up my algorithm. It already has. I just get nothing but suggestions for videos. that are of trains because that's what he likes to watch. So...

You know, that's already a problem in terms of analyzing these patterns. I think it is very difficult to figure out who is a trusted partner when it comes to things like age verification. I've been intrigued, you know, just to sort of take a secondary tack here. Apple has tried to roll out this sort of digital driver's licenses when working with the states for some time. And what I...

Although, you know, certainly people push back for all the reasons that we just discussed. But what I always found compelling about their intended system was that it was designed to minimize the sharing of the amount of data. which is to say if you walked into a liquor store and they would ID you using a little scanner, you would tap your phone, and all it would tell them is, here's a picture of this person. Are they over 21? That's it.

You don't need to know anything else. You don't need to know their name. You don't need to know their address. You don't need to know their date of birth even, right? All you need to know is whether or not they're over 21. And that sort of data minimization is, I think, the standard to which two you want to shoot for. But it is a fair question as to say who gets to verify that information in the first place? How do they do it? And, you know, is this something that is provided by government?

you know, third-party corporations, third-party corporations in conjunction with the government. All those things are questions, are big questions. And, you know, you need to have some sort of framework for these kinds of things in other places in life, right? You need to be able to prove your age if you're renting a car or buying alcohol or...

cigarettes or voting you know anything that has a restriction on how old you can be to do a thing needs to be able to solve this problem and it's such a patchwork right now you've got everything from like extremely onerous requirements of having to upload your id to places which you should not do in most cases, to here's a dropdown box. Just tell us what your birthday was. We trust you. You know, that's everything. That covers the entire spectrum of possible age verification.

Yeah, I don't know. It's a difficult problem to solve. I think it's one that certainly needs work. I'm not sure YouTube's answer is the right one, but it may be a case of a system that's better than... you know, all the others. I don't know. I don't think that's true even in this case, but like, I think we're going to end up with a least worst system, not a good system. That's my feeling on it. James, why don't you wrap us up here?

Yeah, I mean, as you may know, we have the wonderful and not at all Orwellian new Online Safety Act in the UK, which recently came into force. This has led to many sites rolling out these wide variety of age verification mechanisms over here. And many other sites just simply leaving the UK altogether. You know, I can no longer send DMs on Blue Sky. I can't discuss not-safe-for-work topics on a private Discord. And I certainly can't see any people kissing. But...

You know, it sounds like Wikipedia might even have to do age verification or leave the UK as well. So I can't access this stuff. Unless I want to send copies of my face or passport to random companies around the world, or I could subscribe to the kind of service which I think it's now illegal for me to talk about in the context of bypassing age checks. So I will not.

But meanwhile, the kids have already figured out how to defeat most of these, and it's just driving a lot of stuff underground. You know, I would tell you some of the amusing ways that people have been bypassing age checks, but again... I don't want to get people in trouble. And by anybody, I specifically mean me. The problem is that any law that starts from the basis of protecting kids usually escalates quickly to the point of protecting kids, in quotes, from things like discussions about...

being queer or whatever, and ultimately ends up protecting adults from the terrible dangers of democracy. And, you know, we notionally have a left of center government over here. I hate to see what happens when all these mechanisms get handed over to somebody else.

I mean, as for the best way to do it, yeah, I mean, the talk of the platform holders doing it. I mean, Apple knows how old I am. You know, there could be some protocol, which I don't know how it would work, that would tell these services that I am. older than 18, but doesn't need to tell them anything more. I mean, my mac.com email address and my Apple ID is 25 years old. You know, that should be enough.

The platform holders could maybe do this, and I wouldn't have a problem with it, assuming it was an anonymous thing. And I would only have to maybe even just tell one company, potentially, give them all my ID.

As for the worst way to do it, could we update the Touch ID sensor to just take a little bit of DNA each time you use it? Can you carbon date people? All right. With that, we are just about to the end of this episode of Clockwise. that i've got a bonus topic for you boom you are cursed with what you personally believe to be the worst superpower

What is your worst superpower? Lisa, we'll start with you. The worst one would be the ability to psychically communicate with animals. Aquaman would like a word.

They're all just screaming. Yeah. No, it's either territory or food or making more animals. I was going to go with the ability to time travel backwards, but only like two or three seconds. Oh, that's awful. It's so bad because... you can't do anything it's just frustrating and you're like oh i can i can travel back in time you're like how far i don't know like two or three seconds like okay

Yeah, I think mine, it would clearly be telepathy and knowing exactly what everyone around you thinks about you. I think this should say nothing about my current mental health. For me, I decided it was, Dan, this would probably be one of your best superpowers, but for me, my worst, which is that... I could just summon bread because I can't eat it. That is the best superpower. Bread man. Folks listening, if you would like to get ad-free episodes with an extra unwound episode every week,

week where we don't talk about summoning bread for some reason, you can become a member of clockwise. Just go to relay.fm slash clockwise to sign up $7 a month, $70 a year, and you will help support the show. All right. With that, we've reached the end of this episode of clockwise. All this left is to thank our awesome guests, Lisa Schmeiser. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Now, can you get me a croissant?

And James Thompson, thank you so much for being here and infecting us all with your boundless optimism. Well, you know, thank you. And I will take the 15% of the profits of this podcast. Let me just quickly check. 15% is zero. Carry the one. Ah, well, we'll be back next week. Thanks, everybody out there for listening. And until then, remember, watch what you say. and keep watching the clock. Bye, everybody.