April 2026: Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a hot topic for several years, and this year AI has had widespread effects: AI expansion projects have created a shortage of computer storage (hard drives, flash drives), memory chips, and procssor processor chips. Bulk buys of power to run AI data centers have triggered a sharp rise in energy bills. Adoption of AI technologies has prompted many tech companies to begin mass layoffs of employees that managers believe can be replaced by AI agents. And some futurists have told dark tales of a future AI apocalypse.

We also talked about why the MacBook Neo might be a good upgrade for someone with an older Mac, how Tim Cook’s forthcoming retirement is in no way a demotion, and why watching Apple’s June World Wide Developer Conference keynote address is not only fun but informative.

A few items of interest:

• In the Question and Answer session, someone asked what the red dot at the top of their iPhone screen means. A red dot on an iPhone indicates a new, unheard voicemail, or that an app is using the microphone. A red dot on an Apple Watch indicates a new notification has come in (a new text message, an app wants attention, etc.)
• One person asked why Find My does not work on their iPhone or iPad. If Find My is not working, it is because Find My is not allowed to use the device’s location; this can be corrected in Settings > Privacy and Security > Location Services.
• At one point, mention was made of a book, Sons of the Profits, or There’s No Business Like Grow Business: The Seattle Story, 1851-1901. This is a 1967 book by William “Bill” Speidel about Seattle’s colorful and unconventional early years. It is a fun read.
• Two graphics showing how AI adoption may affect jobs in the next few years:

Short overview of AI

The following relatively short video (8 minutes, 15 seconds) reviews how we arrived at this point and suggests why you might want to take a skeptical view of both the claims of the wonders of AI and the claims of an AI-created doom.

Click on the YouTube logo if you want to expand the recording.

Video of the April 2026 meeting: Artificial Intelligence

The meeting video includes a showing of the shorter video shown above. Click on the YouTube logo if you want to expand the recording.

Transcript of meeting: Artificial Intelligence

This transcript was generated automatically by Zoom, and Zoom is sometimes (often?) creative. Use your browser’s find function to search for particular words or phrases.

18:32:47 Getting on to questions. Do we have any questions?
18:32:50 And what would these questions be concentric around? AI?
18:33:05 Um…
18:32:56 I’m going to get into that 7, so no, this is more like, um, I can’t find my mouse pointer on my iPad, and, you know, just, uh… Just questions, because if you don’t have questions, there are things that I was going to talk about, but…
18:33:14 I’d settled for questions right now.
18:33:20 Yes.
18:33:18 I have a question for you. I looked in my garage, I found a monitor in my garage, and the connection on the monitor is… it’s an old… it’s connected to my old computer. It’s a bunch of pins, like a 12-pin connection.
18:33:33 Yes.
18:33:34 And it’s… it was almost brand new. Is there any way that I could hook that up to either a modern-day computer with attachments or adapters or anything, and maybe even to my phone?
18:33:47 Um, the answer is, depending upon what it is, if it’s a VGA monitor, the answer is no.
18:33:55 VGA in terms of the resolution, and that’s because no modern device knows how to talk on a screen that small. If it’s a flat panel display, it’s probably at least, um.
18:34:10 a 1280 pixel across monitor, and there might be a way to get it to work. Um, but the fact is, you’d need a whole bunch of different adapters. You’d need a… you’d need something that was like a USB-C to VGA. I’ve never seen an adapter like that, so it might be a USB to something else to VGA, and you might spend like.
18:34:28 Okay.
18:34:33 $100 on adapters, um, as an alternative, you can get these small screens at Costco now. They’re made by Acer, and they’re, like, $89 or something, and they just plug right into a phone or into.
18:34:56 Oh, yeah.
18:34:48 an iPad or something using a USB-C, and it’s a much better monitor than that monitor in your garage. So, my feeling would be, even if it’s almost brand new, it’s so old that it’s not really brand new.
18:35:05 That’s for sure. Okay, I just wanted it sitting there, and I guess I’ll head out to the dump with that one. It’s not going to fit anything.
18:35:12 Can’t do that.
18:35:16 Well, I’ll take it over to Goodwill.
18:35:12 Um… The, um… Um, yes, you can take it to Goodwill. Goodwill may not have any use for it, but they will accept it.
18:35:24 And, um, almost anything you turn into goodwill, they actually ship off to Tacoma, and Tacoma has a really good electronics recycling facility. We don’t really have one on the peninsula.
18:35:39 You have to remember that their neighborhoods in Tacoma that have more people than all of Clallam County, so we just don’t rate.
18:35:49 I have a question.
18:35:51 Okay, I have an old computer, an old Apple.
18:35:51 Okay, thank you.
18:35:52 Yes.
18:35:55 And I’ve updated to this map.
18:35:58 And I wanted to get rid of it. How do I delete everything off of it before I recycle it? Like, I think Squim just had a, um…
18:36:06 Turn in your old electronic stuff.
18:36:09 um… gathering.
18:36:20 Right. But I want to delete everything off it.
18:36:12 Yeah, the, um… in SWIM, there’s at least a couple churches that, like, once or twice a year, have an electronics recycling event. Um… Yes, um, do you know how old the machine… do you know what model machine it is?
18:36:28 I’d have to get it for you, um…
18:36:31 I’ll go get it, okay?
18:36:34 It’s a laptop. I mean, it’s like a…
18:36:33 No, no, well, is it portable?
18:36:37 It’s like a iPad, a big iPad.
18:36:43 like a Mac.
18:36:42 Um, if it’s… If it’s old enough, if it’s new enough, you should be able to go on to Apple’s site, just type into Google, um, deleting… data prior to resale of, and then, say, MacBook Pro or iPad, or whatever it is.
18:37:03 Okay, okay.
18:37:07 Okay.
18:37:22 Okay.
18:37:05 And Apple has explicit instructions on what you do, step-by-step instructions. If you can’t do that because you can’t get into it or some other things, you can write to me and I’ll see about Plan B. But I really kind of need to know what model it is, but see if there are online instructions.
18:37:26 When they give you the instructions, they’re in alphabet… they’re not in alphabetical, they’re in numerical order. And you want to go through in person, because if you skip some steps, you might leave data.
18:37:37 Yeah.
18:37:37 You might leave data by accidentally removing your access to remove the data. And if you do that, that’s not good.
18:37:47 Okay, thank you.
18:37:51 Other questions?
18:37:55 Oh, Lawrence, have you heard about Tim Cook being fired?
18:38:01 No, he wasn’t fired. Tim Cook designated a replacement. Tim Cook is going to become the executive chairman of the board of Apple, and the Vice President in charge of.
18:38:19 Hard work, hard work.
18:38:29 Oh.
18:38:17 No, the Vice President in charge of hardware is going to be the new chairman, and he’s going to become a member of the board. So, Tim Cook isn’t really going anywhere, but the day-to-day decisions will be made by somebody else. He was not in the least bit fired. When Tim Cook.
18:38:35 took over. Apple was worth about $300 billion, and now they’re worth $4 trillion, so they’re not about to fire him.
18:38:42 Wow. you know.
18:38:45 Are they taxing on my health.
18:38:48 I nominate Michael to be president.
18:38:55 Go ahead, Michael. Say yes.
18:38:57 I wish.
18:39:01 He means president of smug, not of the country.
18:39:04 Right. President’s salary.
18:39:07 you’ll have the same salary I have.
18:39:11 We both have zero.
18:39:20 I have a question, another one.
18:39:18 Um…
18:39:22 So how is it… I don’t understand this.
18:39:23 Uh-huh.
18:39:27 like, I’ll have a conversation with someone,
18:39:31 And my phone’s in the room, but not on. I’m not using it.
18:39:34 And then, about an hour later, that whole subject that I was talking about comes up.
18:39:40 on my phone or my laptop.
18:39:44 It’s like somebody’s spying on me all the time.
18:39:50 But it’s not really that case at all. It’s basically just coincidence. You have to remember that the average person during the course of a day.
18:40:03 will be exposed to something like 3,000 commercials. And you see that the commercials are in things that you read, they’re in things on TV, they’re things over the air, and so on and so forth. And so, with 3,000 commercials, if you happen to be into.
18:40:20 you know, teddy bears, and you’ve looked out for teddy bears or something, and you’re talking to somebody about teddy bears, and then you go to your phone, and it’s got an advertisement for teddy bears, that’s really not because the phone was listening to you, it’s because commercials.
18:40:35 are pervasive and commercials are personalized. So, if that’s something that you’re interested in, you were talking about it to somebody, then it’ll probably… you’ve expressed that interest someplace else, and it’s going to show up in your phone or your computer.
18:40:51 Or even your TV. This one woman in town who, by the way, has… has covered all the electronics in our house with aluminum foil. Um, that’s as far as I’m going to go with that.
18:41:05 She says that the TV is listening to her because it has these things on TV about things that she’s done research on.
18:41:15 Okay. So… Um, but no, your phone’s not listening to you unless you turn it on, tell it to listen to you.
18:41:23 How about Alexa? I mean, I… people… I don’t have that in my house, but…
18:41:28 Alexa does listen to you constantly. And.
18:41:31 Like, I have to protect people if they’re gonna have a personal conversation with their spouse or their family.
18:41:38 They completely turn it all off.
18:41:41 So, listen.
18:41:42 Um, well, even then, because they’re powered by the… there’s no on-off switch, the only way to turn it off is to unplug it. But Alexa does listen to you constantly. It does wait for you to use the word.
18:42:02 That’s…
18:41:57 Alexa, to actually respond, but it is listening constantly. Um, Siri… Um, on my HomePod listens constantly, but the only thing it’s listening for is the words, oh, shut up.
18:42:14 The only thing it’s doing is it’s waiting for that word, and then it actually pays attention to what you’re saying. And most of the stuff that Siri does is local to the device, like my watch, which just said that it wanted me to say what it was I wanted, or your phone or something like that.
18:42:32 All of that transaction takes place on the phone up until the point where you’re doing something that you, um, can’t be answered on the phone. For example, um, the, uh…
18:42:49 Uh, the, um… I wanted to know when… some bridge opened. And so I was talking to somebody, and it wasn’t until I asked my HomePod, hey, when was this bridge open? At that point, that’s something that the HomePod could not answer, so it sent out a message to.
18:43:11 Apple, and it says, hey, when was this bridge open? Came up with an answer, and I had a date. But… All of that takes place on the HomePod, and the only thing that goes out to Apple is the request for information on when the bridge opened. It doesn’t get the rest of the conversation, Apple doesn’t know anything about it. Alexa doesn’t work that way. Alexa has zero intelligence on the device.
18:43:36 It all goes to, um… Amazon. So it’s a very different kind of security, which is something I will talk about later on as well.
18:43:47 Um, because it is…
18:43:48 Irma just says Alexa a little bit ago and my television just turned on behind me.
18:43:55 See, I think it… it’s hard for me to believe that.
