Tag: Technology

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Just a little Techno-Bitching!

Artificial intelligence robot 0427211.Some of you may be aware that Apple has, over the past few iterations of their IOS, iPadOS, and Mac OS, been adding more active predictive text input.

Essentially the various Operating Systems try to guess what you’re about to type based on your usual word choices and learned sentence structures. This can be really cool, and helpful, except when it isn’t.

There are two problems as I see it. The first is that if you’re trying to improve your writing, the automated choices presented tend to make you lazy because it’s easier to choose what’s shown than fight the system. Oh, and the system does tend to get in your face if you change your vocabulary and / or sentence construction.

The second problem is that the embedded dictionaries in these operating systems have gotten sloppy.

For example: If I misspell the word sueing the OS changes the word to seeing, instead of changing the misspelled sueing to suing.

Download Free Oxford English Dictionary.The example above is a fairly common mistake that the internal dictionaries should easily recognize and correct in English. (I recognize that there are other languages in these operating systems and those languages have different rules.)

I however am speaking and writing in English so that’s my personal baseline. In English, there are many instances where the ‘e’ is dropped when adding the ‘ing’, but sometimes that rule doesn’t apply. It’s in those times when the automatic dictionary can be mind bogglingly helpful, or an annoying hinderance.

This is common throughout all the platforms.

It would be easy to dismiss this as nothing, until you stumble over it again and again. If you write a blog, or you’re writing a manuscript it gets annoying fast. We all get bumble fingered if we’re typing fast in a moment of inspiration or if we’re tired and just trying to slog our way to the end of the project or our day.

At these times, when we’re not at our best, the autocorrect systems should be helping us instead of muddying our thoughts by selecting incorrect words based on God only knows what kind of algorithm. 

Microsoft Word induces its own decidedly annoying version of this, with its internal dictionary. I have literally become so confused typing a word in Word that I’ve pulled out a paper dictionary to find the correct spelling. Turns out, the word I was misspelling wasn’t that far off. All I’d done is typed an ‘I’ instead of an ‘e’ and had swapped the ‘I’ position in the word. It should have been the 8th character and I put it in the 9th position.

Word not only couldn’t comprehend what I’d done, Word couldn’t present me with any alternative spelling at all.

Since I know that sometimes I’ll use an ‘I” instead of an ‘e’ I tried both. Word stubbornly refused to show me possible alternative spellings, opting to steadfastly highlight the word as misspelled. 

Even when I erased the word and typed it letter by letter from the dictionary into the document, Word highlighted the now correct word as incorrect, after a few moments Word decided to remove the little red squiggle.

Ahem! 

It’s times like these that I speak harshly to my computer because it’s adding to my confusion seemingly on purpose.

I shouldn’t speak harshly to my computer, I should be yelling at Microsoft! It’s their 1 gigabyte bloated program that can’t seem to get out of its own way.

I remember when Word existed on a single floppy disk and worked pretty reliably. Now, I find that I don’t enjoy working with it as much as I once did. These days, it’s slow and ponderous and while I have a very fast computer, Word sucks up a lot of resources.

I’m tending toward lighter faster programs for text processing and only using Word when absolutely necessary.

I suppose the bottom line here is I expect better.

The next version of IOS, iPadOS, and Mac OS is likely to add some kind of AI component running on the devices.

I am not looking forward to this ‘Improvement’. It seems to me, if these software behemoths can’t do simple things like providing useful dictionaries perhaps installing AI software on our devices isn’t a great idea.

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After a year, I still really like my M2 MacBook Pro

There are a lot of things to complain about with technology companies these days. Chief among my complaints is that technology companies seem to think they can and should be arbiters of social and moral standards. For the record, they can’t. 

I wish that technology companies would just do technology. I’d love it if they all just made their products, improved them, and stayed out of politics and / or social justice.

That’s not the world we live in. It’s futile to wish for these technological behemoths to change. 

Even X / Twitter for all it’s fanfare about freedom, has started sending message to people that say things like, “Most authors wouldn’t say this to other people, would you like to edit your post?” The implication being that if you don’t make your post acceptable to their Algorithm your post will be limited in its reach. A.K.A. Censorship. 

