Leo [00:00:24]:
And it seems like it was only yesterday, except what? It was three weeks ago. Four weeks ago, according to the last episode. And it wasn't like it was planned this way. Life just kind of sort of happened. We had the best of intentions to be here every week, but like I said, life happens. However, so do things. Things happened. I think you've got the.

Leo [00:00:52]:
The most notable stuff that came out while.

Gary [00:00:55]:
Well, yeah, because, yeah, we had the Apple fall announcements, the main ones anyway, that have to do with the iPhone. And of course, normally we would have talked about them that week, but. But hey, you know, the, the advantage is that not only can I say, oh, Apple announced a new iPhone, but I actually have the new iPhone.

Leo [00:01:12]:
Do you. Did you get the iPhone?

Gary [00:01:14]:
Yeah, I got the. I got the 17 Pro Max.

Leo [00:01:18]:
Oh, okay.

Gary [00:01:18]:
So the big one, you know, and. Yeah, so. And it's, you know, so far there's not too much different. I jumped two years because I went from the 15 Pro Max to the 17 Pro Max. So I'm really, you know, playing around a lot with the little camera control that is on the. On the device. But that was there last year too. I just didn't get that generation.

Gary [00:01:39]:
So. So for me, that's like a big change, but it's not really new. Besides that, it's got a 8x zoom kind of. Kind of. Yeah. So it's optical, but they're cheating a little bit. The way they're cheating is all of the cameras are 48 megapixels now, including the telephoto.

Leo [00:02:03]:
Okay.

Gary [00:02:04]:
So what they're saying is you get 8x telephoto, but yeah, it's not using all the pixels, it's using the center pixels. So you're getting the center pixels. You're getting bas, basically, if you forget all the technical details. I have 8x compared to the 5x I had before at the same resolution. But the optical is not actually improved. It's actually less. It's actually, I think, 4x optical. But the.

Gary [00:02:33]:
Because the sensor is so much bigger, I can get a 24 megapixel photo at 8x optical. I just can't do a 48 megapixel at 8x optical, which, you know, is just at 1x.

Leo [00:02:47]:
How big is the. How big is your picture?

Gary [00:02:49]:
48 meg. Well, okay, it's 48 megapixel, but that's an op. An opt in kind of deal because they realize people probably don't want to fill up their camera storage with like 48 megapixel photos of like, Their cat being cute or whatever.

Leo [00:03:03]:
So I could see 48 megapixels of corgi.

Gary [00:03:07]:
Yeah, well, yeah, well, Corgis are a different story. But the, but yeah, you get, you know, the default is kind of 24 and in fact you can go to a default of 12 if you want. And when you do those lower defaults, it's still taking a 48 megapixel photo and then it's using all those extra pixels to create a higher quality version than a standard like 12 or 1224 megapixel. It's just not doing that when you're doing 8x because it can't. I'm thinking that it's probably similar to my, like a, like a DSLR or mirrorless camera. When you have a lens, sometimes the lens is. The lens doesn't put light on the entire sensor. You can only put light on the middle because of how optics work.

Gary [00:03:52]:
And so it's probably doing something similar to that where it's like okay, the optics in it are as good as they're going to get at that thickness of a thin phone.

Leo [00:04:03]:
Right.

Gary [00:04:04]:
You know, and the sensor now is bigger and just can't get, you know, at 8x the light to shine on the entire sensor. So which is fine. And I think it, I did do a comparison because I had my, my old phone right there and I was able to hold them side by side and take a bunch of pictures of the same thing at the same time. And yeah, you could definitely tell 8x versus 5x is yeah, you're seeing not just the detail at a pixel level of like picking out more detail of the actual things, but the quality in general. Like just at that zoomed in amount when you look at the pixels and you could say oh, I could see a nice curve on the edge of that little architectural feature of that building this far away. Whereas the 5X, it's really, it's like a blur. You know, the curve isn't really there.

Leo [00:04:52]:
Right.

Gary [00:04:53]:
So I'm excited because I have noticed with 5x it, it seems to be every time I go to a concert the optimum my optimal viewing distance for a concert. Not too close because I'm old, not too far because I'm old. And so you know, the, the opt. The perfect spot. At 5x I can get a nice picture of the stage. But when you zoom in on the performers faces, it's not happening. But it's just barely not happening. Like it's like oh so close at 5x and now 8x I'm looking forward to my next concert where I'm that kind of distance and I'll be able to get a photo and actually be able to, you know, nothing you'd want to look at too closely, but something to share online of, like, here's.

Gary [00:05:39]:
Here's the guitar, you know, player. And you can see them zoomed in. So that's. That's exciting. Besides that, you know, it's like an aluminum case. It's a little bit lighter, which is nice, but otherwise it's. It's pretty similar to what I had before, just, you know, updated. Every, you know, all the internals and stuff are updated, which is nice.

Leo [00:05:59]:
Does it feel a little snappier?

Gary [00:06:02]:
Yeah, I guess. I mean, you know, my 15 Pro Max was pretty powerful for, you know, a phone. It still is pretty powerful. So going up two generations didn't make enough of a difference for most apps. I think with a lot of Apple's processors now, we're at the point where they're outperforming the software by a lot, which is, for instance, like right now I'm recording, we're doing this thing, and I'm using my M2 MacBook Air, which I use for a lot of things when I don't feel like sitting at the desk in my office as compared to an M1 Ultra at that Mac Studio at my desk, which should be way more powerful, way more cores and everything like that. But a lot of the stuff I, I do, I really don't see the difference between the MacBook Air and my Mac studio because both have such powerful processors to them that doing even. It's not just like, oh, browsing the web in email versus, like, video editing. It's like, what are you doing in the video editing? Like, are you actually just skimming through the video and putting in some transitions? No difference, right? Rendering out.

Gary [00:07:07]:
Yeah. Okay. If you want to look at the times, one is going to be like 45 seconds. The other is going to be like 75 seconds. It's like, oh, okay, there's the difference. But otherwise the responsiveness is pretty good. The big announcement, I think that the kind of the star of the show and the real thing that Apple did that was different was introduce a new model of iPhone called the iPhone Air. And it's an interesting device because it's.

Gary [00:07:37]:
Most of the body is very thin. Right. But the camera bump is still big because they still have to have, you know, the camera, even though there's just the one camera in it. I'm surprised they didn't try to do something where there was, you know, to get that camera bump smaller, but there's also a camera facing forward that kind of needs to be there. And people forget that, you know, the bump is the back of that camera as well as the front of the other camera. But the thing about the iPhone air is it's really polarized a lot of people because a lot of people think it's not, you know, it's like, why would you get that? You know, it's got less battery life because of course, it's thin, it's got a thinner, you know, less of battery in it.

Leo [00:08:15]:
Right.

Gary [00:08:16]:
Why would you get it? And, you know, a lot of people being like, I would never buy that. I would never buy that. But I think, you know, there's also a ton of people going into the stores and seeing it and saying, ooh, you know, look at that. I mean, and I've actually heard people being like, I had a. A reservation, like a. Like, I was going to get the iPhone Pro, iPhone 17 Pro, and it was reserved for me. And I showed up for the appointment, and as I'm waiting for them to bring the box out, I was looking at the iPhone air and I said, you know, and a half an hour later, I walked out with the iPhone air.

