Siri AI

For the June 16, 2026, meeting, we were originally planning to discuss spaces — virtual spaces, virtual screens, and various hardware and software technologies for putting more information in limited screen space. Various time constraints and health issues have forced a postponement of that topic, possibly to July.

Instead, we focused on Apple Intelligence, which was also the main topic of the keynote at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference 2026 (WWDC26), which concluded last week. After teasing Apple’s plans for artificial intelligence (AI) for over a year, the keynote provided some specifics, and these became the topic of the June meeting.

The slides, posted below, contain a wealth of information about Apple’s forthcoming suite of operating systems for the Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and other devices, collectively known as OS 27. Coming out this fall, macOS 27 will be known as Golden Gate, replacing Tahoe. iOS 27 for iPhone, iPadOS 27 for iPad, watchOS 27 for Apple Watch, and visionOS 27 will retain their numerical names, without a California place name.

Central to all of these operating systems will be Siri AI, a new version of Siri that will perform as many of its AI functions as possible on the host device. Among other things, Siri AI will rely heavily on Spotlight for interacting with files, and will also be able to draw on information spanning different applications to satisfy user requests. Because these artificial intelligence functions require specific types of processors, OS 27 will be limited to Apple Silicon devices; there will be no update for Intel-based MacBooks and desktop Macs.

Another big change will be a partnership with Google’s Gemini AI agent for items that require resources beyond what your device can do on its own. Apple will use Private Cloud Compute to protect the privacy and security of Apple device users, sending encrypted, anonymous requests to Gemini; Google will not know what you have requested, nor be able to track any of your private information or activity. Apple has published some technical papers on the subject:

Expanding Private Cloud Compute

https://security.apple.com/blog/expanding-pcc

Introducing the Third Generation of Apple’s Foundation Models

‘https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/introducing-third-generation-of-apple-foundation-models

These new operating systems should be released sometime this fall. Historically, they come out in September or October, but Apple, as usual, declined to be more specific.

Notes for Siri AI meeting

Lots of text. In the listing of OS 27 improvements, the items marked in yellow were ones that I’m particularly looking forward to. These aren’t necessarily the most useful or the most important, just things that I want to see ASAP.

Video of the June 2026 meeting: Siri AI

Video recording of the June 2026 meeting on Siri AI

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

Transcript of the meeting on: Siri UI

This transcript was generated automatically by Zoom, and Zoom frequently has flights of fancy. Use your browser’s find function to search for particular words or phrases.