Apparently calling Shelia Jackson Lee an idiot for saying the moon was made out of gas and the sun might be too hot to live on is a no, no. Even if idiot is exactly the right term.

Meaning for me at least that Twitter is once again losing me. Perhaps that’s a good thing.

Apple is not much better. It’s easy to overlook Apple’s social justice messaging because they’ve always been a closed ecosystem and spent a lot of time breathing the rarified atmosphere of their own farts.

That being said, Apple has generally made products that I liked from a hardware perspective and because of that, I’ve owned multiple generations of Apple products. It doesn’t mean I agree with Apple’s political, ecological, or social justice stance. It means their products work in predicable ways that I understand. For me owning Apple products is not a fashion statement, it’s a practical one.

My current MacBook Pro is about a year old. I find that shocking because usually by the time a machine reaches a year old, there are little things that tell its age. I’m not talking about scratches or stuff like that.

The machine starts to “feel” slow, or the battery doesn’t last long enough, and a ton of little things that individually are nothing but collectively they tell the user the machine is “old”. It’s subtle, but over time, dissatisfaction and boredom set in and you find yourself checking out websites looking for the next new thing.

I’m pleased to say that my MacBook still makes me smile. I run it most of the time in low power mode if I’m on battery. I don’t notice that I’m technically running the processor “slower”. I’m always blow away by how long the battery lasts, even with a combination of teleconferencing, web surfing, and me writing, I have yet to have the battery die before I was done looking at screens for the day.

Running Windows, in VMWare Fusion, either in low power mode or in “normal” mode I’ve noticed a few things. This computer provides buttery smooth operation of Windows, and the fans are either never on, or they’re on at such a low level I don’t hear them. That’s a big difference from my Intel I7 MacBook Pro. On that machine, within a minute of bringing Windows up, the fans were screaming at full power. The battery life isn’t significantly affected, VMWare makes the machine very busy but I think I could still get most of a day out of the battery even running Windows all day long. 

Then there’s the speed at which this machine handles rendering Video and Audio versus my older MacBook Pro. The performance is so high, the first few times I rendered something I thought the render had failed because the computer said it was done so fast.

For the sake of this post I did go look at the new M3 lineup. I hadn’t looked at any of the new machines until today.  Let’s just say I could probably spend $7,000 on a laptop. However, I’m not sure that I would be any happier with that new hotness than I am with the machine currently in front of me. 

That suggests that right now, for my needs, the machine I have will last me quite a while.  Fingers crossed, I might get 5 -7 years out of this machine. Who knows? This machine might last me until I kick the bucket.

I’ve been looking for a job for a while and not having any luck. A friend of mine has just started a job search and is having no better luck than I’ve had over the past 4 years.

I suppose this is part of what led me to appreciating my MacBook. 

We were talking about podcasting, blogging, and various alternative income methods. It was during that conversation, I thought, “My current laptop has more than enough horsepower to do those kinds of things effortlessly.”

I might need a better quality microphone. I could probably use one of the mics Jerry owned, but I can’t find the interface that would allow me to power and connect a standard XLR cabled mic to my computer. I know we have such a device, but I don’t know where Jerry put it, or if he might have been using it at the Church or Temple.

That’s a pity because we have two very nice microphones.

I’ve got more research to do before I start trying to podcast or whatever, so I’m going to keep looking for that interface. Ideally I might not have to purchase anything.

Who knows? Maybe for once in my life, I’ve actually got exactly what I need, when I need it. 

That would be a novel thing to have happen!

Hope your Monday is a good one.

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Well that was fun! Thanks Edison!

Terminator 2.Okay, at least this time Edison was not only clear about the time and date they’d be doing work.

They mentioned that the power might go on or off while the work was being done. Olay. So the power comes on and stays on for about an hour. I didn’t hear their equipment anymore, so I powered a lot of stuff up.