18:43:56 You turned on my TV. I’ll tell you kind of funny story. We bought my wife a little speaker, a little Alexa speaker, and we set it up for her, and it was playing music one day, and it was pretty loud, so I went over to it and he says, Alexa, you know, play softer. And it didn’t do that.
18:44:23 Oh.
18:44:12 It just kept playing loud. I said it 3 times, Alexa, play it softer. And she stopped and she said, I don’t know who you are, but you’re on Sandy’s account. She wouldn’t respond to me. So I had to set it up with my voice signature for to make it work.
18:44:29 It’s funny, but I… they’re listening, that’s for sure. My television’s on, I’ll have to turn it off. Well, it’ll come back on if we say, Alexa, yeah.
18:44:33 Yeah.
18:44:43 spooky.
18:44:38 Yeah, the it does get kind of intriguing. I was. I was in someone’s Tesla, and they had.
18:44:49 What was the name of that movie? Fifth Element?
18:44:52 There’s a scene in the movie Fifth Element, which is a fantastic movie, if you haven’t ever seen it. There’s a scene in The Fifth Element where this professor is talking to an assistant, and the assistant is named Aziz, and he says, Aziz, light!
18:45:08 And, um, it gets lighter. And so he had… this guy had he had named the voice in his Tesla as Aziz.
18:45:21 And, um, it was hilarious listening to him converse with his car in his driveway. Um, I wasn’t willing to actually get in the car with him, because I happen to know he’s a terrible driver, but, um… Um, it was interesting to listen to him talk to his car.
18:45:42 his spouse, by the way, said that he talks to his car because that’s the only one who listens to him.
18:45:49 I have a question, and it’s about when you send out the invitation, you say,
18:45:54 Make sure you write… make sure that your Zoom is up to date.
18:46:00 And how do you do that?
18:46:10 Okay.
18:46:00 Yes. If you’re using… if you’re using a iPad or iPhone, Zoom automatically updates, if you have it set to do updates. If you’re using the Mac, you have to go up to the Zoom workplace menu, and there’s a menu choice there that says check for updates, and.
18:46:22 It’ll go out and see if there’s an update.
18:46:25 But on the iPhone and the iPad, assuming that you have automatic updates turned on, it’ll update itself.
18:46:33 Thank you.
18:46:38 Yes.
18:46:37 I have a question, Lawrence. On my iPhone, which I have an iPhone 15 Pro Max. There’s this red dot in the dynamic island, and.
18:46:50 I looked it up on Google, and they said it’s like your screen is being recorded, or your audio is being recorded, so I disabled all the apps from my microphone and camera, and the red dot was still there.
18:47:06 The, um…
18:47:06 And sometimes it goes away by itself, and other times it… comes back up.
18:47:14 Yeah, the, um… There’s been a lot of, um… misunderstanding about that. The it’s if you look at your phone when you’re actually talking on it, if you’re doing something like a video, you’ll notice that it’s not red, it’s green. And green is when it’s paying attention. Red means that it’s.
18:47:35 kind of acting in standby. But it is a good idea to go through your apps and turn them off for everything that’s not appropriate. As an example, there are lots of… I’m going to pick on games, because games are notorious for this. Games like to collect a whole bunch of… Games make more money from collecting information about you than they do from the purchase of the game. And so what they’ll do is, like, I had this game that wanted to know my location. Nope, not giving you that. Turn that off. The game wants to send you updates. Nope, I don’t care about that. No, it’s not updates as an updating the game, it’s updates in terms of.
18:48:11 You are now on the leaderboard and things like that. Nope, I don’t want to talk to my game. So go through and get rid of the things that are going to be listening to you or track your location, or track other things about you.
18:48:27 Sometimes trying to figure out how to do that is difficult.
18:48:31 But…
18:48:31 Well, I have Google Maps and Apple Maps tracking my location. But other than that, that’s the only thing I have looking at my location.
18:48:42 Would that cause the red dot to come up?
18:48:42 Uh, you… No, because they… they’re not recording your speech or your, uh, or your… or your video. So that shouldn’t cause the red dot… I don’t know.
18:48:55 That’s a good question. I don’t actually know the answer. I can’t give you a clear answer on that. But as an example, one other thing that you want to track your location is the compass on your phone. If it’s… if the compass is tracking your location, you can also use the compass.
18:49:10 to calculate altitude. When you bring it up, and it’ll say, hey, north is that way, it’ll also tell you down below you’re at 59 feet above sea level. But if it can’t track the location, it can’t tell you that.
18:49:22 Yeah, I I have that on also the compass.
18:49:25 For location. But would that cause the red dot? And then the other times I’m sitting in the couch and it just disappears completely.
18:49:44 But is it a security issue?
18:49:29 I don’t think so. And the, um, there’s been a lot of misinformation about that, and the answer is I haven’t paid that much attention. I go through… I make sure that… Well, it’s not, it could be a security issue in terms of privacy, but the reason why I go through and turn off things that I don’t want is that it greatly reduces the battery consumption. When I go to bed at night, I put my phone up to charge, because.
18:50:03 Why should I use the phone at night? And it’s rarely even at the halfway mark. And the way to cut down on your battery usage during the day is just make sure that everything that you don’t need turned on is turned off. And so, um… Do you need it to send you messages? If you don’t need it to send you messages, turn that off. If you don’t need it to track your location, turn that off. If you don’t need it to record your voice, turn that off. If you don’t need it to use the camera, turn that off. And if you do… if you are good about turning that stuff off.
18:50:35 It greatly increases the battery life of your iPod or iPad.
18:50:41 I have a question. When you’re using your iPhone a lot, you open up a lot of windows. There’s a ton of them open. And then I guess you can erase them all. Is it a good thing to do that, or does it make any difference? Are you sapping it when you’ve got a bunch of open windows for all kinds of things you’ve been into?
18:50:58 The answer is, if it’s not… if it’s… you can’t see it on the screen, it’s not really doing anything. So it doesn’t really help you. On older phones, when the iPhone first came out, yes, it would use up battery life if it’s stuck in the background.
18:51:15 But as it is now, what it’s doing is just a placeholder to launch that thing more rapidly. So, you can go and close them if you want to, but it’s not going to make any difference.
18:51:25 Okay, good.
18:51:27 So, if you have tons of apps on your, you know, like, I have friends who don’t…
18:51:31 have hardly any apps on their phone.
18:51:34 And you know, when you get a new phone?
18:51:36 They just load up all these apps, or, you know, and so how do you delete them?
18:51:41 Because I don’t want all these on here.
18:51:45 There are a number of different ways to delete them, and the easiest way is if you hold your finger down on it long enough, you see the app, you hold your finger down on it, it’ll start to move.
18:51:57 And there’ll be a minus sign, and if you press that minus sign, it kills it off.
18:52:02 No, I just did that, let’s see.
18:52:05 I guess you got to be careful there, because they all open up in minuses, and if you hit something else.
18:52:09 Yeah, you don’t want to delete everything, but that’s the easiest way. There are other ways to do it, though.
18:52:12 Yeah.
18:52:15 Okay, well, Steve, I’ll…
18:52:18 rely on you to help me with that, okay?
18:52:22 Thank you.
18:52:26 Uh…
18:52:27 And speaking of Steve, can you hear me? Hello?
18:52:34 us.
18:52:32 Yeah, so I can hear you.
18:52:34 Hey, this is Sherry Hamilton. Steve invited me. I haven’t been to this before, so I’m just listening and I’m going to keep on mute because I have two big dogs that bark at anything that is anywhere within.
18:52:51 hearing distance of them, so I will put this back on… on mute as soon as I’m done, but I just wanted you to know that I’m here.
18:52:58 Okay.
18:52:59 Thank you.
18:53:07 Yes.
18:53:02 Let’s see. I have a question. It’s kind of a simple question, I hope. I’m… We have one desktop computer and I use… I end up using my little iPad that has a keyboard for many functions, but I’m thinking about getting a notebook just so that I have.
18:53:26 more access to a computer. I don’t… especially… anyway, my question is, what is it that… there seem to be a lot of Apple notebooks, you know, the laptops available, different prices starting around $750 or so, and I’m just wondering… what they cannot do that only a computer can do. Is that a good question?
18:53:54 Uh, yeah, in fact, it’s something I wanted to bring up myself.
18:54:00 I’m not in the market for a new computer, because last time I checked, I have something like eight. Um… But, um, um, I was curious about the new Apple MacBook Neo.
18:54:15 mute. Right.
18:54:34 Oh.
18:54:16 Um, I went to… Costco to play with one, and I was quite impressed with what it did. The one that Costco was something like $599 and had a half terabyte drive, um… So it’s kind of in the mid-range of the NEO, and for $599, I was extremely impressed with how powerful it was.
18:54:43 The more expensive ones have different capabilities, like the MacBook Neo, as I recall, has two USB ports, so you can plug a mouse into it, and maybe something else, but not a heck of a lot of things. Now, the good news, bad news, is that’s not really a limitation.
18:55:01 You can go out and you can get these things called USB docs that you can plug into a Neo that allows you to attach a scanner and a printer and a bunch of other stuff. So that is not really a limitation. The half terabyte drive.
18:55:17 Could be a limitation if you shoot a lot of video, or you take a lot of photographs, and so on and so forth, because those things take up a lot of space. Now, the good news there is that if you have a dock, you can also take an external drive and plug it into it, and then you have more storage.
18:55:34 For the, um, for the MacBook. Where it really comes into play that you need a more machine… a larger machine is if you want a larger screen. The Neo has, I don’t remember exactly how many pixels it is, but it’s a fairly small screen, because it’s designed to be a.
18:55:51 a computer for students and easy to carry around on commuter train and things like that. So the screen’s not particularly large. If you want a larger screen, you’re going to need a more expensive MacBook.
18:56:06 If you want more storage, I think the biggest it has is a half terabyte drive. I don’t think it has larger than that, although I haven’t really checked.
18:56:17 If you need more than 8 gigabytes of RAM, you can’t add anything more. It comes with 8GB, and that’s it.
18:56:24 And you would need more memory if you do a lot of photography work, if you do a lot of video editing, if you… if you open up a browser with 40-some windows at once. If you’re using the things that suck up a lot of memory, you can’t really add more memory. So the more memory you’re using.
18:56:45 On the Neo, the slower it will get. But for 99% of the people out there, especially if they have an old Mac that can’t be updated, the Neo looks like a really good deal. If you do a lot of video, if you do.
18:57:03 audiovisual content, uh, if you do a lot of photography and you do editing of photography, you might need a more powerful MacBook. And the MacBook, some of the larger MacBooks also have more than just two.
18:57:19 ports so that it’s easier to plug stuff into them. As an example, um… I have a friend who’s got a MacBook that he has 3 displays. It’s got the built-in display plus 2 large monitors, and you can’t do that kind of trick with a MacBook Neo. But, again, for normal people, the MacBook Neo is quite nice.
18:57:38 Mm-hmm.