Leo [00:08:51]:
Not the good, though, because like you said, the biggest issue with the air from my perspective, is the battery life.

Gary [00:08:59]:
Yeah, definitely.

Leo [00:09:00]:
And I'm just wondering if. If. Yes, it's cool, it's slim, it's sexy, it's all these things. But are we going to find out a number of people with buyer's remorse in a few weeks after they've actually experienced it?

Gary [00:09:11]:
Yeah, I mean, maybe. I think also with battery, there's a lot of people, and I'm one of them that doesn't hit the battery issue much. Like, you know, there's certain things, like, for instance, it's always been browsing Instagram or whatever that just eats up battery life. And also being out and about a lot eats up battery life. Whereas I. I'm at home, in my home office most of the time. I don't use my phone typically to browse through things like Instagram. I'll do that on other devices, if at all.

Gary [00:09:43]:
So I typically will, like, have my phone set to only charge to 80 or 90% overnight. Stop there. And then when I put it on the charger at night, it's still above 50%. Like, I'm not going through that much. And if I am, then, you know, I carry a battery. You know, I'll carry a battery pack or something with me. And I think there's a lot of people like that that are like, oh, I'm fine, I'm fine. Like the battery is not important.

Gary [00:10:07]:
I'm going to carry a battery pack with me no matter what. Like, give me 10 times the battery power. There's still going to be a battery pack in my, in my. Maybe 10 times is a big number, but, you know, give me twice the battery power and I'm still going to have this charger with at all times because I'm going to go through it.

Leo [00:10:27]:
My scenario is similar. It's not uncommon for me to hit the end of the day with like only 50 or 60% left, which is great. But it's part of it is that in my car, my cradle, the place where I put my phone.

Gary [00:10:44]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:10:44]:
Is a wireless charger.

Gary [00:10:46]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo [00:10:47]:
So as I'm driving along, it's recharging the phone. It's very, very easy now, especially with wireless, to just have common places. If it were an issue, if my battery life were an issue here, as I sit here at my desk, I would just have a little portable, a little wireless charging pad sitting somewhere and that's what my phone would be sitting on. So maybe that's the solution for folks that are running with a thinner battery. They can just make an assumption of having more frequent, more commonly available charging opportunities.

Gary [00:11:15]:
Sure. Yeah. I think people know at this point what their, you know, what they run into and all that. And I think the iPhone air. I think it's. It comes down to something I want to talk more about later. It's just that people, I think they need to be more objective and less subjective, I guess, about things like people just saying that, oh, the iPhone air. Why would you buy that? It's like, well, people have lots of reasons, but you might not.

Gary [00:11:42]:
And that's fine.

Leo [00:11:43]:
Right.

Gary [00:11:43]:
And it's not for everybody. Um, but you know, just dismissing it, especially not having seen it and I haven't seen it. Matter of fact, one of the things was one of the people that said that they ended up buying an iPhone air. They, they basically said that, you know, they could believe on ISOs and they said, well, my, I bought an iPhone pro max. So my plan is to go as long as possible that actually seeing one physically because they have that. I don't want that remorse, you know. So I'm trying to stay away from the Apple stores and eventually I'll see somebody with one or I'll, I'll go into an Apple store And I'll see it, I'll be like, oh yeah, okay. But until I do, I don't, I can't really grasp it.

Gary [00:12:28]:
I just have the pictures of it to be able to see. So, so yeah, besides that Apple introduced, you know, a new Apple watches and stuff but no, nothing really. Just new, just the next generation of them. Nothing too big. New AirPods but again, just like the AirPods Pro 2 to the AirPods Pro 3, it's pretty small jump.

Leo [00:12:49]:
I've heard a good thing specifically with respect to I'm using them as hearing aids though.

Gary [00:12:56]:
Yeah, well the AirPods Pro 2 could do that, right? And the AirPods probably doing a better job. Yeah, they're. Yeah, I mean, I would assume so. Yeah. And I just, I mean I, I'd like to, I'd like to update but I, I have too many AirPods AirPods Pros now and they all still work. The things just keep working.

Leo [00:13:20]:
The only start losing them like normal people do.

Gary [00:13:22]:
I, I still have my original AirPods which are, were the things I bought and said, well, let's see how long before I lose one of these. I still have them. I retired them about a year, maybe a year and a half ago. Perfectly fine, they're perfect, they work great and I didn't lose them. And I basically retired them like as a hall of fame kind of thing. It's like I know where they are. They're not getting used anymore. They've, they've done their job.

Gary [00:13:48]:
They were like my favorite Apple product of all time maybe and I moved on to an AirPods AirPods 3 and then I got AirPods 4 because those have some really cool features, you know. And then, but at some point I bought AirPods Pro to try those out and I still use those, you know, in some situations like an airplanes because they seal and all this stuff. But anyway, yeah, they came up with that. Apple may still come out with more stuff before the end of the year. It's not unusual for them to actually come out with another set of announcements in October, but not a big like, not to the big fanfare. Just like, oh, we have a new MacBook Pro and a new iPad or something like that. And they'll just announce them and then say and here's a 10 minute video telling you about them or something. So we'll see if they do that this year because there's some speculation they may not be just because of how good the current lineup is, that the current lineup is like full speed ahead.

Gary [00:14:41]:
Really good MacBooks, really good desktops you know, they've got the new iPhones, the new, the iPads are so overpowered, it's incredible. I mean, because they've got Mac, the iPad pros have Mac processors in them, you know, so they're like super overpowered for most people use them for. So it's like what, you know, there's not anybody saying, oh, we need a new one. They may still come out with some. Something new. But if they don't, I wouldn't be surprised that they just. This is it for the year. We'll see.

Leo [00:15:13]:
Fascinating. Well, we'll try and keep you away from the, from the iPhone air as long as.

Gary [00:15:19]:
Yeah, I know.

Leo [00:15:22]:
So last time we recorded, I mentioned that one of my articles, the article that I used for self promotion was an article about why do we need AI and why do we suddenly need AI? And after we stopped recording, you and I kept on talking.

Gary [00:15:44]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:15:45]:
On that topic. And we decided then, and hopefully we can remember now because it was actually a good, a good discussion, you know, we were touching on, on interesting topics that I think were worth discussing. So we decided to bring it back this week. Yeah, the concept, the question that I got was from someone who basically asked exactly that. Why AI? Why all of a sudden, why do we need this? And my response, I drove an analogy between the automobile 100 years ago. Why did we need an automobile? We didn't. We don't need cars. We still don't need cars.

Leo [00:16:26]:
Life is better with them. Cars have enabled a bunch of things that would not be possible without them or certainly would be significantly higher cost in terms of literal cost or time or something else. But we can easily envision a world without cars. And the same is very much true of AI. We don't need AI, but the question is, what is it going to, how is it going to end up benefiting us in the long run to have it around? My take has always been that it's, it has pros and it has cons. And the pros right now to me significantly outweigh most of the cons that I keep hearing about.