18:29:45 Okay, it’s.
18:29:48 6:30, so I’m going to start with our usual.
18:29:52 questions and answers, and I realize there are only three of us, but…
18:29:55 of a layer. Now, four of us.
18:29:57 But if anyone has a question, I have an answer, and it might even be a correct one.
18:30:03 Sorry. Anyone have a question?
18:30:11 Nobody has a question?
18:30:12 Are you going to go over the new Siri 2.0?
18:30:18 Yes, in fact, I said I was going to do spaces and talk about.
18:30:25 Siri and Apple Intelligence.
18:30:29 And I lied, I’m going to talk about…
18:30:32 Siri and Apple Intelligence, and not going to talk about spaces at all.
18:30:39 Oh, shut up.
18:30:45 I have a, um…
18:30:47 I have a concussion and been feeling somewhat under-ambitious, so…
18:30:52 I’ll put off spaces for another time.
18:30:59 Um, so yes, I will be talking quite a bit about that.
18:31:02 Even though I might have to…
18:31:07 Siri stomp.
18:31:12 Will that get better in the next version of the OS?
18:31:18 No?
18:31:16 No, and it’s partially it’s own fault, because…
18:31:22 I set it up so that I don’t have the word hey first.
18:31:26 I just have it respond to…
18:31:30 its name, and normally that’s perfectly okay, because I’m the only one here, but.
18:31:35 During smug meetings, it gets…
18:31:37 entertaining sometimes.
18:31:40 Once I did a, it was a joke.
18:31:44 I have, um…
18:31:45 I have an Alexa…
18:31:48 Echo Dot, and I also have a Google Home.
18:31:52 And I pasted together a bunch of…
18:31:56 recordings, they weren’t done…
18:31:58 altogether, but I pasted it together so it sounded like they were arguing amongst themselves.
18:32:04 And I.
18:32:06 posted it on.
18:32:09 My user group site on the East Coast.
18:32:13 And I had people from Apple.
18:32:16 People from Amazon and people from Google all ask,
18:32:22 How did I get them to argue with each other and
18:32:25 It was… I just recorded something.
18:32:27 And then I pasted them together.
18:32:29 So it wasn’t as if they were really arguing, but they were all quite.
18:32:33 Intrigued as to how I managed to get them to argue, because it did sound like they were arguing with each other.
18:32:39 But I wrote out a script in order to make it sound that way.
18:32:45 So I do have fun with them unless they speak up when I’m not.
18:32:51 intending them to.
18:32:54 Hmm.
18:32:56 Anyone have any questions?
18:32:57 I do have a question about
18:33:00 Shared albums.
18:33:03 in…
18:33:03 Yes.
18:33:05 in iMovie, you can make a magic movie,
18:33:09 Which entails you just feeding it a bunch of clips, it’ll add transitions and…
18:33:13 All that sort of thing, but it will…
18:33:15 It will make the clips, it’ll shorten them to whatever…
18:33:18 you know, truncate them, or leave them be, and so on.
18:33:22 Well, I’ve noticed that in sharing an album, if you have video clips,
18:33:27 Uh, it works the same way.
18:33:30 It’ll shorten some of them.
18:33:33 And I… is there some way to…
18:33:36 Disallow that, or to… in iMovie, of course, you can…
18:33:40 The shortened clip can be lengthened.
18:33:43 But I don’t see any way to do that in the shared album business.
18:33:47 Um, okay.
18:33:49 I do a great many videos. I do them for…
18:33:53 smug, I do them for my church.
18:33:56 For the church have done something like…
18:33:59 400 since I moved here, and…
18:34:02 2018. So I do a lot of video.
18:34:06 for things other than straight video, like, for example, the
18:34:11 straight for the straight Macintosh user group video.
18:34:14 I record this using Zoom,
18:34:18 I bring it into iMovie, and then I trim out the parts that I don’t want, such as the
18:34:24 part at the start of the meeting where I’m sitting there trying to get the controls to work, and so on and so forth.
18:34:30 So I use iMovie for that, because it’s just one pure piece of video, and I chop out things like
18:34:36 I mean, I had a power failure chop out that part.
18:34:38 Things like that.
18:34:41 For other things that I do, I don’t use iMovie.
18:34:45 So, for example, to assemble a whole bunch of smaller clips,
18:34:48 Uh, you might recall…
18:34:51 that I had, um…
18:34:53 a short video of a bunch of emojis talking about artificial intelligence.
18:34:59 Um, I did that in Keynote.
18:35:01 I recorded the movie clips independently.
18:35:05 Then I fired up Keynote and put them in the order I wanted,
18:35:08 And I set up the transitions within Keynote, and then I exported it as a video.
18:35:14 And the reason why I did that
18:35:16 is that there are other more powerful tools, such as…
18:35:20 Final Cut Pro.
18:35:22 Which is a real bear to learn.
18:35:26 And there are many other ways of doing it. But the nice thing about.
18:35:32 keynote, Keynote.
18:35:33 Basically, he says, I’m going to do this, then I’m going to do this, then I’m going to do this, then I’m going to do this.
18:35:39 You feed it a… you paste in a video that’s…
18:35:42 The length that you want, uh, and it just saves them in order, so…
18:35:47 That’s how I tend to do…
18:35:50 Some of the more complicated things that I’ve done.
18:35:53 There are other ways of doing it, but Keynote, because
18:35:58 within that one slide, if that slide is a 13-minute video,
18:36:05 It’ll be 13 minutes long, and if you don’t want it to be 13 minutes long, you trim it, and then dump it into…
18:36:11 Keynote. You’re not waiting for…
18:36:14 The program, be it
18:36:15 iMovie or Final Cut or whatever.
18:36:17 to dynamically make changes on the fly,
18:36:21 As it’s rendering it, Keynote just saves it as a video.
18:36:25 So and it also allows me to do things that are a little bit complicated. Like, for example,
18:36:32 And iMovie, you can put on titles.
18:36:35 But the titles come in a set format.
18:36:37 And they’re down at the bottom or they’re up at the top, or they fly in all over.
18:36:42 With Keynote, I can make the title anything I want to, because it’s just a slide.
18:36:46 And I can use any font I want to, I’m not.
18:36:48 I’m not subject to the constraints of, uh…
18:36:52 of how iMovie does it, so.
18:36:56 my technique and…
18:36:59 It’s weird, I know, is just to use Keynote, and I lay out
18:37:04 longer videos that are done in pieces in Keynote.
18:37:08 And then after it’s all done the way I want it to,
18:37:11 Then I go to the file menu and I say export, say that I want it as a…
18:37:18 movie, and it renders out the movie.
18:37:22 Again, it’s easier to use than Final Cut. It gives me…
18:37:26 It gives me options that I don’t have in iMovie itself.
18:37:31 So that’s how I do things like that.
18:37:34 How does it paste the clips together?
18:37:38 Well, if I have…
18:37:41 If you recall the…
18:37:44 movie with a bunch of emojis.
18:37:46 I just had a slide.
18:37:48 Paste it in one movie. Another slide, paste it in another movie. I don’t like the order, I just rearrange the slides.
18:37:55 And it rearranges the movies because
18:37:57 There’s one clip per slide.
18:38:00 But will it make it one single movie, or does it…
18:38:03 Yeah, yeah.
18:38:04 It does. It combines all the slides together.
18:38:07 Yeah.
18:38:08 Oh, wow, that is powerful.
18:38:12 I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, but it’s what I use because I’m really lazy.
18:38:16 You can do much the same in…
18:38:19 In iMovie, but.
18:38:22 What I will do in iMovie, because it doesn’t have as much control over things like titles.
18:38:28 At the start of the smug postings that I put up on YouTube,
18:38:34 I have a slide that I made in Keynote, I save that as an image,
18:38:38 And then in iMovie, I just import that image and I stick that at the front.
18:38:43 of the video. So that’s why I don’t have a standard iMovie
18:38:47 title in an iMovie end credit.
18:38:49 It’s that custom smug logo.
18:38:53 But that’s because I didn’t do it in iMovie. I did it in Keynote.
18:38:57 Keynote, I use it for a lot of things other than what it was designed.
18:39:03 But can you? Can you do that with
18:39:06 Like, photos that have been videoed,
18:39:09 And in the photo app, I mean, can you take…
18:39:12 Is that what Steve was talking about?
18:39:14 Well, within photos, you can create a…
18:39:19 a video, those custom videos, just export it as a video.
18:39:23 And then you can suck it into…
18:39:25 iMovie, and you can modify it the way you want and stick a title on the front of it.
18:39:30 Or you can take a whole bunch of smaller videos and put them all together.
18:39:36 That… I do that all the time in iMovie as well.
18:39:38 But a lot of the stuff that I do to control things.
18:39:43 Um, I use.
18:39:44 I use Keynote. I use Keynote because I don’t know if you’ve ever used PowerPoint, but PowerPoint.
18:39:50 is one of the most…
18:39:53 horribly designed things on the planet.
18:39:56 When Microsoft bought it, Microsoft did not develop PowerPoint.
18:40:01 It was… it was an outliner. It would just do text outlines, and so you could add things in, and you could indent things, because it was a text outliner.
18:40:11 And Microsoft decided that they were going to do something else with it, because, um.
18:40:16 a company that doesn’t exist anymore, and I can’t remember the name of it.
18:40:20 Adobe bought it, and I can’t remember the name of the company.
18:40:24 Um, anyway, they had…
18:40:26 They had a
18:40:29 a slide presentation piece, a package.
18:40:32 And Microsoft thought they had to compete with that, so they went and took
18:40:37 What was a really nice outlining product and turned it into PowerPoint.
18:40:41 But PowerPoint does all kinds of just incredibly stupid things.
18:40:46 And Keynote has a much cleaner design.
18:40:49 If you put something someplace, it stays there, it doesn’t wander all over.
18:40:54 doesn’t change fonts, it doesn’t…
18:40:57 Let’s change punctuation just because it’s Tuesday.
18:41:00 It does what you want it to.
18:41:03 And…
18:41:02 And I like Keynote because it does latex and you can have like equations or symbols,
18:41:09 And everything in latex and PowerPoint,
18:41:14 You can’t do that. You have to kind of take a picture of it and then plop it in as a pic.
18:41:18 Yes, and by the way, when he says latex, he’s not talking about
18:41:22 latex gloves, latex is a
18:41:24 is a programming language for doing equations and laying it out typographically.
18:41:29 Well, special symbols, Greek letters,
18:41:32 Well, it was originally designed for math formulas, but
18:41:36 Right, right.
18:41:37 Um, but, um…
18:41:38 Yeah, it’s a very powerful tool, and it’s got a very simple interface, but the reason I really like
18:41:44 Keynote is its consistent.
18:41:47 And I cannot get that kind of consistency with.
18:41:51 with PowerPoint.
18:41:53 PowerPoint just does all kinds of stupid things.
18:41:57 The two pieces of Microsoft software that I use all the time that I really like.
18:42:02 Our Microsoft Word, which I’ve been using since 1984.
18:42:05 and Excel. And Excel is what’s one of those things that people don’t really understand.
18:42:10 Excel is a Mac program. It was developed on the Mac.
18:42:14 for the Mac, it was made by Microsoft.
18:42:16 And it was much later introduced into
18:42:19 Windows, but you can do amazing things with.
18:42:23 with Excel, but you can do amazing things with Word as well.
18:42:28 Okay.
18:42:27 I don’t think I can live my life without Excel.
18:42:30 My whole life is organized by itself.
18:42:34 Then Microsoft works is an oxymoron in any way, except for those two programs.
18:42:40 Um…
18:42:38 I agree. Can I ask you a question?
18:42:42 Does anybody else have problems with their iPhone 17?
18:42:47 Not ringing.
18:42:48 And not only not ringing, and you’re missing calls,
18:42:52 But it doesn’t even show that somebody calls.
18:42:55 And so they’re texting you, going,
18:42:57 I’m trying to call you, but it’s going to voicemail.
18:43:02 So I’ve had this problem now for about two and a half weeks.
18:43:07 I’ve been to, um, I’ve done everything, I’ve looked it up, and it’s like, oh!
18:43:11 You’re one of a million people that has this same problem. Do these 12 things.
18:43:15 So, I went over to T-Mobile, they changed the eSIM, they did all kinds of stuff.
18:43:21 We started it several times.
18:43:23 Is anyone else having that problem?
18:43:26 The answer to that is…
18:43:30 a lot of people, it will not ring because they accidentally mute it.
18:43:35 There are all kinds of… well, I’m just saying there are all kinds of different ways to mute it.
18:43:38 Yeah, right.
18:43:40 You can mute it using the side button, which a lot of people may have accidentally done.
18:43:45 You can mute it doing a bunch of other things.
18:43:47 I, for the most part, prefer to not have it ring.
18:43:51 But the other thing that, um, with starting with the iPhone 17 and the latest version of the.
18:43:57 operating system that people sometimes are not aware of.
18:44:00 You have to be very careful about how you screen calls. It’s got a new call screening feature.
18:44:07 Right.
18:44:07 And you have to be really careful about what you screen. As an example,
18:44:12 You don’t necessarily want to screen all you don’t want to ignore all unknown numbers because.
18:44:18 Exactly.
18:44:19 If you have a doctor’s appointment.
18:44:22 Right.
18:44:22 And the doctor sends you a reminder,
18:44:24 That reminder is probably not going to come from a number that’s in your.
18:44:28 Right.
18:44:29 address book, and if you screen out everything,
18:44:32 That’s not in your address book, it won’t ring. And then later on, you’ll wonder why.
18:44:37 So there are a number of different ways in which
18:44:41 Your phone can be operating perfectly well, and you can still manage to miss calls, depending upon
18:44:47 Right.
18:44:48 How you set up screening and whether or not you accidentally
18:44:52 muted. You can mute it using the side buttons, you can mute it by using the
18:44:56 the control center.
18:44:59 What is that? Yeah, I think it’s called Control Center.
18:45:03 Focus is another thing. Yeah, I’ve been through all those things, and I’ve…
18:45:09 become really aware of all those different things.
18:45:12 So just yesterday, I found on Apple Community,
18:45:16 Where people were talking about this problem.
18:45:19 And then they gave a list of of, you know, the 12 or 15 things to try, which I had already tried all of them.
18:45:26 And then the last one was to restart it.
18:45:29 But not just restart it the normal way, which is I just press the thing, and then it says slide to restart.
18:45:35 And I slide it. This was very specifically, you have to do it exactly this way.
18:45:41 You have the up-down buttons, you press the up once quickly, you press the…
18:45:47 down quickly, and then you hold the side button
18:45:50 Until…
18:45:52 it until the apple appears. You don’t slide it off.
18:45:56 And I did that.
18:45:58 I had to really pay attention to how it…
18:46:01 Senate, and after I did that, it started… I started getting calls.
18:46:06 and they started showing. But it was a specific way of restarting
18:46:11 That’s different from any other way that I’ve ever restarted.
18:46:15 I think you’ll find that that’s a reset.
18:46:18 That’s why I was thinking that it was, yeah, but it wasn’t…
18:46:16 Yeah, that’s a reset. Right.
18:46:22 like, reset to factory standards, because all my stuff is still there.
18:46:26 It was some special reset, and so apparently that’s what it needed.
18:46:30 Yeah, I have heard of people having problems, but
18:46:34 It’s difficult with.
18:46:39 so many people tried to have their phone limited. And the reason why people try to have the phone limit
18:46:47 calls, is that
18:46:49 Throughout the history of the phone in general, when people first started having.
18:46:56 phones in their homes, people complain that they got calls all the time, even if it was only one or two a week.
18:47:01 Well, now you can have a call all the time, and since it’s literally with you all the time,
18:47:07 Yeah.
18:47:06 It can be really, really annoying.
18:47:09 So people have figured out different ways to have it screen it, or just
18:47:12 not have the ringer go off, all kinds of things.
18:47:15 So it’s become a problem.
18:47:19 And when a lot of people say that it’s not ringing, it’s not necessarily because of a
18:47:23 Problem with the phone, it’s because there are just a myriad of different ways of
18:47:29 telling it to shut up. And whether you expect it to or not, you.
18:47:34 happened to hit on a way that’s a bit overly quiet.
18:47:38 But yeah, the reset is an option. I would caution you though.
18:47:44 that if you need to reset it more than, like, once every six months.
18:47:49 there might be something wrong with the machine.
18:47:51 Yeah.
18:47:51 Because that’s the, um…
18:47:54 That’s the, uh… that’s an extreme way of solving the problem. Normally, you need to reset your phone.
18:48:00 Turn it off, turn it back on again. I mean, turn it, power it completely down, wait a few minutes, power it completely back up, and that’s more than enough.
18:48:09 Big.
18:48:08 Well, that was happening to me too. I have an iPhone 15 Pro Max.
18:48:13 And, you know, and on certain calls, it wasn’t ringing, and then I realized I had the setting for screening,
18:48:19 So that if it’s not in my address book, it won’t ring.
18:48:22 Oh, yeah, I did.
18:48:22 But then I found that
18:48:25 I took it off, and all the calls kept coming in,
18:48:27 But it was so annoying, I was getting so many spam calls that I put it back on,
18:48:33 And just check to see…
18:48:35 you know, the missed calls list every so often to make sure
18:48:38 I didn’t miss one that I really wanted. And it turns out, I’ve been doing this for, like, a couple of months now,
18:48:45 Uh, I’m getting less and less spam calls.
18:48:50 It’s, like, almost down to zero.
18:48:50 That’s.
18:48:55 You’re not…
18:48:55 I have… I have a…
18:48:57 I have slightly different problem than the rest of you. Actually, I shouldn’t say that, because I don’t know where you guys are from.
18:49:04 I moved here from Maryland.
18:49:09 And my…
18:49:11 phone number has a Maryland prefix.
18:49:13 Because it has a Maryland free prefix, and because every single lobbying lawyer and lobbying firm.
18:49:19 on the planet is in Washington, D.C., or Baltimore, or somewhere in that area.
18:49:25 I get tens of thousands of calls a year,
18:49:28 From there, asking me to donate money, vote for this candidate, vote against that candidate.
18:49:36 save the whales. Doesn’t make any difference what it is.
18:49:39 All kinds of lobbying. So, I set up call screening, and the call screening now
18:49:46 will make my phone vibrate in the sense it’s in my pocket. I feel it.
18:49:50 And I look at it, and if it’s from 240 or 301 or 703.
18:49:57 or 202, or any of the.
18:49:59 Baltimore, Washington phone numbers,
18:50:01 I don’t answer it.
18:50:03 Could it be the president calling me? Possibly. Could it be someone telling me that the
18:50:10 withholding my social security, I guess I found out I’m actually only 12, might be.
18:50:15 I don’t care if it’s from that area, I don’t want to hear them.
18:50:19 Because I’ve lived here for eight years now.
18:50:21 I don’t really need to hear them anymore.
18:50:25 So that’s my way of screening is also visual. If I get a phone call, I’ll look at it.
18:50:30 And if it’s from the DC area, I just don’t answer.
18:50:36 I’m not recommending that you necessarily do that.
18:50:41 But.
18:50:42 You know, there are different… you have to deal with.
18:50:45 You have to deal with telecommunications.
18:50:48 In your own, um, in your own way.
18:50:53 It’s… it is a problem.
18:50:55 By the way, the FCC
18:51:00 was within 60 days of implementing a rule that required.
18:51:06 The phone companies not to pass through a call unless it was from a valid number.
18:51:11 A lot of these spammers, they use invalid numbers.
18:51:15 You’ll see that the call says it’s from South Dakota. Why? Because there’s a line in South Dakota is not being used. So they say it’s.
18:51:23 from that phone number.
18:51:25 They were within 60 days of making that a rule, because the phone companies have the technology to do this right now, so that
18:51:32 Somebody places a call, they place a text message to you,
18:51:37 The phone company can instantly check to see if it’s from a valid
18:51:40 Phone number. They were within 60 days of doing that,
18:51:45 And the current administration vacated the rule.
18:51:49 So.
18:51:50 Uh, there was relief… there was a technological solution that had nothing to do with your phone.
18:51:56 And, um, they cut it off.
18:52:00 By the time.
18:52:01 It’s… the technology is there.
18:52:04 And in most countries, they don’t allow
18:52:07 companies to do what they do in the United States.
18:52:12 Such is life.
18:52:15 Any other questions?
18:52:17 Now that you’ve heard my rant against…
18:52:19 spam phone calls.
18:52:23 Well, I’m having…
18:52:27 So I have an iPhone 17, and then I’ve got my Mac Mini, which is great.
18:52:33 And then I have an iPad error. They’re all relatively new.
18:52:38 For some reason, my iPad error does not get the emails.
18:52:42 Even though when I go to the iCloud,
18:52:47 Everything appears to be okay.
18:52:49 But I cannot, and I also cannot check emails on my phone.
18:52:54 And I don’t understand why.
18:53:02 And I just used to be so be able to figure this out in the 80s.
18:53:08 with Apple, but now it’s beyond me. I just can’t figure it out.
18:53:11 Uh, but my first question is, what company…
18:53:15 Do you have an iCloud account, or do you have an AOL account or?
18:53:20 I have iCloud, but, you know, I’ve got OliPen for Internet, and I’ve got for my
18:53:27 email, and I’ve got…
18:53:29 T-Mobile for my phone.
18:53:32 Okay, the only pen is for your internet, but it’s… but do you have an email account with OliPen?
18:53:39 Yes.
18:53:41 Okay.
18:53:43 This has nothing against Olipan as a company because I’m actually quite impressed with them.
18:53:50 But OliPen is an email address is not a really great idea.
18:53:54 And the reason is that they are…
18:53:57 a local.
18:53:59 Yeah.
18:53:59 company, which means that if internet access for any reason is cut off from the peninsula.
18:54:05 You don’t get anything.
18:54:06 That’s right.
18:54:08 Apple and Gmail and Microsoft are all global.
18:54:12 Yeah.
18:54:12 In fact, on the space station, they use iCloud.
18:54:16 for email on the space station.
18:54:19 Uh, which isn’t even on this planet.
18:54:22 But, um, Olipan has a limitation because of that.
18:54:25 Other ones that I’m not terribly happy with people using in this day and age are
18:54:30 AOL. AOL dates back to the days, well.
18:54:35 AOL took over email accounts from CompuServe in the 1990s.
18:54:40 And they got really big, and then they got sold, and then got sold again, and they got sold again.
18:54:45 And eventually they acquired by Verizon. Verizon just wanted their customer lists.
18:54:51 And then they sold it to, right now, it’s owned by an Italian.
18:54:54 holding company. They’re spending no money at all on the infrastructure to AOL, so AOL is just.
18:55:02 Not a good choice. Yahoo is not a good choice.
18:55:05 Um, you basically want to… for email, and things where you really do.
18:55:11 when to get your mail. You want to stick with iCloud, you want to stick with…
18:55:16 Microsoft, you want to stick with Google.
18:55:19 And, among other things, they are.
18:55:22 They are global presences, so…
18:55:26 You can be in Spain, you can be in.
18:55:30 forks, and you can get email, assuming that you have internet access.
18:55:35 With Olipen, it’s a little bit rockier.
18:55:38 But in terms of why they’re not showing up on your phone,
18:55:43 and your.
18:55:46 Thank you.
18:55:44 And I think I… I think I know why. I had figured it out, I forgot.
18:55:50 That one of them is an IMAP.
18:55:55 IMAP, and another one is put in as a Pop 3.
18:55:59 And in the addresses in the, you know, email accounts,
18:56:04 And nobody can figure out how to change it.
18:56:08 Well, that’s another reason why I.
18:56:11 recommend Google or Microsoft or Apple because they’re all.
18:56:17 IMAP.
18:56:17 So when you say Google, are you talking about Gmail?
18:56:20 Gmail, yes.
18:56:22 Okay, okay.
18:56:23 And when you say iCloud, because I have an iCloud account,
18:56:29 Yeah.
18:56:29 and then when you say Microsoft, what is that outlook?
18:56:34 Uh, yes, Outlook.
18:56:35 Okay. Okay.
18:56:39 Okay, thank you.
18:56:44 Other questions?
18:56:47 I do not. Hey.
18:56:49 Any other questions?
18:56:51 Does anybody have Starlink?
18:56:55 No?
18:56:57 Yeah, Starlink is…
18:57:02 I know some people who have Starlink that really like it.
18:57:06 But they’re people who…
18:57:08 um, aren’t anywhere near…
18:57:11 Scrim or Port Angeles, they’re out.
18:57:14 on the side of a mountainside someplace, or something like that.
18:57:18 The good news, bad news with Starlink is that.
18:57:22 It’s not a uniform service.
18:57:24 And the other thing is that it’s really good at.
18:57:28 things being broadcast to you, it’s not so great.
18:57:32 about things where you’re doing things interactively.
18:57:36 Um, and part of that is because it’s a satellite service, and the satellite has very little power.
18:57:41 It just doesn’t have a lot of bandwidth.
18:57:44 If you think about it, when Comcast and a bunch of other people got into the
18:57:49 Internet business. They’re very good at delivering things to you.
18:57:54 Uh, like wavetable.
18:57:56 The download speed that you can get from wave cable around here, you can get a gigabyte a second, which is really, really fast.
18:58:04 But the upload going the other direction, is
18:58:07 Just a tiny fraction of that.
18:58:09 Why? It’s because they’re a cable television concern.
18:58:13 They sent identical content out to lots of people.
18:58:17 But email is not identical. Any email you send off is a one-on-one.
18:58:23 And they just don’t have the upload bandwidth going the other direction. Starlink has the same problem.
18:58:29 That unique content going out the other way tends to be quite slow and less reliable.
18:58:36 Um…
18:58:37 And and there’s no easy fix for that.
18:58:41 DISH, for example,
18:58:43 A lot of people have DISH. DISH can send you a TV signal, but when you send something back, it actually goes over phone lines.
18:58:51 So that’s even slower.
18:58:54 It’s just a.
18:58:57 It’s just a… it’s a combination of physics and what you can do with telecommunications.
18:59:03 Would you recommend…
18:59:06 an Internet provider on the peninsula.
18:59:09 I mean, like I said, I have OliPen,
18:59:12 Just for the Internet, but…
18:59:15 Who would you recommend?
18:59:17 If you look at a topographical map of.
18:59:21 of Clallam County, I will tell you that that’s why I can’t recommend anything.
18:59:27 when you’re in Seattle, Seattle might be very lumpy.
18:59:31 But Seattle has over a million people.
18:59:33 And so they have an extensive infrastructure.
18:59:36 Telecommunications infrastructure. We don’t.
18:59:40 Um, if you think about.
18:59:42 How people get here. People come here via 101.
18:59:45 Is there an alternative to 101? Nope.
18:59:51 And our telecommunications are the same way. There’s…
18:59:54 Very limited access in and there’s.
18:59:56 Uh, very limited access going the other way.
18:59:59 And when it comes to telecommunications provider,
19:00:02 If you’re in downtown Sequim, Olypin does a really good job.
19:00:06 But Oli pins completely unavailable where I am.
19:00:10 Hmm.
19:00:10 And there’s even.
19:00:14 the PUD even has fiber optic that they offer.
19:00:17 downtown. High-speed fiber optic.
19:00:20 But if you’re outside of those 8, 10 block area.
19:00:23 They don’t have it. So I can’t really recommend.
19:00:27 I can’t recommend one recommendation.
19:00:31 Okay.
19:00:29 I have a friend out on…
19:00:32 Uh, what’s the name of that?
19:00:36 on Palo Alto.
19:00:38 that.
19:00:40 She uses…
19:00:45 Hughes, which is a satellite.
19:00:48 And the downlink is okay. The uplink is just absolutely atrocious.
19:00:53 She jokingly says that.
19:00:55 It would be easier for her to get in her truck and drive to my place.
19:00:58 to hand me something than to send me an email.
19:01:02 It just depends upon where you live.
19:01:04 Because it’s just not a.
19:01:06 We don’t have a uniform infrastructure here. It’s very…
19:01:11 It’s very broken up.
19:01:13 And I very much like the fact that I can wake up in the morning and eat breakfast and look at.
19:01:21 Doze and fawns and my.
19:01:24 Uh, in my backyard.
19:01:26 But that doesn’t mean I have the same high-speed internet that I was used to when I was in suburban Maryland.
19:01:34 I had a gig up and a gig down.
19:01:38 And I don’t think if there’s any place in the county that has that.
19:01:43 So.
19:01:45 Um… .
19:01:45 There are some areas that are served better, like,
19:01:48 For instance, since we have
19:01:51 Verizon, uh, for our…
19:01:53 Phone service, and we get a fairly good signal here.
19:01:57 Um, we use their service for our internet as well.
19:02:01 I kind of don’t like putting all my eggs in one basket, but that’s what we’ve wound up with.
19:02:06 There’s also another one that we used before that. They have fiber optics that ran into the neighborhood,
19:02:13 to one house, and then that house
19:02:16 agreed to put up a, um…
19:02:20 a short radio type of a system that covers our neighborhood, which is
19:02:25 This is somewhat smaller than your neighborhood, I believe, and uh…
19:02:29 But it’s like 50 houses, or 50 lots here, and uh, so it covers all that pretty well, but…
19:02:36 Um, and we were happy with that.
19:02:39 the heck, it’s not… it’s not Nokia with that. It’s, uh…
19:02:43 I’ve been trying to think of the name, but…
19:02:46 It just depends on your particular area, who can service you well.
19:02:52 You might check with your neighbors.
19:02:54 Yeah, unfortunately, that’s the…
19:02:57 That is the answer.