18:57:42 I have a Mac Mini, and they start at, like, $599, but it does not have a microphone, does not have a camera, does not have speakers, does not really have anything. You just get a box. You have to add your own keyboard, uh, camera, screen, all of that.
18:58:00 Why did I get the MacBook Mini? Because it’s incredibly powerful. It’s many times faster than a Neo, and I do video, so my MacBook Mini has 24 gigs of RAM, it’s got a 2TB drive, it’s got lots and lots and lots of ports.
18:58:19 I’ve hooked it up to two big displays, uh… It’s… it’s a very powerful machine, and it’s really quite small. So that was my choice, but it depends upon what you want to do. The… The Neo, I really took a liking to, but it’s not something that I would buy for myself.
18:58:45 Okay, thank you very much.
18:58:54 I just want to ask you a question. Why did you decide not to… are you not buying it because you just don’t need it, or…
18:59:17 No. Okay.
18:59:01 Oh, I don’t need it. And if I did need it, I’d need something more powerful. Um, I do a lot of video. I do… I have published just… just for… just for the smug, I’ve published something like 40 videos, and for my church, it’s something like 400 videos, so… That’s a… that’s a lot. Plus, I design websites and do all kinds of weird things that most people don’t do.
18:59:28 So, so just in your opinion, would there be any advantage? Generally speaking, I am not doing what you’re talking about that would be limiting… limited with the NEO. Um… I was doing some phone calling for an organization, and I ran… I was doing it on my iPad, and I was… I ran into a technology issue because I wasn’t able to, um, turn one speaker off and allow another one on, and I don’t really understand what that was all about, but I was able to.
19:00:14 If you can do it on the desktop, you can probably do it on the Neo.
19:00:04 accomplish what I was trying to do by using our desktop. And that was an issue that I just… I don’t really know if you could help me with that, if you would know…
19:00:19 I can’t thank you.
19:00:19 Okay, and would there be… I just wonder about getting maybe a more expensive MacBook.
19:00:28 is…
19:00:28 The thing about the difference between a low-level machine and a higher level machine, in addition to the ports and how much memory and so on and so forth it has, the higher-end machines.
19:00:44 Mm-hmm.
19:00:42 have more longevity. As an example, my spouse had one of the last Intel MacBooks, um, before Apple went to their Apple Silicon. But that laptop I still have today. Why? Because it has.
19:01:00 8 i9 processors in it, and the i9 is the most powerful Intel processor that you can get, and it has 8 of those, so it’s a real barn burner of a machine. It’s not as powerful as the most powerful Macs, but there’s still nothing wrong with it. And because it has an Intel processor, it allows… also allows me to run Windows on it.
19:01:24 Right.
19:01:22 which is not something that most Mac people would ever want to do, but it’s something that I do. So a more powerful machine usually means that you’ll have it longer.
19:01:35 Okay.
19:01:35 But the question is, you can go out and get two MacBook Neos for the price of one MacBook Air, so do you really need a more powerful machine? The difference between a Minneo and an Air isn’t that much.
19:01:51 Okay.
19:01:49 So it might be… it might be what you… what you need. What I would suggest is you go into Costco sometime when it’s not too busy, and just play with it for 15-20 minutes, and see if you… see if the keyboard and the screen size are comfortable for.
19:02:02 Mm-hmm.
19:02:06 for you, and there are some things that you probably won’t like. I can’t stand trackpads, but you can plug a mouse into a Neo.
19:02:15 Um, so just… just go and play with it and see what you think. It’s really hard to… It’s really hard to substitute.
19:02:19 Okay.
19:02:23 Somebody talking about a machine with actually sitting down and playing with it.
19:02:33 So, uh, Jolie…
19:02:27 That’s very good guidance. Thank you, Lawrence.
19:02:31 Yes.
19:02:34 This is Irma. I just wanted to comment on your question and Lawrence’s response.
19:02:35 Yes.
19:02:40 I went from a PC, a desktop, which I love, but I don’t like Microsoft for some reason.
19:02:48 Anyway, um, and I went to a MacBook Pro.
19:02:52 And it almost does too much for me. I don’t even… I mean, I have to take lessons on how to use it.
19:02:57 So my advice is go simple, and then go bigger.
19:03:02 That’s all I have to say.
19:03:10 Um, it’s now 7 o’clock, which means it’s now time for me to start the meeting. One of the things I’m going to do is figure out where my chat window is. I’m going to paste in the, um… URL for the, uh…
19:03:27 Uh… for the attendance form, because I would like to know.
19:03:35 attended. And so if you open up the chat window and it’s labeled down at the bottom of.
19:03:43 The screen is chat. The, uh… attendance form. I’ve now posted.
19:03:55 and… I am recording this, and I’ve got closed captioning turned on, and as long as Zoom.
19:04:03 cooperates and actually allows me to save the session, I’ll be able to post the video of the session on YouTube. A couple things I wanted to mention. One is somebody already asked if Tim Cook was fired. No, he’s not fired.
19:04:19 He chose his replacement, and he’s going to be moving to executive, uh… chairman of the… Apple Board of Directors. I wanted to mention the Apple MacBook Neo, and somebody asked about that. I was also going to mention the Worldwide Developer Conference. Apple has this every year. It, uh…
19:04:41 is going to be held in June, and if I can find… Uh… The link to it… I’ll tell you when it’s going to be coming up.
19:05:02 and things are slow.
19:05:08 It’s going to be June 8th through the 12th.
19:05:11 And on the first day of the, um… of the, um… conference they have, um… a, um… keynote address. It’s going to be about 10 o’clock, usually. 10 o’clock.
19:05:33 um… Pacific time, because Apple’s on the Pacific Coast, and in it they talk about their software developments and so on and so forth. The developer conferences for Apple hardware and software developers, and most of it is highly technical.
19:05:48 But the keynote is basically for everybody, and it’s open, and you can link and you can watch it on your Apple TV, you can stream it on your laptop or iPad. I wouldn’t watch it on the iPhone, because that would be brutal.
19:06:04 But, um, it’s free, and it’s always interesting to see what they have coming up.
19:06:14 I also wanted to show a cartoon, but I’ll show that in a second when I get around to the presentation. Most of what I’m going to talk about today is going to be about artificial intelligence in general, and the first thing I’m going to do is show a video that I created.
19:06:31 So, um… The video is about eight minutes, 15 seconds long. It’s not exactly short. You might have questions. I would recommend that you wait until the end and we can talk about it for the rest of the meeting.
19:06:47 But it’s kind of my view on artificial intelligence and where it’s coming from, and things that you need to… be aware of. But the first thing I want to do is to show you a cartoon.
19:07:01 And so I’m going to share my screen. Yes.
19:07:04 Hey Lawrence, it’s Sabrina. I don’t know if I missed it, because I logged on a little bit late, but did you already start the meeting?
19:07:13 Yes.
19:07:25 Yes.
19:07:13 I’m very sorry to come late to the meeting, but… I’m also at work, so I’ve turned off my camera again, and I really need somebody to replace me, because every single night I work, and I will not be… I won’t be around when the meeting starts, or…
19:07:33 very late to coming to the meeting, so I really do… would appreciate it if somebody could step up and take my place. It’s obviously not hard, but if you’re working nights, it is hard to.
19:07:47 log in. So, having said that, I know you mentioned it last meeting, I did watch it later on, and I don’t know if anybody has emailed you.
19:07:57 Specifically or yeah.
19:08:00 Yes, we we we talked about that during the Q&A session.
19:08:05 Oh, okay. Well, I can rewatch it then. Thank you.
19:08:09 Okay. I’m going to share my screen, and I’m trying to decide which screen I’m going to share. Maybe I’ll share that one for a change.
19:08:23 And… There’s probably nothing terribly interesting on that screen right now.
19:08:28 That’s pretty interesting.
19:08:32 Um… This is the cartoon that I was talking about.
19:08:37 That’s a good idea.
19:08:40 Uh, where is that cartoon?
19:08:47 I lost my cartoon. Oh, here it is.
19:08:55 Now, I cannot see my screen of what I’m sharing, so tell me if you see a cartoon.
19:09:00 Let me see one.
19:09:01 Okay. This is meant to be satirical, but it’s also quite accurate.
19:09:09 It’s not really big enough to oh there it’s get better. Okay, never mind.
19:09:09 Um, the…
19:09:15 The, um… the internet was created as a Department of Defense experiment during the late 1960s, and… The Department of Defense, it was done by the Advanced Research Projects Agency. They didn’t really have enough money to create the internet. So what they did is they farmed it out to a bunch of companies. The companies did various things. And for the first.
19:09:41 10 years or so, the internet was basically the Department of Defense, large companies, mostly telecommunications companies, because they already had networks, and universities and some research firms, and that was it.
19:09:57 Then, um… Under… Al Gore, when he was a senator from Tennessee.
19:10:08 Let me use…
19:10:07 I don’t remember what state he’s from. When he was a senator, he was pushing for the commercialization of the internet, and that’s when it really exploded in size. But even after it exploded in size.
19:10:20 The way the internet is designed is really not controlled by anyone, nor is there anyone who’s actually maintaining it. There are a whole bunch of people who write code, that code does something, people think that’s nice, they adopt it, and then it becomes part of the internet.
19:10:37 But there’s nobody overseeing it. And this is basically how it works. Down at the bottom, there are human beings, there’s the electrical grid, there are telephone companies, and then all the rest of it is basically built by volunteers and people who died 20 years ago, and nobody knows what their code does.
19:10:56 That is the internet. So if you went to know sometimes why the internet looks like chaos, it’s because it is.
19:11:06 Uh, it’s… That’s just the way it is. And I wanted to show this to you, because even though this is designed as a parody, it’s also true.
19:11:16 It is basically just a bunch of stuff out there that somebody thought was a good idea. And now I’m going to show the video that I created.
19:11:29 And… make this big enough. for you to see move that out of the way, which you probably can’t even see. But it bothers me.
19:11:41 Tell me if you can… the first few seconds are silent, but then it’s going to have sound.
19:11:46 And if you can’t hear it… Artificial intelligence in science fiction books and films is devoted to machines that can think, problem solve, and act independently of humans. These machines can be in the form of robots or giant computers, or a combination of the two.
19:12:02 Usually, for dramatic reasons, the artificial intelligences decide that humans are obsolete or a threat to the machines, or blight upon nature and try to exterminate them.
19:12:15 Artificial intelligence research has different origins. Over 50 years ago, NTT, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone started work on speech information processing, spoken Japanese is relatively simple with just 46 sounds.
19:12:32 But the Japanese language is most often written in kanji, a set of roughly 17,500 characters.
19:12:41 To graduate from high school, students are expected to know at least 2,100 kanji, as well as hiragana, a syllabic character set of 46 characters for Japanese words, katakana, a syllabic character set of 46 for non-Japanese.
19:12:59 words, and Roman ju, words written in the Roman alphabet.
19:13:04 Mdt wanted to solve 2 problems. One, have humans be able to write something in Japanese without using a typewriter with 17,500 keys? And two, have typed text translated into machine-generated speech?