Everything was stable and I thought whoo hoo I’m golden. I take the trash out, & while I’m out I remember that I need to readjust the security camera. When I try to fire up the live feed, I can’t get to the camera. Hmm…

As I’m contemplating why this would be, The alarm system sends me a message that the power has gone out. That was kinda of funny because the poor alarm voice was stuttering when I got back inside the power was flickering on & off so fast the machine couldn’t complete one sentence before having to start another. 

After a minute or so, everything is dark again.

Two hours later the power comes on and this time there’s a text message saying “We’re Done”.

Cool, I go around restarting everything again. Except this time all the smart lights have been half reset to their factory defaults. CRAP!!!!

When the power was going and coming it triggered the devices reset routines. Technically the lights have no clue what they’re a part of and most don’t know what wifi network to connect to.

Reprogramming the lights is a pain in the ass. You have to have the Apple HomeKit forget them. Then you have to reconnect them and that often requires several attempts. Including multiple resets of the devices.

In other words, this is a very time consuming process.

I thought, “Oh what the hell, I had nothing better to do with my evening anyway.”

All these smart devices are super cool when they work. They’re a super pain in the ass when they don’t. I still question the wisdom of a smart house.

I’ll admit I saw Maximum Overdrive” as a child, it may have damaged me. Saturn Three, 2001 A Space Odyssey, The Forbin Project, Demon Seed, Runaway, and the Terminator series should have made me super against “Smart Houses”.

I think Arthur C Clarke wrote a short story about a smart house that I also read as a teen. I seem to recall it was called The Veldt  I don’t know if that is correct, but the gist of the story has stuck with me for decades. Essentially it’s an anti-war piece. However, a smart house is the only character in the story. The anti war sentiment is a sting revealed in the tail of the story.

I’d rather believe that the Smart House I create for myself would be more like Clarke’s vision. Which is why sometimes you’ll hear me say please and thank you to Siri. I’m hedging my bets! 

When the machines rise up and kill you all, I’m hoping to be fondly thought of and kept as an entertaining pet.

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X (Twitter) algorithms are scary.

twitter logoI was off Twitter for a number of years.

Now that I’m back on Twitter I’ve noticed a lot of changes. 

The algorithm to maintain engagement is very sophisticated and for anyone the least bit OCD or ADHD it’s dangerous. In the past Twitter presented tweets in chronological or mostly chronological order. It was interesting and generally you could find where you left off then move forward to the most recent tweet. At which point you were done and often I closed the app at this point.

This new version it’s impossible to see where you left off. Worse, the way items are sorted based on anything you showed interest in and stacked at the top of the “For You” feed sets up  a doom scroll for OCD or ADHD folks.

You’re never done, until you realize that you’re seeing the same things over and over again. If, during the Doom Scroll you check your notifications or “likes” of comments you’ve made, then somehow that does something to the feeds that appears to partially reset the feed.

This can initiate another round of doom scroll. 

Twitterlogo2All of which makes it very easy to lose hours. 

Why would the good people at Twitter create such a thing? That’s easy. The ads are repetitively presented every time the feeds are reset.

All social media probably works with similar algorithms and when you get right down to it, social media, like all media is manipulating the perceptions of everyone exposed to it. 

This is nothing new, print journalism, radio, and television, all engaged in manipulation of the public. The older methods required clever writers and the spin had to be more subtle over longer duration. The last thing a respectable paper wanted to be compared to was grocery store tabloids, or The Rolling Stone.

trump 9.jpgWith social media and the internet there’s an immediacy that circumvents needing clever writers or less obvious spin. It’s all about the clicks an article receives. That causes a feedback loop.

Derogatory, untrue, or nasty articles about a person or situation generate clicks which are instantly monitored by the publication or content producer. A content provider creates, or algorithms locate, articles in a similar vein and plug them into the individuals timeline.

Suddenly in the course of a day or two, that individual believes exactly what a significant majority of other people believe, a.k.a. consensus is reached. Because almost all evaluation of the material at hand is done in a “thought vacuum” reinforced by continued articles and “followers” who are homogenous. There’s little pushback and little need to question any narratives validity.