19:02:59 When I moved here, I was on AT&T. Kathleen had a discount because she was in the military and they offered a really good discount.
19:03:07 So we’d had AT&T since we…
19:03:11 First got cell phones, and we moved into this house, and we couldn’t get a signal at all.
19:03:16 And not having to signal on your cell phone in your own home.
19:03:20 really torqued me off, so we switched to Verizon.
19:03:23 Is Verizon better?
19:03:25 Well, where I am, yes, but…
19:03:28 2 miles away, maybe not.
19:03:32 Right.
19:03:32 It’s, um… I can’t give you… I can’t give you a.
19:03:35 uniform answer, because it depends… because our.
19:03:38 Our topology is so…
19:03:40 convoluted.
19:03:42 Well, if I have the OliPen,
19:03:44 But I also have a Gmail account.
19:03:47 So, which I never use,
19:03:49 But if I lost the OliPen because…
19:03:53 Something happened on the peninsula, I could still use my Gmail.
19:03:57 We accept that you’re not thinking about this the way you should.
19:04:01 If you lost your early pin, you don’t have Gmail either, because nobody’s using the Gmail.
19:04:06 That’s right, that’s right, yeah.
19:04:09 We’ll be an island, yeah.
19:04:11 Please.
19:04:11 So, if you went to do something like that, you need to start using it immediately.
19:04:16 Yeah.
19:04:16 And I have a friend who has an AOL account.
19:04:19 And I set up the AOL account so it automatically sends… it forwards everything that comes into the AOL account.
19:04:26 to our Gmail account, because that way when it comes to her,
19:04:30 when she responds, it may have… they may have sent it to AOL, but the response will go to the Gmail, so then the next time they send a message.
19:04:37 It’ll go to their Gmail. So just gradually, over time.
19:04:42 The AOL will be irrelevant.
19:04:44 Okay.
19:04:44 And that’s the same thing you can do with the Olipen. Just set it up to
19:04:48 Okay.
19:04:49 Auto-forward to Gmail.
19:04:50 And then just respond from Gmail, and after a while, people just…
19:04:54 Use your Gmail.
19:04:56 Okay. Thank you.
19:04:58 And it’s after 7. Yes.
19:05:04 Michael said that he’s not our president, but does our non-president have a report to?
19:05:09 Provide the rest of us.
19:05:13 I think
19:05:13 Did you set up the, uh…
19:05:16 the attendance sheet.
19:05:18 Yes, I did, um, but I did not log into my
19:05:23 email to you, give you that address. So, let’s try doing that.
19:05:35 I somehow lost.
19:05:37 My video.
19:05:47 We see you just fine.
19:05:50 Yeah, but I.
19:05:52 I
19:05:56 I was just moving something out of the way.
19:05:59 And Zoom decided… oh, there you are!
19:06:04 Uh, I’m trying to log into my email so that I can.
19:06:19 Get your… the meeting link.
19:06:27 Oh, and I was trying to remember what that other
19:06:31 service that we had was, and it’s, uh…
19:06:34 Uh, Nicola.
19:06:36 Nicole is good if you’re in a specific area covered by them, so you could try that as well.
19:06:50 And I believe the charge was, like, $80 a month for it, and we get our Verizon for…
19:06:56 Uh, 45 a month, so…
19:06:59 It made sense to make the move.
19:07:01 Yeah.
19:07:02 Um, I did set up an attendance link and I can’t reach it because I’m not in my
19:07:07 own account, I’m in my fake user account.
19:07:11 And my fake user doesn’t have access to my…
19:07:14 Vice President accounts, so…
19:07:16 Heck.
19:07:20 That’s my.
19:07:23 summary here, just heck.
19:07:31 Um…
19:07:32 The schedule said that we were going to talk about spaces.
19:07:36 And about…
19:07:40 Apple intelligence and Siri, um…
19:07:44 AI. And we’re not going to do that because…
19:07:48 I’m suffering from a concussion, and…
19:07:51 Just found.
19:07:53 life difficult, but…
19:07:56 I want to at least explain what I’m talking about.
19:07:59 On Mac, if you have a laptop, you have a limited amount of screen space.
19:08:04 And if you went to do something complicated, pretty soon you run out of spaces to tuck things away.
19:08:10 And the Mac operating system has built-in ways of
19:08:14 of handling that, including…
19:08:17 virtual screens that you don’t normally see, but you can flick to those.
19:08:21 other screens to do things.
19:08:24 And you can also have overlapping windows. If any of you have ever used Windows.
19:08:29 Windows, when you bring up an application that occupies the entire window.
19:08:34 And on the Mac, no, you can tile it so you can have multiple things open at once.
19:08:39 Um, and I wanted to talk about that because I’ve seen several people recently.
19:08:43 run into problems because they just couldn’t get everything they wanted to do.
19:08:48 on screen at once.
19:08:50 And I wanted to show different ways of doing that. For example, the, uh…
19:08:55 The current Mac operating system,
19:08:58 If you shove a window up to the top,
19:09:02 menu bar, it’ll actually offer to put that in a different space.
19:09:07 And a lot of you have never done that, or you didn’t know what it was trying to do, so I was going to demonstrate that, but I just.
19:09:14 Uh, I’m not up to that today, so instead I’m talking about
19:09:18 Apple Intelligence.
19:09:20 And about what Apple did at their keynote.
19:09:24 Um… last week?
19:09:26 Last week. Um…
19:09:29 First thing, a couple things about the Worldwide Developer Conference. It’s called WWDC, which people think makes it sound like a…
19:09:37 A rock concert, and to some extent it is.
19:09:40 They broadcast it for free. It used to be that you had to travel down to.
19:09:45 San Francisco and pay to stay there for a week.
19:09:49 But now they broadcast it for free and all the sessions.
19:09:52 You can get online.
19:09:55 It is a software developer conference, and…
19:09:58 Anyone want to venture a guess as to how many software developers work… how many software developers work on Apple.
19:10:06 products.
19:10:10 Like, is it 10,000?
19:10:15 I heard that they had…
19:10:18 a thousand…
19:10:20 Um, um, app…
19:10:23 app.
19:10:28 People turned in a thousand,
19:10:31 apps an hour to them for
19:10:33 You know, trying to get him into the system.
19:10:36 Yeah. They run about 1,000 apps, new apps or revised apps, an hour.
19:10:41 Yeah, that’s…
19:10:42 There are 10 million people
19:10:45 who have a developer accounts, and I happen to be one of them.
19:10:49 Do I actually develop stuff for Apple? No.
19:10:53 I got a developer account because when I worked for the government.
19:10:56 I wanted to make sure that what Apple was doing wouldn’t break things that I was creating.
19:11:02 for the general public. So I would download the latest software, I’d play with it.
19:11:08 figure out what the bugs were, figure out things that I liked, things I didn’t like.
19:11:13 lobby Apple to change the things I didn’t like.
19:11:16 And so that’s how I got involved in this. But do I regularly develop software for?
19:11:22 Apple products, so the answer is no.
19:11:26 Um, but, um…
19:11:27 Anyway, so they now have the worldwide developer conference so they can.
19:11:34 have these seminars that last an entire week to talk about.
19:11:38 What Apple’s going to be doing in the future.
19:11:40 And the focus is mostly on software.
19:11:43 They have, on occasion, introduced new hardware.
19:11:46 Um, this year…
19:11:48 They didn’t introduce any new hardware at all, which is unusual.
19:11:52 There wasn’t any announcement of any kind of new hardware at all.
19:11:56 But the software developer, the keynote,
19:12:01 did talk about something that I’ve mentioned previously when I was talking about.
19:12:04 Apple Intelligence, I said that
19:12:07 I wanted Apple to work on.
19:12:11 making Apple Intelligence more powerful, yes.
19:12:14 But I also didn’t want them to abandon.
19:12:17 the emphasis they have on privacy and security.
19:12:22 If you go into ChatGPT, or you go into Anthemorphic, or you go into…
19:12:28 Cloud, or you go into Fireflyer.
19:12:30 Any of the other AI models out there.
19:12:33 When you submit a question or you give it a paper to look at or whatever you do,
19:12:41 They keep that.
19:12:43 They use that information to train their models.
19:12:48 And I don’t want to do that.
19:12:50 Uh, there are good reasons not to want to do that. For example.
19:12:53 There’s a case right now in South Carolina, North Carolina, I don’t remember exactly where.
19:13:00 of this lawyer who found out that his spouse was going to divorce him.
19:13:05 Because she had uploaded.
19:13:09 a draft of the, uh…
19:13:11 Her divorce decree.
19:13:13 into an AI model, and he had seen it.
19:13:17 and tried to kill her.
19:13:20 Well, I’m not planning on killing anyone, nor do I really want anyone to try and kill me.
19:13:25 But I really don’t want any of my personal information.
19:13:29 to be on Google, to be on.
19:13:33 meta to be any of those places.
19:13:35 And I’m fairly… I have a lot of practice at keeping my.
19:13:39 personal information outside of.
19:13:44 outside of the public domain.
19:13:45 Now, if you go into…
19:13:48 Google, and you type in my name,
19:13:50 If you put my name in quotes, quote, Lawrence Charters quote.
19:13:54 Type it in, press return, you’ll see lots and lots of things about me.
19:13:58 But those are things that I choose to have out there.
19:14:01 I don’t want them to know anything about my personal business.
19:14:05 And so I don’t want them to use that for training.
19:14:09 I did not want Apple…
19:14:12 To expand their AI.
19:14:16 offerings at the expense of.
19:14:19 individuals’ privacy and security.
19:14:22 And I was extremely pleased at what I saw in the keynote.
19:14:27 But I’m going to show you a…
19:14:31 a, um…
19:14:33 a keynote presentation that I did, different than Apple’s keynote.
19:14:37 Uh, in which I talk about
19:14:38 what they talked about at the
19:14:41 At the developers conference, but then I’m going to focus particularly about
19:14:45 how Apple is doing artificial intelligence.
19:14:49 and how it’s doing it in a way that’s actually useful to people.
19:14:53 Artificial intelligence, a lot of people say, I have no use of artificial intelligence.
19:14:59 Which isn’t true at all.
19:15:01 Um, I don’t know if you’ve ever used Microsoft Word and had it correct your grammar.
19:15:05 It’ll go through and it’ll do things that looks like your Christmas tree. It’ll have things red and green and blue.
19:15:11 Saying, you didn’t do this, you didn’t do that, and you can go through, it’s up to you to actually fix those things. It’s not…
19:15:17 rewriting it for you. But it’s up to you to go and fix those things.
19:15:21 And there’s a company out called Grammarly that does the same thing with things that you do.
19:15:26 On the web, works within your web browser,
19:15:28 And as you’re typing in a response to somebody on a website, it’ll sit there and say,
19:15:34 Um, you should put a comma here and
19:15:36 do all kinds of things.
19:15:38 Those are…
19:15:40 Most of the tools that people use, that people would call artificial intelligence.
19:15:45 I would say that the not really, but it’s getting there.
19:15:48 Because most of the artificial intelligence tools.
19:15:51 that we currently have are actually offshoots of that.
19:15:56 They’re offshoots of these.
19:15:58 grammar checkers that, uh…
19:16:00 have been going around. When I have to admit that when, uh…
19:16:04 I wrote my first word processor, the first word processor on a computer that I ever saw.
19:16:09 was one that I wrote. And when a commercial one came out,
19:16:13 A few months later, I told my spouse that I was going to buy it, and she said, why? And I said,
19:16:18 It has a spell checker.
19:16:20 I was an editor of a magazine, I was editor of newspapers. One thing editors know right off the bat
19:16:28 They can’t edit their own stuff.
19:16:30 Because I knew what I was writing.
19:16:32 And so I will go through and I’ll have misspellings all over the place that I don’t notice.
19:16:37 I noticed it in somebody else’s work, but I don’t notice it in mine.
19:16:40 So a spell checker to me was a godsend because it made it sound like I actually knew
19:16:46 how to spell. And that was the first sort of artificial intelligence. Is it really artificial intelligence? No.
19:16:54 Because as an example.
19:16:56 This one guy said that, uh…
19:16:59 His interest was piqued.
19:17:02 when he saw such and such. He spelled peaked, P-E-A-E
19:17:06 K-E-D.
19:17:07 Well, that is a peak, but it’s not the kind that the same as peaked your interest.
19:17:13 And I made fun of this for several weeks before he caught on to the fact that.
19:17:18 I was using three different versions of the word peaked.
19:17:22 to make fun of him, and he didn’t understand why I was doing that.
19:17:27 But he eventually caught on.
19:17:28 So I’m going to show you a presentation.
19:17:31 It’s got a lot of text.
19:17:34 You feel free to stop and ask questions.
19:17:38 But I’m going to show my screen.
19:17:40 As soon as I remember how to do that.
19:17:46 How about this one?
19:17:49 And…
19:17:51 What do you see right now?
19:17:55 Any.
19:17:55 We see a space background with, uh, with, uh…
19:17:59 Um, weather stuff on it.
19:18:01 Okay.
19:18:01 You got the weather, the widget, the weather widget.
19:18:04 Yeah.
19:18:03 the weather widget. Okay, we can shrink that down, because we don’t really…
19:18:09 Although I have to admit, I like the weather.
19:18:11 better today than yesterday.
19:18:14 Yeah.
19:18:14 Yep.
19:18:19 I’m not going to do this full screen, because when I was doing this full screen,
19:18:24 I found out there’s an artifact that I didn’t like, so I’m going to…
19:18:31 You’re going to see my navigation off here on the side.
19:18:35 Um the.
19:18:40 We’re not gonna do spaces, we’ll do that some other time. They introduced a lot of things at the Worldwide Developer Conference.
19:18:48 And I’m going to go through about 100 and some odd of them fairly quickly.
19:18:53 These are things that they improved in OS 27.
19:18:57 One thing they were very consistent about this year.
19:18:59 is they called it OS 27.
19:19:01 Even though the Mac operating system has a new name,
19:19:06 It’s macOS 27.
19:19:08 Golden Gate is the name of the next version of the operating system.
19:19:12 They still referred to things as OS 27, because the changes that they’re making
19:19:16 The improvements tend to be for the
19:19:20 iPhone, the iPad, Mac OS.
19:19:23 Vision OS in all of them, so…
19:19:26 I’ve highlighted some things that I think are intriguing,
19:19:29 In yellow, like, for example, more relevant spotlight searches, but they have just a whole bunch of things.
19:19:36 And here’s one screen.
19:19:37 And here’s another screen.
19:19:40 And here’s another screen, and I’m not going to bother to stomp on all of these because
19:19:45 There are a lot of screens.
19:19:47 But I will put my…
19:19:49 PowerPoint slide up on the…
19:19:54 a straight Mac.
19:19:55 Lawrence, Lawrence.
19:19:57 I just want to say, if you’re…
19:20:01 I don’t know how our… probably everyone else feels the same. If you’re not up to doing this, I mean,
19:20:05 A concussion is a big deal.
19:20:08 You know.
19:20:08 Oh, this is… no, it was doing something…
19:20:14 additional that was a strain. I’m actually doing okay today.
19:20:16 Okay, all right. Just want to make sure.
19:20:20 But anyway, there are just a lot of things, and I’m not going to go through all of them, but uh.
19:20:25 One of them, for example, that I’m really intrigued with is that you can set
19:20:29 Different levels.
19:20:32 audio levels for alarms, so that
19:20:35 For example, in the morning, I like to wake up, I, my
19:20:40 watch. Doesn’t sound an alarm, my watch tickles my wrist, and that’s… that’s fine, because it’s.
19:20:45 wakes me up, but it doesn’t alarm me.
19:20:48 But for other things, like I’m going to go in for a.
19:20:52 a CAT scan on Thursday to check on my concussion.
19:20:57 For that, I want to make sure that I don’t miss that appointment, so I want that alarm to be something that I won’t ignore.
19:21:04 Whereas another one, which is, remember to take out the trash.
19:21:08 Yeah, that’s important, but it’s not time specific, so that can just be a general.
19:21:12 you know, alarm. And you’ll be allowed to change the alarm
19:21:18 volume for different types of alarms, depending upon what it is you want. Not different types, for different alarms.
19:21:23 And so there are lots of different things that you can do.
19:21:26 Another change, one that I even highlighted here was that
19:21:29 A lot of the operating system changes in the past,
19:21:33 have been for Apple’s apps alone.
19:21:37 So that if you were using Safari and they made some security thing, it would apply just to Safari.
19:21:43 Well, with the next version, a lot of the things they’re going to do work with third-party apps as well.
19:21:49 And one, for example, is
19:21:51 Support media sharing from third-party apps.
19:21:55 Well, if somebody sent you something in Google Photos,
19:21:58 And you’d like it to be in Apple Photos, you can get it, but sometimes.
19:22:03 You have to go through several steps in order to have it.
19:22:05 So, I don’t know exactly what this is going to look like when it’s finally delivered, but.
19:22:11 The idea of making it easier to.
19:22:15 share, uh, media between different applications. It sounds like a good idea to me.
19:22:21 Um, and this has, like, 160, or… I don’t remember how many.
19:22:25 And I just… there’s a…
19:22:27 During the keynote, they flashed this up on screen with these… it’s one screen.
19:22:32 that has these boxes of text floating through it.
19:22:37 And somebody captured that and wrote them all out, and I just stuck them into a slide.
19:22:44 What OS set 27 will work on? It’ll work on pretty much anything that’s got an Apple Silicon chip.
19:22:51 It will not work on anything prior to that.
19:22:55 So if you have an Intel-based
19:22:57 iMac, or you have an Intel-based
19:22:59 MacBook, uh, it’s not going to work on that.
19:23:04 And there are some technical reasons for that, but…
19:23:07 That is, this is basically the end of the, um…
19:23:12 Intels. And I have an Intel-based…
19:23:15 iMac Pro that, uh…
19:23:19 Um, that I’m really sorry that I won’t be able to do these things on.
19:23:23 on that machine anymore, but that machine is also 8 years old, so, you know.
19:23:29 It’s stood in good use.
19:23:33 But anyway, anything that’s running Apple Silicon,
19:23:36 OS 27 will work on it.
19:23:40 There are some caveats, which I’ll get to in a second.
19:23:44 Uh, iPads that can use OS 27 are pretty much
19:23:49 Any of the current machines and going back
19:23:53 several generations as well.
19:23:56 Like, for example, my iPad Mini has an A17.
19:24:01 Pro chips, so it can work, but the previous version of it
19:24:04 I will not. But it’s a fairly broad range.
19:24:10 iPhones that can use OS 27. This goes back to iPhone 11, which is something of a surprise.
19:24:17 Because the chip in an iPhone 11 is really quite ancient.
19:24:21 And I think the reason why they did this was that.
19:24:25 Uh, last year, when Apple promised that a lot of stuff was coming out for Apple Intelligence.
19:24:32 they didn’t actually deliver.
19:24:33 So this is kind of a makeup for that. They’re going to.
19:24:36 have it go back farther. But there are going to be some caveats to that.
19:24:41 Which is basically the more powerful of the hardware, probably the more benefits you’re going to get from it.
19:24:47 So an iPhone 11, yeah, it’ll probably run iOS… it’ll probably run OS.
19:24:53 27, but will it be able to do that with all the bells and whistles?
19:24:57 I don’t think so.
19:25:00 There’s a technical summary of…
19:25:03 One way in which Apple is doing this new intelligence model.
19:25:07 And it’s on Apple’s website at this address, which you don’t have to copy down, because I’ll put it on the website.
19:25:13 But it’s basically a quick overview.
19:25:17 of how they go about doing that, but I have some flowcharts for that as well that I’ll…
19:25:22 that you won’t understand, but I’m going to show you anyway.
19:25:27 The 2 things that…
19:25:29 came across most powerfully in the keynote was that
19:25:33 Apple Intelligence and Siri AI.
19:25:36 are going to emphasize privacy and security.
19:25:41 That when you basically…
19:25:43 Ask your phone or your iPad or your Mac to go out and do something, or find something,
19:25:50 Basically, the only people on the planet are gonna know about it are you and your device.
19:25:57 One thing that Apple…
19:25:59 could not do as well as Google.
19:26:02 was Google has a really good artificial intelligence.
19:26:07 technology called Gemini.
19:26:09 It’s had different names, and it’ll probably have new names in the future, but it’s called Gemini.
19:26:16 And.
19:26:18 what I think they spent this last year doing was coming up with a.
19:26:23 Contractual relationship with, uh…
19:26:26 Google that allows
19:26:28 Apple to have Google on the back end,
19:26:32 But only after the stuff has been anonymized. In other words,
19:26:37 You send a request off to your phone saying,
19:26:41 Who was president in 1827? Your phone doesn’t know that. He goes out and asks Apple. Apple may not know who the president was in 1827.
19:26:50 It asks Google, but when it asked Google, it doesn’t say,
19:26:55 who’s asking the question.
19:26:56 And it doesn’t keep the answer.
19:26:59 So Google responds, sends it off to Apple.
19:27:02 Apple sends it back to you, and then Apple gets rid of the fact that that transaction ever took place.
19:27:10 So, yes?
19:27:10 Lawrence, I had a question. What about…
19:27:12 When you’re interacting with Siri,
19:27:16 Um, and you’re having a conversation
19:27:20 Does Siri is going to remember
19:27:23 The first part of the conversation,
19:27:25 to be able to answer maybe a second part, and where’s that information saved so that Siri knows
19:27:32 What you’re saying…
19:27:34 The answer to that is… I don’t know exactly. I heard.
19:27:39 They talked about that a bit.
19:27:41 But there’s a… there are two different parts to…
19:27:44 Apple intelligence, the way that Apple is doing it. And one reason why they came up with Siri AI.
19:27:51 In the past, when you wanted to go to ChatGPT.
19:27:57 You would go into your browser, usually,
19:28:00 And you go to the ChatGPT site and you type in whatever you wanted, and it would come back.
19:28:06 in your browser.
19:28:08 Apple is pushing that more into Siri, so you would ask Siri a question.
19:28:15 Siri, if it knows the answer, would give you the answer.
19:28:18 Like, what is my name? It’ll tell you what your name is.
19:28:22 What day of the week is it? It’ll tell you that. What time is it? Tell you all kinds of things. Where do I live? Knows that.
19:28:28 all kinds of things it knows.
19:28:30 But for things it doesn’t know and has to go out.
19:28:33 That’s when it would talk to Google.
19:28:37 Will it remember the question?
19:28:39 If it was something that…
19:28:41 that Siri knew the answer to already.
19:28:45 And you’re asking a follow-up to that, the answer is probably yes.
19:28:49 If it’s something that it did not know, and
19:28:52 It doesn’t it sent that out someplace else and you ask a follow up question. You might have to repeat part of the follow-up question.
19:29:00 Because it can… it looks like it will have the ability to follow up.
19:29:05 questions that it is in control of.
19:29:07 But if it has to go elsewhere, I’m not sure that that’s going to happen.
19:29:10 But I also heard it was going to…
19:29:14 Uh, know what is currently on your screen,
19:29:17 Yes.
19:29:18 And where is that being stored?
19:29:21 Again, that’s actually taking place on your device.
19:29:25 Your device knows what’s on the screen.
19:29:28 They’ve had that character recognition software for quite some time now, so it can read what’s on your screen.
19:29:33 And if it knows that that’s a picture of your daughter, for example,
19:29:36 And you can say, oh, what is her birthday?
19:29:40 And if it knows that that’s your daughter, because it’s on your machine and it knows that’s your daughter,
19:29:45 It can say, oh, her birthday is, and it looks it up and…
19:29:48 whatever record that it has, again, on your machine.
19:29:51 That’s why it’s important to understand exactly who’s doing the work.
19:29:56 You have a staggering amount of information about yourself,
19:30:00 on your iPhone.
19:30:02 On your Mac, on your iPad.
19:30:05 So, it can do those kind of follow-ups if it’s something, again, that it can see your screen and it knows you’re doing that.
19:30:11 Like, for example, what you can ask the question that you have a picture of, I don’t know that it can actually do this, but as an example.
19:30:18 You have a picture of a pomegranate. What can you do with it? Well, if it was up to me, you could throw it away, because I don’t like pomegranate.
19:30:24 But it might suggest that you…
19:30:27 make something with that pomegranate, because it knows that that’s a picture of a pomegranate, and it’s on your machine.
19:30:32 If it doesn’t recognize it, it can’t tell the difference between a pomegranate and a
19:30:37 Pomeranian, then it might have to actually go out and ask for things like that. It depends upon what it’s.
19:30:45 what its knowledge base,
19:30:48 can encompass.
19:30:50 And so it’s going to…
19:30:52 It’s looking at privacy and security,
19:30:56 And it’s doing as much of that as possible on your device, because that way it doesn’t even have to go outside.
19:31:01 to ask anybody else.
19:31:04 Have you tried it on the beta version of 27?
19:31:06 I cannot answer that question.
19:31:09 Oh, okay.
19:31:13 This is a kind of a flowchart of how it works.
19:31:18 And again, this is going to be in the slide deck that I put up on the site.
19:31:22 But here is your iPhone or your iPad or your Mac.
19:31:27 You ask it questions. If it’s something that it knows how to do,
19:31:31 It’ll process it on the device,
19:31:34 It figures out…
19:31:36 What parts it might be able to do itself, and what parts it can’t do. If it can do it all itself, it’ll talk to you.
19:31:43 Like, you say, where’s my picture of Timmy? And it knows that Timmy is your.
19:31:48 your cousin, and it brings up a picture of Timmy.
19:31:51 So it can do that all on the phone because it knows all that stuff. Assuming that you’ve ever bothered to tell it.
19:31:56 that that weird guy is your cousin Timmy.
19:32:00 If it doesn’t know what it is, it sends it out to the… over the internet, it’s encrypted.
19:32:07 And it sends it out over to Apple’s private cloud compute, and they call it,
19:32:11 Private Cloud Compute, because it’s a.
19:32:14 It’s Apple Intelligence, but it’s not used by anybody else.
19:32:20 in your instance, other than you. You might be
19:32:23 using their private cloud compute along with a million other people at a time.
19:32:27 But in terms of your question, it’s all in its own little.
19:32:31 Enclave, and it’s not being shared with anybody else.
19:32:35 And if it can come up with the answer, it sends it back to you.
19:32:40 And it’s anonymized. So the apple doesn’t know where it’s coming from, and you don’t know where it’s coming from.
19:32:46 And exactly how that encryption works, don’t worry about that.
19:32:49 how it knows how to send it back to you? Well, it’s sending it from one
19:32:54 key token to another key token. Key tokens generated on the fly.
19:32:58 It says it got it from this address, it sends it back, and then it throws away.
19:33:03 the key, so it doesn’t really have any way of talking to it again.
19:33:05 This is for.
19:33:08 talking between you and Apple.
19:33:11 It’s…
19:33:11 Can you ask for the source of this answer?
19:33:14 Um, I don’t… I don’t know that. For some things you can, but for other things, like if it’s a picture of your cousin Timmy.
19:33:21 And it’s in your photos library, I don’t know if it would tell you that or not. Probably just show you Timmy.
19:33:28 And you could say, hey, he’s out of your Apple Photos. I don’t know what it would do.
19:33:32 Haven’t tried something like that.
19:33:36 If it can’t answer it between your device,
19:33:40 And apples private cloud. It gets a little bit more complicated.
19:33:44 So, your question goes out to Apple’s cloud.
19:33:49 out here, and then if Apple doesn’t… if it needs to get more information like.
19:33:58 Who was the first president who wasn’t born in the United States? Believe it or not, our first several presidents
19:34:02 weren’t born in the United States. So who was the first president who was born in the United States?
19:34:08 Apple might know that, but it probably doesn’t, and it would go out and ask Google.
19:34:13 So when it goes to Google,
19:34:14 It sends the key, this key that it created on the fly to accompany the question,
19:34:21 sends it out to Google,
19:34:23 Google looks for it, parses out the question, figures out what it is.
19:34:27 and then sends it back. When it sends it back,
19:34:31 The… Apple has it in what they call these ephemeral VMNs, virtual
19:34:37 machines.
19:34:39 It uses that to process the request that it gets back from Google, sends it back onto you,
19:34:45 And then it destroys that virtual machine. So it just all goes poof.
19:34:49 Apple doesn’t keep a record of the request, it doesn’t keep a record.
19:34:54 Record of the answer. And Google doesn’t have any information.
19:35:00 from you.
19:35:03 All they have is this anonymous request.
19:35:05 Now, if you happen to send a question that you explicitly identify yourself, like,
19:35:11 uh, did, uh, Law Charters attend the.
19:35:14 1989 Macworld conference.
19:35:17 If that was your question,
19:35:19 And Apple doesn’t know the answer, and it goes out to Google, and Google looks it up and finds out that you’re on the.
19:35:26 You were registered at the 1989 Apple Macworld
19:35:31 conference and sends it back to you, it doesn’t know who answered the question, but it does know that somebody asked that about Lawrence Charters.