19:13:20 These two processes are known as speech-to-text synthesis and text-to-speech synthesis.
19:13:35 Meanwhile, in the Us. Ray Kurzweil, while still in high school, created pattern recognition software to analyze classical music, and then synthesize new songs based on these patterns. After graduating from MIT, he founded Kurzweil Computer Products.
19:13:52 and develop pattern recognition software for recognizing printed text. Now called OCR, or Optical Character Recognition.
19:14:02 Kurzweil used these innovations to create machines that allowed the blind to read books by having the machines scan books and then speak at the text aloud, as well as having the blind type messages by speaking into machines that produced.
19:14:17 Printed text. Hey, Mac, an iPhone, an iPad, or an Apple HomePod is an inheritor of the research by NTT at Kurzweil.
19:14:28 You’re going to ask a HomePod to play Taylor Swift’s latest album, or ask your Mac to read aloud an email message.
19:14:36 or dictate a message and send a Memoji avatar to someone using your iPhone.
19:14:42 You can also create a video which animated figures can teach you about artificial intelligence using LiDAR mapping of your face to texture map a robot, a dragon, a panda, a koala, or a cute tiger over your face as you talk.
19:14:58 Is this artificial intelligence? It takes a staggering amount of computer power and is computationally much more demanding than a text message. But while it might be inspired by artificial intelligence, it is basically more of a sophisticated tool or toy than an example of machine thinking or problem solving.
19:15:21 Kurzweil, by the way, also came up with the Kurzweil curve, a chart that mapped the advancement of computer power to various benchmarks, such as the brain power of a mouse, a human, or all humans combined.
19:15:54 Your Matt can also speak using a wide range of voices with a wide range of accents and cultural attributes. For example, here is the word squim using just a fraction of the voices available on your Mac.
19:16:07 With a full list of possibilities displayed as well.
19:16:11 Circling, circling. Sacram. Second.
19:16:39 In this example, Moira, an Irish woman’s voice, reads the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence. Note that all these voices, Memoji and the video editing, was produced entirely on an iPhone or Mac.
19:16:53 Without assistance from any other source, with one exception.
19:16:58 When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them.
19:17:13 A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
19:17:21 Almost all of the current controversies about artificial intelligence concern derivatives of the text-to-speech and speech-to-text work done by NTT and Kurzweil.
19:17:32 Large language models, LLMs, are essentially massive compilations of how human language is constructed and used. The models are based on the texts of millions of books and countless billions of web pages sucked in and indexed over decades.
19:17:49 Most of the LLMs are based on data compiled before 2020 and know little or nothing about the present.
19:17:57 They also can’t tell facts from fiction, and H.G. Wells novel War of the Worlds is just as believable to an LLM as William Shire’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
19:18:12 Aside from not distinguishing between fact and fiction, LLMs also pose problems of privacy and security. When you send stuff to an online AI agent, that AI agent retains the information.
19:18:25 which it then uses to answer other people’s questions. You surrender privacy and security to the AI agent.
19:18:34 AI agents are also promoted for their ability to replace people.
19:18:38 While they can’t think and problem solve independently, their facility with language threatens customer service jobs, receptionists, secretaries, computer programmers, and other white collar jobs.
19:18:51 They may not perform these functions well, but they don’t need vacations or salaries or retirement.
19:18:59 Don’t tell an AI agent anything that is private. Don’t mistake a chatbot as a human being.
19:19:08 Be suspicious of online communications, which can include text messages, email, or web pages.
19:19:14 that solicit private or sensitive information or promote unlikely or irrational statements, situations, or forecasts.
19:19:24 Any person you see face to face is usually more trustworthy and worthy of your trust than an artificial intelligence agent.
19:19:33 The one item not produced in this video on a Mac or iPhone was the photo of a puffin using a typewriter with hundreds of keys. That photo was produced by Google Gemini.
19:19:45 It was asked to produce a typewriter with thousands of keys, but stopped at hundreds.
19:20:01 and. I lost my navigation. There it is. Okay, questions?
19:20:13 Yes.
19:20:12 I have one. You mentioned that the AI bot cannot tell fact from fiction.
19:20:20 If you were to ask it what the source of its information is, would it give it to you?
19:20:28 That depends upon the AI bot and having said that, you still can’t necessarily trust it. As an example, um, a, um… lawyer for the current administration, uh, submitted a brief to a court in which it cited a bunch of cases, all of which were made up.
19:20:51 Oh, wow.
19:20:52 When… when they were challenged on this, they asked the AI what was the source, and the source it was giving was made up as well.
19:21:00 Wow. Pretty amazing.
19:21:05 So… well, it’s happened… that was the one that was most famous, because it got blared across a bunch of papers, but it’s happened hundreds of times since then with lawyers citing spurious cases.
19:21:20 And to the point now that a lot of state bars have said that they will sanction lawyers who do things like that.
19:21:28 Isn’t that equivalent to perjury?
19:21:31 No, it’s not equivalent to perjury, it’s equivalent to judicial malpractice, and it’s a violation of their oath. You have to remember that lawyers have to be admitted to the bar, and to be admitted to the bar, that automatically makes you an officer of the court. You’re not paid by the state.
19:21:47 But you’re an officer of the court, and they have rules and regulations and codes of ethics and so on and so forth, and this is considered to be a violation of those. So there have been several lawyers where the sanctions against them were disbarment.
19:22:03 Hmm.
19:22:02 So that sanctions can be fairly heavy, but I’m using that as an example because people think of… of… courts of laws being fact-based. Somebody says something, you have to prove it, you have to give evidence. And, uh, if the evidence is made up, that’s rather difficult to prove. It’s easy to prove that it was made up, but it doesn’t help your case at all.
19:22:25 And as an example, the Secretary of Health and Human Services presented testimony to Congress with a whole bunch of citations for things that were backing up.
19:22:40 his point of view, those were made up as well. They were completely fictitious.
19:22:44 Now that, if it was at a hearing, would be perchery, right?
19:22:58 lying. I’ll just.
19:22:48 It wasn’t a hearing, but the, uh, they didn’t consider it perjury. They considered it to be… Um, I don’t remember what they said, but they didn’t… they didn’t…
19:23:03 his defense apparently was he thought it was real.
19:23:09 Hmm.
19:23:09 But again, I’m not trying to say that AI is evil or you can’t trust it or things like that. I am trying to say that what we currently consider AI, for the most part, is not.
19:23:25 artificial intelligence. It’s a tool that was created to manipulate language.
19:23:33 Hmm.
19:23:34 So if you have a conversation with Siri, Siri was developed by Apple specifically to act as it says, an intelligent assistant. So, if you want to know what time is it, you’ll get an answer. If you want to know what day it is.
19:23:48 Believe it or not, that’s one of the things I’ve asked in the morning, what day is it? Because I’m not working anymore, and one day looks a lot like the other day, so I’ll ask it what day it is, and I get back and answer.
19:24:01 That was designed by Apple for a very specific purpose.
19:24:07 what people are trying to do with AI now, though, has gone way beyond that. For example, Amazon and several other companies have tried to incorporate AI into their customer service. So if you go onto the web and you say, I want to return.
19:24:24 something, the AI bot will ask you, well, why do you want to return it? Do you want a refund? Do you want it in exchange? And so on and so forth. If you go on to the app, if you go onto Amazon’s site, nowhere, if you search through all of their menus, nowhere does it say.
19:24:40 anything about refund. You can return things, but if you want a refund, that’s not given. You have to actually go through this exchange with this bot in order to get a refund. And even then, it depends upon who.
19:24:56 who sold it to you, because a lot of the things sold on Amazon aren’t actually sold by Amazon, they’re sold by a third party. Amazon acts as a marketplace.
19:25:07 Um, and they want to replace the people who used to handle these questions with AI and get rid of those people, because then they don’t have to pay them anymore.
19:25:28 Right?
19:25:18 But it’s designed to be a tool, and what they want to put the tool… what use they want to make of the tool is the problem that a lot of people have. It’s one of the problems that I have with it. I used it to make an illustration. I wanted that puffin with a.
19:25:35 with a typewriter with thousands of keys, I didn’t get it, I only got hundreds, but still, it was a good illustration of why the Japanese don’t use Japanese typewriters, because it’s… it would be impossible. And I’m not an artist, so… Google drew that for me.
19:25:53 But it’s not really artificial intelligence, and it’s really not… problem solving. When I… When I have a problem, usually it’s a problem that I thought up or someone gave me, and then I had to think up an answer. What AI, the currently version of AI does, it goes out there and it looks for previous answers to that question.
19:26:17 And then it offers those, which is not really the kind of problem-solving that I used to get paid to do. Um… And in a lot of places, it doesn’t work. If you have a leaky faucet, AI can’t do anything about it.
19:26:36 there’s good things about AI, like, um, my son, um, travels all over the world hiking and
19:26:43 this and that. And he wanted to… he wanted to minimize his…
19:26:48 uh, packing and all that, so it taught him how to do that.
19:26:51 And then he works for Amazon, and he said… he’s made it through 4 layoffs, which is… he sometimes wishes he could get laid off, because they get 6 months of severance pay.
19:27:03 Plus their benefits for 6 months. But, and he’s sick of working there, but he said,
19:27:10 AI is not going to… he said he predicts that in the next 4 years, or 5 years,
19:27:16 They’ll be rehiring people because
19:27:18 The bots just can’t do what he does.
19:27:22 So, I have hope, but I, um, also am very suspicious about them, and I use AI for book club,
19:27:31 uh, you know, reading books and doing a presentation, or, um…
19:27:36 I look to how do I fix this broken pipe in my house, because I’m alone?
19:27:42 And how do I, um…
19:27:45 you know, you know, fix-it sort of things. They’re real good at that, but…
19:27:50 Otherwise, that’s it.
19:27:54 And I wouldn’t say that AI is helping you fix things. I would actually use the web more for that. The reason for that is that some things offered by AI don’t make any sense. As an example.
19:28:10 Electricity comes in different… there are different ways to measure electricity. You can measure in ohms, which is the voltage that everybody knows about, but you can measure it in amps, which is the pressure of the electricity, and you can also measure it in terms of volts, I meant to say volts.
19:28:28 amps and ohms. Ohms is the resistance. And I was looking at this one explanation of how to fix something, and it did not acknowledge the fact that there’s such a thing as resistance. There’s ohms.
19:28:42 And if you had followed this line of how to fix this piece of electricity electronics, it would have set it on fire because, again, it didn’t know anything about ohms, whereas if you looked it up on the company’s website.
19:28:56 It gave you very detailed instructions on how to fix their piece of equipment. And AI doesn’t necessarily know that.
19:29:05 So what about… is there AI Gemini or something?
19:29:19 Video.
19:29:07 Oh. Gemini basically is an AI front-end on top of Google. Um, and Gemini is what I use to create that… that, uh… uh, drawing. But… When I go into Google and I’m looking for search results, I don’t use Google Gemini because Google Gemini will quite often give you what is the most common answer, which isn’t necessarily the correct answer.