Gary [00:17:11]:
Yeah. Oh well, for me it's, it's about different people use AI in different ways. And I see it as for some people in some professions and stuff, it hasn't gotten there yet. And it can seem confusing to some people as to why, what, what the big deal is, but in some people, in some professions it's really obvious. And I think the, the one that it was the most obvious right from the get go was people that code, you Know programmers and it's a huge profession, right. There's a ton of people worldwide that write computer code. And like the, you may have, may have or may have not noticed that some of the first use cases of all the AI models were all for coding to help people that code. And that is because coding is a, is a weird thing.

Gary [00:18:08]:
You, there's so much knowledge as opposed to wisdom, right. And wisdom being like, oh, you kind of know how things work. You know the basics, you know the structures and logic and all that. And the knowledge is like, what's the actual command? What do I need to, how do I compile in this development environment? How do I, what's the. There are 17 different ways to create loops in this environment, which is the one I should be using now. What's the thing that, that I call to actually access this system function? Tons of that stuff. And what do you do? Well, in the old, old days you would have used reference books, right? A programmer would probably had a whole shelf filled with reference books that you went through. And, and there was, and there were one or two of those that was well worn.

Gary [00:18:48]:
They never went on the shelf at all. They were always right next to your keyboard. Right. And dog eared and written in and all this stuff. And then we got, you know, online stuff and most of the reference stuff was online plus a lot more. Yeah, you're showing me the assembly language reference guide.

Leo [00:19:09]:
Yes.

Gary [00:19:10]:
We have these little booklets actually for.

Leo [00:19:13]:
The, for the processor. I'll, I'll see if I can, I did scan it, I'll see if I can't come up with a, an image to throw in the show note. But yeah, that was like the Bible back in the day when we were doing.

Gary [00:19:24]:
And, and it was imperfect because it was still paper, it was still looking up things in the index. It was still sometimes where you had to like you got stuck and you were in those books for a while before you wrote your next line of code. Online was better because searching index and searching in links and cross links and then people helping each other out and lots of websites sprung up basically to where there were forums and people writing articles, people answering questions, asking questions and all of that. Um, and that really became, you know, online became the thing, right? Just you did a Google search for what it is you needed and appointed you on all sorts of different directions. If you didn't know your answer, you could actually ask other people. But here's the thing about that. It, it started to really suck. Like it was good, immediately good.

Gary [00:20:16]:
And then it Started sucking really quickly. And I don't know, I, I don't know why people are so rude online, but people got rude online and it started to become a thing where it's like, well, I can ask a question, but I'm probably going to get people calling me stupid for not knowing the answer. Because there are other people that do know the answer. For some reason, some of them feel obliged to let me know that I'm stupid. There are people that will tell you you posted in the wrong place or whatever. It. Plus the fact is that searching became problematic. You.

Gary [00:20:50]:
There are different versions of things, right? Different coding for Java, there's different versions of Java, there's different versions of, you know, Swift or whatever programming language, Python. And the solution from five years ago doesn't work anymore, but it still comes up when you search, right? Matter of fact, 50 pages of that solution come up when you search, but not the one for today, right? So it became worse and worse over time. And AI basically fix that. It basically let you, instead of having to go into all those sites, you could just ask like it was an assistant, oh, what is it? I need to do this or whatever. And it would come back with an answer. Not the next day like the online stuff did, and not with anything rude or whatever, but it would just come back with an answer immediately. It may not be the right answer, but programmers were used to that, used to getting the wrong answer online a lot. And the AI actually seemed to be wrong less.

Gary [00:21:50]:
It was quick at responding. And when it was wrong, you could usually get to the right answer very quickly. You could say, nope, that didn't work. Oh, let me think. Oh, try this. And then it was like having a little assistant next to you and it was great. And this, this immediately put AI out in front for one major profession right away as being a useful tool to help you be more productive, less stressed. And all this stuff, which is a lot more than a lot of other Internet things have done, a lot of other Internet things floated around for a long time before people found a use for them.

Gary [00:22:24]:
And the AI kind of right away was like, coders were like, oh, wow, our lives are so much better right from the get go. And then it started to be other professions as well, but not everybody, and still not everybody. And there's, there's still a lot of people out there that are like, why do we even need this? Like, why? I ask, I can ask a question. Look, this blogger wrote about asking this question and then they got the wrong answer. Okay, great, I could have Given you an example of asking the wrong question online 10 years ago and some a human giving me the wrong answer too. But it happens so often that nobody would have taken note of that article.

Leo [00:22:59]:
Getting you that wrong answer much.

Gary [00:23:01]:
Exactly, yes. So. And it's actually, it's actually better. I mean, it is, yeah. You'd get the wrong answer so often before it was not new, it was not newsworthy. And now suddenly getting a wrong answer is newsworthy if it's from AI, but you know, it's, it's getting better and better and uses are for it are getting better and better, but doesn't mean there aren't bad uses. Just like with, you know, automobiles, right. The same technology went from automobiles, went into tanks, they created tanks with those.

Gary [00:23:35]:
Right. They created, you know, probably lots of other bad things. I don't know with like the technology.

Leo [00:23:41]:
Going to automobiles, the other scenario, I mean, you don't even have to to veer off to tanks. People have used their automobiles for bad things, right? Well, sure, it's a net positive for society, but that doesn't stop somebody occasionally from plowing their car into a crowd of people they don't agree with or.

Gary [00:23:58]:
Just, or just driving under the influence of alcohol and. Yep, yep.

Leo [00:24:03]:
So yeah, it's funny, I have started to use AI for occasional coding tasks and one of the ones, the one I loved, I forget exactly what I was asking for, but in classic AI response I asked it to write me some code that would do a certain thing.

Gary [00:24:25]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:24:25]:
And it gave me pages of code, Right. And it was all neatly put into general purpose functions and organized well, even had some documentation. It all looked really good, but it was like four times what I actually needed. I just wanted a few lines of code to throw into a script that I was writing. So I said, okay, that's nice, make it shorter. And it did. I said, well, make it shorter still. And it did.

Leo [00:24:54]:
So that's one of the other interesting things about its approach to coding and in that it is able to refine what you give it or what it has given you. I actually take a little bit of issue with coding being the first major use of AI because certainly all of the publications that were happening when AI first came out were all about writing, just plain old writing. People were using it to write blog posts or write term papers or write this, that or the other thing. That was a bad example in the sense that this was AI being used in what I want to say misleading ways. Right. People were using it to write and then presenting it as their Own. I don't think that's happening with code. I don't think.

Leo [00:25:40]:
I think people are using it for coding unashamedly. Right. They're writing code with AI to make it.

Gary [00:25:51]:
Yeah. I mean, sometimes I, I think it works best as an assistant. You know, it's like you have somebody sitting next to you that you could. Instead of opening those books or going online, you can just say, you know, oh, what's the regular expression to get this? And they just happen to be like, you know, oh, here, try this. And you're like, okay, cool. And so I think it works like that. I think writing was really quick to follow the initial use of coding. And it was such a great punching bag for people that were against AI right away.