19:35:39 Because, yeah, it’s… it’s… it had to know at least that much, so it will know that.
19:35:45 But in terms of who asked the question, what they wanted to use it for, what they’re doing with it, has no idea.
19:35:51 So this is basically how it works. And the keys to this are these keys, these secure keys that it…
19:35:59 that Apple creates, and then Apple destroys.
19:36:02 Those are the things that protect.
19:36:04 your data. When it’s going out,
19:36:06 Google gets nothing. When it comes back, they destroy the key.
19:36:10 And without the key, you have no idea what’s going on.
19:36:13 And these virtual machines, again, after it completes a request, it gets rid of the virtual machine.
19:36:20 And a virtual machine is basically just a pocket of memory that’s
19:36:22 that’s being used on their servers.
19:36:25 And it’s being used for that task, and after that task is over, they just get rid of it, and they reallocate the memory for other things.
19:36:32 So this is basically how it works.
19:36:34 And again, I know this is probably looking…
19:36:36 weird, but it’s how it works.
19:36:39 Kind of gives you some examples.
19:36:42 Um, couple days ago, I was using the AP app on my phone,
19:36:46 And it said, Washington, United States. No article available in your area.
19:36:52 Now, this cracked me up because it actually makes me feel good when there’s no national news about the area that I’m in.
19:37:00 There’s no wildfires, there’s no mass shootings.
19:37:02 There’s no ferry boat that went aground. It’s nice that there’s no, uh…
19:37:09 no news about it. Is this an example of artificial intelligence? And the answer is no.
19:37:14 When you go into the AP News app, you get to specify.
19:37:19 What your areas of interest are. My interests are women’s
19:37:24 basketball. I really like women’s basketball. Washington State.
19:37:28 And a few other things. So I go in there and I specify that. If there’s no news about Washington State, it comes back and says.
19:37:35 No article available in your area. Now, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t articles about lots of other things, but just nothing
19:37:41 That particular moment about Washington State, or about women’s basketball, or whatever it is.
19:37:46 And this is not AI, this is basically just a kind of a list processing, and I’m not on that.
19:37:53 Nothing I wanted was in that particular list at that point.
19:37:57 So this doesn’t take AI, this is just basic computer programming.
19:38:01 Here’s an example of something that says it’s officially Beatles’ first album, Please, Please Me.
19:38:06 was released closer to the 1800s than to the present day, and it shows.
19:38:11 The number of dates from the 1800s till today.
19:38:16 And to the Beatles album and then to today.
19:38:20 And you are.
19:38:22 You are… the Beatles were closer to the 1800s than you were to their first album.
19:38:28 Because we’re getting old, and that was a long time ago.
19:38:31 This is not exactly AI either, because a human came up with the question.
19:38:37 A human figured out the answer. Now, he probably used a computer calendar.
19:38:40 But this is not AI.
19:38:42 It’s a… it’s just a…
19:38:45 Clever question and clever answer.
19:38:47 Here is a chart of where you’re likely to get bear attacks.
19:38:52 And it says, Mercury, Venus, approximately no risk of bear attack.
19:38:57 Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.
19:38:59 Also, no risk of bear attack.
19:39:01 Is this AI? No, this is a cartoon that somebody drew that is 100% correct.
19:39:06 But it’s not artificial.
19:39:09 It’s not artificial intelligence.
19:39:12 And this is a list of all data centers in Europe in the year 1437.
19:39:17 And as you notice, the map is completely blank, it’s just a map of Europe.
19:39:23 And is that AI? No, it’s just a human came up with a way of telling a joke.
19:39:28 And it’s nothing artificial intelligent.
19:39:33 Um, this is… happened on my phone.
19:39:36 I got a message that says Apple Pay wallet protection auto change.
19:39:40 Charge alert for your Apple ID, $537.40, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
19:39:45 It’s got a bunch of verbiage here.
19:39:48 Apple flagged this as…
19:39:50 possibly fraudulent.
19:39:54 But it was up to me to decide that it was spam,
19:39:57 And up to me to press the little button that says delete and report spam.
19:40:02 So it’s not really AI, it’s just Apple’s programming doing what I asked it to do.
19:40:08 I told it to flag suspicious.
19:40:12 messages, and it thought this was suspicious.
19:40:15 So none of that’s AI.
19:40:18 This is the illustration I was going to use for tonight’s talk that I didn’t deliver.
19:40:24 on spaces. And I typed in to, uh…
19:40:27 Google Gemini said I wanted a photograph.
19:40:31 of a penguin being very…
19:40:33 anxious about trying to keep track of what’s on 10.
19:40:37 uh, computer screens.
19:40:39 So it was a puffin.
19:40:43 that was anxious about trying to read 10.
19:40:46 computer screens. And there are actually 11 computer screens, so, hey, I got a bonus.
19:40:51 Plus, a laptop screen, plus an iPad screen and two phones.
19:40:58 So it gave me more than I asked for.
19:41:00 Uh, so we got a penguin, we have a penguin, we have a puffin.
19:41:05 that’s really upset, and if you could zoom in, there’s actually something in here that, oh, it says this, uh…
19:41:10 This coffee cuff back here is.
19:41:13 Puffin Patrol, some nice little things that I didn’t really ask for, but…
19:41:16 It pleases me greatly.
19:41:20 Google Gemini created this photo for me. Is that artificial intelligence?
19:41:26 I’d still say no.
19:41:29 It’s a tool that I used
19:41:31 To create something, and we call it artificial intelligence, but.
19:41:36 I was the one who created the problem.
19:41:38 I was the one who set the parameters of how I wanted it to be,
19:41:42 displayed, and it generated it using…
19:41:46 generative AI, but is it really artificial intelligence?
19:41:51 No, we’ve had the ability to do this. You know, Apple’s been an Apple.
19:41:55 Industrial light and magic has been doing things like this for quite some time.
19:41:59 It’s not really intelligence, but it is what we currently classify as.
19:42:05 AI. Now, the next thing I’m going to show you…
19:42:07 is a little bit more impressive.
19:42:11 Now, I told…
19:42:15 Gemini.
19:42:16 to create a video for me.
19:42:20 of a puffin trying to use an iPhone, trying to answer.
19:42:24 an iPhone and
19:42:27 I hope that this will play, and you can see it.
19:42:40 And we have a very frustrated puffin, because…
19:42:44 It just… it lacks the equipment to…
19:42:48 To, uh, answer the phone.
19:42:50 Now, is this AI? This is really getting close to AI because I just I typed in maybe.
19:42:55 15 words, and it created that video.
19:42:59 And it’s a photorealistic.
19:43:03 Puffin and that’s an identifiable iPhone.
19:43:07 It’s one of the older ones that’s got a mechanical button.
19:43:10 And you didn’t tell it what kind of background you wanted or anything?
19:43:14 No, it kind of… I think Puffin was kind of a dead giveaway.
19:43:18 Oh, yeah, yeah.
19:43:22 Um, so…
19:43:23 That’s the kind of thing that is what I would consider closer to being.
19:43:28 AI. Now,
19:43:30 some things to think about.
19:43:32 If you…
19:43:33 If I do this today, I happen to have a Google…
19:43:38 one account, I can’t remember if that’s what they call it.
19:43:40 It’s a paid account.
19:43:43 with Google, because I have a whole bunch of email, and I’ve got websites, and a bunch of other stuff.
19:43:49 So I’m paying Google for my account.
19:43:53 And if I ask this, I’m sure that because I have a paid account,
19:43:57 I will get a better level of service than people who are doing this for free.
19:44:03 What a lot of these AI companies do is they give you tokens, and you get so many odd tokens for this.
19:44:08 account, and for this level of account, you get more tokens for higher levels, and so on and so forth.
19:44:14 So, how many tokens did I burn up creating that video? Have no idea.
19:44:20 I suspect that for apples.
19:44:24 AI that talks to Google.
19:44:27 that it’s… there’s going to be probably a very basic level that has very little access.
19:44:33 And if you want more, I think it’s probably going to require that you have a
19:44:37 and iCloud Plus account.
19:44:40 The iCloud Plus accounts cost money.
19:44:44 That’s when you want more.
19:44:46 storage for your iCloud. But if you pay for more storage in iCloud, you’ll automatically get things like
19:44:55 The privacy protection on your browser and a bunch.
19:44:59 other things that come at present.
19:45:02 But I think you also probably would get more access to.
19:45:07 Um, um,
19:45:08 Google AI. Why? Because it’s costing.
19:45:12 Google money to do this, and it’s costing Apple money to support this.
19:45:17 So, I suspect that
19:45:19 If you want to do more with AI, you’re going to have to have.
19:45:24 and iCal out plus. That is not clear. They haven’t made that clear.
19:45:29 And it might be a while before.
19:45:33 That’s I have a clear answer on that.
19:45:38 Apple AI limitations. The more powerful your device, the more it can do.
19:45:43 If you look at the amount of RAM,
19:45:46 That’s on an iPhone 17 Pro Max compared to.
19:45:52 that iPhone 11, the iPhone 17 has a lot more memory.
19:45:55 available to it. It also has more storage available to it.
19:46:02 AI is going to require
19:46:04 both memory and storage to do its work.
19:46:08 Because if you ask it a question like.
19:46:11 Uh, how many would, uh, how many
19:46:15 How much wood could a woodchuck of a woodchuck could chuck wood?
19:46:19 That’s a joke.
19:46:21 It’s easy for you to say.
19:46:22 Yes, well, also, I’m not feeling all great that great, so tongue twisters are a little hard.
19:46:27 I, uh, yeah.
19:46:29 But Apple right now can give you an instant answer for that. Why? Because billions of other people have asked that because it’s an obvious thing to try and
19:46:36 trick Siri. But…
19:46:39 in the… if you’re doing this with AI, and you say,
19:46:43 generate me a photograph of this.
19:46:46 That’s going to take storage both
19:46:49 device first. No, thank you.
19:46:51 That’s going to retake storage to actually parse out the question.
19:46:55 It’s going to take storage on your machine,
19:46:59 to send off a.
19:47:01 query to Apple that might send it off to Google and then come back.
19:47:05 It’s going to take RAM, and it’s going to take storage space.
19:47:09 If you have a phone and you look at the iPhone storage,
19:47:13 setting in your settings.
19:47:15 And you’re almost completely maxed out.
19:47:18 You probably are going to have trouble using.
19:47:22 Apple AI, simply because you don’t have enough space on your device.
19:47:26 to work with. So, the more powerful your device,
19:47:29 The more I can do, the more free RAM and more storage you have, the more you can do.
19:47:34 You can do more if you are more skilled and educated.
19:47:39 Um, and I… I’m not doing this because I’m trying to be an elitist.
19:47:43 It’s just that if you have a word processor,
19:47:46 And you have a degree in English.
19:47:48 You probably will be able to use that word processor.
19:47:52 more fluently than someone who is struggling to get out of junior high.
19:47:58 You can do more if you have more imagination. Now, as you might have noticed, I’ve got a thing for.
19:48:04 Penguins and puffins, so…
19:48:07 I can ask them to do ridiculous things.
19:48:10 If you don’t have that tendency and you’re much more linear.
19:48:14 thinker, then you probably won’t be able to do as much.
19:48:18 So, yeah…
19:48:20 I’m just learning a new graphic design program.
19:48:25 And, uh, I’ve never used AI before, but
19:48:29 There’s AI built into it.
19:48:31 And so I can… I’m starting to learn that
19:48:35 Just what you were saying.
19:48:37 And I do have an English degree. But if I can…
19:48:41 describe to this AI thing and type out
19:48:45 Exactly what I am thinking, like the details, using these brand colors and
19:48:50 And it needs to… this is the date, this is the time, and all that, and…
19:48:54 Uh, you know, in the…
19:48:57 format, it’ll spew out several different versions of whatever this thing is that I’m
19:49:03 trying to create. And it is a matter of being able to say it in a
19:49:10 Very clear way. It’s pretty cool, and it… I’m just learning it now, but…
19:49:15 That I… that way of being able to explain it to AI in a way that it can.
19:49:20 Put it back. It’s pretty cool.
19:49:23 What’s the name of the program?
19:49:24 Canva.
19:49:25 Oh, I’m not familiar with that one.
19:49:27 It’s a graphic design program.
19:49:29 Well, yeah, but I use several of them. I just haven’t heard of that one.
19:49:33 Yeah.
19:49:33 A lot of it has to do if you…
19:49:36 If you forget the fact that it’s got the word compute in it,
19:49:40 We don’t actually use…
19:49:43 computers for computations.
19:49:46 Right.
19:49:46 They perform things by doing computations. We use them as communications tool.
19:49:52 My iPhone is sitting in my pocket is a full-blown Unix computer.
19:49:56 more powerful than any Unix computer in the world in 2000, in the year 2000.
19:50:01 I mean, it’s just unbelievably powerful and it wanders around in my pocket.
19:50:05 and answers spam for me.
19:50:07 But we use them as communications devices and not as computers.
19:50:13 However, when it comes to using computers.
19:50:16 The more you can articulate what it is you’re trying to do,
19:50:21 the better luck you’re going to have at actually getting what you… what you want.
19:50:25 That puffin answering the phone, I was astonished that I got what I wanted on my first try.
19:50:31 Uh, the one with the.
19:50:33 puffin and all those screens. That was actually my…
19:50:37 second try. Um…
19:50:38 The first try was okay, but I just… I wanted to tweak it a bit.
19:50:42 But again, being able to figure out
19:50:45 A lot of people, they say, well, uh…
19:50:49 I’ve got tomato soup and I’ve got cheese in the refrigerator.
19:50:54 What can I make with that for dinner?
19:50:57 Well, the answer is probably not a lot, but if you were to give it a few more ingredients to work with,
19:51:02 You can probably ask Gemini or
19:51:05 Apple Intelligence, or Siri,
19:51:07 to come up with a recipe for something.
19:51:10 But you have to be able to provide it with enough building blocks to get something that’s useful.
19:51:16 I can’t remember the movie that I saw, it was many, many years ago.
19:51:16 Yeah.
19:51:20 This woman who had no money at all went into a.
19:51:24 department store.
19:51:26 When they had soda bars,
19:51:29 And she asked for hot water.
19:51:30 And she asked for a catch up.
19:51:32 And she made herself tomato soup.
19:51:35 If you’re desperate, yes, that’s tomato soup, but.
19:51:38 If you have more ingredients and you can more articulate what you want.
19:51:42 Um, you get better results. In her case.
19:51:45 The hot water was free, and the ketchup was free, so that’s what she had. She had tomato soup.
19:51:51 And again, the other thing that I want to say is I don’t know if it’s going to require iCloud Plus to do this.
19:51:57 But a lot of the stuff that they were talking about in terms of the encryption,
19:52:02 is built into iCloud Plus and does not come
19:52:05 with the vanilla version of iCloud.
19:52:08 that you get for free.
19:52:09 Um, so that remains to be seen.
19:52:15 Um, things that you can do with… actually, I should have this other thing out here first.
19:52:22 I’ll get to that.
19:52:24 Things that you can do with the new Apple AI because it’s built into Siri.
19:52:30 Because it’s built into Siri, and Siri can talk to almost anything, including Apple passwords,
19:52:36 One of the things you will be able to do
19:52:37 is go into the password app,
19:52:40 and say, most of us have, if you use Apple passwords for storing passwords.
19:52:45 Most of us have sites that we’ve been to
19:52:48 that have had compromised passwords.
19:52:50 Uh, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve done anything wrong.
19:52:55 With the forthcoming release of OS 27, you’ll be able to ask passwords
19:53:02 to reissue.
19:53:05 to redo all the compromised passwords. It’ll just go through all of them.
19:53:09 And if it’s a weak password, or it’s been compromised, or if it’s been repeated,
19:53:13 It’ll go through all of those and issue new ones.
19:53:17 It does that by logging into the website, going through the security protocol for that site.
19:53:22 Assuming that the site supports this,
19:53:24 And creating a new password, and then logging off.
19:53:27 If you did this by hand, it could take you 20 minutes for each one of these.
19:53:32 Yeah.
19:53:32 So this is a huge, um,
19:53:35 Huge win for sanity.
19:53:38 Um, I would suggest that for a lot of you.
19:53:41 Before you actually tell your Mac or your iPhone to do this.
19:53:45 that you go through your list of passwords and passwords,
19:53:49 And if you’re not using that anymore,
19:53:52 If you’re not using that anymore,
19:53:55 Just delete your account on that, uh, on that site.
19:53:58 There’s no reason to reset the password if you intend to go back there.
19:54:02 And some of these things don’t even exist anymore.
19:54:06 Uh, I found out.
19:54:08 that.
19:54:10 Passwords has an account of mine for CompuServe.
19:54:13 I’m pretty sure CompuServe doesn’t exist anymore.
19:54:16 And I know the source doesn’t exist. The source
19:54:21 Again, it dates back to the…
19:54:23 1990s, and it doesn’t exist anymore.
19:54:25 So just delete those things, and then…
19:54:29 You won’t spend time trying to…
19:54:32 have it contact sites that don’t exist anymore.
19:54:34 But this is going to be something that comes out with OS 27, and I think it’s a…
19:54:38 Huge boost for security.
19:54:40 Another thing that you can do
19:54:43 And as a photographer, I’m not sure that I’m really wild about this.
19:54:48 Um, I take documentary-style photographs. When I take pictures, I take them to document things.
19:54:54 He was a newspaper editor, magazine editor.
19:54:56 And I don’t want to create things that didn’t exist.
19:55:00 So, I’ll go out and I’ll take a photograph, and if that photograph doesn’t work, or whatever, I’ll take another one until I find one that does.
19:55:09 I went up to.
19:55:12 to Vancouver.
19:55:15 BC to see my…
19:55:17 Daughter, granddaughter, and son-in-law.
19:55:18 And I was up there for 10 days, and I took 3,000 photographs.
19:55:23 And of those 3,000 photographs, most of them are never going to see the light of day.
19:55:28 Because I, if I didn’t like something, I’d take another one.
19:55:32 With the new Apple Photos and Apple Intelligence, you can do things that you could not do before. You can
19:55:38 Reframe photographs. So if you took
19:55:41 you’re shooting down on someone.
19:55:43 And you decided it’s better to shoot up,
19:55:46 It’ll allow you to edit in such a way that it looks like you’re shooting upward.
19:55:50 Or if you have…
19:55:52 you’re shooting somebody, and in the background, there’s a palm tree.
19:55:56 And offense, and over on the side, there’s a garage with junk in front of it.
19:56:00 It’ll allow you to extend
19:56:02 The palm trees and other things off to the side to cover up the fact that there’s a
19:56:08 garage there, which is really cool.
19:56:11 I’m not sure that I actually like that because
19:56:14 I like photographs to capture reality rather than to
19:56:19 paper it over with fiction, but…
19:56:21 That’s a cool thing to be able to do.
19:56:24 And it’ll also be able to automatically
19:56:26 Just clean up some things like, uh, over…
19:56:30 exposed spots or underexposed spots.
19:56:35 I haven’t played with this, but it sounds cool.
19:56:38 Even though I have some qualms about it.
19:56:44 going still on photographs with Apple Photos.
19:56:48 When Apple Photos first came out, I didn’t… was not very impressed with it, because I used uh
19:56:53 Lightroom from Adobe, which I think is a much better
19:56:57 package for…
19:56:58 keeping track of photographs.
19:57:01 Photos didn’t impress me, but the new photos.
19:57:05 Uh, over the past several years has gradually gotten to be really quite impressive.
19:57:09 And among other things, with the version coming out this fall.
19:57:14 It’ll allow you to do things like set up… it’ll automatically create a collection
19:57:20 of photographs taken by you.
19:57:21 So it won’t have photographs
19:57:23 that were taken by other people that people have sent to you, or screenshots, or things like that.
19:57:28 It’ll only be things that you took.
19:57:30 And that might be something that you’ll want.
19:57:33 And the other one is you can have identity documents, like,
19:57:37 passports and driver’s licenses and so on and so forth.
19:57:40 things that are, um…
19:57:44 identity documents that you might want to carry with you.
19:57:46 Even if you’re not carrying your wallet, you can still have access to it.
19:57:50 It’ll automatically create a collection of those things.
19:57:53 And all of these collections, by the way, you also can password protect so that if somebody
19:57:58 Grabs your phone, they don’t necessarily have.
19:58:00 Access to this stuff.
19:58:03 So that’s going to be coming out in Photos.
19:58:06 And, um…
19:58:08 Other things you can do that you could not in the pa- that you can’t currently do.
19:58:13 You can ask questions that require data from multiple sources.
19:58:18 I can ask my S…
19:58:22 IRI, to turn on my TV.
19:58:25 And I say SIRI, turn on Dungeness. Dungeness is the name.
19:58:31 of my Apple TV, so it can turn it on.
19:58:34 Once it’s turned on, I can say, launch YouTube TV on Dungeness,
19:58:39 And it launches my list of channels that I have, and so on and so forth.
19:58:45 Well, in the future, you can go beyond that and say, send an alarm for my appointment today at Olympic Medical Center.
19:58:51 Which is using multiple applications at once. It uses your calendar, it uses alarms, uses clock, uses messages.
19:58:58 So it goes through messages to find out what the thing that Olympic Medical Center sent.
19:59:03 It knows it can then examine what time it said,
19:59:06 And it can figure out, okay, I like my alarms 15 minutes in advance, 30 minutes in advance.
19:59:12 And do all of this sort of stuff from multiple different applications at once.
19:59:17 all on your phone or all on your Mac.
19:59:19 Or you can say, notify me when the price drops on the 70 to 300.
19:59:24 zoom lens at Glaser’s camera. Glaser’s camera is a big
19:59:28 camera store in.
19:59:30 in Seattle. And if you…
19:59:32 If you’re a camera person, I highly recommend you never go to Glazers because
19:59:37 You’ll leave poorer than you when you went in. Has just amazing stuff.
19:59:42 But if their website notices a drop in price.
19:59:46 It’ll Safari will check it and say, okay, it had a drop in price and it’ll send me a reminder that there’s a drop in price.
19:59:54 Have I tried this? Have no idea if this is going to actually work the way it’s described.
19:59:58 But I’m intrigued with the possibility.
20:00:01 Show me the photo of Mount Shasta I took last week.
20:00:04 Again, it can do that on your own device without talking anything else.
20:00:08 Assuming it could recognize Mount Shasta,
20:00:12 goes through your photos, looks at Miles Shasta,
20:00:14 And it can bring it up. And Mount Chasta can identify one of two ways. Either you explicitly
20:00:21 stuck a label on it saying, hey, this is Mount Shasta, or it’s looking at the GPS coordinates
20:00:27 on the photo and says, ah,
20:00:29 This is probably Mount Shasta.
20:00:31 But right now, I ask it to do that, and it probably is not going to work.
20:00:36 I can ask photos to do things like…
20:00:38 Show me airplanes. Type in airplanes, shows me a lot of airplanes.
20:00:43 But it will also make mistakes. It’ll give me a picnic table.
20:00:48 Why will I give me a picnic table? It’s got a horizontal surface, it’s got splayed-out legs on it.
20:00:53 Looks like an airplane to Siri.
20:00:57 But I’m assuming that that’s going to get a little bit brighter in the near future.
20:01:03 Being able to articulate questions like that and get useful results.
20:01:09 is something I’m looking forward to.
20:01:13 Another thing that I want to…
20:01:16 that might seem kind of esoteric, but it’s important.
20:01:21 Apple has pretty much…
20:01:23 If you look at the keynote and how they presented this stuff,
20:01:27 Siri is the intelligent assistant that we’ve been using for years.
20:01:31 And Spotlight is the indexing function on the Mac and on your iPhone.
20:01:37 And Apple Intelligence is their cloud name for all of this stuff.
20:01:42 Basically, they’re now collapsing all of these, and the way to do most of this stuff is going to be through Siri.
20:01:49 You want to ask a question, you ask Siri.
20:01:51 And Siri can go out and use Apple Spotlight to find files.
20:01:55 can use Apple Intelligence to.
20:01:57 Ask for information above and beyond what it can find.
20:02:01 But they’re really pushing the fact that Siri’s going to be
20:02:03 The interface for it. Why? It’s because people use Siri all the time.
20:02:10 I use Siri several times a day.
20:02:13 Even on days when I’m not doing that much.
20:02:17 It’s just a… it’s a really…
20:02:21 powerful way of using
20:02:23 a device, especially when you’re busy doing something else. I was washing.
20:02:26 Dishes yesterday, and I had a phone call from a woman who’s.
20:02:31 spouse just died.
20:02:33 And the phone announced that she called, and I told,
20:02:37 Siri, to answer the phone, I could chat with her on the phone while I was washing dishes. Actually, I had to stop washing dishes because
20:02:45 Dishes make an awful lot of noise, you can’t actually talk, but
20:02:47 My hands were still wet.
20:02:50 Okay.
20:02:49 And I could still talk to her.
20:02:52 Didn’t have to touch anything. I could just do that.
20:02:55 with my voice.
20:02:57 Making that the kind of gateway
20:03:00 into doing more things, I think is a huge…
20:03:04 Uh, plus.
20:03:06 Any questions about that? Because I did talk a lot.
20:03:15 Thank you for the graphic thing. That was really very clarifying.
20:03:21 Yes, it was.
20:03:29 The
20:03:31 I will.
20:03:33 post the, um, slides on, uh…
20:03:37 And the
20:03:38 Straight Max site, because again, just the list of…
20:03:42 I don’t know how many pages, 20 pages worth of things that they’re planning on updating.
20:03:48 Those had nothing to do with Apple Intelligence. Those are just things that they are fixing or enhancing.
20:03:55 There are quite a few innovations in women’s health, for example, that they’re adding to.
20:04:01 Um, the iPhone.
20:04:03 into Apple Watch and there are…
20:04:07 just changes to cosmetly.
20:04:09 People have had trouble if they have an iPad,
20:04:12 The iPad now allows you to tile applications on the iPad.
20:04:16 Which was something that they introduced with iPadOS 26.
20:04:20 A lot of people still don’t quite understand how that works.
20:04:24 And they’re making some slight tweaks to the appearance to make it more obvious.
20:04:29 how to do that sort of stuff. Um, and they just…
20:04:33 Literally hundreds of.
20:04:35 changes they’re making to what we have already.
20:04:39 But the big…
20:04:41 message for most of the keynote was that there.
20:04:44 going in with both feet into
20:04:47 intelligence, and they’re doing it in such a way.
20:04:49 that they’re emphasizing privacy and security.
20:04:54 your privacy and your security.
20:04:58 One interesting kind of…
20:05:02 Side effect, though, is that it’s not going to be immediately available in the EU.
20:05:08 Now, the EU, unlike the United States has no privacy laws that apply to corporations.
20:05:13 Nothing. If the corporation
20:05:16 Has your private phone number, they are not required to do anything about it.
20:05:20 They can use it as often as they want.
20:05:22 Because we don’t have any privacy laws.
20:05:24 The EU has very strong privacy laws, so
20:05:27 The EU has strong privacy laws.
20:05:30 Apple’s new operating system is going to emphasize privacy and security. Why is it going to take a while to be in the EU?
20:05:38 It’s because in the EU,
20:05:41 They want
20:05:44 They basically went to…
20:05:47 have access to…
20:05:49 Apple’s security in order to make sure that it’s really secure.
20:05:54 They want Apple to compromise their security.
20:05:56 To prove that their security is secure.
20:05:59 And Apple is saying no.
20:06:08 And, uh, Apple’s probably going to continue to say no until Europe gives up and just…
20:06:15 decides on a different course.
20:06:17 They had a similar thing where the
20:06:20 Uh, the British government wanted Apple to give them.
20:06:25 a security certificate that allowed
20:06:27 the British government to examine all.
20:06:32 iPhone traffic going in and out of Britain.
20:06:35 And Apple said no.
20:06:36 And they… Apple fought with Britain for that for a couple years before.
20:06:41 Britain eventually gave up.
20:06:43 I’m hoping it doesn’t take that long this time.
20:06:47 But.
20:06:49 Um, it.
20:06:50 It was an interesting.
20:06:52 Apple developers can’t.
20:06:55 conference, and I’m greatly looking forward to seeing what happens this fall when they.
20:07:01 bring out the new…
20:07:02 iPhone, iPad, Mac,
20:07:05 Vision OS software.
20:07:08 What will happen when you take your iPhone to visit your daughter in England?
20:07:14 And you’re able to use all this…
20:07:16 Artificial intelligence in the Us.
20:07:19 When you get to England, what happens?
20:07:22 I suspect I won’t be able to use it in.
20:07:24 England
20:07:27 Okay, any idea how they’ll keep that from happening?
20:07:31 Oh, yeah, because the.
20:07:34 Apps are geo-fenced.
20:07:39 Ah.
20:07:39 Geofenced is basically… it knows where you are, and depending upon where you are,