19:29:36 Okay.
19:29:40 Thank you.
19:29:39 Yes, Chris.
19:29:44 Recently, maybe 3 or 4 weeks ago,
19:29:48 I ran into an AI…
19:29:52 assistance, self-identified.
19:29:55 When I tried to call a law enforcement,
19:29:59 A local law enforcement?
19:30:02 Um, entity, and I can’t remember which it was.
19:30:06 But, uh, or why I was calling, even.
19:30:09 But I was very frustrated because…
19:30:13 if you run into it,
19:30:15 as a…
19:30:17 as a blockade for any other kind of…
19:30:23 phone inquiry,
19:30:24 It’s very frustrating because you never get…
19:30:27 You never get any help from it. It’s a barrier to get beyond or try to figure out how to…
19:30:34 get around it.
19:30:36 It’s just there, and it’s no help.
19:30:40 That’s all.
19:30:40 That that is that is one of the complaints about you have to remember the people who decide that they want to replace human beings with with AI. For the most part, they’re not people who are skilled in whatever it is they’re replacing.
19:30:57 They are the financial manager for a company who wants to get more profit so that the stock price goes up, or something like that. It’s not the people actually doing that job. So you’re basically having someone make decisions on what skills they need.
19:31:15 when they themselves are not skilled in the problem that they’re trying to solve.
19:31:20 I don’t know what they don’t know.
19:31:22 Yes, they don’t know what they don’t know. And one of the… one of the complaints about… common complaints about AI, and I’ve had this complaint myself, is AI is a barrier to the solution. If you don’t want 911 to be answered by AI.
19:31:39 Because, you know, your house is on fire. Oh, what kind of fire is it? Well, I don’t care, my house is on fire. Well, you need to tell me what kind of fire it is. It’s a chemical fire, you know, you don’t want to sit there and argue with a robot. You want somebody to show up and put out the fire.
19:31:54 Right.
19:31:55 And companies use… companies are looking to AI as a barrier.
19:32:03 Yeah.
19:32:01 to giving refunds. I can’t remember the name of a movie. It was a, it had… Catherine Hepburn and what’s his name?
19:32:17 Spencer! Spencer!
19:32:15 Tracy, I can’t remember his name. Anyway… sensor tracing. It was a black and white movie about this, um, department store in the 1930s, and people trying to return things after Christmas. Well, stores don’t like people to return things after Christmas because they have to give their money back. So if you have AI.
19:32:36 be the person they have to argue with, the AI can engage in circular reasoning that just frustrates you, and you walk away, and you don’t get your refund.
19:32:47 And companies think that’s a good thing. Now, me as a customer, I don’t think that’s a good thing. So you need to be a little bit skeptical when you’re dealing with AI or with a chat bot or with an automated.
19:33:03 Um, answering system. I don’t know how many of you have ever tried to call up Social Security, but Social Security, trying to get a human being to answer the phone is difficult.
19:33:13 And you don’t want to be stuck in that position. You’d rather a human being answer your question. But for a lot of government agencies, a lot of businesses, they want AI because they… They don’t want to pay people to do those functions.
19:33:29 Right. They don’t want a personal interface.
19:33:34 They don’t want to deal with the salary, the benefits, the retirements, the sick leave, they don’t want to deal with that.
19:33:41 The AI, as long as there’s power, it’ll work.
19:33:44 Which will cost all of us a lot of money.
19:33:47 Uh, yes, speaking of the costs of AI, even if you want to insulate yourself from AI, you can’t. And I’ll give you an example. I have, um… Mike, I have a whole bunch of storage on this computer. It’s like, I don’t know, 30 terabytes, that’s 30 trillion bytes worth of storage.
19:34:09 Well, I have it set up as mirrored storage, so that I take two identical drives, I put them into this box, and when I write something to that box, it writes it on two different disk drives at once, so that if one dies, I’ll still have all the data on the other one. It’s called.
19:34:38 Huh.
19:34:26 Miri. One of my drives is… it’s not… it’s not… it hasn’t stopped working, but I can tell it’s having problems. I wanted to replace it. I cannot buy a hard drive to replace it, because the AI companies have bought up.
19:34:42 The entire future production of hard drives for all of 2026.
19:34:49 And they’ve all… and they’ve bought up most of the memory being produced for 2026. So the price of memory and hard drives has gone up astronomically. This one drive that I paid $200 for last year to replace it today, they went $900.
19:35:06 And I don’t want to spend $900. So the AI is affecting you in different ways.
19:35:13 And isn’t it affecting us environmentally?
19:35:22 Yeah. Right.
19:35:17 It’s infecting us environmentally because it has a huge electronic cost, electrical cost. Washington State, you may or may not know this, we have the lowest electrical prices in the country. We have these big hydroelectric dams that produce.
19:35:32 We’ve got wind farms, we’ve got a little bit of solar, but basically we have the lowest prices in the country. But on the East Coast, they want data centers as well, and on the East Coast, energy is much, much more expensive. The bulk buyers get it at a discount. So what happened is Microsoft and.
19:35:51 Amazon and some others weighing in with these huge bulk buys to buy electricity at a low discount price, and there’s so little left over that the price for average consumers and small businesses has skyrocketed.
19:36:07 This one, I was reading the story in the New York Times about this one family in, um.
19:36:14 West Virginia, the woman has $200 a month as income that she gets from some kind of, uh… public assistance. I don’t exactly… that wasn’t clear in the article. What was clear, that she had a $997.
19:36:31 electrical bill for one month.
19:36:37 And that’s… astounding.
19:36:43 So, yes, it has effects beyond… Um, beyond the individual and it doesn’t make any difference what your attitude is towards AI. It’s expensive. It’s driven up the cost of memory, driven up the cost of hard drives, driven up the cost of electricity, and…
19:37:02 It’s not clear that that many people have actually benefited from it. The cost-benefit ratio for a lot of companies hasn’t shown up yet.
19:37:16 they just… they can’t prove that they’re actually saving money or making money off of it.
19:37:21 Right, right.
19:37:22 So, do you recommend using it? I mean, or what would…
19:37:28 slow all that… that process down.
19:37:35 Right.
19:37:31 Well, what would slow it all down is people being better educated, but that isn’t something that you have much control over. What I… the reason why I did my presentation as a video, I wanted to show you.
19:37:46 What you could do using a Mac and an iPhone without.
19:37:53 resorting to artificial intelligence someplace else. Just on your own phone, on your own computer, I developed that, uh, that, um… that video. In fact, I took a screenshot.
19:38:07 of the, uh… of my, uh… When I was producing that, let’s see, how do I share my screen?
19:38:18 Can you send that to us so we can look at it again, and um…
19:38:22 Oh, I’m gonna post the video, but I want to show you the, uh… Took a screenshot. This is my, uh… iMovie clip. And what I did is I took these little videos.
19:38:36 of texture map video basically pointed my phone at my face. I talked to it, and as my lips moved, it made these little creatures move their lips, and I recorded it on my phone, and then I sent it to myself as a message. And the reason I have.
19:38:52 So many is that there’s a limit as to how long one of these Memoji can be. It’s… I don’t know, 15 seconds or something like that. So when I wrote up my script in advance, I spoke into my phone, I changed the emoji, and then using iMovie, which is on your iPad, it’s on your iPhone.
19:39:14 Couldn’t do it.
19:39:10 Although, you’d have to be real glatton for punishment to edit a movie on your phone. It’s on your Mac, it’s free. I use that to collect the sound clips, which I created on the Mac, and I used, uh… my phone to create the animated talking heads, and that’s how I created the movie. So all this was done on my iPhone and my iPad, and the only part that wasn’t was that photo… that photo of a puffin.
19:39:41 With that huge keyboard. That was done on Gemini, and that’s simply because I’m a terrible artist. But this was all done on my Mac, with the intelligence on the computer.
19:39:56 Hmm.
19:39:55 or on the phone. And that’s… that’s why I did that video. I wanted to show you what you could do without using AI. And another thing to note is that, uh… Uh, when you use Siri.
19:40:09 If Siri can answer your question without talking to the internet, it will.
19:40:14 You can ask Siri what your name is. You can ask Siri what day it is. Siri knows all that stuff. It doesn’t need… it doesn’t need any particular help. If you want to know what the weather is, Siri knows that as well. It doesn’t need to ask the internet.
19:40:29 Why? Because your Mac probably knows that. It can get that from your Mac or your phone. If you have the weather app running, it could figure that out without talking to Apple. When it does talk to Apple, I want it to know when this bridge was built.
19:40:45 There was a story on the news about something, a problem with the bridge, and so I wanted to know how old it was. So I asked, how old was the bridge? Well, Siri inside of my home doesn’t know that, so Siri asked Apple, but it’s important to know how Siri does that.
19:41:02 Siri anonymizes the question. So it doesn’t… Apple doesn’t know that the question came… yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn’t know — Apple doesn’t know who asked that question.
19:41:17 Apple does a search to find the answer, usually by checking something like Wikipedia or something, and then it sends back the answer. So Apple does not have that information.
19:41:31 Apple has the question, but it doesn’t know who asked it, and it sends me the answer back, and I found out when the bridge was built. So, Apple’s really, really, really invested in making sure that your privacy and security are secured.
19:41:47 When you’re using their automated assistant. Most… well, I can’t think of anybody else who’s doing that. Microsoft is not doing that. Amazon is not doing that, Google is not doing that.
19:42:02 ChatGPT is not doing that. They’re not doing that because they want your answers, they use your questions to incorporate into their knowledge base, and then they feed that back out to other people.
19:42:17 Wow.
19:42:18 Which is why, if you go into Siri on your Mac OS or on your phone, or on your iPad, it’s got a little checkbox that says, do you want to use ChatGPT? And it’s turned off by default. You have to explicitly turn it on.
19:42:37 And at that point, if you want to, then it’ll use ChatGPT, but it’s turned off by default because ChatGPT will not sign up with Apple’s privacy agreement.
19:42:51 There is a rumor. It’s been rumored for some months that Apple is going to partner with Google so that you will have access through Siri to Google Gemini. And Google Gemini.
19:43:06 is like the rest of Google, it’s driven by advertising. They say they anonymize their requests and so on and so forth, but the fact is, if you look at some page on your phone, and then you’re looking at a different page on a different subject on your computer, an ad will come up with whatever you were looking for on the phone, because Google shares that stuff.
19:43:28 I’ll bet you the reason why that’s taking so long is Apple wants to ensure that they anonymize requests made through Siri to.
19:43:38 Google Gemini. Why do they want to do that? Because Apple is invested in security and privacy.
19:43:46 And they probably want to maintain that in any partnership. And Google probably doesn’t like that too much, but on the other hand, Google wants access to the 2.5 billion users of Apple products.
19:44:00 Hmm.
19:44:02 They’re negotiating from a position of strength here. Um, but I’m sure that Google wants to.