Gary [00:26:22]:
Because, you know, with coding, you could, you could be like, oh, look, it wrote this piece of code. Look how this. It's. It's three lines. It could have been two lines. How stupid is AI? Right? And then, and then the rest of the world would have been like, I don't even understand what you're talking about. Whereas, like, with writing, you could say, oh, look, I asked AI to write something. Look what it came up with.

Gary [00:26:41]:
And everybody can read it and say, oh, ha ha, AI got it wrong. Or. Or did something dumb. So it was easy. Easy to see. And I, I. Yeah, I don't necessarily. I'm not a big fan of AI for writing or publication.

Gary [00:26:58]:
Like, I think, I think a lot of people also take a narrow view of the writing part because not all of the writing is for publication. Like, sometimes I think that one of the best uses for AI writing is when it's for an audience of one.

Leo [00:27:11]:
Yes.

Gary [00:27:11]:
Write this. Just from. Take this and summarize it. You know, it's basically thing. I actually just did an example today that I used in a video. I got sick of looking at articles that are clickbait headlines that are questions in the headline. Right. You ever see this? The headline is a question.

Gary [00:27:29]:
You know, the answer is a few words.

Leo [00:27:32]:
Right.

Gary [00:27:32]:
And it's like you could have said the answer in as many words as the headline, but instead you gave me a question as a headline and you're making me read the article. So. So I have, I have a little.

Leo [00:27:42]:
Always at the end of the article, too. You have to page through tons and tons of words and ads, of course, and then you find the answer, and it's always disappointing.

Gary [00:27:54]:
Yeah. And you're. And half the time I'm doing it because I'm guessing the answer. This is. My brain works like this, it's like if I don't, if I don't know the answer or I don't care, it's like I don't read the article. But if my brain goes and says, I bet you the answer is this. And it's like, oh, now I have to read it, see if I'm right. So I put a little AI prompt in a shortcut where I could just the couple keystrokes.

Gary [00:28:13]:
Any article I'm looking at online that has that, that, any article at all, the prompt is basically find the question in the headline and then tell me the answer from reading the article. So it just restates the question, which is a great way to prompt it because even if they phrase it as something different than a question, but it really is a question. It's like prompting you to think of this question. This, this prompt will question and rephrase it as a question and then just tell me right away. It's this. It's because somebody made a mistake. That's why they, that this is true. Or whatever.

Leo [00:28:47]:
The ones that I keep running into are actually in the entertainment arena. Specifically. For whatever reason, Google has decided I need to see articles about Star Trek for whatever reason. All right. Yes. Star Trek. This, that, or the other thing. And there's always a series of articles.

Leo [00:29:05]:
Very common is, you know, these two Star Trek characters will never be seen again. Here's why. Okay. I just want to know who they are. Who am I not going to see again?

Gary [00:29:18]:
Yeah, there you go.

Leo [00:29:20]:
It's like page after page after page of, here's the backstory, here's some history, here's some other crap that really doesn't relate to the answer to the question. And then finally, at the very end, below all the ads that you had to page through is, you know, oh, yeah, it's this person, you know, probably usually some really minor character that had nothing influential to do anywhere. But they made me look.

Gary [00:29:44]:
They made you look.

Leo [00:29:45]:
Yeah.

Gary [00:29:45]:
So you could have AI look on your behalf.

Leo [00:29:48]:
Yes.

Gary [00:29:48]:
Instead. So, yeah, there's, I mean, there's a ton of stuff. AI is such a general tool. We should be clear. We'll talk about large language model. AI is what we're really talking about. It's such a, a wide tool that it's an easy punching bag to find things that it does that are wrong or, or if you have some sort of anti AI agenda, it's so easy to support it. It's.

Gary [00:30:10]:
It's kind of like if you were to be, have an anti, I don't know. Literacy agenda. You know, you could find tons of stuff to support why you shouldn't read. You know, don't read because there, there's this book exists or this thing exists, or somebody exists.

Leo [00:30:26]:
Wait a minute.

Gary [00:30:27]:
Exactly. You know, did you know you could take a piece of paper out, these words can set, you know, together, and that's something people could read. Reading is bad, you know, and it's kind of the same thing with, especially these days. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, it's, it's an interesting thing, but I think AI is fundamentally different from, you know, I hear people compare it to things like cryptocurrency or, you know, NFT art or.

Leo [00:30:57]:
Right, yeah.

Gary [00:30:57]:
You do stuff like that. Yeah, that. It's like, oh, that's AI is the next thing. And it's like. Yeah, but the thing is, it's already, it's already creating value. It was creating value at day one. It may not create value for you.

Leo [00:31:10]:
Right.

Gary [00:31:10]:
But it's creating. It doesn't have to. It's creating value for a lot of people. Maybe the real thing is that it's somewhat overhyped in, in the media. If, like, if you're seeing AI a lot and you're not using AI a lot.

Leo [00:31:26]:
Oh, yeah.

Gary [00:31:27]:
Then maybe it's overhyped from your perspective.

Leo [00:31:30]:
The scenario that a lot of Windows users specifically are facing is that Microsoft is pushing Copilot, its AI tool, just amazingly hard. It's in the operating system, it's in Microsoft Office, it's in the web browser, it's in a bunch of different places. And one of the questions that I get is how do I make it go away? They. They're feeling like it's being forced on them, and that acts as a disincentive for them to actually take the time to perhaps play with it and explore how it might be a little helpful to them. No, they're just seeing it as something that Microsoft is ramming down their throats and therefore their gut reaction is to want to get rid of it. And yeah, that does AI as a technology a huge disservice.

Gary [00:32:19]:
Yep.

Leo [00:32:20]:
I'm assuming that that's ne. I assume it's not being pushed as hard on.

Gary [00:32:25]:
Oh, there's definitely some people complaining. They have the same complaint. Right. About Apple Intelligence. Right. That's being pushed down their throats in particular. You know, the operating system comes with it and it's. But it's downloaded as a separate chunk after you install, and it's like a 4 gig LLM large language model that's added so the people that are very mindful of like every, you know, gig on their drive are like, okay, how do I, I don't need it.

Gary [00:32:56]:
How do I turn it off and free up that space? You can't. I mean, maybe Apple should add something.

Leo [00:33:01]:
You can't.

Gary [00:33:02]:
Really, you can't. Yeah, maybe Apple should add something at some point. But, but right now you. Yeah, you can't. So it's, it's kind of built in. And, and Apple did go, you know, their latest round of Macs and stuff, they, they upped their lower limit of what the SSD has, basically saying, okay, we don't want people buying the, the super, you know, tiny SSDs anymore. And, and, you know, but I mean, yeah, maybe they should have the way to do it. I mean, they're tying it into a lot of different things, a lot of different parts of the operating system, a lot of different apps are using it for lots of just little things.