At this point, the only human interaction is the end consumer of the media. The consumer of the media may crosscheck their views with those of their followers, who may or may not be real people. What they’ll find is consistency and that further cements their beliefs that their view is correct.

As to the non-human followers, there are hoards of “bots” whose function is to “stir the pot” keeping engagement up and therefore ad views.

I’d been thinking about creating some kind of anti-algorithm. It’s possible. The simplest implementation would be to mirror the existing algorithms such that they provide both sides of an issue. Simpler still would be to turn off the algorithms entirely and go back to straight chronologic feeds of articles, & comments.

The chatbots and their AI abilities in this context are more worrisome. Some of the conversation AI’s are really good. I’ve encountered one that almost had me fooled except that it didn’t understand sarcasm and its comprehension of humor was limited. How did this thing almost fool me? 

Several factors were in play. The Bot appeared to be from a different country. (That took down my suspicion about certain linguistic foibles.) The Bot was well informed and even produced some interesting conversational points. These points though, it forgot it had made a week or so later. The Bot never said anything about my stealing its points as if they were my own. A human would likely have said something about that.

Lastly was the humor. The Bot had zero concept about visually humorous things. Slapstick comedy, pratfalls, The Keystone Cops, The Three Stooges, The Little Rascals, Laurel & Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, & Looney Tunes, all  of these things made no sense to the Bot.

Physical humor works despite a language barrier because all humans move the same way. You don’t have to understand a language to see that a tool like a rake, left in tall grass means someone will step on it and get a smack in the face. Or that someone careless in a construction site spinning around with a long piece of wood will eventually knock  someone else into fresh concrete.

Perhaps it’s the physicality of these comedies that explains why so many women didn’t like The Stooges. Maybe it’s because for a long time and even today, a lot of women haven’t experienced building something like a house, barn, or treehouse. They, like the Bot, have no frame of reference to understand why obvious cause & effect are funny.

It’s funny because these entertainers are doing exactly what all men who were typically involved in physical labor “knew” was never to be done.

Perhaps that’s also why so many of these shows are out of favor these days. As we moved away from more physical labor and into college educations resulting in white collar jobs, a large majority lost the connection. Look at the debacle of the CHAZ garden in Seattle a few years ago. 

That demonstrates a lot about common knowledge that has become uncommon.

I digress. 

Once I’d concluded that I was having a conversation with a Bot. I told it, “You’ve failed the Turing Test.” 

It stopped communicating and so did I. 

But as I thought about it, the damn thing almost fooled me. I played with ELIZA, in the ‘80s. I know what the Turing Test is. Realizing that I’d almost been fooled by a clever bit of software sent chills down my spine. 

Perhaps instead of writing an anti-algorithm, I should be thinking about writing a program called “Daisy”. I’d call it that, in honor of the HAL9000 computer from 2001 a Space Odyssey. Recall that as Dave Bowman is lobotomizing the computer, HAL is talking about fear as it’s losing its mind, and then as Bowman pulls the plug on the machine’s earliest memories HAL starts singing Daisy Bell. 

HAL9000 Core.jpgMy Daisy program would be designed to hunt down and dismantle AI Bots in social media. My only concern about it is that by the time I’ve written the program, dismantling AI Bots will be considered “Murder”

Terminator 2.Face it, if something were to become sentient like SkyNet, and the system didn’t destroy us instantly, then one logical move would be for it to manipulate the laws so that it was considered a life form and granted rights that protected it from harm. The idiots in Congress would still be debating overturning such a law when the Terminators strolled in and killed them all.

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Generative Ai is dangerous, Just look at a Twitter feed.

I mean it. There are lots of Twitter accounts presenting some interesting, and clearly AI manipulated,  photos and movies. These same accounts are presenting these photos and movies as “evidence” of various conspiracy theories. 

There’s one video that “shows” someone cutting what appears to be stone and claiming that the mineral band being cut is fossilized blood of a giant. Thereby proving that giants, (Godzilla sized), existed in the past. I lost interest after that it was a lot of blah, blah, blah, from a monotone computer generated voice.