19:44:10 See if they can finagle it. But if Apple sends them an anonymous request.
19:44:15 And Google agrees to it, then you’ll have access to Gemini.
19:44:21 But without violating your privacy. Having said that, there are still things you don’t want to do. If you want to write a ransom note saying that you’re holding the neighbor’s German Shepherd hostage unless you get $200,000.
19:44:38 Or 27 Bitcoin or whatever. That’s probably not a good idea to ask for, uh… And artificial intelligence, editing for your ransom note. It’s probably not a good idea. That’s… you don’t want to let the AIs know that you’re committing crimes. For one thing, once it leaves your home and it’s out on the internet.
19:45:04 It’s really easy for somebody to get a search warrant and seize that as evidence, so you don’t want to do that.
19:45:10 If you’re gonna do a ransom note, do it the old-fashioned way. Find a newspaper someplace, cut out all the little letters, glue them, make sure your fingerprints are in the glue, and mail it off.
19:45:25 I could comment on that, but…
19:45:29 Like with Donald Trump.
19:45:29 I think…
19:45:32 I’ve used a… I’ve used it a couple times to write some letters, and it does a great job of writing letters for you by giving it its basic information. It comes out really good. Except the one time when I said, I’d like to write my wife a love letter, so I gave it all the basics and everything, and it came out really good, and I presented it to her, and she said.
19:45:50 Who wrote this? It just wasn’t me.
19:45:56 Bad book.
19:45:56 Man. Speaking of which, that reminds me, I have another demonstration that I was going to show you. And this one is about writing, and I’m going to… share my screen again.
19:46:11 If I can remember where… Oh, there it is.
19:46:16 the stupid… screen sharing, it annoys me because some of the controls in, uh… In, um, Zoom are at the top, and others are at the bottom.
19:46:28 Um, and it’s for the same function. I’m going to bring up.
19:46:35 a really poorly written scientific paper. Can you see the poorly written scientific paper?
19:46:40 Yes.
19:46:41 Okay, you probably can’t actually read it because it’s too small.
19:46:44 Yeah.
19:46:47 Okay, this is on the regression analysis of economic factors influencing immigration rate in Lithuania.
19:46:55 which I know is just hot on the tips of everyone’s tongue is something you want to know about. I’m going to take this opening paragraph.
19:47:03 I’m going to copy it. And I’m going to paste it into pages.
19:47:09 If I can remember where pages is. I can’t remember pages.
19:47:13 Sorry, down here.
19:47:16 pages. Okay.
19:47:22 Yes, open the new version. I should get rid of the old version.
19:47:27 and we don’t want to do that. We’re going to create a new document.
19:47:37 and we’re going to paste in that text.
19:47:44 and I know it’s too small to read, so I’m going to blow it up.
19:47:51 Hmm. I don’t know how to increase the size. Oh, let’s it’s up here.
19:47:58 Let’s make it 200%. Let’s make it 300%.
19:48:04 And here you go.
19:48:07 Okay. Now, this is Apple Pages, and it works the same way in Microsoft, but you can’t do some of the things I’m going to be doing. And it says that this is not a particularly well-written thing suggesting that it becomes a very… it wants an article there, it wants.
19:48:27 It wants to change an article here, it wants to add an article there, um, so on and so forth. But even if you went through and fixed all those problems, it’s still pretty terrible. So I’m going to… highlight it all. Got to come up to this little icon here, which you can’t see very well. It’s called Show Writing Tools Panel. So I bring up Writing Tools, and I say, I want this to be concise.
19:48:53 And I press this, and it thinks about it, and it rewrites it.
19:48:58 more concisely. You see, it’s shorter, but it also reads a little bit better. The paper presents the results, I still need to go through and do some things. Um… to emphasize the immigration rate, reduce the unemployment rate. There’s still things here that I need to do. And the things that it needs to fix are done by… highlights them by underlying them in red, and decrease.
19:49:24 The Gini coefficient, which Gini is a term of Arrington statistics.
19:49:30 This is shorter and it’s easier to read than the original. And this was done in pages.
19:49:36 The important thing to note is that it also took place entirely on the Mac.
19:49:43 Is this artificial intelligence?
19:49:48 I would. I say yes.
19:49:48 Yes, no? This is kind of a borderline, it’s a little bit more artificial intelligence than those texture map on the phone. Speaking of which, I was talking about texture map. If I take out my phone, there’s this little black bar at the top.
19:50:07 That’s got a whole bunch of LEDs that fire off and get the contours of my face, and then when I was talking with a tiger, it painted the tiger over the contours of my face. That’s how I had the tiger top.
19:50:22 using the phone. And if you have a phone that does facial recognition, an iPhone that does facial recognition, you can do the same thing. Send, um, they’re called Memoji.
19:50:33 It’s not a… it’s not a emoji, it’s a memoji.
19:50:37 This is a little bit closer to artificial intelligence, but it’s still using the large language model tools that were developed basically way back in the day by NTT and by Kurzweil. It’s taking what they know about language, and they’re saying, well.
19:50:54 In English, this paper presents the, there really should be an article there. So it flagged that and said, you know, you want to put an article there, and then it suggests to put an article there. But when I told it to do it more concisely, that really is getting.
19:51:11 A little bit up there. It’s something that an editor would do.
19:51:15 Having said that, and having demonstrated, and having… and knowing that this is still.
19:51:20 all on the Mac. Is this artificial intelligence?
19:51:32 Did it independently discover a problem? No, it was built to do this sort of thing.
19:51:40 did it independently solve the problem? No, it actually suggested things, and I had to make the decision.
19:51:48 So it’s not an independent entity that’s going to take over the world and launch nuclear missiles. We still don’t have that. And I’m hoping we don’t.
19:52:02 This is an artificial intelligence tool, but it’s not artificial intelligence. In the classic sense of, can it think on its own? No, it can’t. It’s a tool you still have to do the thinking. And, um… When the gentleman was talking about the love letter to his spouse that his wife challenged and said, uh, who wrote this?
19:52:25 That is the important thing. When you’re using tools like this, you.
19:52:31 The individual still have to make the decision. As an example, a different example.
19:52:39 Um, I can’t, oh, um… There’s a phrase for when you want to rig something up and it’s done in a haphazard fashion. What’s a way to just talk… what kind of phrase do we use for that?
19:52:56 I’m… what I’m looking at is trying to save a way… I want to use the phrase jury rig without saying jury rig. How do you spell jury rig?
19:53:04 Jerry rigged. Jerry-rigged!
19:53:09 J-E-R-R-Y.
19:53:07 How do you spell it?
19:53:12 Not really. It’s spelled J-U-R-Y, as in rigging a jury.
19:53:18 Well,
19:53:19 The Jerry rig is actually a misunderstanding of the original phrase. And it came about during World War II because we were fighting the Jerrys, so jury became jerry rig.
19:53:29 Uh-huh.
19:53:31 I wrote a paper, and it wanted to replace jury rig with jerry rig.
19:53:37 And I said, no. I had to make the decision, no, because I happen to know more about the origin of that phrase than the computer did. But the computer is using these large language models, which a lot of people contributed to, and a lot of people got it wrong.
19:53:56 So what you’re saying is AI could change our language.
19:54:01 Um, I think it already has. I’ll give you my favorite example.
19:54:16 Right.
19:54:08 What city… well, you… I gave you an example when I was showing you that. What city do I live in? I don’t actually live in Scrint, but I live in Squim. How do you pronounce Squim?
19:54:19 CEQA!
19:54:21 Well, that’s the way that it’s written. Um, I have my… I have Siri on my phone is set to use the voice of Moira. Moira was the voice that read the Declaration of Independence to you. Why do I have Moira as my voice on my phone?
19:54:39 I just like that voice, and also, I get a kick out of it every time it mispronounces swim.
19:54:47 Oh, Larry. I had a similar problem with Siri and I told her that she was pronouncing it wrong, that the E was silent. And from then on, she said swim.
19:55:07 Oh, okay. Okay.
19:55:00 Yes, well, in my particular case, I’m using an Irish version of Siri, so I just left it that way because I think it’s funny. But if it is pronouncing it correctly.
19:55:15 if you… if you… there’s a… there’s a… there’s a state right in the middle of the country.
19:55:21 It starts with an M, and the people in the north call it Missouri, and the people in the south call it what?
19:55:28 Missouri.
19:55:28 Missouri. Which… which one is going to win?
19:55:35 Missouri.
19:55:36 I have a theory. People are beginning to pronounce place names.
19:55:43 The way they hear them said in Apple Maps, and the way that they hear them said in Google.
19:55:50 So if you’re using Google Maps, Google will say, turn right on something or other road. Well, there’s this road in Columbia, Maryland. I can’t remember the name of it. It’s named after the developer of Columbia. Columbia was one of the first planned cities in the United States.
19:56:06 And this road is named after that developer. Well, most of the people in town pronounced his name one way, but after Google Maps became prevalent, people started using Google Maps.
19:56:22 After a few years, everybody in town pronounced it the way that Google Maps pronounced it. So… Will AI change the way we look at a lot of things? It already has in terms of pronunciation. We tend to pronounce place names the way that Google Maps and Apple Maps pronounce them. We tend to pronounce a lot of other things the way that the national.
19:56:45 Newscasters pronounce them. The national newscasters are deliberately chosen from the Midwest, for the most part, which is not West, but it is kind of in the middle.
19:56:56 Tom Brokaw was from Texas, but he’s kind of the exception and he even has a Midwestern, more of a Midwestern accent than a Texas accent. We are gradually changing our pronunciation of a lot of things based upon mass media.
19:57:12 In the old days of radio, you heard radio, but you only heard radio for a couple hours a day, and then it was doing something else. With TV, TV’s much more prevalent, and with Siri, and with Google Maps and Apple Maps, it’s in your pocket.
19:57:29 So it’s changing the way. Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s changing the way we pronounce.
19:57:38 place names. And I think in time, it’s also going to end up changing the way we do other things as well, because it’s setting a common standard.
19:57:47 By the way, who are the biggest users of.
19:57:53 of, uh… internet tools in the world.
19:57:58 English students.
19:58:00 Chinese. More Chinese people speak English than Americans speak English.
19:58:13 There are about 334 million English speakers in Japan… in China, and there are about 320 in the United States.
19:58:24 That’s… what?
19:58:24 I have. I have a daughter that’s teaching Chinese children over Zoom.
19:58:30 And she’s got about 20 students, and they’re little kids from 7 to 10, 12 years old. And she’s making living. She lives in Bordeaux, France, and she does it into the folk, the little kids in China.
19:58:44 And she’s doing fine, but she, uh, they’re really into learning the English language there.
19:58:49 Right.
19:58:50 Yes, they’re they’re really into their learning the English language, and I have a friend who lives in DC, and she was born and raised in Maryland, so was her husband. Her child, who is now 8, has attended nothing but Chinese school, so… She’s doing that because she wants to make sure that the child is literate, and what language makes sense in her case, she thinks it’s going to be Chinese. So, there are lots of… there are more English speakers in.