Gary [00:33:43]:
And it's not, it's not like using Chat GPT where you go to Chat GPT or you use the Chat GPT app and now you're using it. Sometimes on a Mac you're using it and you forget you are. Like, you could be asking Siri a question and oh, yeah, obviously I'm using it. But you could also be in the Photos app and say, oh, I want to clean up this photo using the cleanup tool. Ah, guess what? Using AI to do that. It's an AI feature inside of the Photos app. So there's, there's lots of little things inside of some of the apps like mail and reminders and stuff. Like Reminders now is a way to categorize.

Gary [00:34:18]:
You can create a reminders list. Just add a bunch of things to the reminders list and say, oh, this is getting huge. There's a function that says auto categorize and it will look at your list, come up with a set of categories that's not too big, not too small, and put everything in a category. So it could be a list of a shopping list, it could be a packing list, it could be work to do list. It'll figure it out using an LLM and, you know, something you could have done, you could have, you could give a list to Chat GPT. You could have done this two years ago and said, give me this list. But, you know, have it sorted by category. They're just doing it.

Gary [00:34:51]:
But it's built into an app, you know, that handles this. It's not just text that it's doing. So there's a Lot of that kind of stuff that Apple's got going on. And then they're, they're gearing up for the like LLM version of Siri. Because right now Siri is still just a voice assistant.

Leo [00:35:11]:
Right?

Gary [00:35:12]:
But it's a voice assistant that's smart enough to know when it needs to ask the large language model something.

Leo [00:35:18]:
Oh really?

Gary [00:35:18]:
And it will, and it'll kind of hand it off. So if I ask it a question like what's the fastest animal on earth? Like the voice assistant has no idea, but it's smart enough to say, oh, you've, you're asking me a question here about stuff. I've got this large language model, I'll pass it off and then return the answer. But what it's gearing up to is being able to, you tell it you want to do something and then it will actually do it. Like right now you can't go and say, you know, you have a folder of files you can't tell it to like, oh, take this folder of files and just show me the ones that have a picture of a giraffe in them. Like, like you have to build something or do something special to do that. But eventually Siri is going to get there where it'll say, oh, I can interpret that and I'm going to do a. I'm going to look at each image and do some hidden tags and then return a list and then show it to you in this kind of preview format so you could see the one.

Gary [00:36:16]:
It'll figure all that stuff out. We're probably a year away from that, from some of that functionality.

Leo [00:36:21]:
Funny, the, the Amazon assistant who shall not be named because she's listening over my shoulder and I don't want her to wake up. They just enabled assistant name plus which is supposedly tying in some amount of AI. So far I haven't noticed a whole bit, a bunch of difference, but I do plan to. To play with it a little bit. It just seemed like the home assistants like that were a huge opportunity for doing AI like things. Having con. Many of the conversations that we're having with Chat, GPT and others could just as easily be handled by some of these home assistants for a lot of people.

Gary [00:37:06]:
Right? Yeah. And you kind of do that with Siri now if you're just looking for information. I, I've heard the term thrown around that I'm starting to use it myself. The term agency having the, the assistants gained agency with AI. Like you can find those three things and then you can ask Siri to like do something with your files, you know, build me a presentation about, you know, something and it builds a presentation for you or it get, go through my photos and grab appropriate photos for that. It has this agency to actually do things instead of just show you text or show you results, you know, on the screen. And we're getting there. And I think that's where we're, we're headed.

Gary [00:37:54]:
And it's not going to be the kind of thing where it's going to be an announcement overnight, like when LLMs were kind of born. Right. That two years ago, you know, when ChatGPT kind of hit that point where suddenly everybody went nuts over it, that one week, you know, I think agency is going to be a much slower, like it'll sneak up on us and there'll be people that'll be like, well, look what I can do now. Look, we'll look what I can do now. And then a few months will go by and suddenly we'll just all be used to doing things using our voice and we'll be in Star Trek. You know, computers do this. Yeah.

Leo [00:38:28]:
It's funny, I actually could change the wake up word for this device to be computer, but after having done that, it dawned on me that I say the word computer way too often.

Gary [00:38:40]:
Yes.

Leo [00:38:40]:
And kept waking up. I wish it could let me specify a custom wake up word, but.

Gary [00:38:48]:
Or just maybe it'll just be good enough to realize through the context. I mean, for me, I would love to be able to say computer, but only have it trigger when I say, when I say it the way Sigourney Weaver says it. In Galaxy Quest, there's a certain we. It's, it's a, it's one of these, Joe, inside, not really inside jokes, but jokes in our family to, to say computer, like the way she does it in that movie.

Leo [00:39:15]:
And if you think about Star Trek specifically, the way their quote unquote, wake up word when they want to address the computer, they just say computer. So clearly it's got that level of contextual understanding that allows it to know that. Yep, this one's for me anyway, that's interesting. We'll see, we'll see what AI turns into. And like I said, you and I are both using it fairly regularly, but not in, not in these more controversial ways. We're just using it together.

Gary [00:39:47]:
Right. And stuff. Yeah. Summarizing coding ideas, stuff like that. Yeah, Brainstorming, a lot of brainstorming.

Leo [00:39:56]:
So one of the things that's coming up in two weeks actually is the end of support for Microsoft Windows version 10. And obviously there's been. I've written so much about it, I've answered so many questions about it. I have heard so many strong opinions about it. I have expressed the occasional strong opinion back. But I really think it's interesting because this one's a little different. First of all, I think a lot of people entered into it without really understanding what end of support means. And of course it does not mean that the computer suddenly stops working.

Leo [00:40:38]:
It keeps working just fine. The real thing that I think is causing a lot of people angst is the fact that the next version of Windows, Windows 11, has these additional hardware requirements. And we can argue right and left whether or not, you know, they should, they shouldn't, whether they should make those hardware requirements more suggested rather than requirements, et cetera, et cetera. There's a whole lot of people thinking that Microsoft is ultimately contributing to a huge e waste problem because everybody's going to have to buy new computers, which is simply not the case. You can Keep using Windows 10, you can install Linux on your Windows 10 machine. There are hacks that will allow you to install Windows 11 bypassing some of those requirements. You get the idea. It's not an all or nothing.

Leo [00:41:36]:
Nobody's actually being required to purchase a new machine. But it dawned on me and was mentioned by a couple of my readers, that this is something that your world actually has been through a couple of times. Most recently, I would think, with the processor change. If I understand it correctly, current versions of Mac OS don't support the x86 processor anymore.

Gary [00:42:02]:
No, they do. They still do, but we're getting close to the end.

Leo [00:42:06]:
Okay.

Gary [00:42:07]:
Yeah, the current Mac OS 26 Tahoe still supports intel and there are a few machines from 2019 around that are intel machines that can run Tahoe. The Apple intelligence stuff won't run on them, but. But the rest of the operating system more or less does. So Apple hasn't done it yet, but it's coming and they've. And they've done it before. They, they basically.

Leo [00:42:36]:
They did it before when they switched to the X86, right?