20:07:44 It applies this set of protocols, and if you’re someplace else, it applies that set of protocols.
20:07:50 Um, Apple did it that way because
20:07:53 For example, if you have a phone that you bought in the United States.
20:07:57 And you’re a Belarus citizen.
20:08:01 Belarus really likes to spy on their own people.
20:08:06 They don’t want people going into Belarus.
20:08:09 and evading what the police can do.
20:08:12 So, what happens when that…
20:08:14 phone that was purchased in the United States, you go into Belarus,
20:08:17 It starts following Belarus law.
20:08:20 Apple basically has to do it that way.
20:08:22 Now, there are some cases, though, where the developers screw up.
20:08:27 Um, I was curious about this.
20:08:29 this icon that appeared on my iPad,
20:08:32 It was a yellow icon with a B on it.
20:08:36 And I happen to know that the B is the symbol for Manchester, England.
20:08:41 Manchester adopted the bee as a symbol because it was a city of industry, and they built trains, and
20:08:46 all kinds of other stuff. So, they were all busy little bees.
20:08:51 I suspected it was for the Manchester bus service, so I launched it, and it told me that there were no Manchester buses.
20:08:57 Available anywhere in Scrum, which was a real shock.
20:09:01 I mentioned this to my daughter.
20:09:04 And my daughter said that she got rid of off of her phone,
20:09:07 Because it’s improperly geofenced. She bought her phone in the United States.
20:09:12 And because she bought her phone in the United States.
20:09:16 It’s geofenced, so it doesn’t work in Manchester, so.
20:09:19 It would work for me, but give me no information, or it won’t work for her.
20:09:24 In England.
20:09:25 That’s not geofencing, that’s a programming error.
20:09:30 They screwed up.
20:09:31 Because it should be based upon where the phone is located.
20:09:35 Not where it was purchased.
20:09:37 It should be based upon where the phone is located, and uh…
20:09:41 Um, I thought that was hilariously funny, but it’s not a.
20:09:44 It’s not really an Apple problem, it’s the developer for the.
20:09:48 For the app just screwed up.
20:09:51 But that’s how it… that’s how it knows how to properly…
20:09:57 what the restrictions are that apply.
20:09:58 For example, child pornography rules in Great Britain.
20:10:02 changed as of, uh…
20:10:04 June 1st, and they’re much more draconian.
20:10:08 Pornography is prohibited.
20:10:10 From being displayed to, to, uh…
20:10:13 Children under 18. Just absolutely prohibited.
20:10:16 What’s the restriction in the United States?
20:10:21 There really isn’t any. It changes from…
20:10:24 State to state, city to city, and it’s not enforceable in the United States.
20:10:28 But because the entire country went this way in Great Britain,
20:10:32 If you show up in Great Britain with your US phone, instantly you probably aren’t gonna…
20:10:37 You’re not going to be able to view your favorite porn sites because it doesn’t know how old you are.
20:10:44 Because it’s geofenced. So.
20:10:47 There’s a right way and a wrong way to do almost anything and.
20:10:51 And the Manchester bus system screwed up.
20:10:57 Uh, I was really disappointed that I couldn’t get a bus in.
20:11:00 to Manchester in Squimla.
20:11:06 Probably just as well, the gas bill from here to.
20:11:09 England would be horrific.
20:11:12 Yes.
20:11:11 Lawrence.
20:11:12 Apple intelligence be put into CarPlay in your car?
20:11:18 Um, the answer to that is the.
20:11:21 It will be, for example, you can tell it to optimize a route and so on and so forth, allegedly.
20:11:27 The trouble with CarPlay, because CarPlay
20:11:30 is in an automobile, and automobiles are also covered by.
20:11:34 uh, transportation rules.
20:11:36 It won’t be as full-featured as when you’re sitting there and just talking to your phone.
20:11:40 It’s got to be much more constrained because.
20:11:44 You’re not allowed to create a distraction in the car.
20:11:47 So having it help
20:11:49 Avoid distractions, like…
20:11:51 If you’re going down the road and say, uh,
20:11:54 Uh, take me to the McDonald’s in Silverdale.
20:11:57 Will it do that? Yeah, because it doesn’t…
20:11:59 take you away from what you’re doing, which is driving.
20:12:03 But anything that can interfere with what driving, it’ll probably be constrained.
20:12:07 Carol, did you have a question?
20:12:09 I do.
20:12:11 I want to know about your…
20:12:14 fall, and you’re…
20:12:16 You said you had a concussion?
20:12:19 Uh, yes, I was.
20:12:21 uh, taking some… someone…
20:12:25 To.
20:12:27 to an appointment, and as they started to get out of my car, they started to fall.
20:12:32 And I was intent on keeping them from falling.
20:12:36 And when I stood up, I banged my head into the…
20:12:39 uh, door frame of my, uh, car.
20:12:43 And, uh…
20:12:45 It’s been bothering me now for about 10 days.
20:12:51 So, it’s nothing…
20:12:54 spectacular, it’s just…
20:12:57 Will it take just time to get over it, then?
20:13:00 It took me time to have someone look at it when…
20:13:04 Immediately after this happened, I was taking this person to their appointment,
20:13:10 And I wasn’t able to address it, and then the next day.
20:13:14 I didn’t really feel that bad. It wasn’t until…
20:13:17 A day after that, that I was feeling bad,
20:13:20 I tried to get a steamed appointment by at Olympic Medical.
20:13:24 And they told me the soonest I could get an appointment was July 15th.
20:13:29 Which is kind of far in the future, especially if you have a concussion.
20:13:33 I happen to be in Port Angeles the next day.
20:13:37 I went into the ER, hoping that I could be seen there,
20:13:40 After spending five hours in the ER without even being logged in,
20:13:44 I left.
20:13:49 So it took me…
20:13:50 So what about just like the Squim walk-in clinic.
20:13:53 The Squimoncan clinic I knew from experience that they don’t really like this kind of thing. They’d much prefer.
20:14:00 for a thing that might be a concussion, they much prefer you go.
20:14:03 To the ER. But today I did manage to get the uh.
20:14:10 the primary care clinic to see me.
20:14:13 But I did that because, among other things, my spouse was a nurse,
20:14:17 And I wrote a message to…
20:14:21 The care team.
20:14:23 I explained what the problem was, I explained
20:14:26 I tried A, I tried B, I tried C.
20:14:28 And they put me on a wait list and they had a vacancy today, so I got…
20:14:32 seen instead of July 15th, I got seen on June 6th.
20:14:37 16th. So…
20:14:40 saved almost a month.
20:14:43 Hmm. Wow.
20:14:46 The healthcare system in the United States is under severe strain, and it’s not just here.
20:14:51 Yeah.
20:14:56 Any other questions?
20:15:00 Is Apple Wallet usable in Washington state?
20:15:03 I use Apple Wallet all the time. Are you talking about the.
20:15:07 Apple, the driver’s license ID and wallet?
20:15:10 No.
20:15:12 No.
20:15:09 Yeah. No, I thought you could add your license to the wallet.
20:15:16 Yes, by Washington.
20:15:15 In some states, and it’ll be used, like, at the airport.
20:15:19 Washington is not one of the states.
20:15:21 Oh, okay.
20:15:23 Colorado is Virginia is.
20:15:25 Virginia, which did not give women
20:15:27 the right to own property until 1996.
20:15:31 Virginia allows you to put your ID.
20:15:36 Your driver’s license to Apple Wallet.
20:15:39 Washington State, which has had women politicians since the 1890s,
20:15:43 hasn’t done that, so…
20:15:46 I have no idea why.
20:15:49 But it’s up to the states. It’s not…
20:15:53 What can I say?
20:15:56 There are lots of other things you can do, like, for example,
20:16:00 Bloedell Reserve, which is a garden on Bainbridge.
20:16:02 You can put your membership card for Blodell Reserve into Apple Wallet.
20:16:08 That struck me as really wild that you could do that for a garden, but you can’t.
20:16:14 Stick your your ID.
20:16:16 for the state into Apple Wallet.
20:16:21 Just strange.
20:16:24 I have opinions, but…
20:16:31 So, do you, uh, from a standpoint of artificial intelligence,
20:16:36 There’s…
20:16:39 Two…
20:16:40 uh, levels…
20:16:42 Well, probably multi, but you’re probably gonna… you’re probably already thinking about what I’m gonna ask. I don’t know how to frame it well, but…
20:16:49 But, you know, the futuristic Terminator, where when…
20:16:54 Uh, when… when it was able to…
20:16:56 Uh, start actually thinking on its own, bad things happen.
20:17:01 And that is a belief that that…
20:17:04 will happen…
20:17:06 When it gets that capability that there could be really bad things happening.
20:17:11 Uh, do you think that there are people working on that, or it is working on that now?
20:17:18 Um, okay, that’s a…
20:17:22 No.
20:17:19 That’s not a simple question, but it is a good question.
20:17:24 First of all, I want to back up a bit.
20:17:26 A lot of what we… most of what we hear about artificial intelligence is not artificial intelligence. It’s not independent.
20:17:33 Right.
20:17:34 Problem solving is not independent solution.
20:17:38 When I wanted that picture of a puffin, I came up with the.
20:17:42 problem, I…
20:17:43 outline what I wanted the solution to look like, and then I was the one who decided that it had actually
20:17:49 done what I wanted, so…
20:17:51 It was a tool that I was using.
20:17:53 It wasn’t an artificial intelligence.
20:17:58 Are there artificial… are there things that are good at… that are actually doing things that humans cannot do?
20:18:03 Yes, and one of them is.
20:18:06 The current artificial intelligence engines are large language models, which means they’re really good at grammar.
20:18:14 Well, what is something that is… that involves grammar that really is a problem that humans can’t seem to be able to solve?
20:18:21 And I’ll tell you the answer to that is…
20:18:24 Programming. There are…
20:18:26 trillions of bytes of code out there that in your web browser, on
20:18:32 On websites, all kinds of code out there.
20:18:34 Most of them done by human beings, a lot of them done incompetently by human beings.
20:18:40 Well, uh, several of the large AI.
20:18:44 companies have found out that if you.
20:18:48 take computer code, and you feed it to the large language models,
20:18:52 they can find defects.
20:18:54 Well, that is, A, really great.
20:18:57 Because if they can find the defects, then you know what to fix.
20:19:00 But it’s also really bad because if the good guys can find the defects in the code,
20:19:05 The bad guys can too.
20:19:09 So why do I think the Chinese are doing right now, and the Russians are doing right now?
20:19:13 They’re feeding all the Western language code that they can find.
20:19:16 into AI engines trying to find
20:19:19 defects so that they can exploit them.
20:19:22 Um, so that’s a good news, bad news, but it is something that.
20:19:26 that large language models are really good at. They’re really good at grammar, so…
20:19:32 In most modern programming languages, you end a statement using a semicolon.
20:19:37 And one of the most common ways to have an error is just miss a semicolon.
20:19:44 There’s a computer language called Lisp that was used for artificial intelligence research for a lot.
20:19:49 And LISP actually stands for something, but I can’t ever remember what the real word is, because
20:19:55 What most people who programmed on Lisp used to call it is,
20:20:00 Stands L-I-S-P, stands for lots of irritating, silly parentheses, because Lisp has a whole bunch of parentheses.
20:20:06 And if you miss one, your program fails or does something really ridiculous.
20:20:12 But finding those flaws, that’s something that large language models are really good at.
20:20:17 Is that really artificial intelligence? It’s getting close simply because it’s not something that really we’re very good at.
20:20:23 doing. So it’s getting close.
20:20:28 But are the computers ganging up on us to take over the world?
20:20:33 Now, the largest…
20:20:36 thing that humanity has ever created.
20:20:38 is Google. Google is millions of servers.
20:20:44 Scattered throughout the entire globe.
20:20:47 They go out and index all of these websites, so they basically have all that knowledge. It’s a really, really powerful, powerful
20:20:54 tool, the likes of which it exceeds
20:20:57 It exceeds the atom bomb, it exceeds
20:21:00 A nuclear aircraft carrier, almost any project we’ve ever done.
20:21:03 It vastly exceeds them in terms of
20:21:07 scope and capability.
20:21:08 But it’s not intelligent.
20:21:11 It can’t create its own problems, it can’t solve its own problems, it needs somebody to
20:21:17 to direct it.
20:21:19 There’s a joke that was popular when microcomputers first came out.
20:21:24 it basically was saying,
20:21:26 Never trust a computer you can’t throw out the window.
20:21:29 Well, one of the advantages of microcomputer is that if it was acting stupid, you could pick it up.
20:21:34 Go over to the window and throw it out the window.
20:21:36 And that’s basically one way of also maintaining control. Oh, you’re gonna act up, just toss you out the window.
20:21:44 I use the analogy of what the big flaw was with HAL and Colossus and.
20:21:50 All of these science fiction computers.
20:21:52 they didn’t have an off switch.
20:21:54 All of my computers, and this house has, like, a dozen.
20:21:57 I know where the off switch is for all of them.
20:22:01 So I’m very much in control of the artificial intelligence because.
20:22:06 I know that if the power goes out,
20:22:09 I’m in control.
20:22:12 How do they check…
20:22:12 I might be really sad because my computers aren’t working, but at least I know I’m in control.
20:22:17 What was your question?
20:22:19 How does AI know
20:22:21 that maybe the information they went out and got is wrong.
20:22:26 It doesn’t. That’s one reason why you have so many of the…
20:22:29 Lawyers get in trouble for
20:22:32 Having, um,
20:22:34 citing cases that are actually hallucinations.
20:22:38 Right.
20:22:39 If you have a novel that
20:22:42 references a case, Marbury v. Madison, which is a real case, but it’s Marbury versus Edison.
20:22:50 And it cites that as a case because it was in a novel.
20:22:53 You suck that into…
20:22:56 These AI language models, they can’t tell the difference between that fake case and a real one.
20:23:02 And Giuliani was disbarred.
20:23:05 for using fake cases, and a whole bunch of others are.
20:23:09 There is a whole huge lawsuit, several million, multi-million dollar lawsuit,
20:23:14 In California, no, it wasn’t in California.
20:23:17 I can’t remember where it was, that was thrown out just a couple weeks ago, in which both sets of it was Arizona.
20:23:23 Both sets of lawyers were using AI.
20:23:26 And they were basically throwing…
20:23:28 fake cases at each other.
20:23:30 And the…
20:23:30 Well, how can Apple guarantee security?
20:23:35 from picking up bad data.
20:23:37 Um, it’s, again, it’s being used as a tool. It’s not going to necessarily… if you ask.
20:23:45 Which presidents were born outside the United States? There’s a set list of answers. It can send you that list. It’s like…
20:23:52 8 people.
20:23:53 But if you ask…
20:23:54 But what if somebody put a bad list out there, and it grabs the bad list?
20:23:59 Well, it.
20:24:01 if there’s more than one copy of those lists, that’s the sort of thing that’s being… that’s replicated, like,
20:24:06 What is 2 plus 2? Billions of things out there are going to tell you that it’s 4.
20:24:11 And somebody might have some site that says it’s 3, but the consensus pretty much is going to be.
20:24:17 4. Plus, computers…
20:24:20 Yes.
20:24:18 But does it check the consensus? It doesn’t check the it does.
20:24:22 Yes.
20:24:25 Any type you have an answer, there’s a weighted answer.
20:24:29 And the more people that agree with that,
20:24:31 You come along, how do we pick president? It’s the one that we.
20:24:36 The majority of the people who are bothered to vote,
20:24:39 Pick that person. Is that person right? According to the election law, that person is right.
20:24:44 And that’s basically how these search engines work, and that’s how.
20:24:50 A lot of these things. The problem with the cases that… case law.
20:24:54 that we have is that Giuliani was trying to create new case law.
20:25:00 So he wanted something that had never been done before, there was no precedent.
20:25:05 And so went out and found precedent.
20:25:07 And the precedents came out of Tom Clancy book. Another president came out of a Patterson book.
20:25:13 I can’t remember what Paterson’s name, but he writes these thrillers.
20:25:17 Okay.
20:25:19 Um, as far as the searching was concerned, those must be legitimate cases. It matches the circumstance.
20:25:25 So therefore, it must be the answer.
20:25:28 And Giuliani threw it in his court brief and.
20:25:31 And, uh, it got him disbarred.
20:25:36 Have you tried to use AI to create a website?
20:25:41 Um, I have something that I’m working on.
20:25:44 right now that I’m not ready to show anybody.
20:25:46 It’s not so much an A… it’s not so much creating a website.
20:25:51 I had an AI… I worked with somebody else.
20:25:55 to ingest a website that I’d already made.
20:25:59 that had gigabytes worth of data.
20:26:02 And it created a wiki out of it. A wiki is a knowledge base.
20:26:07 created a wiki out of the stuff that it ingested, so.
20:26:12 It has… it indexed all the articles, it did summaries of what the articles were about.
20:26:18 It could extract the major topics.
20:26:21 Um, and, uh.
20:26:23 I was really… it was a fascinating exercise.
20:26:26 And if and when I get…
20:26:29 a few things fixed. Uh, I’ll show it to people.
20:26:32 But that was done by using cloud, which
20:26:36 Claude, which is C-L-A-U-D-E.
20:26:41 that artificial intelligence agent.
20:26:44 And the person who was working with me is a…
20:26:47 Former professor at George Mason University, professor of computer science.
20:26:51 And it was an interesting thing because I was the editor of that magazine.
20:26:56 So it was sucking up a whole bunch of things that I’d written, and…
20:26:59 stuff that I edited by other people.
20:27:02 And it was a fascinating exercise.
20:27:05 But it didn’t create a website, it created a wiki, which is basically a…
20:27:10 index of this website.
20:27:14 with summaries and speculations.
20:27:16 My spouse had written some things, and among other things.
20:27:20 theorize that Kathleen Charters was the spouse of Lawrence Charters.
20:27:25 Because again, it’s an AI engine. It didn’t know.
20:27:29 So it could theorize that, but it didn’t really know.
20:27:32 And it also theorized that Lawrence Charters and Lawrence I Charters were the same person.
20:27:37 But again, it wasn’t sure, but it theorized that they were.
20:27:41 the same person. So it was an…
20:27:44 It was an interesting exercise.
20:27:45 And that was a big project. I mean, 4.5 gigabytes worth of…
20:27:50 Steph
20:27:53 Last question.
20:27:54 Yeah.
20:27:56 If AI gave you an answer from a Tom Clancy novel,
20:28:00 And you asked that the source of its answer, would it tell you that it was a Tom Clancy novel it got it from?
20:28:06 It depends upon…
20:28:09 How explicit you can make the question. Like, for example,
20:28:13 If you.
20:28:15 Ask for, you know, you have tomatoes and you have a bunch of ingredients and you say.
20:28:21 Give me a recipe for this, and it comes up with a recipe.
20:28:24 And you say, and then you would ask,
20:28:27 Why did you pick Pimentos for this recipe? It may not be able to do that because it’s a collage.
20:28:35 of multiple things. And that’s one of the problems that you can.
20:28:39 You can quiz people about things like that, but it’s very difficult to.
20:28:44 quiz a database about something like that.
20:28:45 But what if you said, what book did you get the recipe from, or what source was the recipe from?
20:28:51 But see, a lot of the recipes that you can get from AI engines are not out of a book.
20:28:57 Oh!
20:28:56 They’re dynamically created based upon the ingredients. It knows that.
20:29:00 that if you have peanuts, and you have
20:29:03 If you have and you have honey, and you have this, and you have that, that you can make sticky things like.
20:29:09 peanut clusters, and so on and so forth.
20:29:11 It doesn’t need a specific recipe.
20:29:13 If you throw in something new, it can say, well, you might be able to do this, simply because the preponderance of the evidence.
20:29:20 says that these things will work together.
20:29:23 Oh.
20:29:23 But did it come out of a specific book? It may not be able to tell you that, because it’s not doing that.
20:29:27 Yeah.
20:29:30 Could Giuliani have prevented us?
20:29:32 Mishap, or I’m going to call it that.
20:29:36 By specifying that…
20:29:38 The precedents have to come out of the state code annotated or the federal code annotated. Could he have done something like that?
20:29:47 Um…
20:29:50 As a lawyer that went and got him off the hook.
20:29:53 Because as a lawyer, you submit
20:29:56 a document to the court,
20:29:57 And you say, this is my work. I stand by this. I did this research.
20:30:03 You are not saying, somebody says this, you are saying,
20:30:07 I am presenting this to you as something factual.
20:30:10 And what’s the way to prevent factual.
20:30:15 Uh, fraud in that, check your work.
20:30:18 Did he do that? He didn’t.
20:30:19 Right. But I’m saying if he had if he had set those kinds of limits,
20:30:23 Then he would have been able to check.
20:30:26 Because, you know, you can check those different code annotated.
20:30:29 Well, yes, you…
20:30:29 I mean, it’ll either be there or not, according, you know…
20:30:34 Yeah.
20:30:33 It’s like saying, this is on page 56 of the…
20:30:36 King James Version of the Bible, something like that.
20:30:40 Well, um
20:30:40 I’m gonna either be there or it won’t.
20:30:42 Depending, do you know how many printings of the King James Bible?
20:30:45 Well, but you know what I’m saying, that the one…
20:30:49 You know what I mean? Because you can specify the…
20:30:50 Yes, I indeed.
20:30:52 Yes.
20:30:52 In other words, you set fairly strict parameters.
20:30:56 I don’t know whether… I mean, it should… it should follow that, right? It should…
20:31:04 There are times where that’s not…
20:31:07 useful. For example,
20:31:08 Washington State annotated code.
20:31:13 is online for the state of Washington and you can actually specify down to the paragraph level.
20:31:18 It’s a website, and so on and so forth.
20:31:22 You can do that for Washington State, for a lot of states, you can’t do that.
20:31:26 Ah.
20:31:28 Plus, I’ve read that if it can’t find something like that,
20:31:32 In some cases will make it up.
20:31:35 Well, yes, but that’s the hallucination part.
20:31:38 The hallucination means that it still found something that it could come up with.
20:31:42 But what it came up with may not have been from a real source. For example,
20:31:47 Hunt for Red October.
20:31:49 Hunt for Red October is a novel by John Clancy about
20:31:53 This Russian submarine defecting to the US.
20:31:57 And it was a great movie, it’s a good… it’s a good novel.
20:32:03 Is that real, or is that invented?
20:32:11 What do you mean, the novel?
20:32:13 The infrared October.
20:32:16 Well, I don’t know, but it might be one of those deals where it’s just based on a real incident, but that’s so broad.
20:32:22 It is based upon a real incident. It’s based upon the capture of U555.
20:32:28 In the Middle Atlantic during World War II,
20:32:31 by Admiral James Gallery.
20:32:34 Admiral James Gallery, without bothering to tell anybody else,
20:32:37 decided he was going to capture a U-boat.
20:32:40 And he captured one. And in the process, he also captured an Ultramachine, which he thought was hot stuff.
20:32:47 Churchill wanted Gallery executed.
20:32:53 Why? Because nobody told Gallery that Ultra existed.
20:32:57 Nobody told Gallery that Enigma machines existed.
20:33:01 So he went out and captured
20:33:04 First wartime capture of an Enigma machine,
20:33:07 And Churchill was afraid that it might give away the war, because the Allies had been using Enigma
20:33:13 captures for months.
20:33:16 And Gallery might have blown the whole thing, so…
20:33:19 Churchill wanted Gallery, an American admiral executed for doing a really great job.
20:33:25 The hunt for Bed October is basically a fictionalized version.
20:33:28 Using the Soviet Union instead of Nazi Germany,
20:33:32 about the capture of U-555.
20:33:35 That’s not the one that’s in the Chicago Museum of Science. Oh, it is.
20:33:38 Yes, yeah, yeah, it’s the one that’s at the field.
20:33:40 I’ve been in it!
20:33:42 Well, it’s something that I’ve wanted to do.
20:33:44 Um, but I haven’t been to the…
20:33:46 I haven’t been there, I want to see the the
20:33:49 I’m a World War II historian. That’s my specialty.
20:33:54 It’s a different ocean, but still.
20:33:56 Yeah.
20:33:56 I would like to see the U-boat.
20:34:00 But that’s based upon a real story.
20:34:03 But is it fictional in terms of the hunt for Red October? Yes.
20:34:07 But is it based upon something that happened? Well, sort of.
20:34:13 It gets complicated. And there are novels that cite Washington state code.
20:34:20 there are novels that cite Washington state code, so you can say,
20:34:24 WSC, whatever, and it’s made up.
20:34:27 Ah.
20:34:28 And how is a poor little robot supposed to know that?
20:34:30 Well, but if you said it’s got to come out of the Washington State code annotated,
20:34:34 You mean the artificial intelligence will see it in the novel and think that it did come out of
20:34:39 Yes.
20:34:40 Washington State, I get it.
20:34:42 Yes.
20:34:42 So it’s not all that intelligent.
20:34:44 No.
20:34:48 That is not intelligent at all. It’s a tool.
20:34:52 Yeah.
20:35:00 Next month.
20:35:02 Um, two things. First of all, I can… I still want to do the presentation on spaces, because I see a lot of people getting.
20:35:09 Kind of trapped in…
20:35:11 They say that the computer’s not capable of doing something that probably is if they…
20:35:16 knew how to do certain things.
20:35:18 That’s one thing. The second one is that.
20:35:22 My church…
20:35:24 Um, maybe putting in new monitors this month.
20:35:28 And if they’re ready next month, and I can find a weekend.
20:35:33 We might have a Saturday meeting at my church.
20:35:36 Where we can do things in person and possibly…
20:35:41 Bring in.
20:35:43 equipment that we don’t want anymore, and…
20:35:45 foisted off on one another.
20:35:48 But again,
20:35:48 Yeah, sounds a great idea.
20:35:50 If you have suggestions of what I could do instead,
20:35:54 Please send them off to me.
20:35:57 Or couldn’t we do it in conjunction with just have the meeting there, but also trade stuff?
20:36:02 Well, that’s what I intend to do, but…
20:36:05 The in-person thing might be on a different topic than…
20:36:10 Our regular monthly.
20:36:11 topic. It depends upon how ambitious I feel.
20:36:15 Okay.
20:36:18 Also, there’s a festival in.
20:36:20 July, so who knows?
20:36:22 Well, are you going to download the beta version of 27 and fiddle around with it?
20:36:28 I cannot confirm or deny.
20:36:30 Okay.
20:36:34 I will tell you that if I do, it’ll probably be on one of my iPads.
20:36:39 I’m pretty interested in that.
20:36:41 How well that, uh…
20:36:44 new passkeys passwords app will work or not.
20:36:48 Um, that might be one of the last things I’d try.
20:36:52 Because I’d rather not screw up…
20:36:55 My passwords.
20:36:56 Well, couldn’t you use Peter Lyon’s password?
20:36:59 That’s a thought.
20:37:02 But then I’d have to set the…
20:37:05 Peter line up with one of my iPads.
20:37:09 I’m kind of jealous of my iPads.
20:37:13 But, uh, yeah, that’s a thought.
20:37:16 Anyway, write to me if you have questions or suggestions or whatnot.
20:37:21 Did you ever put up the the sign-in sheet, or…?
20:37:25 No, because it’s in an account that I can’t…
20:37:28 reach. If I… if I go into that other account, I kill the…
20:37:33 Zoom session.
20:37:33 You put a link on the website.
20:37:36 Uh, I can do that, but I’m afraid I’ll get sign-ins from, you know,
20:37:41 King Kong and whatnot.
20:37:43 Yeah, okay.
20:37:43 Do you want to just take our names down?
20:37:45 I took a screenshot, but, um…
20:37:48 Okay.
20:37:48 Among other things, one person, they signed in, I think,
20:37:52 Uh, might have been you.
20:37:53 is listed as Zoom user.
20:37:56 Which is…
20:37:57 Oh, yes, I see that.
20:37:59 Oh, am I supposed… okay, I guess you can educate me. How do I fix that?
20:38:03 Um, are you using a Mac?
20:38:06 iPad.
20:38:07 The answer is I don’t know how to do that on an iPad.
20:38:11 Okay.
20:38:11 When you first sign into the meeting,
20:38:15 It asks you what name you want to be known as.
20:38:19 Yep.
20:38:18 Really? I’ll watch for that next time, okay?
20:38:19 Ah.
20:38:22 Okay, I had no idea that…
20:38:25 You only knew me as Zoom user.
20:38:30 I’m Sherry, by the way.
20:38:32 The.
20:38:33 Steve knows me, so…
20:38:35 My daughter had a
20:38:40 Apple time capsule.
20:38:41 Which is a combination router, backup device, so on and so forth.
20:38:46 And when she went off to college, because she wanted a firewall between her and.
20:38:50 everybody in your dorm, and we were coming up with names for it.
20:38:55 And I suggested DEL space asterisk period asterisk.
20:39:00 Which she thought was fine, but it freaked out the Windows people, because that’s the command to delete everything on your hard drive.
20:39:07 Oh, my gosh!
20:39:09 So they left her firewall alone, which is kind of what I wanted them to do.
20:39:15 But you can do strange things with names if you’re evil.
20:39:22 Or creative.
20:39:24 Well, that was a little evil, you know.
20:39:27 Well…
20:39:28 Anyway, good night, everyone.
20:39:31 Good night, thank you.
20:39:32 Yeah, good night!
20:39:32 Thank you very much.
20:39:33 Yeah, thanks much.
20:39:34 Appreciate it.