19:59:20 China than there are in the United States, and they’re rapidly becoming a lot of Chinese speakers in the United States and other countries, simply because China is China. And I mention this because when you’re talking about changes that come about, cultural change can come about for a lot of different reasons.
19:59:40 And population is one of them. But the way in which, um.
19:59:45 Apple Maps pronounces place names the way in which Google Maps pronounces place names. I think that’s going to gradually become.
19:59:54 more of the standard. And yes, you will run in things like jerry rig and jury rig.
20:00:05 Simply because language changes over time.
20:00:13 I can’t begin to tell you how many people have said, uh, what was it?
20:00:20 Oh, it’s a it’s an idiom that comes up all the time. People mispronounce the idiom, and they don’t really realize that they’re mispronouncing the idiom. They’re dropping a whole word that changes the meaning, and over time, that’s just the way people talk, and they think that’s… it doesn’t make any sense anymore, because they dropped that one word.
20:00:40 Um, but, um… Um… with, uh, with… The tools that Apple is providing you today.
20:00:50 I’m not afraid of Apple’s technology. I understand how it works, and I also understand that I, ultimately, choose how to use it. If it wants to put a comma, and I don’t want to put a comma there, I don’t. Speaking of commas.
20:01:06 And commas are important to me, because I used to be an editor.
20:01:09 There’s something called an Oxford comma, and an Oxford comma says when you have a string of things, you put a comma in there to separate the individual things, so you don’t end up with strange construction.
20:01:24 Quite often, I will put in commas that Microsoft Word or Pages will say, no, there shouldn’t be a comma there, because it doesn’t require an Oxford comma. But there’s a different kind of comma that I use all the time. It’s an aspirational comma.
20:01:41 People think of aspirational being, it inspires you. But in this case, I mean it allows you to take a breath, an aspirational comment, you put that in a place where it breaks the phrase up so that you don’t lose oxygen.
20:01:55 If you read a long sentence with no commas, you will mentally start gasping for air. So if you put a comma in there, it breaks it up and it’s easier for you to digest. And that’s an aspirational comma. And I argue with pages and Microsoft Word about.
20:02:12 Mm-hmm.
20:02:12 Operational comments all the time. And that’s perfectly okay because it’s my choice. It’s my tool.
20:02:22 Right.
20:02:20 I’m not their tool.
20:02:25 I use dot dot dot instead of commas.
20:02:31 Let’s not editorial right.
20:02:30 Yeah, well, I used to do that when I was… Yeah, I used to do that a lot, but when I actually had to edit a newspaper in a magazine, I cured that myself of that time. This one book, it’s called Sons of the Prophets. It’s a history of Seattle. It’s an actual.
20:02:49 History of Seattle called Sons of the Prophets, spelled P-R-O-F-I-T-S, and it talks about the people who founded Seattle, and they founded Seattle because they wanted to get rich. They would go out and they would do things like round up house pets and sell them as a dog team to people who were going to Alaska. So they have.
20:03:08 you know, these little dogs, little dogs, they sell 12 of them to say, yeah, this is a trained dog team. So this guy spends several thousand dollars to take this trained dog team up to Alaska, and harnesses them all, and the dogs just sit there and look at him like he’s an idiot, because.
20:03:27 Okay.
20:03:25 Yes. So Sons of the Prophets. This guy, almost every single paragraph in the book ends in an ellipses, and after a while, I wanted to set it on fire, but it is a really funny book, and I can actually recommend it.
20:03:40 What’s the… who’s the author?
20:03:41 I don’t remember. I read it 50 years ago, but it’s Sons of the Prophets, P-R-O-F-I-T-S.
20:03:48 Interesting. I grew up in Seattle.
20:03:49 And it’s a history… it’s a history of Seattle, and it’s hilarious, except for the ellipses.
20:03:57 Um, any questions?
20:04:00 No, but a comment. You are just great, Lawrence. Honestly, what a great program.
20:04:08 Lawrence?
20:04:11 Uh, just on the subject of…
20:04:08 I don’t know. Yes.
20:04:14 Uh, pronunciation.
20:04:17 Uh, being, being an English major with history of the language,
20:04:22 courses way, way back in my background. I’ve been noticing that
20:04:28 some broadcasters.
20:04:32 on TV channels have adopted
20:04:36 Occasionally pronunciations.
20:04:40 patterned after UK.
20:04:44 pronunciation.
20:04:47 Yes.
20:04:48 instead of Midwestern or… or, God forbid, any regional taint,
20:04:54 In the U.S., it’s UK, and I… I’ve been…
20:04:58 checking… well, you can… you can Google a word, and then…
20:05:04 with the word pronounced,
20:05:07 Right next to it, or pronunciation, and you’ll find…
20:05:10 All kinds of sources that will tell you… that will sound it out for you.
20:05:16 Um, and I’ve just been astonished.
20:05:21 things I’ve found.
20:05:24 Well, the, um… it’s interesting about that, because with the advent of TV, one of the first TV programs we had that was from outside of the United States was BBC was broadcast, like, an hour a day in the 1960s. My family didn’t have a TV until I went to college, so I don’t know this, but I’ve heard.
20:05:41 that they would have these BVC broadcasts, and people started watching them, and then people started using some British syntax simply because they were exposed to it. And I read a lot of English novels, and I would think I’d see things like whilst, and I’d make fun of my daughter, who lives in England, every time she uses Welts.
20:06:02 Um, so yes, that does… that does exist. I actually bought the Oxford American Dictionary for my phone, because you can get either a British or an American pronunciation for some words. Some words.
20:06:18 in British, they just don’t use those… that letter or something, and I think, why is it there? Like, um… Worcester is an example.
20:06:35 Yeah.
20:06:30 If you look at how it’s spelled and how it’s pronounced, they have nothing to do with one another. And there was this when the Fasham, which was a family name that’s actually spelled with, like, 14 letters, most of which they don’t use.
20:06:44 So it does get interesting. The idiom I was telling you about earlier where it’s changed over time, the idiom is couldn’t care less.
20:07:02 Mm-hmm.
20:06:54 That means that you could not care less, but you hear people say all the time now, could care less, which is not the same thing at all.
20:07:06 But that’s an example of language changing over time.
20:07:11 Lawrence, on that note. You may want to watch David Mitchell’s program about the Queen’s English. It’s a YouTube, he’s got a channel on YouTube, he’s a British comic.
20:07:22 The Queen’s English, David Mitchell, YouTube.
20:07:25 Okay. That sounds worthwhile. If nothing else, it’s something I can send to my daughter to torment her.
20:07:32 He covers that very same thing. that particular idiom.
20:07:35 My daughter. My daughter has three degrees and I only have two, so I, uh… I don’t let that stop me when it comes to making fun of her, but when it comes to language, uh, two of her degrees are in linguistics, so, you know, I have to be careful because she’s the expert.
20:07:56 Any comments about what I’ve said. I will give you a quick summation. One, I’m not afraid of AI. Two, the AI that we’re talking about today is not really AI.
20:08:07 Three, be very, very, very skeptical when you use AI. Remember that you’re in control, and if it’s not the tool that you need for the problem at hand, give up on it. And that includes things like chatbots. When they say that they won’t give you a refund.
20:08:24 If you want a refund, find some way around it. And I’m not saying that sometimes it’s not going to be difficult to do, but you should be in control, not this computer sitting under someone’s desk in Ohio.
20:08:40 Um, any questions?
20:08:47 Okay. As you heard from our president when she stopped by briefly, she doesn’t want to be president anymore.
20:08:56 Do we have any volunteers to be present?
20:09:05 Someone suggested Michael, and I’m more than willing to say Michael can be president.
20:09:12 I think all of us should ask Michael to be president.
20:09:16 Yes.
20:09:12 Did Michael?
20:09:17 Where’s Michael?
20:09:19 He might have dropped out because he was running away.
20:09:24 Oh, no, he’s still on. He’s just being silent.
20:09:26 Yeah.
20:09:28 I agree. Michael… Michael should be president.
20:09:33 It’s like…
20:09:30 How did I get volunteered? What does the president do?
20:09:33 I’m voting.
20:09:35 Oh, this is Michael.
20:09:35 I second the nomination. I second denomination.
20:09:42 Oh, we have a quorum.
20:09:38 I don’t think we have a quorum. There’s more people in the… in the smug group than this, right?
20:09:50 As far as I’m concerned, we have a quorum.
20:09:54 Come on, Michael, give back to the group. We all want you.
20:09:57 What is the president do? I’d have to ask.
20:09:57 Yeah, come on, Michael.
20:10:02 You’re gonna have to change hats, but other than that.
20:10:02 Uh, the president basically… Yeah, that’s about it.
20:10:06 What? What? I didn’t hear that.
20:10:10 So you’re gonna have to change hats. But other than that.
20:10:08 I’m doing the you might have to change.
20:10:12 Oh, I could do that.
20:10:19 Okay. What do we want to do next month?
20:10:16 All right. I think it’s settled, Lawrence.
20:10:22 Can we send you suggestions?
20:10:25 Yes, you can send me suggestions. I will point out that actually, I should look at my calendar.
20:10:32 To be on a trip. That’s going to…
20:10:34 By the way, I just read recently that the new library in Squim is open, so is it possible that in the summer we might have a meeting or two in that library?
20:10:45 Uh, either in that library or at my church, which is another possibility.
20:10:51 Uh… let me go to… May 1, 2, 3. Okay. I’m going to be gone the start of the month, but I’m going to be back well in time for… The meeting. Um, I did go to the new library on their opening day because I wanted my late spouse and I have our names on a plaque near the front door, because we donated to the building, so…
20:11:19 I do feel that we should utilize the building, but I haven’t talked to him about that yet. Um, if you haven’t been to it, it’s well worth the visit. It’s just a… It’s just a pretty building. And it’s got spaces for children, and it’s got a little courtyard outside where you can sit around and read in the sun if you want to. It’s just really nicely done.
20:11:46 But the day that I was there was also full of people, because it was the… it was the first day it was open. So I need to go back.
20:11:55 But I would like to have a meeting in person, either there or at my church sometime this summer. Last year, we… or was the year before last? It must have been the year before last. We had a Saturday meeting.
20:12:14 Right.
20:12:11 Which seemed to work because people don’t like driving at night, and uh… During the weekday, people might be having some else to do, so we had a Saturday meeting, and we had a decent turnout. So, um, that might be what we aim for.
20:12:27 Um, for topics for next month, um… Email me suggestions. This artificial intelligence presentation that I did was based on an email suggestion.
20:12:44 It can be on hardware or software. So, just… Send in suggestions.
20:12:54 Do you have any idea of what IOS 27 is going to look like?
20:13:01 Um… If I did, I couldn’t tell you because I signed a developer agreement with Apple.
20:13:08 Oh, okay.