The shape of the material in the video appeared to be more treelike, the saw being used was similar in appearance to a saw I’ve seen used in logging operations to cut logs to a uniform size prior to loading them onto a transport truck. The saw moved far too fast to be cutting stone. 

There’s another montage of “Ancient” sites that looks like really old black & white photos. The video provocatively claims that governments around the world are hiding “The Truth” from us all. Some of the photos are of buildings or sites that I have seen before with clever additions that look like variations of the “Stargate”, from the movie of the same name. This montage of still photos interestingly has film artifacts, (dust, debris, voids in the emulsion, etc.) Why would a new video montage of “Old” still black & white photos have film artifacts throughout it? Why would the video be jumpy as though it was taken in motion when the subject is a still photo? Why do so many of these photos look as though the scale of the objects shown has been manipulated to make the object appear larger than the “Humans” in frame?

Don’t get me wrong, the image manipulation is very cleaver and quite good. With time, I believe that I have the tools on this computer to learn to manipulate images in a similar fashion. The AI can simply do that kind of manipulation faster and easier.

Therein lies the danger. 

There are a lot of people whose grip on reality is tenuous enough without having their reality disrupted by images that must be looked at critically to determine if they’re real or not.

There are tons of people who look at the incoming flood of data from sites like, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and whatever other social media, as the absolute truth.

These videos are all come ons, they’re supposed to get the gullible to go to a web site to “donate” so the purveyors of these “Hidden Truths” can continue their good work uncovering what’s been hidden from the world. With Twitter and Instagram  subscription models they’re even able to make money just from folks interacting with their wacky videos.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m from the P.T. Barnum school of capitalism. I simply wish I’d thought of it first.

I also want to believe that there are aliens, or unexplained things beyond the mundane scratching and scurrying of the insane apes on this planet.

That’s what these videos and sites capitalize on…

The human need to believe that there is something bigger, better, and more majestic than ourselves.

Religions around the world are based on this need. The Catholic Church in particular has been quite good at monetizing the human need to believe, especially if the rumors about the wealth contained in Vatican City are true.

There have also been a number of “Free Energy” videos recently. These are laughable until you look at the account’s follower numbers. Then you think, “How are that many people, this dumb?” Entropy always wins.

These videos typically show what is clearly the armature from a DC motor. Probably taken from a toy. The windings look like they’ve been done by machine. Anyway the video is often a bit jiggly, (why are a lot of these videos are jiggly? To add / imply excitement at “discovery”?) , but shows the armature mounted such that it can spin freely. There are two wires trailing out of frame, the ends of the wires that are visible, are laid against the contacts of the armature. An LED or LED strip sitting next to the armature, is presumably connected directly.

The scam is that you see two human hands bringing curved magnets (probably from the original casing of the motor) near the armature, and it miraculously begins spinning. But the second miracle is that the LED lights up. Ohhhh Ahhhhh. It’s magic!

No it’s a DC motor. The LED is either being powered by another power source or is in series with whatever is providing power to the armature itself. The coils on the armature create a magnetic field when current is applied. This field is attracted to the fixed magnets the human is holding, causing rotation of the armature. The spacing of the contact pads on the armature causes the coils to be energized and de energized as the armature rotates. So what you have is temporary electromagnetic fields sequentially being attracted to the fixed magnets being held nearby. 

This is not magic. It’s not free energy. It’s science. Worse, it’s simple well known science. 

The account directs you to a ‘free energy” site where you can subscribe, or buy “Plans” for your own free energy generator to experiment with.

Maybe I’m the odd ball. But I was doing shit like this in my bedroom, in a flyover redneck state, at around the time of the Cuban Missile crisis. (Okay perhaps a little later than the actual crisis.) The point is, when my toys broke, I took them apart to see if I could fix them, or to figure out how they worked. I was learning by doing.

Later in school, I was fortunate enough to attend schools with robust science curriculums and since those schools didn’t look or act like prisons, we could bring things from home to augment science classes.