April 2026: Artificial Intelligence

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.

Artificial Intelligence – A short overview

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

Video of the April 2026 meeting: Artificial Intelligence

Video recording of the April 2026 meeting on 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.

Security, Privacy, and Apple Intelligence

The January 21, 2025, meeting started, as usual, with a Question and Answer (Q&A) session.

Things we talked about in the meeting:

  • Brief mention of the lawsuit against Apple over privacy and security in Siri, and comparison with previous lawsuits against Google and Amazon’s Alexa
  • How Apple handles security and privacy in iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS
  • Apple Intelligence in action: Image Playground (on iPhone, iPad, Mac)
    • Not the same as Apple’s Playgrounds app (a free application for teaching the Swift programming language)
  • Comparison to Microsoft, Google, and Adobe AI efforts
  • Apple Intelligence in Apple Mail, Apple Messages, Apple Photos, Apple Pages
Apple Intelligence logo

Video recording of the meeting

Click on the YouTube logo for a full-screen view.

Transcript of the meeting

Use your browser to search for specific words or phrases if you don’t want to read everything.

18:33:22 Getting back to what I was talking about earlier.
18:33:28 You were recording in time lapse and the way to fix that is to open up the video in iMovie. And I don't know that you can do this on a phone. You might have to do this on a on a computer, open it up in iMovie and go into
18:33:46 I can't remember where it's located. There's one of the menu options about the video And if you play it, if you tell it to slow down the video it'll stretch it out again.
18:33:59 So that it doesn't you don't you're not showing several minutes worth of stuff in 18 seconds.
18:34:07 Yeah.
18:34:07 But, um. Imovie can both slow down the video as well as speed up a video.
18:34:14 I see. Okay, I'll give that a try. Thank you.
18:34:14 And… And also one other thing is if you're going to share it with her or you're sharing it with anybody.
18:34:24 When you are done modifying the video. Go to the file menu and export it and export it as an MOV file, as an M4V file.
18:34:36 File, not as an infinite. As an MP4 file.
18:34:41 The reason is that MOV files are proprietary to Apple. And while a lot of video things will accept them now.
18:34:52 Your average PC user probably won't be able to read it.
18:34:57 And so if you export it to MP4.
18:35:02 Then at that point, everybody can that can see it.
18:35:07 Oh.
18:35:08 The mov file format has a lot of special things like the slow down, speed up and other things that other movie formats don't support.
18:35:19 So um exported as an MP4.
18:35:24 Before I put our stuff up on the website, which I admittedly haven't done in a while, but I'm going to in the near future.
18:35:31 I exported as an MP4 so that I can upload it to YouTube or send it to somebody MP4 is not as compact.
18:35:42 Is MOV. So the file get larger, but at least people be able to see it. And I'm sorry disappeared there.
18:35:53 Oh, I'll just ask you real quickly, though, if she has Apple products would it work with the mov File.
18:36:04 Okay.
18:36:01 It'll work with the MOV or the MP4. The apples are fairly much format agnostic.
18:36:10 I do all my video editing on a Mac because it's much, much, much more flexible than doing it on a Windows machine, our church We stream our video and we put it up on YouTube, but I do all that work from home.
18:36:27 I see.
18:36:25 I don't do it at the church. It drives you nuts to try and do this on a I don't know, Windows machine.
18:36:35 Well, boy, you know, we just I just want to state our appreciation for you. Both George and I think it's just fabulous that you're that you continually meet together with people who are interested in learning and sharing information.
18:36:53 And the fact that you're even open to some of these questions that come up which may be really, really at the bottom level of understanding. We just appreciate you, Lawrence.
18:37:05 Thank you.
18:37:06 I've been doing this for a long time. Kathleen and I started the South Bay TRS-80 users group.
18:37:18 In 1977. A long time ago. We were both much younger.
18:37:20 Oh my goodness.
18:37:25 Yeah, yeah. You've had a long journey together. Yeah, thank you.
18:37:29 Yep.
18:37:31 Okay, I'm going to go ahead and mute myself and turn the video off, but we're here.
18:37:36 Okay.
18:37:37 Will be listening.
18:37:41 I need to do something, which is what I want to turn that on.
18:37:46 And I want to turn on that. So that I… And… Before someone asked, I forgot to… make a sign-in sheet, I think.
18:38:03 So let me check that quickly, but I don't recall that I did so. I might have surprised myself and done so.
18:38:20 Yeah, I didn't. Oh, hell.
18:38:30 So much for bookkeeping. We're in the middle of the question and answer session after a short brief pause because the internet went out.
18:38:42 Anybody have a question?
18:38:45 Well, go ahead. Go ahead.
18:38:45 Yes. Lawrence, what speed do you get on your computer?
18:38:53 Generally. Yes.
18:38:54 Are you talking about internet speed? I'm paying for one gigabyte download and 30 megabytes upload, which doesn't really have anything to do with reality it's about If I'm lucky, it'll be around 400 megabytes download and 30 megabytes upload.
18:39:17 Quite often less than that. 30 up.
18:39:20 30 up you said.
18:39:24 To reasonably upload a video to somebody you can't really do so with less than about 10 megabits. I shouldn't say megabytes to 10 megabits per second.
18:39:35 Is about is slow as you can go to upload a video without someone dying of old age in the meantime.
18:39:45 It just takes a long time. Megabits per second And you divide that by eight, that's how many megabytes so 10 megabits per second is about one megabyte per second.
18:40:03 1,000 megabits per second, which is what gigabyte is. You divide that by 10 and that's about 100 megabytes per second.
18:40:14 Theoretically. And in practice, there's a lot of stuff that goes on to slow it down.
18:40:22 Kathleen and I noticed that every day between about Oh, six and eight, we will lose the internet for a while.
18:40:33 And that's not unusual. The reason is that everybody starts using the internet.
18:40:39 Around six to eight local time. And most people do not have a path to the internet straight from their computer to the internet, it goes out to a concentrator for an entire neighborhood.
18:40:53 And so that entire neighborhood goes out at once. When we were on the East Coast.
18:40:58 I once, back in the days before they had better security.
18:41:01 I found out that there were 255 people in our neighborhood, which is the maximum number that you can have in a local cluster.
18:41:10 So when they would come home at 5, 36 o'clock. Things just went down to a crawl.
18:41:17 But on the East Coast now you can get fiber link internet, which is a gigabit up and a gigabit down.
18:41:27 I don't expect to have that. On the peninsula before, say.
18:41:38 Right.
18:41:35 No, 2050 or something. One of the things that The new administration wants to do, for example, is to get rid of the subsidy for rural internet.
18:41:49 There's been a subsidy has been available for like 10, 15 years And one of their proposed savings is just to get rid of that.
18:41:57 So I don't think that things will get better anytime soon.
18:42:03 Well, what about the thing that musk has? Is it Starlink or something?
18:42:10 What's funny?
18:42:09 Starlink is, like a lot of things, is downlink um oriented. Dish has satellite downlink But it's down link only.
18:42:21 To in DISH if you go if you want to send something back, you send it over your telephone line.
18:42:27 And over your telephone line, basically you're going at modem speeds from the 1990s.
18:42:33 So, um. In terms of upload with Starlink it's really next to non-existent. If you think about it.
18:42:42 To run and to run a internet peering environment, that's where a whole bunch of cables come in and it sends it out to everybody over the neighborhood.
18:42:52 That's usually done with a router that consume several thousand watts. Satellites You have a powerful satellite, if it's 10 watts They're just very low wattage.
18:43:08 So essentially, the wattage of the of a light bulb.
18:43:14 Is what powers the satellite. So you're sending that very faint signal down with low wattage to the ground Where it's then amplified and distributed.
18:43:24 That's okay going one way, but when you have a whole bunch of signals coming the other way, it can't possibly handle it. So satellite is satellite is is not really a two-way communication. It's basically one way. The weather satellite beams down
18:43:39 Photographs and video of the Earth. But if we tried beaming that stuff up to the satellite, it would just clog it.
18:43:48 That's why for satellite television.
18:43:51 There's one beam coming up and one beam going down. And once it hits the ground and that one beam coming down is distributed.
18:43:59 But there's very limited amount going back up. And even today, most satellite TV really isn't satellite TV. It's coming over.
18:44:08 Ground or suburbs. Oceanic cables or something like that. It's not really It's not really coming from the satellite. The satellites are distribution points.
18:44:20 Gps, for example. In order for GPS to work on your phone, you have to have a minimum, I think, of five satellites that it can reach at one time.
18:44:31 And most often the seven to nine, if you're closer to the equator than we are.
18:44:37 And it's takes those very minuscule amounts of information that's getting from those to figure out where you are. But you're transmitting nothing the other way.
18:44:50 So satellite is basically just one way.
18:44:54 Yeah. Well, they didn't say anything about the ups and downs of it.
18:44:58 You know, I mean, I heard about you know I'm always complaining about speed
18:44:59 Well. If you're sitting… Yeah, but if you're typing a message And then you press return to send a response, that's upside.
18:45:11 Yeah.
18:45:10 It's not going to the satellite. It's going over a modem or if it's going over some cable someplace, it's not going to the satellite.
18:45:16 So Starlink wouldn't do you any good at all. Right?
18:45:20 It's good if you're doing something to receive content. Like, for example, television programs that you dish works fine for that. But in terms of sending signal back. No, it doesn't work.
18:45:33 Right. Right. Well, there are also…
18:45:35 Most people are really happy with it though, aren't they? Sterling.
18:45:38 Which? Yeah, but most people just consume content.
18:45:44 They just, they're not really doing anything they're not replying to anything.
18:45:43 Oh, yeah, that's true. Yeah.
18:45:49 Now, you don't happen to have a really good Verizon signal where you are, do you?
18:45:55 I have a good Verizon signal because I have my phone use Wi-Fi.
18:46:02 So when I'm in my own home, I can get a good Verizon signal, but that's not because it's coming over the air.
18:46:08 It's coming over a cable. When we…
18:46:10 Right. Yeah, yeah. So Verizon has a really good that that uh internet package that they offer separate from the phones is Working really good here so man it's cheap, relatively cheap. I have Verizon service from my phone so it costs $45 for a good package
18:46:33 Yeah, a lot of people that I know who live in cities, they also like the T-Mobile.
18:46:33 You know, more speed
18:46:40 Yep.
18:46:39 But do you have to live in a city that actually has a good T-Mobile infrastructure like Chicago.
18:46:46 But… That was one question that somebody wanted me to talk about was what was a good cell phone service and what was a good internet service locally?
18:46:57 And the answer is I can't talk about that because i can't talk about Unlike the East Coast, it's not flat around here.
18:47:04 And what works for me, I live in sunland won't work if you live up on Bell Hill. And if you live up on Bell Hill, it's not what somebody in Carlsberg can do. And if you live in Carlsburg, it won't help you out.
18:47:18 Someplace else. It's just it's extremely episodic. If you go online and you say, what are the best internet providers in swim and you get this list, all of that's paid advertising. It's not based on anything at all.
18:47:35 And some of the people that appear in those listings don't even have service locally.
18:47:40 So the answer is you're pretty much have to try it. Talk to your neighbors and see what they say.
18:47:49 Because there's no way I can give you a way There's no way I can give you a… a good answer.
18:47:58 If you live in Squim, there are certain few blocks downtown. And when I say few, like 20 blocks downtown where you can get high-speed cable from a company Nicola or something like that.
18:48:13 Every time I see the name, it reminds me of the cough drops.
18:48:18 They have good high speed cable. And also, if you live in Squim, Olipin is a good source. It's not cable. What they do is they put a a dish on your dish on your house and you get and you
18:48:32 Basically a microwave link. To wherever their local transmitter is. And depending upon whether or not there are buildings and trees in the way.
18:48:41 Olepen may not be able to do anything for you. Those are two examples that work, but only if you're in Squim.
18:48:50 If you live… someplace else, your best bet is just to talk to your neighbors and see what they say.
18:48:59 We're not going to get good self service on the peninsula. We're not going to get good internet service on the peninsula.
18:49:07 And a lot of that has to do with the fact that, let's put it this way.
18:49:11 Victoria B.C. Has more people just in the town of Victoria than in all of Clallum County.
18:49:19 And Clallam County goes from
18:49:24 I can't remember the name of the little village It goes, anyway, 70 miles from here to the to the Pacific Ocean. And there are 70,000 people we probably have a lot more deer than that.
18:49:36 And deer don't use the internet. You know, we just we're just not a big market.
18:49:44 That's one reason also why. When somebody wants to know how long does it take to get from Seattle over here, I say, well, if the wind's blowing, it could take hours.
18:49:53 Because you've got the fairies to contend with and you might close the bridge and we might have an avalanche or mudslide or You know, we just We're not in a metropolitan area for which I am very grateful But when it comes to
18:50:10 Cell service and internet bandwidth, there's just no
18:50:13 Nothing has passed in Washington. When we moved here because the speed limits were so slow, when we first moved here just coming into the state of Washington, you know, I couldn't in the highway and I could only go 60 and stuff like that. And I said, and then you get here and all the water, like you said, and everything.
18:50:34 Yeah, we're about 35 miles or so from Seattle. However, it takes, you never know.
18:50:47 Yes.
18:50:39 Yes. My mother kept on trying to get me to invent a Star Trek transporter pad because then she could have gone to visit my daughter in england She could have visited my brother Alexandria, Virginia, she thought that was a good idea.
18:51:00 But I wasn't able to quite manage that.
18:51:05 Lawrence?
18:51:08 Yes.
18:51:05 Lawrence, I have a question. I remember quite a while ago, we were talking about copy machines.
18:51:14 And you said instead of dealing with their software you connected them to something on the computer. What did you do and how do I do that?
18:51:26 Oh, um… If you have a printer.
18:51:32 Mm-hmm. Yeah.
18:51:32 Most printers have a copy function. So you just go there you put the whatever it is you want copied down and you go to the copy menu item press it say how many copies you want and copy it.
18:51:47 The um If it has a sheet feeder, you can even give it a stack of things to copy and press copy and it'll copy the entire stack.
18:51:56 So I don't use copy machines at all. The other thing.
18:52:01 Okay, and what i'm trying to do is I'm trying to copy something and download it to my files.
18:52:10 And I'm having trouble doing that. It doesn't it doesn't it will it will scan it But it won't download it.
18:52:21 So I'm wondering if there's some kind of trick or something.
18:52:25 Cindy.
18:52:26 Actually, there is a trick. Maybe. It depends upon how new you're new computer is and how it was cooked up to how it was hooked up to your printer.
18:52:38 I have… two printers. And I did not use the software that came with them.
18:52:46 I used, I just hooked them up. And then I told Mac that Mac software to talk to them. And in the setup, one of the things you can do is you just tell it.
18:52:57 You find the… printer on your network and ask it to install a driver on your computer for that printer.
18:53:09 Dior Mac ships with thousands of print drivers for all kinds of printers. And you find the one that matches or the one that's close.
18:53:18 And you're up and running. If your printer is also a copier, it'll also do scanning And to scan it, you use simple text. Actually, it's called Preview now. Simpletext was an old name.
18:53:31 Preview.
18:53:31 What is it?
18:53:36 Yeah.
18:53:36 Let me show you. Let me find something to print.
18:53:43 First of all.
18:53:59 Okay. Let me… share my desktop.
18:54:09 Yeah, go ahead, let it do that.
18:54:16 First of all, go to settings And in settings If you go down to printers and scanners.
18:54:25 You tell it to add printer or scanner He goes out and looks. Yeah, go ahead.
18:54:31 It goes out and looks on your network to see what it is. You say that you have something that tells you what it thinks it is. You say add it.
18:54:38 Well, they've already added it, so I'm not going to do that.
18:54:47 Mm-hmm.
18:54:41 Instead, I'm going to say that I've already added those I'm going to go down and preview allows you, if you look at a photograph.
18:54:53 It opens in preview. So we're not going to use it for that. We're going to go up here to the file menu and say.
18:54:59 Import from scanner And Rachel is the name of one of my printers.
18:55:06 That I hardly ever use it for printing. I use it for… scanning mostly.
18:55:14 And it's doing an overview scan and it goes and does an overview scan.
18:55:23 And so I go then and I select what I want scanned
18:55:31 I draw a little box around what I want scanned and I say scan And when I'm scanning it, I also have a different things that I can do. In this case, I want to save it as a PDF So I say scan
18:55:47 And it goes and scans it. And then I say save By telling it to.
18:55:56 Save and it's uh Wicked.
18:56:02 Media card.
18:56:07 And then… I go find my scanned item.
18:56:16 And it's hiding behind something that I saved here. Oh, it saved it in documents.
18:56:23 If you don't tell it not to, it'll save it in documents.
18:56:33 Actually, I don't know where I'd saved it. If you don't know where something's saved, you just go through this Same pre-process again say
18:56:47 Actually, I just tell it to go find it.
18:56:59 It didn't work. Why didn't it work?
18:57:02 Could you put this step by step in the newsletter?
18:57:06 If someone reminds me.
18:57:10 Because I'm always wanting to put something in them.
18:57:16 Printer and mail it to somebody you know And…
18:57:26 I spent 20 hours getting it done that I don't know the steps that got me there.
18:57:26 Okay.
18:57:30 So here is my Wikipedia. Friends of Wikipedia card.
18:57:37 Wikimedia is the company behind the nonprofit behind Wikipedia. And I donated money to them. So they sent me a card.
18:57:46 Which they don't normally do. I'm kind of surprised they did this. Probably because they want more money.
18:57:52 But that was a physical object that now I have something I can send out to people.
18:57:56 And when you save it, you can save it also as a JPEG in case if it's If it's a…
18:58:10 If it's a photograph that you want to save as something but if you if you Send me a message. I can see if I can… write out the steps and put them on the on the website. It's it's not all that complicated.
18:58:28 But the first time through, it's less than intuitive, I will admit.
18:58:34 You're looking at, especially since one of the tools that i use preview people normally look at if you click if you click a… photograph for example And… Here's a photograph. It comes up and it opens in preview. Preview is the program that just opened that thing.
18:58:57 Which is something I wanted to talk about today, by the way.
18:59:01 I've got to show my screen so you can see what I'm talking about.
18:59:07 So Lawrence, would she be able to use the zip drive in her printer?
18:59:08 This? Yes.
18:59:13 And then just take it to her. Computer.
18:59:17 A zip drive or maybe if she probably doesn't have a zip drive. Zip drives don't exist anymore.
18:59:22 Oh. Oh.
18:59:23 It might have a CD, I might have a sd card in some printers, but those are actually fairly rare.
18:59:33 I practice.
18:59:33 Image is being shown in preview and preview is if you take a screenshot or something and click on it, that's what it opens up.
18:59:43 And reason, I wanted to show you this cartoon because it's something that you should keep in mind.
18:59:49 A lot of people when they when they say that you are the product and they're talking about Twitter and Facebook and so on and so forth.
18:59:58 What they're saying is that basically is saying Twitter and YouTube and not so much YouTube Twitter and Facebook and so on and so forth.
19:00:09 They make their money by selling your content. And the content that you provide them is your name, your contacts, your friends.
19:00:18 Your purchase history, your advertising preferences and so on and so forth.
19:00:24 This cartoon is saying that you are not, this device is not your device.
19:00:31 You are the products, you are the devices device it owns you, which is somewhat cynical but also somewhat true.
19:00:42 And I just thought I'd share that with you because it cracked me up when I saw that.
19:00:50 We are at the end of our… Q&A questions period but if anyone has one more question, I'll try it.
19:00:57 Yes.
19:00:57 May have one. Are you aware of a problem with CarPlay in the iPhone?
19:01:04 Where if you ask Siri to play a playlist It just plays some random song and ignores your comment.
19:01:13 And that's been going on. I went on the internet And I Googled the problem and it turns out a slew of people have the problem.
19:01:23 And it goes as far back as IOS 17 and a half.
19:01:27 And it's still present today in 18.2.1.
19:01:31 Yeah, the problem with that is that when you
19:01:38 Apple uses car parlay so you can do things like tell it to play Taylor Swift or something like that.
19:01:46 When it comes to When it comes to playlists though, that's much, much, much harder.
19:01:53 Taylor Swift, if you If you download a Taylor Swift song and it's on your phone, you tell it to play Taylor Swift.
19:02:02 The metadata, the information that tells that what Taylor Swift is, is embedded in the song.
19:02:11 So when you download Taylor Swift to your iPhone. It knows that that's Taylor Swift because Apple's metadata says so.
19:02:20 But if you say, play my Sunday afternoons playlist, it looks through your metadata and it can't find that because it's not really on the device that's in your That's in your own part of the operating system.
19:02:33 Supposedly
19:02:38 There's two parts of the operating system. There's the part that belongs to Apple, and Apple uses it to talk to its stuff.
19:02:45 And there's your stuff. And Apple can't touch your stuff. And the reason is that it's the only way to protect you in case someone seizes your phone.
19:02:58 So if somebody takes your phone They might have the phone, but they can't touch your stuff.
19:03:05 And neither can your car. And this came up because this came up because a security engineer was going down the road one day Security engineer at Apple was going down the road one day And his kid said.
19:03:21 Play such and such. And it played this kid's playlist that he didn't even know was on his phone.
19:03:27 And the security researcher said. That is not a good thing.
19:03:33 Because other people would do things like they knew that they'd steal someone's phone, they wouldn't give them his password.
19:03:40 And they beat him up and he still wouldn't give him the password, but they knew he was girlfriend with Gina. So they call Gina. Anyway, call Gina and say, Gina, I lost, you know, soon I lost my daughter because he's telling me the password to my phone and they give him the phone.
19:03:57 So Apple said, your stuff is completely under your control.
19:04:03 Apple can't touch it. And when you say play Taylor Swift, okay, I can do that.
19:04:11 When you say… Yeah, but if you say play the Sunday playlist, nope, not going to work.
19:04:10 Yeah, that works fine. That works fine.
19:04:17 Yeah, the only problem is the only problem is If you're alone in the car to play a playlist, you have to manually click on one of the songs in the playlist and it'll play the rest of the playlist automatically but
19:04:33 That's not a good thing if you're driving and you want to just have Siri do it and you can't.
19:04:40 Yeah, my solution is not something that Most people will go with because most people will go with because It costs money and that's how I use XM Radio.
19:04:53 And unless I'm on a ferry or in a tunnel or something.
19:04:51 Oh, okay.
19:04:56 Or if I'm going through a Are there tall trees or going through a valley or lots of other exceptions. It works fine.
19:05:04 Right.
19:05:06 It was kind of a shock when I moved back from Japan because in Japan.
19:05:10 All of Japan can be covered by one satellite. One TV satellite, one radio satellite.
19:05:15 Hmm.
19:05:17 So if you go anywhere in Japan, you can listen to the same radio station anywhere in Japan.
19:05:26 Right.
19:05:22 You don't ever have to switch it to the local channel, especially when I was in college going between here and Washington State University. I'd have to switch the radio about a dozen times to get up.
19:05:33 Right. Right.
19:05:33 A decent signal. Well, in Japan, anywhere you go in the entire country one You just leave it on the radio station that you like.
19:05:42 In the UK, where basically BBC, leave it on the same channel.
19:05:48 In the United States, it doesn't work that way. So when XM Radio came out, I was on the East Coast.
19:05:53 I went for that in a heartbeat. But it doesn't provide you the same richness that you can provide with your own playlist on your own phone.
19:06:03 Right.
19:06:05 If they give you that, if they give voice access to that They can get voice access to too much else.
19:06:13 And so Apple said, no. Also, the National Transportation Safety Board said, not a good idea.
19:06:21 Because again, if it's a two-way thing. As you're traveling down the road.
19:06:29 You're the um you're the your phone is also picking up local things from the environment and putting them up on the screen. Like, for example, it'll tell you that the speed limit dropped from 30 to 20 when you're in 10.
19:06:40 Right, right.
19:06:41 You have it on there. So it's getting information from the outside world. And the National Transportation Safety Board doesn't want people to mess with that.
19:06:49 So it very much is limited by the government for safety reasons.
19:06:54 And it's limited by Apple for privacy and security reasons.
19:06:59 Though Apple is never going to fix that issue.
19:07:05 I wouldn't say never, but until they can figure out a really clever way of insulating it in such a way that it can't mess with the car And it can't mess with your privacy and security.
19:07:18 They probably don't consider it broken. There are lots of things that you may think are broken because they don't work the way you want.
19:07:26 Right.
19:07:25 It doesn't necessarily mean that Apple thinks they're broken because As you can tell just by their computer ads.
19:07:32 What they sell a lot of is convenience, but they also stress privacy and security.
19:07:40 Right. Thank you. That explains a lot.
19:07:43 Yeah, probably not what you wanted to hear.
19:07:48 One last thing.
19:07:47 I have another iPhone question. And that is, I recently, I have an iPhone 16 and I recently did the update.
19:07:56 That they suggested was necessary. And I've lost Siri.
19:08:03 I mean, she doesn't answer me anymore. So I wondered if anybody else had that problem.
19:08:08 Um. I haven't had that problem, but I suggest that If you go into the settings and just look for the setting for Siri as well as the setting for Apple intelligence You might want to look at both of those.
19:08:24 Okay. Okay.
19:08:26 Apple intelligence. Works with Siri in 181 a little bit different than it did Prior to that.
19:08:33 Yeah, I did that earlier and I could make her she wouldn't talk out loud. I could access her by pushing the button on the side.
19:08:42 Of my phone and saying hey siri she would be there, but she wouldn't talk.
19:08:47 And I asked, you know, just have asked So.
19:08:50 Is it possible that you might have turned the volume down?
19:08:52 It's… No, but I'm going to do what you said.
19:08:58 Yeah.
19:08:59 I might just go up to Verizon, which is where my carrier and just say Help me, guys.
19:09:06 I will warn you something about the Verizon store. And in fact, all the local phone stores.
19:09:12 They're not actually run by Verizon or AT&T or anybody. They're run by a contract.
19:09:18 A contractor and they only get paid if you do something that they make money from. So if you go up there for general questions. Sometimes they're just not going to be particularly helpful.
19:09:32 Because they don't get reimbursed for that.
19:09:36 Okay. Thank you. Yeah.
19:09:42 Is Apple ever going to learn how to alphabetize Is there a reason they don't?
19:09:47 If you're talking about things like titles. Probably not. I used to work as a librarian book titles are alphabetized by something called the Anglo-American cataloging Rules. So for example, if you're Title is The Great Gatsby. You don't put it under thee you put it under
19:10:12 Great and a man for all seasons is under man not a And you have MC and then MAC was a person's name.
19:10:24 Are both alphabetized as if they're MAC. Makes great sense for books.
19:10:31 Apple doesn't do it that way because And they really can't.
19:10:38 There's a technical way that they could do that sort of thing But it would take forever. The other thing is that in terms of Apple actually does a really good job of alphabetizing for most things quite well, because unlike the American
19:10:58 The ASCII american standard code for information interchanges, which is what computers use for assigning characters.
19:11:08 An uppercase a is a 65, a lowercase a is a 97.
19:11:12 So if you computerize things, if you tell the computer to alphabetize things.
19:11:17 It'll have things that are all uppercase at the top and things that are all lowercase down at the bottom.
19:11:22 Apple doesn't do that. So they're really good at alphabetizing. But when they're coming to things like names and titles.
19:11:31 No, it's… That's a…
19:11:33 Well, when I first got an Apple computer, which was in 2010, and right off the bat like on the internet, you find something and you, oh, I want to keep this article and what do they call that and you could
19:11:46 Throw it in there. Just tap it and it would save it for you. But it wasn't alphabetized.
19:12:01 Oh, actually they can do that kind of appetizing almost instantaneously.
19:11:53 And I thought this was so great for just a little while then I had such a long list. And then I'm having to drag everything and And I've…
19:12:08 Oh.
19:12:08 I shall show you because I need to move on to the demo and I'll I'll do that as the first part of the demo.
19:12:13 Okay.
19:12:20 I need to. You probably can't see these, but I've got these things on the screen that are kind of messing with me.
19:12:28 So… I have to move them out of the way.
19:12:34 I have a folder here called AI Illustrations. Actually, that's not
19:12:42 That's not what I wanted.
19:12:59 Here we got things in alphabetical order. If you click up here, it's alphabetical order by either ascending or descending by name If you go over here, it does it by date modified. Here it does it by kind.
19:13:13 I'll give you a more extreme example.
19:13:28 Here they're oftentimes by name. I click on it again. It doesn't in reverse alphabetical order.
19:13:33 Here it does it by date. Here it does it by size.
19:13:39 Here it does it by kind. And you can even do it by color.
19:13:40 Okay.
19:13:48 Right.
19:13:44 You notice that I have these little green And blue dots, well, that's by tags. I can go through here and I can just make a tag for this particular thing.
19:13:54 I don't want to mess it up because that actually tells me something.
19:13:58 But to change the alphabetizing, just click on the head of the column.
19:14:04 Okay.
19:14:04 And you can do it by any of these things. And if you see something you wanted to advertise by something that's not shown.
19:14:11 You go up here to view, show view options there are things that may not appear. Like these are date modified, but you can have it by date created, date last open, date added.
19:14:24 Version, comments, all kinds of different ways that you can have things
19:14:30 Hey, okay. Awesome.
19:14:33 I did not want to do that. So I won't do that.
19:14:40 And if you find views that you want, go back to this show view options.
19:14:45 If you pick out the ways that you want it to
19:14:52 What those column headings are supposed to be. Push this thing down here to say use as defaults. And that way any new folders will have those same options.
19:15:03 Available to you. Like I want tags always because i use colors to uh colors to to keep track of things.
19:15:10 Uh-huh.
19:15:12 If something's blue, it means I've blacked it up. If it's something else.
19:15:17 May not have backed it up.
19:15:24 Before I do anything else and get on to, I was going to talk about Apple intelligence and security.
19:15:30 I wanted to show you a video.
19:15:38 And this is the video. This is a van called OK Go.
19:15:46 And you probably won't be able to hear this because I don't know, maybe you can or not.
19:15:55 I'm going to…
19:16:07 This video is a video rock video that you can get on YouTube.
19:16:13 It's made with 64 iPhones. And at various times they will do things that go between screens.
19:16:23 So for example, this guy can stick out his hand and it goes across to the screen next to him.
19:16:29 And they do all kinds of Funky things.
19:16:41 And I mentioned this to you because if you ever want to do something funky with your phone.
19:16:45 And that's a funky thing that you can do with your phone.
19:16:50 But it was shot on iPhones and it uses iPhones as the As the… catchy technical gimmick.
19:17:04 Another thing that I wanted to just briefly mention. Mr. Lockwood asked me if I knew anything about using a phone with two eSIMs.
19:17:18 And the answer is yes. If you have a phone that accepts two eSIMs, it means you can have a primary and secondary phone line on it. So one phone, two phone numbers means you have to pay for two phone numbers
19:17:35 And you get to describe which one is the primary or secondary. You can also have one as a business and one as a personal.
19:17:43 And if it's a primary, it's going to be a P. A secondary is going to be an S, and if it's obviously business, one's going to be a B and one's going to be a P.
19:17:51 But you can separate it that way. You get two different phone numbers. You have all kinds of different things you can do.
19:17:59 A primary phone number means that if you make a phone call.
19:18:02 That's when it's that's the number it's going to use. But um the things that you can do is you can also say for messages in FaceTime, you could use either. For a default line is going to be one For cellular data, you're only going to use one.
19:18:19 This way you can have a cheapo line for one and the other one on unlimited or whatever you want to do.
19:18:27 In playing around with this, I also found out that you can have different ringtones. So you can assign the ringtone If you call on the secondary line can be different from your primary line.
19:18:38 And I've done that because I now have Both Kathleen's line and my line on one phone.
19:18:46 Because… I want to be able to receive her phone calls.
19:18:53 And that's too small to tell but anyway. It was fairly transparent.
19:19:00 But I would suggest that if you do want to try this that the first thing you do is go online and get some instructions. Apple has to support line explaining how how… how you can use it with two sims and that's not what I want. I want this.
19:19:22 And I also want to talk briefly about security. This is a screenshot I took.
19:19:30 Of something that says chase wants to know if I recognize this charge for $200, $385.
19:19:41 $560. And yes, I recognize that no wrong charge.
19:19:47 I did neither of those. Instead, I went up and I declared this to be spam.
19:19:51 And why did I do none of those? Because I went up to the address line, which is right up here where it says this.
19:19:57 Chase Fraud Protection. And if you hold down your mouse button on it, it shows you what address it really came from.
19:20:05 And this came from Kenneth Duncathan iCloud.com, which is not chase So if you see something suspicious.
19:20:17 To come up here and click on the on the um who it says it's from to find out if it's really from them.
19:20:27 Are they also are they also all at once of just getting tons of ads in my email or very, well, they're not even some of them, I'm sure it's not even legitimate ads but um
19:20:43 The answer is for something like that, just go up and mark them. Make sure you mark them.
19:20:49 As spam. Because if you don't mark them as spam, you'll just get more of them.
19:20:55 Right. Well, I've always, what I've done before I was done before i because i usually say subscribe and subscribe. And I would unsubscribe.
19:21:05 Now that what they're doing, you go there to unsubscribe and they want your email to unsubscribe.
19:21:12 Yes. Don't unsubscribe. Because the reason why you shouldn't unsubscribe is not obvious.
19:21:15 Right.
19:21:19 If you unsubscribe it, it says unsubscribe That's a live one.
19:21:25 Yes.
19:21:25 So you've told them it's not a random number. Now, if you are getting messages from, say, Swains and you don't want to get messages from Swains anymore.
19:21:34 Go ahead and unsubscribe if you're getting them from JCPenney's and you know it's from JCPenney's, go ahead and unsubscribe.
19:21:37 Yes.
19:21:42 By the way, JCPenney still is selling goods. They just don't sell it in stores.
19:21:48 So if it's a legitimate company, you know it's legitimate and you don't want to get their messages anymore, just say unsubscribe.
19:21:54 But otherwise, just go market as spam. And that's true for messages. This past year, you might have noticed that we had an election the state actors, meaning other countries use the excuse of our elections to just fill our mailboxes, our messaging full of spam.
19:22:18 And it was they've done this in the past, but nothing like this time.
19:22:22 I was getting a couple hundred messages a day that were just people trying to find out if I existed.
19:22:31 And what you do is you go up there and you, again, say just that you mark it as a to delete and the Mac will ask you, do you want me to block this? And you say yes, and it'll do so.
19:22:43 The problem is that sometimes you can't really tell. This says the USPS package has arrived at the warehouse and cannot be delivered to you.
19:22:52 Okay, now this sounds like something that you would care about because the United States Postal Service seems legit.
19:22:58 But if you look at the URL, it doesn't end in USPS. There's this hyphen and then it's got this stuff here.
19:23:05 This is who actually sent it. It wasn't sent to you by the US Post Office.
19:23:11 It looks legit, but look at this email address, this URL, and you'll see that it's not the US Post Office.
19:23:19 And this one here, your vehicle has an unpaid pole bill To avoid excessive late fees, go and promptly pay 699 and it gives you this thing.
19:23:31 Easy drive. But this is, again, it's not a legitimate Also, I haven't traveled on a toll road in a long time.
19:23:44 Eva with JobMatch, Lisa here is at info for the UPS position. Click here, blah, blah, blah, for an interview.
19:23:52 I did not. Try out for a UPS position.
19:23:57 So that's not a, this is another one where it says There's a post office.
19:24:04 Address and that's not really a post office. Something that I found that I really liked is this chart Which is what people think
19:24:18 Our problems with illegitimate actors and what is actually the case, reported cyber attack causes In 2024, 7% were beaches.
19:24:32 Based on privilege misuse. 23% were miscellaneous heirs, 26% were social engineering. Social engineering means that somebody got in by pretending to be somebody else.
19:24:44 8% were Well, actually basic web attacks 33% were system intrusion where they actually got into the system.
19:24:57 But this is the incidence that reported the ones that were reported most often were denial of service attacks, which is they didn't get into the system at all they just gunged it up so bad that you couldn't use it.
19:25:10 So you see what actually happened and what most of the attacks were there's a complete misconnect In terms of academia.
19:25:22 In terms of what people are publishing. And what incidents they actually… talk about. You'll notice that you'll notice denial of service attacks gets a lot of attention in academia, but in terms of total problems, it's really not It's outsized compared to the real problem.
19:25:45 News coverage talks about denial of service attacks. If Twitter goes down.
19:25:50 But 66% is lost or stolen assets And again, you can see that what's actually going on and what's actually happening are not the same thing.
19:26:02 And what people look for is not the same thing. So what I want to tell you about is basically what you should be concerned about.
19:26:11 You should be concerned about your password. If you have a simple password and simple means under 15 characters you are vulnerable.
19:26:23 If you reuse a password. You are vulnerable. Not only are you vulnerable, you're extremely vulnerable.
19:26:31 If someone breaks into, you offered a campaign donation to some guy who is running for state representative.
19:26:41 Somebody hacks his site. And they get your credentials. Well, you had never intended to log into his site again. So you use the same password that you use for everything else.
19:26:51 Except that now that person has a legitimate username and a legitimate password that they will then try against banks insurance companies credit unions, anything that involves um something of value to people. So that's why you you want to make sure that you have your password down safe.
19:27:16 You want to make sure that, and safe means 15 characters or more.
19:27:22 And you also don't want to ever reuse a password for anything.
19:27:27 It doesn't make any difference if it's a simple thing or it's a useless thing.
19:27:32 Don't every reuse a password. Because as you can see.
19:27:37 In terms of the amount of stuff that people have that they have control over that lost and stolen assets is mostly your data that was lost.
19:27:49 Breaches in terms of banks and so on and so forth, that's actually fairly rare where people run into problems is lost and stolen assets.
19:27:58 Now, how can you write a a password that's going to be difficult to… to break into? And the answer is.
19:28:09 You make it long but easy for you to remember. So as an example.
19:28:18 You live in Squim. I like the… Lavender.
19:28:33 This has upper and lowercase characters And it has a number and it is.
19:28:40 33 characters long. It's easy to remember.
19:28:44 2024 doesn't necessarily mean you like the Lavender Festival 2024. It means that you set this password in 2024.
19:28:53 So like in 2026, you look at that and you think.
19:28:56 I should change that because it's been up there for two years.
19:29:01 So this is an easy to remember password It's easy to type. When you have something like
19:29:33 If it's hard for you to type, you won't type it that often.
19:29:37 So find something that's easy and fast to type and is long. And more than 15 characters is long.
19:29:44 You will find stupid companies that say that, oh, they don't accept a space as a character So if in that case, you just have to say i
19:29:58 Like the lavender. Let me make that uppercase just for the heck of it.
19:30:09 The dash is a special character that almost everybody allows. But some stupid things, including Microsoft, don't like spaces.
19:30:18 So this has a special character. It's got numbers. It's got upper and lower case.
19:30:23 And it's fairly fast to write. So the simple way to keep yourself safe.
19:30:30 Is to have long passwords and never, ever, ever reuse them. This way, if they break into your account at Bank of America.
19:30:40 They might cause damage, but they won't be able to get into your bank account at sun soundt sound um bank here in swim because you have a different username and password there.
19:30:55 Yes.
19:30:54 Hey, Lawrence. But if you have, say, for instance, 100 passwords and each one of them is a passphrase like that.