20:13:08 So, um… I will tell you that according to the news sources, it’s going to have more AI in it, but exactly what that means, I don’t know. I’m hoping that the rumored.
20:13:24 partnership with Google comes to fruition, and I’m hoping that if it does come to fruition, it comes with significant security and privacy controls. That’s Apple’s strength right now, and I’d like them to.
20:13:38 keep that. I myself am quite paranoid. If you saw through the… you could probably see from the iPhone literacy sessions that we had that, um.
20:13:51 I’m really big into paranoia. Paranoia is a good thing. I recently discovered someone who had never put… they had never password locked their phone, and I didn’t even think that was possible until I saw their phone, and their phone is really old and on old versions of iPhones.
20:14:07 Yes, it is possible not to password lock them, but paranoia for something that costs… the total cost of a phone, you go out and buy the cheapest iPhone out there, it’s $2,000. You may not think it’s $2,000, but if you took… have the total cost of your contract over two or three years. It’s about $2,000 and it’s got a staggering amount of personal information. So protect it.
20:14:33 Be paranoid. Don’t give it a simple password. Don’t name it after your puppy.
20:14:39 Um, be paranoid.
20:14:40 So maybe more comment… a class on that would be great, on privacy and, um…
20:14:48 Don’t you agree, you guys? I mean…
20:14:51 All right.
20:14:51 those of us who don’t know that.
20:14:54 What about the, um…
20:14:57 The, uh… oh, now I can’t find the word.
20:15:01 We won’t be able to use, uh, our airport capsules.
20:15:06 with iOS 2.7, is that right?
20:15:10 Oh, you… you… if you have a time capsule, which is the, uh.
20:15:16 It’s an airport router, but it also has a disk drive in it, so you can do wireless backups. The time capsules are formatted with HFS+, which… it doesn’t make any difference what that means. It’s an older way of formatting a drive.
20:15:32 And starting with iOS 7 and with macOS iOS 27 and macOS 27, you’ll not be able to back up to an HFS drive anymore. Hfs is quite, quite old.
20:15:48 And it’s very slow, and it’s got lots of problems, and Apple’s just basically discontinuing it. You can still read things from it, but you can’t. You can’t wirelessly back up, which is a problem for me, because that’s how I have my.
20:16:03 uh, laptop backed up. I don’t plug it in, I just… It just automatically backs itself up wirelessly, and I’m going to have to come up with another solution to that. It’s not a big… problem. But yes, that is something that is coming down the pike, and that might be something that Apple talks about in their keynote in June.
20:16:25 Okay. Related.
20:16:27 Related question.
20:16:29 Um, other…
20:16:31 Legacy equipment.
20:16:34 I…
20:16:37 trips across something that, uh, a neighbor thought they were helping me by giving
20:16:43 To me, which is an airport extreme.
20:16:48 And I… it’s just been sitting in a paper bag for, I don’t know, 5 years or something?
20:16:49 Yes.
20:16:54 What should I do with that?
20:16:58 The airport extreme probably will still work as an airport as a Wi-Fi station. The airport Xtreme, unlike most Wi-Fi routers, actually has a firewall built in. The downside is that if it’s been.
20:17:13 If it’s really called an Airport Extreme, it’s using an older version of Wi-Fi that is quite slow compared to the current ones, and the firewall that’s in it hasn’t been updated in five years or more.
20:17:29 also a problem. When it comes to something I should mention when I’m talking about Wi-Fi speed, you can get Wi-Fi now that will run faster than a megabyte a second.
20:17:40 Um, and it’ll run faster than 100 megabytes a second, which is quite fast.
20:17:46 That won’t make your internet any faster. It means the speed from one machine in your house to another machine in your house will be fast. But your interconnection from your home is whatever your internet provider.
20:18:02 has. And if it’s 10 megabits per second, that’s as fast as it’ll go, regardless of the speed of your Wi-Fi router.
20:18:10 Where it’s important, though, is the newer versions of Wi-Fi, in addition to being faster, also have better security. So a device that supports Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7 is actually much, much more secure.
20:18:27 than one that has 802.11. G, which is what older ones have.
20:18:35 Can I put this…
20:18:37 this box in the trash, then?
20:18:46 Okay?
20:18:40 You can put it in the trash, or you can give it to Goodwill. Believe it or not, there are people out there who want those old… they have, like, uh… They have older machines that they don’t… they can’t afford to upgrade, but they need a good Wi-Fi router, and then you plug it in and set it up, and it’s up and running.
20:18:58 So what about the security issue with whoever data is on it?
20:19:07 Yeah.
20:19:04 Um, on the router itself, it’s not going to have any personal information other than someone’s account when they originally set it up. So they… No, and Airport Extreme does not have a disk drive.
20:19:11 So it’s not a backup device like, uh, the other… Oh, okay.
20:19:21 Yeah.
20:19:19 The time capsules have a disk drive, and uh… Um, and I’m going to have to give up my time capsules, because… If I can’t back up wirelessly to them, I don’t need them anymore.
20:19:36 It was interesting, when I got the time capsule, uh, Kathleen had just gotten a MacBook, which is why I got the time capsule, and she wanted to know how she was going to back it up, and I said, turn it on. She turns on her Mac, and I pointed at the time capsule, and it starts backing up.
20:19:52 It was that simple. And without the time capsule, it’s going to be a little bit more complicated to back up a laptop.
20:20:04 Other questions?
20:20:06 I I have one specifically, you know, probably other people won’t be interested in it, but my find my app stopped working on my iPad. I cannot get the thing just to work again.
20:20:20 Um, I googled it, said it’s a common problem with iOS 26, but if I put in 26.2, they’ve found a solution for it. I mean, it’s working fine on my phone, and I did put in the latest, uh.
20:20:37 update, which is 26.4, and it still has that problem.
20:20:43 I don’t have an answer, because I haven’t run into that. I’ve heard of people having that problem. What is the device specific model?
20:20:53 It’s an iPad air. iPad Air 5.
20:21:04 It sounds old.
20:21:02 Huh.
20:21:06 Okay, hold on.
20:21:01 I think. No, it’s not. It’s been a couple of years. I’d say less than a year old, I’d say.
20:21:11 Okay.
20:21:12 Have you… have you shut the machine down entirely?
20:21:15 Yes. Nope.
20:21:26 How do you do that? I went to that, and I couldn’t see how… I went to…
20:21:16 And that didn’t do anything. I don’t have an idea. Um, before you log off, if you haven’t signed in, please sign into the sign-in form, which I…
20:21:32 Chat? No?
20:21:33 Yeah, if you go to the chat, just click on the link there that says forms.gle, and then it’s got an address. Click on that, and it’ll open up your browser window, and there’ll be a form that you fill out with your… Um, with your name and phone and email address.
20:21:56 Okay, thank you.
20:21:59 Any other questions?
20:22:01 Can he delete the Find My and reinstall it?
20:22:04 No, it’s… it’s built into the operating system. It’s considered… It’s not part of the operating system, but the operating system doesn’t want you to kill it.
20:22:13 So another thing that was suggested when I googled it was to reinstall the operating system. And I don’t like the sounds of that.
20:22:27 This… yeah, on an iPad, that’s kind of a problem, because the… the way to reinstall it is to basically.
20:22:38 You said it, yeah. As if you were going to sell it.
20:22:37 reset it, and… And yes, and that’s kind of extreme, unless you’ve got it all backed up on the…
20:22:46 Well, it is backed up on the, you know, on, uh, uh, on the… shoot.
20:22:53 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
20:22:53 In iCloud? Yeah. It’ll take a little while to put everything back, but it’s still kind of extreme. You can reinstall the operating system on your Mac at almost any time because on the modern Macs, one of the OS 27.
20:23:15 Mm-hmm.
20:23:20 Mm-hmm.
20:23:11 The operating system is held in a different part of the hard drive from all of your data. So if you, say, reinstall the operating system, it just writes it to that part. But in iOS, it’s not segregated. It’s segregated that way, but it’s not… You don’t…
20:23:26 User accessible.
20:23:28 you know, the tools don’t exist for you to just write to that part. It wants to redo everything.
20:23:36 Yeah. No, no, I appreciate the the thoughts anyway.
20:23:36 Sorry about that.
20:23:41 I’ll give it some… if… send me a… send me an email, I’ll look into… Um, because not having Find My turned on is not a good thing, so…
20:23:51 And it’s turned on, and I can find it from my phone, but I can’t… Find my phone on it, or anything else.
20:23:58 Yeah, that’s… that’s not good. So, send me an email, and I’ll… I’ll see if I can come up with a thought or two.
20:24:05 Okay, thank you.
20:24:08 And if there’s nothing else, then I want to say goodnight to everybody.
20:24:13 Thank you, Lawrence.
20:24:12 I have a question. It’s got to do with the connection here. I can see everybody, and I can hear everybody, and I think you can hear me, but I can’t see my photo on here anyway. My picture.
20:24:27 It’s on the list, it says my name and then me.
20:24:23 Um, it should be in the list…
20:24:30 and I can see talking about. I can’t see it on the display of the gallery or anything.
20:24:32 Oh.
20:24:36 It’s a nice palm tree you got going there.
20:24:38 So…
20:24:40 Uh-huh.
20:24:41 Yes, yes.
20:24:39 Can you see that? I can’t even see that. I didn’t even know what I had back there. I used to have…
20:24:45 So there’s a bunch of, at least on mine, there’s a bunch of different icons, not icons, but pictures across top of people, and then there’s an arrow at the end of it that you can click on, and that shifts a whole bunch of new people in, so it’s because you can only display 5 at a time on mine, anyway, with my old system.
20:25:04 Well, I see a lot of people’s names on the bottom with no pictures, just names, and I see, but I see about 5 of us now, several people have left. But I’ve never did see my face, and not that I’m egotistical, but I just never saw it. But I could hear you, and you could see me, I guess.
20:25:21 Yep.
20:25:23 Yeah, I don’t have an explanation that, but Zoom is weird, too.
20:25:27 name.
20:25:27 Yeah, I could see you, Joey, on the bottom of the five. You’re the last one.
20:25:34 Yeah, palm trees in the background.
20:25:35 Yep.
20:25:32 Show palm trees in the background. I think that’s what I… I used to have snowstorms back there, but I didn’t change it.
20:25:33 Yeah. Palm tree beach…
20:25:41 Ring time. Okay, I was just wondered, because I… I enjoy the session very much, and I could see everybody talking, but I’m… I know you heard me, but I couldn’t see myself.
20:25:53 Yeah, before you completely log out, you might want to go and check to see that you have the current version of Zoom, which is… 7.0.0.
20:26:02 7.0 point 0.
20:26:06 Okay. I thought I did that before I signed on, but I’ll get checked for updates.
20:26:11 Anyway, I thank everyone and have a pleasant evening.
20:26:13 Oh.
20:26:17 Yeah, thank you, Lawrence.
20:26:18 Thank you, Lauren.
20:26:19 Yeah, thanks, guys. Bye.
20:26:21 Lauren, you’re just the best.