Gary [00:42:39]:
Yeah, they have about a seven year. They try to keep things supported for about seven years, but it's just like you said, where it doesn't mean the machines stop working, just they can't upgrade to the newest operating system. So you get this funny dichotomy of people being very upset about not being able to use the latest operating system. While you also have Mac users that are purpose on purpose, they're using old operating systems because they don't want to upgrade, they don't like change or whatever. So you know, you get the both ends of it happening there. But yet it typically Apple produces security updates for about two years after that. So you're still like secure, you know, using a secure operating system for maybe up to nine years. And then you can debate whether or not it's still secure after that because you know, at that point there's not like there's people out there trying to develop like malware for nine year old operating systems.

Gary [00:43:34]:
And, and then you as a user of such a system is like susceptible necessarily to like you're just willy nilly downloading pirated games all the time or something. Right, you know, right.

Leo [00:43:45]:
We're definitely facing that with Windows 10. In fact, by one of my most recent articles was just how to keep you running Windows 10 safely. And yes, Microsoft has a program where you can extend the end of support date by a year. But even without that, if you're not taking updates, yeah, 99.9% of the problems happen because you inadvertently asked for them. Right. You installed something you shouldn't have or you opened an attachment you shouldn't have. And I get that a lot of people feel that that's blaming the victim. That's fine, I won't push back too hard on that.

Leo [00:44:24]:
But the fact is we are our own worst enemy and we are our own first best line of defense regardless of the operating system state. I know that there are individuals who are running Windows 10 who have explicitly stopped updates. They've taken measures to prevent updates from happening and have been running that way for multiple years simply because they feel that the updates are riskier than any malware that they might encounter because they know how to behave properly and keep their systems safe themselves. It's a fascinating and interesting time for Windows right now with this kind of, with this kind of hardware change.

Gary [00:45:11]:
Yeah, you're getting a taste of what the Apple world kind of goes through these cycles like this all the time. But the Apple world's always getting new Mac users that are always experiencing the first time through the cycle and are upset that they're, they bought a new Mac. It seems like just yesterday, but it was seven years ago and now they're like, oh no, I can't use the new, you know, whatever. And I just, this is a brand new Mac, you know, and yeah, okay, that's fine. If a definition of a brand new Mac is seven years to you, that's perfectly fine. I mean if you buy a house and it's seven years old. It's a brand new house. Yeah, it's a relatively new house.

Gary [00:45:51]:
If you buy a car at seven years old, it's not new anymore. But you know, so it, it's all relative to different things. And yeah, it comes down to like, it's hard to please everybody. You certainly don't want to have like a large number of. Well, you don't. What you don't want to have is you don't want to hold your software back because you're supporting a wider range of machines. Like, you don't want to go and say, hey, we have an idea for a new feature. But you can't really introduce it now because it only works on the machines from the last six years.

Leo [00:46:24]:
Right.

Gary [00:46:25]:
And we wanted, we, we want to support more. That's only like 80 of the market, you know, of the, of the users now. And that's not enough. So we don't want to, you know, introduce this feature until next year. So the 80 that could have used the feature don't get to use it because you decided to hold back, you know, so where do you draw that line? Right? And you draw it in different places for different features. Apple's definitely done that with like, you know, Apple Intelligence with the iPhone. Boy, they came out with Apple intelligence and at the time they came out, it was basically, it wasn't even a year for some iPhone models. Like if you bought an iPhone 15 when Apple Intelligence had come out at the time the iPhone 16 came out, you couldn't use Apple intelligence on your iPhone, which was a year old.

Gary [00:47:15]:
IPhone 15 Pro did, but not the iPhone 15. That was like the closest Apple ever did a major feature to like, you know, Macs, you can go back four years, but the iPhone's one and the not even one. And for Windows computers and Mac computers, some features, you know, any machine that will take the upgrade can get the feature. And other times it's like, well, there's a bunch of footnotes to do translations in this way with this thing. You need. Oh, you're going to, it needs, you know, this processor and above or it only works on these, this list of computers or whatever. So yeah, it's a, it's a problem which actually like leads me into.

Leo [00:47:56]:
Yeah, I was going to say go for it.

Gary [00:47:57]:
Next topic. Yeah, so the next topic is, it's kind of interesting because this is something I'm hearing over and over again. I've done a bunch of videos with the new Mac OS Tahoe, talking about a feature called Launchpad. I don't know if you know what Launchpad is or was, but Launchpad was a way to launch apps. That's all it was. It's a way to launch apps. So the idea was you've got, on the Mac, you've got a dock at the bottom of the screen. You put your main apps in there, and you can launch your apps that way.

Gary [00:48:24]:
And you can always search for them and launch them. And you could just launch them by going to your applications folder and launching them there. But for regular users, like, instead of saying go to your applications folder or whatever, if you want to launch any app on your Mac, you could trigger Launchpad and there was a button on the screen to do it. There was also a keyboard shortcut and a grid of app icons showed up. And it sometimes it was several pages long that you could scroll through and you could see the icon for the app you want to launch, click on it and launch it. And there were keyboard shortcuts and you could search through it and all that. But it was basically a way to see all of your apps in one place and launch them. And you could reorder the apps, kind of like on a phone screen.

Gary [00:49:05]:
How you could reorder the icons, you could reorder them, you could group some into folders if you wanted to. And it's called Launchpad. It was around for a long time. And the thing is, is that a lot of people hated it. Really hated it. People would say, it's. I would do a video on it. Hey, how did you sell me with Launchpad? And I would get tons of comments of people saying, does anybody really use that? Like, who actually uses Launchpad? Let's just search for it with Spotlight and launch the app.

Gary [00:49:32]:
Put the app you want in the document you know, you don't need. Launchpad is the stupidest part of Mac os. People hated on this thing over and over. And if you looked at went to other sites and people were talking about Launchpad, people talk about how stupid it was. If you people ask questions on forums about Launchpad, other people would say, don't use Launchpad. Use Spotlight. Use your doc. Do something else you don't.

Gary [00:49:52]:
Launchpad is dumb. So Apple improved Spotlight, which is the way to search for things and kind of activate things in your Mac. And one of the things they did is they said, okay, we realize that a lot of people use Spotlight to launch apps. Seems to be the preferred way and will boost that functionality, make it easier than ever to launch apps for Spotlight. And we'll Just get rid of Launchpad. Like, you don't really need it, didn't provide anything. You couldn't do any anyway else. And now with Spotlight having increased capability to launch apps, easily Will get rid of Launchpad.

Gary [00:50:23]:
And then all of a sudden, out of the woodwork came tons of people that loved Launchpad. Right? And of course, you know, it's the. It's the squeaky will gets the grease kind of thing. It's like there were tons of people that just never commented saying, oh, by, I love Launchpad, like, why would you do that? Like, you never say that. Or, I use. I use Launchpad every day. Thank you for sharing. Like, why, what is it? Why are you even mentioning it? But now that it was gone, people were complaining.

Gary [00:50:51]:
Why did they get rid of it, all that stuff? And to me, it was obvious, okay? You and your world there didn't notice that other people were hating on it for years and years. And so Apple got rid of it. And also, it was definitely overlapping. I mean, the Venn diagram of Launchpad and other things. Launchpad is completely swallowed by other things. Right, right. And so they got rid of it. And now people are complaining about it, that they got rid of it and asking them to bring it back.