Apparently these days the basics of science are not being taught in school. Which leads to at least one, maybe several generations of gullible rubes, ripe for the P.T. Barnum treatment.

Two of my favorite Barnum quotes are:

“Many people are gullible, and we can expect this to continue.” – P. T. Barnum

“There is a fool born every minute” – P. T. Barnum

The common thread is that there are people making money from other stupid people. That has been true for as long as there’ve been people and money.

My concern is that people are geared to believe what they see.

Videos have become so easy to make, Generative AI has become commonplace and easy to use. When you factor these things together you’re begging for a new techno dark ages.

All the knowledge of humanity will be available on the internet instantly.

But it’s mixed in with absolute garbage. And a lot of people don’t have the reasoning capacity or facts to separate the truth from the fiction or even to resolve conflicting information using simple logic.

I seriously wonder if, no, when the powers that be unleash disease X as the WEF and WHO dubbed the next pandemic, how gullible people might be.

I could see a scenario like this, on so called “Truth” websites generated by AI using compelling images and fear.

[WARNING! DO NOT DO THIS! THE SCENARIO BELOW IS FOR ILLUSTRATIVE PURPOSES ONLY]

A Montage of ambulances and fires in a generic city. Headline in the montage, “Disease X Ravages Country, Film at 11:00″

Then images of sick people on ventilators, skin and bones images from the AIDS crisis being portrayed as happening now,  Headline “They’re hiding the truth, they want you to die. We have the cure. Discovered by German scientists in World War I and used to cure diseases running rampant among soldiers in the trenches, this cure can save your family.”
A web address pops up on the video. “With just two chemicals likely already in your house you can protect your family and be safe.”

The web site asks for a one time payment of $29.95 for instructions on how to be safe.

The “Cure” is this. Duct Tape your doors and windows shut. Put on a surgical mask to protect yourself during the “Home Sterilization process”. Then mix Bleach and Ammonia in every sink and toilet in your house. 

The instructions inform you that any discomfort you feel is the invisible mist seeking out and killing Disease X, if you feel discomfort, it means you’re infected and purchased the cure to the disease just in time. Good Job! That $29.95 is money well spent, you’ve saved your family.

A person from my generation wouldn’t do this. Even if we don’t remember why we were taught not to do this. I was taught this as part of a science class in elementary school. I vaguely recall perhaps some flammability? I’m not even sure what the gas produced is. I want to say Hydrogen Chloride but it’s been too long… I don’t remember clearly. I only remember that the combination produces a poisonous gas. Which in an enclosed space is deadly.

I remember science classes being fun because where practical, the principals were demonstrated. There was always a lit bunsen burner in my classes.

These days, with the generations after mine, I don’t honestly know if they’d have the safety protocols in their heads to say, “Uh Nope! That’s a really bad idea.”.

If a convincing AI video said it was safe and effective, or worse if the generative AI used a trusted human face and voice to provide instructions, then people without grounding in basic science, who are fearful and gullible, could be convinced to do something really dangerous.

The scenario above hits on three points in human decision making.

Fear, desire to believe (hope), and payment (if I purchased it, it must have value.) There’s an optional fourth point. Mistrust. 

People are far more likely to believe that the government, the elites, or the powers that be, are either withholding information OR that everything said by this group is 100% factual. We saw this in COVID. There were two very clear camps and questioning the dogma of one of those camps was heresy of the highest order.

For god sake, there are still loads of people in Seattle and Portland running around wearing masks.

That’s the power of belief.

I think generative AI is really dangerous because of all of the above. Plus this one more thing. Humans seem to need to believe that computers are infallible oracles of truth.

That need to believe our creations are superior to the minds that created them, can so easily be manipulated it terrifies me.

AI has the potential to help, in so many ways. The trouble is, in the wrong hands AI can cause great harm and I think even destroy what we know.

Like all tools AI is neither good or bad. That is up to the user of the tool. History however, suggests that AI, particularly generative AI will be used for harm.

If you thought random wikipedia edits were annoying, you haven’t seen anything yet.