19:31:03 Back to the same problem is how do you know which phrase goes with which You know, account.
19:31:09 That's where you use a password manager. And I highly recommend 1Password.
19:31:17 What is the name of the name? I just got this wrong earlier today. Sequoia.
19:31:23 Comes with a password manager. Built in. And the same password manager is built in to Sequoia It's built into the current iPhone and iPad operating systems.
19:31:36 So, and if you tell them to sync to each other via iCloud.
19:31:40 If you make a password on your Mac and later on you're using the bank app.
19:31:45 And you want to know what the password is, you can look it up on your iPhone.
19:31:49 Because it syncs to your phone, to your iPad, to your Mac.
19:31:54 All together. And Apple now bundles that into Sequoia to uh iPad, OS 18 and into iOS 18.
19:32:08 So that's the easy way to keep track of it. And if you're not on the current operating system, I highly recommend 1Password.
19:32:20 One password you do have to pay for, and if you use it on both your Mac and your iPhone, you'll have to buy two copies.
19:32:27 One for the Mac and one for your iPhone because the iPhone version is It's got the same name, but it's a different thing. So they charge you twice for it.
19:32:37 But Sequoia would work for both.
19:32:42 If you have the current operating system on your Mac and the current operating system on your iPhone, yes, it'll work for both.
19:32:50 The trick is make sure that you go into your iCloud preferences and sync them.
19:32:56 So that they talk back and forth to each other.
19:33:00 Lawrence, I have a quick question. I use 1Password.
19:33:03 Yes.
19:33:06 I just got a new iMac. And it's got the built-in password program and it keeps popping up and getting in the way of my 1Pass work.
19:33:13 Is there a way for me to turn that off?
19:33:17 I haven't wanted to. So the answer is I don't know.
19:33:22 I don't know.
19:33:21 Okay. It covers up it covers up the 1
19:33:29 Thing that pops up that you click on.
19:33:32 It should disappear if you just click anywhere else.
19:33:38 But I don't know if you can turn it off because I haven't wanted to.
19:33:36 Yeah. Okay. Thank you.
19:33:47 Mm-hmm.
19:33:42 I have both 1Password and I have passwords, which is the Apple application. And I'm going to be switching everything to passwords Because among other things, they don't charge you a subscription fee.
19:33:52 Oh.
19:33:56 So.
19:33:58 How much trouble will that be?
19:34:05 You have to export your passwords from 1Password, which is a pain.
19:34:10 Yeah. Okay. Thank you.
19:34:11 It's not impossible. In fact, 1Password even has a built-in menu that tells you how to do it.
19:34:18 You probably won't be able to figure out how to do that without looking at their documentation.
19:34:22 Yeah.
19:34:22 And passwords itself, Apple's passwords has a page that tells you what format it needs to be in.
19:34:31 And you can do it.
19:34:34 Okay, thank you.
19:34:37 I wanted to… spend what little time we have left because I got sidetracked on other things, talking about apple intelligence One thing that's different, you'll notice that almost everybody wants to have artificial intelligence embedded in something They think that you went to buy.
19:34:55 And most of the things that people went to embed it in, I find horrifying.
19:35:00 If any of you have ever had a Roomba, a Roomba originally said that it had artificial intelligence and then I kind of backed off of it because people have had Roombas know that they're actually pretty stupid.
19:35:12 They've got a good algorithm, though. Roomba goes along until it bumps into something and then it bumps into something and it slowly starts turning in a direction until it can free itself and then it goes off until it bumps into something else.
19:35:25 And some of the more advanced ones. Can actually keep an internal map. It draws a map of where it's vacuum.
19:35:33 So it figures, okay, I went in a straight line here. I should be able to turn around.
19:35:38 180 degrees and go in a straight line back the other way and get the entire floor by doing this.
19:35:45 So that's not really artificial intelligence. They actually built some intelligence into the to the robot. But a lot of the ai stuff Intuit is talking about that they have artificial intelligence in their accounting software I don't know about you, but I would prefer that the only intelligence involved in keeping track of my accounts is mine.
19:36:09 I don't want something to come in from the side and decide, oh, no, you didn't pay enough for that bill. I got to bump it up or drop it down or not count it this month.
19:36:20 I don't want artificial intelligence in. In accounting.
19:36:25 I don't trust it yet in cars. You know, there are things that… I don't want to do.
19:36:31 Apple has their artificial intelligence, which they call apple intelligence And it now exists on the iPad, the iPhone, and in the Mac. And on the Mac.
19:36:43 There's a this menu item that appears in Sequoia says apple intelligence It is turned off by default.
19:36:52 So Apple says, hey, they've added Apple intelligence to Sequoia. Well, I'm not seeing anything different. You have to turn it on.
19:36:58 So here's the menu item on your settings. And then you go through and just turn on the parts that you wanted to pay attention to.
19:37:08 And one of the things that I should have mentioned this earlier, somebody was saying they say, hey, Siri.
19:37:12 You no longer have to say, hey, you can just say, Siri.
19:37:16 And then my HomePod is yelling at me.
19:37:22 My HomePod is upset because I called it. But you don't have to have that hay anymore.
19:37:31 Right. I'm pot is yelling at me.
19:37:34 You have to turn it on. And same thing on your phone. You have to turn it on.
19:37:40 And then you can do some things that are fairly clever, like for example It will… It's useful.
19:37:51 It gives you new ways to look at your mail, for example. It'll summarize things.
19:37:56 If I look at, if I get a mail coming in, it'll give me a summary of the message.
19:38:00 It looks through the content and gives me a summary. What Apple does, though, that's extraordinary is how they've done that.
19:38:10 They don't offer this on all Macs. You have to have one of the last two models of iPhone and you have to have a recent Mac.
19:38:19 Why? Because it takes a considerable amount of horsepower and it takes more memory in order to do these tricks.
19:38:28 And that's because Apple does as much of a processing as possible on your computer.
19:38:34 So if you ask at what time is it? It'll tell you what time it is. It would do that before.
19:38:40 If you ask it how far between here in Seattle, it can actually do that kind of calculation.
19:38:46 On your device, as long as it has an internet connection and ask how far away is Seattle.
19:38:52 It'll come back with an answer. But what the question was, it doesn't pass on.
19:38:57 The Apple intelligence only passes on the necessary information to answer the question.
19:39:03 How far is it from here to Seattle? The only thing it really needs to know is where is Seattle? Because it knows where you are.
19:39:12 And then it does, with the original question why you wanted to know about Seattle.
19:39:16 Doesn't know. Doesn't care because the rest of it's done on your machine.
19:39:21 And the summary, when it's summarizing messages, the messages are already on your machine. It does an analysis of the words in there and says.
19:39:29 Okay, Barbara wants to know if Shishimata water your lawn tomorrow.
19:39:34 Okay it'll give you that summary before you even open the message.
19:39:38 But there are other things it can do. And among the things it can do is a new app that you probably didn't even notice, but you might have.
19:39:49 What is it called? Image Playground.
19:39:54 Image playground exists On the iPhone, the iPad, and on the Mac.
19:40:01 And these are images that I created with Image Playground. But before we get into that, I want to get into that I lost my… folder here. I wanted to show you some things that I did.
19:40:19 I wanted a picture of an Asian water dragon reading a book. Now, something that you need before you look at these photos something you should know Asian dragons do not have wings.
19:40:32 Asian wagons don't have wings because they don't need wings in order to fly.
19:40:37 And as a result, Asian dragons have four limbs. I have four feet.
19:40:43 And you have four limbs, two hands, two feet. European dragons have six limbs.
19:40:50 Four legs plus two wings. Technically, that makes them a bug.
19:40:55 I did not want to bug. I wanted an Asian water dragon. So I went into Adobe Firefly And I said, I want an Asian blue water dragon reading a book.
19:41:06 And it gave me this. And it gave me… Actually, I should just open them all up at once.
19:41:17 Different kinds of variations. The very first one I got was this one down here.
19:41:23 Where it's reading a book, it's reading a book It's reading a book.
19:41:29 It's reading a book. It's reading a book.
19:41:33 Slightly different. Each time. And then this one's a little bit different. That's because I said I wanted a Asian Blue Dragon.
19:41:43 Reading a book in the style of Hiroshige. Hiroshige is a famous Japanese illustrator of the 19th century.
19:41:50 So this one's a little bit more nuanced than that one.
19:41:56 For example. And this is another one.
19:42:01 This is Hiroshige and this one is Hiroshige. You notice that this second time it threw in We got way water is because it's a water dragon. This one's got waves because there's a water dragon, but now it has flowers too because you know hey
19:42:15 It's an Asian dragon.
19:42:19 Did you notice that one of those had a book that had two spines?
19:42:23 Yes, I did notice that. We'll get to that in a second.
19:42:30 I didn't do quite as many with many Microsoft co-pilot.
19:42:35 Simply because I don't like the dragon. It doesn't have… It doesn't have a… any wings, but this one looks to me look an awful lot like a horn toad like I used to see down in Texas.
19:42:49 This one's a little bit more dragon-like. And the nice touch is that it's actually oriental writing here.
19:42:56 And this one's back to being a hoard and toad. So Microsoft does get Microsoft does.
19:43:02 Some points, particularly for this one. And this one also, I said in the style of Hiroshige, so it made it slightly different This they consider photorealistic And this one's more of a woodblock print.
19:43:16 Hiroshige did woodblock prints. Then we come to apple
19:43:27 Apple intelligence. Again, it's a blue water dragon reading a book in a library.
19:43:34 And this is Apple's blue water dragon. This is the photorealistic and this is one that I say was a illustration. So that's not bad.
19:43:44 Except that the first time that I tried this. No matter what i tried I said it was an Asian dragon that I wanted.
19:43:51 I got wings. And instead of reading a book for some reason, it's playing cards.
19:43:57 And I can't really explain it. It's just… Not the Asian dragon that I wanted.
19:44:13 Then I said I wanted to This is an Apple intelligence. This is what it is good at.
19:44:20 I said that I wanted a penguin cheering on its team, its basketball team And you notice that even the basketball team in the back are penguins. So this is a penguin with a basketball so that you know it's a basketball
19:44:35 And the team in the background and those are penguins as well.
19:44:39 So that's not half bad.
19:44:46 And here are different pictures of me. Now, this is the photograph that it started with.
19:44:53 It's a picture of me. Done in Apple portrait mode.
19:44:57 Taken with my iphone. And here's what it came up with.
19:45:05 I said that I want a scholar down reading a scroll in the style of Hiroshi So apparently scholars are glaring a lot so Even though my original photograph didn't have me glaring Because I'm a scholar, I have to be looking sad or glaring or something.
19:45:21 And here I said that I wasn't a scholar. Here I said I wasn't a scholar and it's it created that from based upon that picture.
19:45:35 So how does it do that? Well, let's try something again and something again
19:45:46 Giant toad. Swallowing.
19:45:51 Test. Here's a giant toad in front of a castle. Not quite what I wanted.
19:45:59 Because it's not doing much in the terms of swallowing, although it does look like a giant toad.
19:46:07 And you're going to have space themes So now we have… giant toad and because it's a space theme and now it's got constellations in the background And if you find one that you like, you say done And it makes it larger and then you can just drag it off onto your desktop.
19:46:27 So this is Apple intelligence. It did not go out to the internet.
19:46:33 Except for just a general idea of what a toad looks like and what a castle looks like. But what I was asking for It did not send that out.
19:46:41 So it's an interesting way to create an interesting way illustrations for illustrations for something that you're trying to do.
19:46:49 But there are limitations, definite limitations.
19:47:05 You say politicians screaming at protesters with rifles there's a good chance it won't do that.
19:47:11 Says unable to use that description. So it also kind of censors you.
19:47:19 The reason for this is it doesn't want to be on the front page of the New York Times Saying that people were creating hate speech using ample intelligence.
19:47:29 So it does limit in terms of what it is that you what you can ask for.
19:47:37 But if you want to um
19:47:48 Birthday cake for a girl. Comes up with a birthday cake and it gives you different variations Like if you decide that you want to blue birth day take for a girl. Hopefully it'll change the color Okay, that's kind of a…
19:48:11 Almost a teal, but sure Oh, 315th birthday.
19:48:18 A very old girl.
19:48:24 Anybody have a suggestion if something you want me to try?
19:48:27 I have a quick question right quick, though. Is this just for the Mac or is it on iPhone and iPad
19:48:35 It's on your iPhone, it's on your iPad. You just have to look for Image Playground.
19:48:38 And… Well, I did a search and it doesn't find it.
19:48:43 Okay. I am, yes.
19:48:43 Are you using iOS 18? It's on mine.
19:48:49 I'll take a better look. Thanks.
19:48:50 Oh, a question. Did you… I don't remember if I had to download it or not.
19:48:57 Did you turn on at… Did you turn on Apple intelligence on your iPhone?
19:48:57 You have to turn it on.
19:49:02 I did, yes. I just did.
19:49:04 Yeah, you might have to download it.
19:49:09 Okay. Suggestions, and it's something you want me to try.
19:49:22 I asked it to do SpongeBob SquarePants smoking a reefer and it wouldn't do it.
19:49:27 Yes, it won't, because it recognizes those as either restricted by content being the reefer or restricted by copyright.
19:49:38 Right. So then I asked for a square sponge smoking a cigar It will do that.
19:49:47 Where? Yellow.
19:49:57 Sponge smoking a cigar.
19:50:06 I, uh, uh. Need to get rid of the birthday things.
19:50:14 So…
19:50:14 Okay, that's a little bit weird, but that's a little bit weird
19:50:30 So I went to download Image Playground and there's a charge for it.
19:50:37 But the description of the in-app purchases are all in Japanese, Chinese, whatever.
19:50:43 So I can't read them. Okay, so we want the Apple one.
19:50:45 Then it's not apples.
19:50:50 Yeah.
19:50:50 Okay, great. Thank you.
19:50:54 Okay. I'm going to skip the image playground because you can play around with that if you have uh
19:51:05 If you have the right operating system And I went to go on to something else, which also is with Apple intelligence And I can never find it. Oh, there it is.
19:51:16 I don't use pages that much.
19:51:23 You'll have to forgive me if I don't seem to know what I'm doing.
19:51:39 This is a complex sentence. This sentence has… 206 words and it's one sentence.
19:51:48 And… That alone should tell you just probably too much.
19:51:54 Let's make this a little bit bigger so you can read this.
19:51:59 Fantastic piece of prose.
19:52:05 And we get 200. Ah, we can get to 200. Okay, this is just a terrible piece of prose. It's one sentence so Just trying to read this out loud, you'd kill over in a faint just from lack of breath.
19:52:18 So I'm going to select this, I'm going to go up to the edit menu to writing tools, which is something new.
19:52:25 And I say that I want this to make this friendly.
19:52:35 And it comes up and i copy that.
19:52:40 And I come down here and I paste that And it makes it gnarly.
19:52:46 Friendlier, but also way too big.
19:52:53 You'll see that among other things, it's much, much shorter than the first one.
19:52:59 And also it's more than one sentence. It's at least three sentences that I can see.
19:53:06 Okay, other possibilities are other possibilities are for um for writing tools, I come back I try it again and I say I want it professional
19:53:24 And I copy that. I'm going to paste it in, get giant text again.
19:53:36 Make this 11. There's a possibility that that's may even be longer than the original.
19:53:47 But at least it's now multiple sentences, I think.
19:53:54 Actually, it might be exactly the same thing. Oh, well, so that didn't work out so great.
19:54:02 Possibly because i didn't do them. And we're going to go up to writing tools and we're going to say concise.
19:54:17 And we copy that.
19:54:36 And… So as you can see, it made some fairly made some fairly decent changes here. And I looked at these earlier and they basically say the same thing.
19:54:49 This is an example of Apple intelligence. And it didn't have to reach out across the internet to do that.
19:54:56 It just sees that this is a big huge, ridiculously long sentence If you have a sentence that goes on for more than three lines, it's probably too long.
19:55:05 So the first rule of thumb is break it up into individual sentences.
19:55:09 The second thing is to get rid of repetitive prose. It managed to do that.
19:55:16 Things that are repeatedly used over and over and over again. Got rid And if I really worked at it, I could get a professional one that would actually be shorter than the original.
19:55:28 Possibly, but. It's built into the… It's built into Apple intelligence.
19:55:39 It does the same sort of tricks on your email. You write something. There's a commercial on TV where this guy who's writing this nasty notes to his supervisor and then he asked to rewrite it as something friendly and it comes across and he gets a compliment
19:55:59 From his coworker. That's done with Apple intelligence and it's actually quite good. What it will not do, which is what you see the news stories about.
19:56:10 If you ask it to write the great American novel, it won't.
19:56:14 You actually have to write something and it'll help you rewrite it.
19:56:18 Now, there are other ways to do this. Microsoft has had editing tools built into Word for quite a long long time and you can have add-ons Let me bring up Word.
19:56:33 This is Word. There's this thing called Grammarly, which is a plugin that you can buy or you can use the free version.
19:56:43 That as you're doing things it'll do things make suggestions on how to do it better.
19:56:50 But this little symbol that I have here, because I have a Microsoft account for the entire office suite That little symbol means that Copilot is here. So Copilot will allow me to create a draft using co-pilot. Again, I'm a decent writer. I don't need co-pilot's help.
19:57:08 But for this horrible, horrible sentence, which I did have to deal with.
19:57:12 I did use some AI to figure out how to make it comprehensible. I figured out once this is actually syntactically, it makes sense.
19:57:22 In terms of syntax, it just doesn't make sense in terms of human beings understanding it.
19:57:29 And I'm a firm believer that policies and procedures If they're meant to be followed by individuals, they should be able to be read by individuals.
19:57:38 If you need a lawyer, then it was poorly written. So this is something that's built into pages and numbers and pages and numbers and keynote.
19:57:52 As well as Apple Mail and Messages. On your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
19:58:00 And it's all part of Apple intelligence. But it won't work if you don't turn it on.
19:58:05 Apple Intelligence does not work. With Microsoft. It does not work with with… Chrome does not work with Microsoft Edge, things that aren't made by Apple doesn't work with those.
19:58:24 Yes.
19:58:23 Lawrence, I found it does work. With non-Apple things.
19:58:32 If you go into Word and put that same sentence and you right click.
19:58:38 You'll get the writing tools instead of being in the edit menu like it is on all the Apple products. You just select the paragraph and then right click and you'll see writing tools come up.
19:58:52 Is it Apple's writing tools or Microsoft's?
19:58:55 Apple.
19:58:57 It is possible because Apple let their developer conference did say, if you want to incorporate these tools in your software, do it. But for the most part, right now, it's just Apple stuff. I haven't noticed that with Word, but I'll go and look.
19:59:12 I tried it with Word and PowerPoint. They both work great by just right clicking after you selected it and then it comes up with the editing tools and It's the same as the one you see in pages and numbers.
19:59:26 I have my own best idea on how to improve PowerPoint.
19:59:32 Throw it away and use Keynote. Keynotes much more intelligent.
19:59:40 Keynote will read PowerPoint. So you don't even need PowerPoint. I use Keynote for everything.
19:59:46 When I was working for the government, I used to have to do presentations using PowerPoint.
19:59:52 And people would say, oh, your slides look so great. How'd you do that? I used Keynote.
19:59:58 And then I export it in this PowerPoint and went in used them at work, but PowerPoint i PowerPoint was originally designed as a outlining.
20:00:12 Application just to do outlines. And Microsoft basically destroyed it. The guy who sold PowerPoint to Microsoft.
20:00:22 Is to this day a millionaire, but he really, really resents what they did to his software.
20:00:29 And things like access. Their database they bought the name Access from Tandy Corporation.
20:00:36 And access was a calendar. When it was running on TRS-80s.
20:00:42 Microsoft bought it because it just wanted the name. They threw away the application and created a database.
20:00:49 I could tell you horrible tales about computers. Anyway, any questions about that? I realize that was a short demo, but that's really pretty much all you really need to know.
20:00:58 You need to turn on Apple intelligence on your phone, on your iPad, on your Mac, if you want to use it.
20:01:04 And then it works with keynote and numbers and pages and pages Safari and Messenger and And the image playground Just pick out something you'd like to stick on a card someplace and just go play around with image playground.
20:01:25 It's something to note about it. Apple Intelligence, which I should Bring up and go away.
20:01:34 I don't want to keep you. Yes.
20:01:35 Florence. And passwords, do I have to enter all of my various passwords or does it automatically find any of them from any other programs and automatically bring them in?
20:01:49 Apple passwords will, as you're going to websites and entering your name and password It's keeping track of those.
20:01:56 Apple passwords. And to some extent to some extent 1Password does the same thing.
20:02:06 But if you've been to, if you just downloaded and installed Sequoia this week.
20:02:14 It doesn't know about anything you've done in the past. Oh, actually, that's not true.
20:02:18 Come to think of it, that's not true because even your old passwords. Safari, for example, has been keeping track of them for quite some time. If you go into Safari settings There's a section here on a section here Passwords. It's been there for years.
20:02:37 And the only thing they've done in Sequoia is they've instead of being as part of Safari now, it's now a separate application but Safari has been keeping track of passwords for years.
20:02:50 But it won't know if it won't know if If you go to a website using chrome Edge or Firefox, it doesn't know anything about it.
20:03:03 Yes.
20:03:01 Lawrence, I have a question. With the apple intelligence or any artificial intelligence can you take some sort of a legal jargon or like some sort of insurance jargon that Who in the hell can understand it all and have it simplified in very simple
20:03:24 Things that you can understand.
20:03:25 Yes. The answer is yes.
20:03:30 Okay. And how would one approach that?
20:03:33 You just copy it out of off of their website, for example, is a good place to find the fine print for your insurance contract, just go onto your website and ask for a copy or scrape it off of your PDF.
20:03:46 And then paste it into pages and say, go to the writing tools and it'll simplify it.
20:03:53 Thank you.
20:03:54 One thing I wanted to show you. I told you that Apple doesn't go out and send your entire request. There is an exception. If you want to use chat GPT and you have a chat GPT account.
20:04:07 You can set it up so that it will use chat GPT. I don't want it to use ChatGPT.
20:04:13 Because I don't want it to have that out there. One of the things that happened with ChatGPT, ChatGPT is the AI interface that's been in the news over the past year or so.
20:04:25 They had a data breach. Several months ago.
20:04:30 And if you had a chat GPT account then whatever you had in your account.
20:04:38 Not necessarily has but me personally has be in somebody else's hands.
20:04:42 But if you wanted to use ChatGPT, you can allow Apple intelligence to go out and talk to chat GPT. But I didn't want it to, so I turned that off.
20:04:57 And the reason why the rules are slightly different, you have to be signed into ChatGPT in order to use it.
20:05:05 And so it might stay on your computer if you're doing Apple intelligence. But as soon as you start using chat GPT, it has to send the request to ChatGPT.
20:05:15 So it's no longer just on your computer. Yes.
20:05:16 Lawrence. I don't have a chat GPT account.
20:05:21 But Siri does say that it got some stuff from ChatGPT.
20:05:32 Oh, and I don't need an account then.
20:05:27 That's because it makes a request from ChatGPT. You don't. It depends upon what it is. For example, if you there are some things that you can get from ChatGPT that gives you a limit. I think with a free account, you get limited to
20:05:45 How many requests per day. Once you run up against that barrier, it doesn't work anymore.
20:05:51 Oh, okay. Gotcha. Thank you.
20:05:52 You have to wait until the next day.
20:05:57 So I just wanted to mention the fact that, yes, you can You can talk to chat GPT if you want to, but I have that turned off because I don't want to.
20:06:10 Yes.
20:06:09 Glorious. I read in several places this week that the next iteration of iOS and sequoia should be available next week.
20:06:19 And it will turn on Apple intelligence by default. Instead of having it turned off.
20:06:27 I haven't read that.
20:06:34 Okay, I hope there's a way to turn it off because a lot of people don't want it for a variety of reasons. Like for example.
20:06:40 In schools, you don't want schools students using that if they're using in a writing class and you want them to write complete sentences and paragraphs teacher padded.
20:06:49 Probably there will be a way to turn it off. I'm just saying it'll be And you won't have to turn it on. It'll be on by default.
20:06:58 I haven't read that. I'm not sure what I think of that.
20:07:04 I personally probably would have liked it. I don't know. Maybe they've done enough testing and they think that uh the training wheels can come off. But I do… caution people to be very careful with artificial intelligence.
20:07:18 Because artificial means it's really not real. And it can make mistakes. So for example.
20:07:26 Artificial intelligence and spreadsheet. Not sure what i want it to do.
20:07:30 If I type in two and I wanted to add it to two of that and come up with a four.
20:07:35 I don't want it to be creative. I really want a four.
20:07:40 So just something to just something to wonder about. Also keep in mind that If people are basing their predictions upon beta software.
20:07:51 When it goes out to the beta testers, Apple wants them to beta test them, so it might be turned on by default.
20:07:56 Doesn't mean it's going to be turned on by default for users.
20:08:00 Just they said it's the golden master which was released
20:08:06 I'll believe it when I see it.
20:08:09 I guess we only have to wait a week if that's a week Accurate.
20:08:13 Yeah, well, a lot of things aren't.
20:08:17 Yeah. Adam, thanks.
20:08:18 Lawrence, it's getting kind of late in the session, I know, and this is kind of new stuff.
20:08:25 But maybe next time or sometime in the future, you might share with us what you think might become of the AI that the $500 billion heirs are announcing Sometime over the weekend.
20:08:41 They're going to put into it. I'm just real curious what that buys.
20:08:49 It buys more billionaires. More people will make money from it.
20:08:55 I don't know that that's necessarily a good thing.
20:09:00 I don't think it's going to make you and I think it's any red room.
20:09:04 Well, the only thing that I saw was one of the people in there was talking about cancer research and how it might find cures for cancer, which sounds like a wonderful thing, but I don't I can't for the life of me figure out how this stuff happens.
20:09:20 The answer is they've been saying that for 20 years. The biggest steps in cancer research were done with just old-fashioned computing.
20:09:29 And that was when they mapped the human genome that project. That was a giant step forward. But you see, you have to do the basic science. Artificial intelligence can't really get you through to the basic science.
20:09:44 And they haven't seen anything now with AI that can't be done with traditional computing. For example.
20:09:53 The uh the uh the word tools that I was showing you.
20:09:58 Grammarly has been doing things like that for a decade, Microsoft has been flagging things. I used to tell people when I was teaching.
20:10:07 That if they sent me a paper that looked like a Christmas tree and everything was underlined in red and green.
20:10:12 They couldn't send it to me until they got rid of all the red and green. And that's because Microsoft.
20:10:20 15 years ago was flagging things that were misspelled and red and it was flagging repeated words like saying the the and things like that. It's been doing that for a long time.
20:10:31 That's not artificial intelligence. That's just good programming. What Apple is doing, the part that they've added to it is the security part in terms of the tools themselves.
20:10:44 That's not necessarily new technology. The security part is definitely an Apple innovation.
20:10:53 So finding how cure for cancer, I don't see how that's going to That's a good sales technique.
20:11:01 To tell you that it's important, I don't see that it's going to make a difference.
20:11:07 There's a Adam angst has tidbits this week.
20:11:14 Short article about how to use chat gpt With spreadsheets to get information that he would have had to spend an awful lot of time manually to get and also some of the pitfalls some of when it doesn't, it goes wrong.
20:11:32 Bruce Schneer also has an article on his site about some of the dangers of AI making up stuff.
20:11:40 Ah, yes. That's been a problem for quite some time. When they did the… The current AI models, the large language models, large language, it's called large language models.
20:11:52 Because they fed it billions and billions of words. The large language models that we have today does not know the difference between to whom the bell tolls in Grey's Anatomy.
20:12:08 It doesn't know that one's fiction. It doesn't know what fiction is.
20:12:13 So if in for whom the bell tolls, if the hero manages to patch himself up using a old bandana and it allows them to run 40 miles through the desert and you try to do that, you'll probably die.
20:12:29 Because it's fiction. But the large language models cannot tell the difference between a lie the truth, fiction, and reality.
20:12:41 And those are different things. I don't know the difference.
20:12:43 But doesn't AI, if you ask it, tell you the source of its information or no?
20:12:49 Oh, it doesn't?
20:12:49 No, because no because it's compiled. It's compiled out of billions upon billions of things. And it might tell you the source of something But what it's telling you may not be the part that you focus on. For example, if you want to know
20:13:04 Write me a… a resume to get a job as a programmer.
20:13:09 Okay, write you up a perfectly good resume. And you go in and you turn it in and they laugh at you because they gave you a resume for a cobalt programmer.
20:13:18 And if you don't know that a cobalt was a language from the 1950s.
20:13:21 Obsolete.
20:13:23 You're in sad shape there. It usually doesn't tell you anything at all.
20:13:33 Wow. That's dangerous. That's dangerous.
20:13:35 Yes, it is. And that's why when people say they want to use AI for a doctor's diagnosis, I think No, no.
20:13:47 If he wants to do a doctor's diagnosis on a robot, that's fine.
20:13:45 I don't think so.
20:13:51 Diagnosis on me. No, I. I'd rather have humans do that.
20:13:59 Good luck finding one.
20:14:00 Keep in mind that the movie 2001 were already a couple decades late in making that happen.
20:14:08 So what they could do in 2001, the movie we still can't do in 2024.
20:14:14 True intelligence is hard. And if you don't believe me, if you're the least bit skeptical.
20:14:22 Go into a high school class on any subject And tell me how difficult or how easy it is to teach them anything at all.
20:14:36 There's a reason why, by the way. I was a double major in my undergraduate.
20:14:42 History and education. I did not even bother to apply for the education degree, even though I qualified.
20:14:49 Because after going and teaching and student teaching, I decided, no, I want to teach college.
20:14:56 I wanted people to pay to listen to me. Rather than listen to me just because the bus took them there and they had no choice.
20:15:07 There's a difference of motivation.
20:15:12 Probably right.
20:15:16 Any other questions before we go?
20:15:20 Oh, I need a new computer. And do you know of anything coming down the pike? Should I wait a while? Is there something that I don't know what's out there right now.
20:15:35 Apple's definitely going to come up with something in 2025. I have no idea what.
20:15:39 I will tell you that I will tell you that If you want a laptop.
20:15:44 All of the Apple laptops right now, the only thing I would suggest that you pay attention to is the hard drive size.
20:15:53 If you buy any Apple laptop, any Apple desktop, they've doubled the amount of memory.
20:15:58 So now you get A minimum of 16 gigs and that's because they needed more memory for the AI stuff. But that means that every single model of everything they have has enough memory.
20:16:12 What people tend to try and save money on our disk drive space.
20:16:18 You will use more disk drive space than you know what you're doing.
20:16:22 I'll give you an example. If you have an iPhone and you use messages as an iPhone.
20:16:29 You should go into your settings and see how much room messages is using. It's probably using in the gigabytes Because nobody ever bothers to delete old messages, which means that every time somebody sent you a photograph or sent you a PDF or sent you a movie, it's still in messages.
20:16:47 And the same thing happens with your computer. Get at least a terabyte of disk drive space And any of the apples out there will be sufficient for your needs.
20:17:02 Everything Apple is producing right now this very second has more power than you can use.
20:17:11 I recently bought a new machine. I'm sorry?
20:17:12 I don't use a lot of space anyway. I don't use a lot of space anyway.
20:17:18 You might not think so, but once you start taking photographs and people, they tend to be very careful when they photograph things.
20:17:27 Go and photograph everything. I would go to the grocery store and Kathleen would send me a photograph Saying, I want this brand of this brand of oil. And I want this brand of soy sauce And so on and so forth. There are lots of things that people use cameras for that you don't think about.
20:17:45 I was talking to my daughter, she was here in late December.
20:17:51 And I was talking to her and I said. I have a list on my phone. I'll send it to you. And she came over and used her phone to take a picture of my screen.
20:18:00 And I said, what did you just do? And she says, it's faster.
20:18:06 So now she has a picture of the screen showing my list of things that I wanted to show her. People use photographs for everything and they just, they take up space.
20:18:17 So don't shy away from having a terabyte of this space. You'll end up using it for something.
20:18:25 Even if…
20:18:25 I don't use, let's see, I'm going there right now Let's see, what do you find that under? Go to the bottom.
20:18:34 Just click on the image of your disk drive If you don't see the image of your disk drive.
20:18:41 If you don't see an image of the disk drive, it's actually hard to find out.
20:18:46 Well, isn't that under the black apple? How much spice you're using?
20:18:52 No, it's buried. It's there, but it's buried.
20:18:59 And everybody's
20:18:59 But anyway. Everything that Apple produces today, I would recommend.
20:19:05 Just make sure you have enough disk space. The question that Mr. Lockwood asked me earlier, and I sent it back, the response was.
20:19:13 He has a friend who wants to move from a uh from a PC to a Mac and he's already got a screen, he's already got a mouse, and he's already got a keyboard.
20:19:23 Does he need a new one to work with a Mac Mini? And the answer is no.
20:19:29 It doesn't come with any of those things. And you can plug a… PC, keyboard, mouse and screen into it. The question is if you that you really need to think about is Is the keyboard any good? Is the mouse any good? And is the screen any good? A lot of PCs come with really
20:19:51 Terrible screens. And Apple makes a point of having really good strains.
20:19:56 You can get not the one from the manufacturer, but you can go into Costco and you can get a really nice LG monitor for not much money.
20:20:05 That's better than the screen that comes with any PC that I'm aware of out there right now.
20:20:13 So, uh. But yeah, you can go out and get a Mac Mini and reuse the PC screen and mouse and keyboard.
20:20:23 Cheap.
20:20:28 It says… 40.84 gigabytes.
20:20:20 But you might end up buying a new one later on anyway, simply because you don't like the the quality
20:20:32 Of 256 GB 25.
20:20:36 Okay, that's not much. Which means, among other things, that you're not saving any movies or or photographs to your hard drive.
20:20:47 And you really should.
20:20:50 Yeah. Well, and I… I guess that was in the newsletter about what the other gentleman just talked about uh I learned because I just learned about the messages and call it attachments or whatever with it it doesn't delete.
20:21:10 And… Why don't they fix a delete that means delete? Anyway.
20:21:17 So how do you… go in and get rid of those.
20:21:21 Like you just said.
20:21:28 Yeah. Right.
20:21:23 If you click on a message, you can delete the message You can do that on the Mac. You can do that on your your iPhone. That'll get rid of the message. But if it's a long string of messages, it gets rid of the whole thing.
20:21:38 It gets rid of like if you have a string of 200 messages If you delete it, it gets rid of all of them.
20:21:44 There is a way to delete the individual photographs and movies and so on and so forth but I'd probably have to show you how to do that.
20:21:55 At some meetings.
20:21:55 Well, I don't save messages. I don't have reason to. Or if it's saved, it's just till the appointment comes or whatever.
20:22:03 But I thought it said something about if in those messages there were pictures sent or something like that.
20:22:12 That the pictures don't get deleted.
20:22:17 Until you delete the message, the pictures don't get deleted. There is a way to delete individual attachments in a message string, but I'd have to show you, I can do that at some meeting sometime it's
20:22:31 If you if you delete the message
20:22:35 Then it deletes all the attachments.
20:22:38 Okay. Well… Okay. How is it stacking up for those people that are having a problem then?
20:22:45 Most people don't delete messages. No.
20:22:48 They don't delete them.
20:22:51 None of us work on it.
20:22:54 You can set your machine to delete them automatically after 30 days.
20:22:54 That's…
20:22:55 Oh, excuse me.
20:22:58 Yeah, you can also set it up so they'll delete it automatically after 30 days.
20:23:02 But here's an example of why you might need more space.
20:23:07 My niece lost her phone.
20:23:12 And it wasn't an iPhone. It was an Android phone. She lost her phone.
20:23:16 And with it, she lost the baby pictures for her eldest son.
20:23:20 Her eldest son was 12. She had never backed up any of the photographs.
20:23:28 So when she lost her phone. She lost 12 years of photographs.
20:23:34 Uh-huh.
20:23:39 Yeah.
20:23:34 All of them permanently. So that's why you should, among other things save photographs and such.
20:23:45 To your computer because it's got the room for it.
20:23:48 Thank you, Scott. In photos, I think we got five or six thousand photos in there all europe all over the world And… Does that take up a lot of space?
20:24:04 Yeah, it should be more than your 40 gigs. 5,000 or 6,000 photographs should be a fair amount of space.
20:24:12 No movies.
20:24:15 It should still be a fair amount of space, but… I have probably 300,000 photos so i'm a special case.
20:24:22 I'm looking at the 24-inch iMac desktop And… I know you said you recommend a terabyte and everybody's ever looked at my computer as always says.
20:24:46 You bet you could.
20:24:38 Good grief. You're not using anything you know And… So… And I thought, do I need to pay that extra money just for something I don't use?
20:24:56 I consider disk drive space sort of be like closet space. Most people don't have any extra room in their closet.
20:25:03 So if you use the closet like most people do. You'll fill it.
20:25:03 Yeah.
20:25:08 Unless you have a really big closet. So get a big closet.
20:25:12 I've been… using a long time but okay I must speak.
20:25:17 We can also just get an extra external hard drive.
20:25:21 You can get an external hard drive, but a lot of people don't know how to save things other than to the internal drive.
20:25:29 Apple, if you install a new piece of software, it puts it on the internal drive.
20:25:33 If you save a document, it puts it by default on the internal drive.
20:25:37 So the external drive for most people doesn't really help them that much.
20:25:43 It's um it's it's easier if there's just more space there to begin with.
20:25:48 I will also tell you that Since moving to Squim I've helped half a dozen people who had their Macs stop working in all half dozen cases because it filled up the hard drive.
20:26:01 If you'll fill up the hard drive, your Mac stops working.
20:26:06 Well, how do I tell how full it is? Just look up there. It tells you.
20:26:12 Click on the red apple. Tell you. The red black apple. Black apple.
20:26:18 Like this right here.
20:26:18 Anyway, I don't know of anything about that apple that will tell you how much space you're using.
20:26:26 Because it doesn't.
20:26:26 No. Lawrence, this has been really interesting, but I need to leave.
20:26:30 Sure.
20:26:33 Yes, and I do too.
20:26:34 Um can Can I, I haven't signed in and I never figured out how to do that.
20:26:42 That's all right. I forgot to make the sign-in sheet so uh What can I say? I… I am. I am.
20:26:49 Messed up, but… If you have ideas on what we should do in February, please send me an email.
20:27:00 Message my message. Addresses on the website or just send it to Straight MAC period vice president Straight Mac.
20:27:13 Is that right?
20:27:15 Well, again, thank you so much. I mean… Okay.
20:27:24 Oh, like, okay. Okay.
20:27:18 Send it to my email address. Just go look in your received emails and just reply with what we should do next month okay
20:27:27 Hey, Lawrence. Lawrence, this is Darcy. Real quick, are we paying dues this year?
20:27:32 Yes, we decided we'd pay them once a year in January.
20:27:39 In January.
20:27:39 And do we send them to the president
20:27:45 No, there's an address on our website. It's under the join menu. It's got the address.
20:27:53 I have the address. It says… Would you like me to read the address?
20:27:50 To send it to. It's a post office box downtown.
20:27:55 Okay. No, I can look it up. Thanks.
20:27:55 Okay, great.
20:28:00 Okay.
20:28:02 One other thing about memory that he was asking about and If you go up to the Apple icon in the corner, it does tell you about it. Go to About This Mac and then there's a selection of storage and it'll tell you exactly how much you've used.
20:28:17 Oh, it's gone. No.
20:28:19 Right. Thank you. I'm signing off.
20:28:19 That's easy.
20:28:23 Good night. Thank you, Lawrence.
20:28:24 Oh, that's, it's been forever since I used that. I forgot about it then.
20:28:31 Yeah, Indy. Hey, thank you, Lawrence.
20:28:33 Okay. See you next month. Bye-bye.