Gary [00:51:19]:
And I get some of those complaints are, you know, the whole, you know, if. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. There's the it wasn't hurting anybody thing. There was the, you know, why not give us more options, you know, let it stay or whatever. Why do they have to get rid of it, that kind of thing. And, you know, what comes down to the fact that Apple has gotten rid of lots of software features over the years, tons of them. There used to be this thing called Dashboard. It's a big thing that they got rid of.

Gary [00:51:50]:
There used to be these control panels and, you know, 30 years ago that they got rid of. There's lots of little features that they have gotten rid of over the years and bits of software, too, that they've retired simply because in most cases, a lot of people weren't using it and they wanted to move forward and they didn't want to burden the operating system with supporting all of the old legacy features. And I think that's the right thing to do. They're not always going to make the right decision on which things to retire.

Leo [00:52:23]:
And there will always be somebody for whom that was their favorite feature, always.

Gary [00:52:26]:
And sometimes they bring stuff back, and people love to complain and say, oh, they brought this back. They had that five years ago. And it's like, well, yeah, it's, it's a little. And you're, from your perspective, it looks like it's the same functionality now. It's done differently. Like widgets today look a lot like the dashboard we had 10 years ago, but it is different. And there was some fundamental software flaws because dashboards, they were very processor hungry and the widgets are not right. They're designed not to be processor hungry, kind of passive things.

Gary [00:53:00]:
So they may look the same to you, but there's actually some architectural differences. But yeah, it's a problem for whether it's an app, like an individual app that does something, a word processor, whatever. You know, the developer might need to sometimes shed features and add new ones just to keep it manageable. And not just for the developer, but for new users. You know, you might think it's great, there's a million features of your favorite app that, whatever, but it may be preventing new users from actually even getting into that app because it's so complicated. And if new users don't come into the app, the app dies.

Leo [00:53:37]:
It's funny. Microsoft, of course is, I want to say guilty. I mean, it's just the nature of software development as a business. Over time this happens. Hell, one of the, one of the packages that I worked on personally when I was back there, Microsoft Money, it doesn't exist anymore and it had a loyal user base and they all needed to go scrambling for something else. More recently they've taken out, you know, an application called WordPad, which is a very, very lightweight word processor. I think, I don't know what their motives are because it's actually very small. I don't know that it really had much of an impact on the system.

Leo [00:54:19]:
My suspicion is that that was a marketing maneuver. They wanted to push more people to the Microsoft Office suite for their word processing needs. One that continues to frustrate the heck out of me is that for years now they have told us there's a statement somewhere online that says the backup program that is included with Windows, you shouldn't use that. You should be looking for third party alternatives because we don't support it anymore. We, it's actually called Windows 7 Backup. And you know, we suggest you use something else. I mean, you know me, backups to me are fundamental. They need something in the operating system that just makes it happen as, as easy as Time Machine is on a Mac.

Leo [00:55:15]:
But they're not going to go in that route. And yeah, things disappear all the time. Again. Windows 11, the taskbar, they changed the heck out of that. Right. They moved things around. They took away functionality. Believe it or not, one of the pieces of functionality that people complain the most about that is missing in the Windows 11 taskbar is the ability to put it either at the top of the screen or the right or the left of the screen.

Leo [00:55:38]:
It's now anchored to the bottom only, Whereas in Windows 10 and prior, you could throw it around wherever you wanted it to be. So, yeah, it happens. It just does. And I get that for some people, it's frustrating when their. Their favorite feature or something that they maybe didn't think of as favorite but they took for granted suddenly disappears. It can be pretty, Pretty frustrating.

Gary [00:56:07]:
Yep.

Leo [00:56:09]:
All right, so I have a. Get off my lawn.

Gary [00:56:13]:
Yeah. And it's. Yeah, a pretty universal one, I think so I'll pile on.

Leo [00:56:17]:
Okay, good. This one, it. It dawned on me the other day, one of the things I get. You probably get this on the Mac side with icloud. I get people complaining about cloud storage in general, but specifically OneDrive, Microsoft's cloud storage. Why would you upload your documents to Microsoft's servers so that they could then scan your documents, steal your content, train their AIs, do whatever the heck it is they're doing, which of course I don't believe they're doing. They certainly not to that degree. They certainly are scanning for CSAM child sexual abuse material.

Leo [00:56:57]:
And they're public about that. They say that in the terms of service, but my thinking was a little bit along a slightly different line. Great. You don't trust OneDrive, you don't trust Microsoft, but you're running Windows, Microsoft Windows. If Microsoft wanted to scan your documents, they don't need you to upload it to OneDrive for that to happen. They could, in the background, quietly, without your ever noticing, scan everything on your machine. They have access to it. They have to have access to it in order for the operating system to do its job.

Leo [00:57:39]:
And yet somehow OneDrive is more threatening. I don't get it. And I think I understand not trusting Microsoft. I do. And I understand switching to different platforms because of it, but picking and choosing things that within the Microsoft ecosystem that you do and don't trust when fundamentally you just don't trust Microsoft. That continues to confuse me to no end.

Gary [00:58:09]:
Yeah, it's the same on the Apple side with icloud, you know, and even more so, Apple controls the hardware and the software and the operating system and icloud. So then if you don't trust icloud, but you now you've got the software and the hardware. That's the same company. I think a lot of people will extrapolate all the way to. Well, it's not that I think the company is snooping on me, it's just I think the company will give up my data to a government like. And so. But it's still the same trust. It's still what you, you gotta trust that Apple or Microsoft is going to follow the law when it comes to that.

Gary [00:58:49]:
If you think they're going to go and say, well, forget the law, we'll just give them this, this stuff without a subpoena or whatever, then, then, yeah, you're not trusting Microsoft or Apple. And then, yeah, you've got the, the bigger problem is you're still using all their stuff to store all of your data and they could just use other means to do it.

Leo [00:59:13]:
It's even the government side of things though, right? I mean, understand, you know. Yes, if they get a subpoena and they want to grab all of my data out of OneDrive without my knowing, usually, yeah, to give it to the government. My assumption is that yes, there's a process that, that could happen, but what if the government went to Microsoft and said, hey, Leo's running Windows. Could you tell us what's on his machine?

Gary [00:59:35]:
Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, and I think it's right.

Leo [00:59:39]:
The technology part is not the problem, it's the ethical part. Could they. Would they.

Gary [00:59:44]:
Right. Exactly.

Leo [00:59:45]:
Really unclear.

Gary [00:59:47]:
Sometimes the, sometimes people think it is a technology problem though. Like, I'll, I'll hear this. It's like, oh, I'm worried about my data on icloud and I say it's encrypted, you know, and they're like, yeah, but does that really protect you? Yeah, it does.

Leo [01:00:03]:
To be fair on that argument. Right. It's encrypted is actually imprecise. It's more a matter of how encrypted is it. And what I mean is that, for example, if you, I don't know, but if you can go to icloud and you can sign into your account and you can access your documents online without your computer. Yeah, Apple could do exactly the same thing.