A toy, and more books

A toy, and more books

Townscaper

Some games are a game (there is a goal, you win, etc.), and some games are toys (no plot, no goal, but fun). Townscaper is a toy: you build buildings, islands, bridges, cathedrals, castles, apartment complexes — whatever strikes your fancy.

You can play Townscaper on the web for free. Just point your browser at the website,

https://www.townscapergame.com

and start clicking around. Fun. Addictive. It is also one of the few video games I can play just as well as my seven-year-old grandchild. For almost everything else, she reigns supreme.

The web version requires an Internet connection, but there is a version for the iPad that works without access to the Internet, perfect for keeping your brain alive in a clinic waiting room or waiting for a significant other to do whatever it is that they want to do and you don’t. The iPad version costs something like $4.95 (it costs a developer money to put something on the Apple store, and the trivial cost reimburses them for the effort), but if you like the web version and have an iPad, it is a modest purchase.

Townscaper on iPad:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/townscaper/id1549531491

Screenshot of Townscaper on an iPad. It includes bridges, balconies, open-frame buildings, and seagulls, among other things.
Screenshot of Townscaper on an iPad. I was experimenting with building bridges, creating buildings with open frames, building ridiculous balconies, and other fun things while sitting in a clinic waiting room. While it isn’t obvious from the still image, you can rotate your creation, zoom in and out, and generally have great fun building fantasy structures. There are seagulls, too, but you have no more control over them than non-digital seagulls.

Townscaper has its own Wikipedia entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Townscaper

The developer also has a more limited, but somewhat richer game that is web-only, Brick Block,

https://oskarstalberg.com/game/house/index.html

Books

On a more serious front, Take Control Books has updates to titles of interest. Take Control of Untangling Connections, 3rd edition, covers USB, Thunderbolt, HDMI, Displayport, Ethernet, and audio connections, cables, compatibilities, and other things. If you have a tangle of cables around your computer, this book will tell you what the cables do, how to use them, why they are not interchangeable, which ones you can do without, etc.

Take Control of Untangling Connections book cover

Take Control of Apple Media Apps covers Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, Apple TV, Apple Books, and the various complexities of consuming books, music, audio, and video on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. As someone who has a couple thousand books in Apple Books and over a thousand albums in Apple Music, take my word for it: you can organize things and make life easier.

Take Control of Apple Media Apps book cover

Keep Safe Using Mobile Tech is a new book aimed at a growing problem: keeping your private information safe on your iPhone, iPad, laptop, etc. You have a wealth of health information on your Apple Watch and iPhone, a wealth of private information on almost every Apple device, and a vast trove of financial information spread across apps, passwords, and documents on all your devices. Knowing how to maintain access, how to keep your information secure, and how to prevent accidentally sharing what you don’t want to share — these are not simple tasks. But they also are not beyond your abilities, if you know how, and this book aims to teach you how to take control.

Keep Safe Using Mobile Tech book cover

Take Control Books has also released updates to Take Control of iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, as well as Take Control of Sequoia. As these are updates, not new editions, you can download a free update quickly through their website. The update, among other things, talks about new capabilities via Apple Intelligence and some feature updates to various applications.

Take Control of iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 book cover
Take Control of Sequoia book cover

Remember that SMUG members can get a 30% discount on Take Control books by using the discount code published on our website: https://strait-mac.org/discussion-topics/take-control-books-discount-for-smug-members/

December 2024 Apple Security and Apple Intelligence updates

Apple has issued several security and feature updates over the past month. The most recent:

Apple VisionPro – visionOS 2.2 — security, plus additional Apple Intelligence functions

Apple TV — tvOS 18.2 — security update

Apple Watch — watchOS 11.2 — security, and additional Apple Intelligence functions

macOS Ventura — Ventura 13.7.2 — security update

macOS Sonoma — Sonoma 14.7.2 — security update

macOS Sequoia — Sequoia 15.2 — security, plus additional Apple Intelligence functions

Trivia: sequoia is a seven-letter word that uses all five vowels: a, e, i, o, and u. This means nothing, but if you misspell Sequoia, it is probably because you left out a vowel.

iPad — iPadOS 17.7.3 — security update

iPad — iPadOS 18.2 — security, plus additional Apple Intelligence functions

iPhone — iOS 18.2 — security, plus additional Apple Intelligence functions

AirPods Pro 2 — firmware updates to allow the AirPods Pro 2 to act as a hearing aid when used with an iPhone or iPad running iOS 18.2 or iPadOS 18.2. Since AirPods don’t come with a screen, it is not obvious what firmware version they are using, but you can find out how to check in an Apple Technical Note:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/106340

Security updates

Most of the security updates are focused on further locking down web-based functions. While you mainly think of the web in terms of Safari, Apple’s web browser, there are web functions built into Contacts, Mail, Pages, Numbers, Photos, Messages — almost anything that Apple creates that touches the Internet. You might see that Safari has also been updated, but all of the listed security updates include the updated Safari.

Apple Intelligence

Two important things to note: first, Apple Intelligence puts you, the user, in control of Apple Intelligence, which means among other things that you have to turn it on. To learn how to use Apple Intelligence on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, the easiest way to learn about it is to use the Tips application on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

Among the many pages of information on how to use Apple Intelligence, pay particular note to ChatGPT functions. By default, Apple anonymizes (protects your identity) when using Apple Intelligence, but ChatGPT has an option of allowing you to log into ChatGPT and allow ChatGPT to keep track of your prior requests. This is not recommended, but it is an option.

Messaging security

There have been several alarming news stories about security when using instant messaging (SMS, or Short Message Service). SMS is limited to 160-character messages, and if you sent a message to someone not on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac and the message was over 160 characters long, it would be broken into multiple parts. This paragraph, for example, is 450 characters long (not 450 words, but 450 characters) and would be broken into three parts.

Apple Messages has no such limitation, and in addition to text messages, Apple Messages can send emoji, memoji, genmoji (customized emoji created with Apple Intelligence), video, audio, documents, etc. And long messages are not broken into parts, unless you decide to break them apart.

If you are sending from an Apple device to an Apple device, your message is encrypted end-to-end, and no one can intercept and read the message. If you send something to a non-Apple device, such as a phone or tablet running an Android operating system (Google Pixel, Motorola Razr, Samsung Galaxy, etc.), it can’t be encrypted end-to-end. Not “Apple won’t encrypt it” but Apple can’t encrypt it. There are a number of technical reasons for this, but if you have a Messages conversation with anyone and you see green text bubbles instead of blue, your conversation is not encrypted, and can be intercepted and read by anyone with some inexpensive technology.

This isn’t an issue as long as you aren’t writing about illegal activities or sending sensitive medical, legal, or financial information. But do keep in mind that your security in any given electronic exchange is only as good as that of the participants in that exchange. If your part is secure but anyone else in the conversation is not, the conversation is, by definition, insecure.