Gary [01:00:28]:
Well, they just need your password to do it.

Leo [01:00:32]:
Correct. And almost by definition they, they have the ability to know your password.

Gary [01:00:38]:
Ah, see, that's. But that's not true for most of Apple's data. You. They don't.

Leo [01:00:46]:
You're trusting them.

Gary [01:00:48]:
Well, exactly. Well, that's where people are falling. They're. They're saying no. I'm sure they do have a way to get in. I'm sure they do have a back door.

Leo [01:00:56]:
You and I understand the technology at least behind passwords. Right. Where the password, if it's done right, actually never leaves your machine. It gets hashed and it's the hash that gets compared, yada, yada. But the fact is that entire process is still controlled by Apple or.

Gary [01:01:10]:
Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. They're telling you that they don't have the password, but I mean, they could, they could have the password, but they don't is the thing. And yeah, there's. Yeah. You have to, you have to trust that not just what their future actions are, but their past actions too. If they say we don't have. We don't have your password, only you do.

Gary [01:01:34]:
We don't have a back door we didn't build one in. That's trusting their past actions and their future actions. Is, Is that any way we do have to get to your data? We won't, we won't do it unless, you know, everything is, is, is legal. Which of course is the same for you. Right. You could get a search warrant, of course.

Leo [01:01:50]:
Yep.

Gary [01:01:51]:
You know, you, you could write down on a piece of paper some information and put it in a lockbox in your closet. Right. But if somebody, a law enforcement officer shows up with a warrant at your door, guess what? They're going to be able to read that piece of paper. And it's the same thing with. Actually your data then is better secured because if they went to Apple or Microsoft with that warrant and said, here, we got a warrant. Give us the data. Okay, here it is. It's a bunch of encrypted stuff.

Gary [01:02:23]:
Best of luck with it. Because you can't get into it. You can't get into it. But that doesn't mean they can't go to you and say, okay, we have a warrant for your password. I guess so.

Leo [01:02:34]:
The difference is that I think warrants executed at the company level are usually done without your knowledge.

Gary [01:02:41]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo [01:02:43]:
That they're looking.

Gary [01:02:44]:
So it's good that they can't. The encryption is protecting you from getting your stuff stolen without your knowledge.

Leo [01:02:51]:
Right.

Gary [01:02:52]:
Doing that's stolen.

Leo [01:02:54]:
But anyway, that was.

Gary [01:02:55]:
Anyway, anyway, enough.

Leo [01:02:57]:
Just groping about. About.

Gary [01:02:58]:
Yeah. Being grumpy about it. Yeah.

Leo [01:03:01]:
On the cool side of things. So. Yes. Reasons that we missed one or two of the record of the episodes is that I went on a trip. I drove with a friend to Helena, Montana. We actually did that in a day, which we won't do again. It was a very, very long day. The return Trip was broken into two days, but there did my Rivian, which is an always connected vehicle.

Leo [01:03:28]:
And I was just. All of a sudden we were flying down the highway in Montana at something like 80 or 90 miles an hour and I was sitting there using my laptop connected to the Internet again in the middle of nowhere, playing with AI for some reason, the fact that that scenario is even possible just kind of blew me away. Just kind of made me appreciate all of the pieces that have been coming together to make that kind of stuff happen. Anyway, that was just me being kind of of awestruck again by the the Enthusiast and Tech Enthusiast hour came out. So in terms of real things, of course it's been a few weeks. A couple of things I was going to mention Wednesday. Season two finished up. We enjoyed the heck out of that.

Leo [01:04:24]:
Looking forward to season three since they did of course leave it as a very big cliffhanger. Don't know if you were watching that.

Gary [01:04:32]:
I haven't started season two yet.

Leo [01:04:34]:
Oh, you, you'll. You'll enjoy it. It's fun.

Gary [01:04:36]:
Oh yeah, I'm sure I will.

Leo [01:04:37]:
In terms of acting, there's a scenario where two of the actress, the actresses, they do a body switch, classic fantasy sci fi trope. And it was very, very interesting to watch them both act the other character flawlessly because the character so very, very different. But to then actually see those actors do that and do it so well was a lot of fun. Star Trek Strange New World Season three wrapped up. It was an uneven season from many people's point of view, but we enjoyed all of the episodes. Our standards are probably a little bit lower. We're not pedantic when it comes to Star Trek. We're here to be entertained or to be or to have, you know, be made to think.

Leo [01:05:24]:
And various episodes definitely did that. And then last night we watched Superman the movie, the most recent movie. I wasn't sure if you'd seen that yet or not. It turned out to be better than I was expecting. It was much of all things. The way I would put it is that Superman in this movie turned out to be a little bit more human than some of the other Supermans we've seen in the past. And I really enjoyed the combination of storyline and light humor and. And of course the dog.

Leo [01:05:55]:
Can't forget the dog.

Gary [01:05:57]:
Cool. Cool. Well, I've got my recommendation for any cool is the perfect October read I found. There's a book called I know there are a lot of fans of this book now. A Night in the Lonesome October. And It's Roger Lasni's last book, a famous fantasy and sci fi author and it is a great little read for spooky season. As a matter of fact, there are 31 chapters and each one of them is for a day of the month of October.

Leo [01:06:34]:
Oh, cool.

Gary [01:06:34]:
So from what I understand it, some people like to read the book just, you know, in addition to other things they're reading, read one chapter a day leading up to Halloween, October 31st. It is, it's a really cool, fun, you know, Halloweeny type read with lots some familiarish characters in it and it's really cool. I'm surprised I did not know about this book until this year and I, I read it just last week and so I won't be reading it through October, but I could see myself actually reading like next year or whatever, just remembering to just before go to bed, read one chapter a night or something like that and follow along in the story because the story takes place each night in October and all that. So pretty cool.

Leo [01:07:24]:
We have good timing because I just came to the end of my, my latest fiction that I've been reading. I've been kind of pondering what to do next. So maybe I'll do this.

Gary [01:07:34]:
Yeah, there you go.

Leo [01:07:35]:
Let's see. So for self promotion, yes, I want people to see how to keep using Windows 10 safely after support ends. It's askleo.com 184526 I think it's important for people to understand that things are not nearly as dire as Microsoft would have you believe. And of course, admitting that you could continue to use Windows 10 is not in Microsoft's best interest. So you'll never hear it from them, but you will hear it from me and I'll show, you know, talk about how and why and so you don't have to run out and buy yourself a new machine until you know you need to for some other reason.

Gary [01:08:16]:
Cool. I'll point to the video I did on alternatives to using Launchpad. If you, if you were a fan of Launchpad, there are, you know, lots of different things that you could do to replace your favorite functionality there with something. Not actually new things for the most part, but things that have been around that you could have been doing before as well. Cool.

Leo [01:08:38]:
Alrighty. Well, I think we did a good job coming back after all this time. Hopefully we'll be able to be a little bit more consistent in the coming weeks. As always, thank you for listening and we will see you here again. This time, I mean it real soon. All right, take care, everyone. Bye.

Gary [01:08:56]:
Bye. Bye.