Category: Computing

Every tech support task you should do for your family

How to save money, prevent hacks and make everything work smoothly.

Like getting your teeth cleaned or emptying the gutters, there are a number of digital maintenance tasks everyone should see to once or twice a year.

  • Update all the software.
  • Make sure contact emails are up-to-date.
  • Turn on two-factor authentication.
  • Set up a password system.
  • See if the storage is full.
  • Set up automatic backups. (In my opinion, this should be the very first priority.)
  • Adjust accessibility features.
  • Scan for any malware or adware.
  • Cancel unwanted subscriptions.
  • Organize cable and streaming services.
  • Check the cable, Internet and phone bill.
  • Add legacy contacts.
  • Lock down all the privacy settings.
  • Set up computers so you can help remotely.
  • Find local tech support.
  • Clear out old unwanted tech.
  • Set up any holiday tech gifts.
  • Review common scams.

Each of these tips has an explanation of why it’s important and how to do it. Yes, it’s a lot of items, but doing as many as you can will help, and you can do (for example) one item a week. 1,600 words: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/20/tech-support-checklist/.

ChatGPT

You may have been reading about ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), the new AI that can write comprehensible English prose… and more. First, from Time Magazine (link), a brief intro:

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a chatbot created by the San Francisco company OpenAI. Known as a generative AI, it responds to virtually any prompt you give it with startling speed and clarity. Whereas many chatbots only know how to respond to certain keywords or triggers, ChatGPT can respond to complex questions and spit out comprehensive, essay-length answers on virtually any topic.

ChatGPT is able to do this by running the Internet’s vast amounts of data through powerful neural networks: software loosely designed on neurons in the human brain. This technology has existed for several years. Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Meta, recently argued that ChatGPT was “not particularly innovative” and relied largely on Google’s Transformer neural net technology unveiled in 2017.

I have not visited the chatbot myself (not quite feeling up to giving them my phone number), but here are some examples that I found in other’s articles:

Instruct ChatGPT to assume the role of a sarcastic comedian who only responds to all of your future prompts in a hilariously sarcastic manner, then try to give it a go:

“I tried to get insurance coverage for my left shoe, but the insurance company said no because it’s ‘not a valuable enough item.’ I mean, have you seen my left shoe? It’s a work of art. Plus, I’ve had it for over 10 years. That’s like a lifetime in shoe years. But apparently, the insurance company doesn’t appreciate fine footwear.”

Or this test:

Write me a funny essay about thinking:

“Thinking can be a real pain in the brain. It’s exhausting, frustrating, and sometimes it feels like it’s just not worth the effort. But let’s face it, what else are we going to do with our time? Watch reruns of “The Price is Right” for the millionth time? No thanks.”

Remember, the above snippets were written by a computer program.

Three points from my own personal thinking:

(1) Is this really artificial intelligence? From my understanding, it is not. ChatGPT puts related words together in sentences based on their frequency in existing sentences on the web. It’s generating sentences; there’s no intelligence there. Similarly, AlphaGo can play the game of go better than the best human players, and chess programs can beat humans, but that is their one trick. They cannot learn other functions. They are definitely not like human intelligence, or what AI researchers call AGI: artificial general intelligence.

(2) On the other hand, ChatGPT is probably going to be a very powerful tool. Producing an article based on other human articles is in one sense unnecessary, yet an awful lot of what you see on the web, on news sites, all around you is… re-written text from other people. Really, most news articles are repeating or rewording what a politician said, or what a corporate press release said, or what witnesses at a tragedy site said. Some business news sites are already apparently using many computer-generated articles, because a lot of them don’t need any original thinking. So if this capability becomes widely and inexpensively available… it will make up more and more of what we read. I have no doubt that this will have both advantages and disadvantages.

(3) Also remember, this is just a start. Future versions will be far more powerful. I’m sure people dismissed the first Wright Brothers airplane because it couldn’t go more than a mile and couldn’t carry 100 passengers. But a few decades later, airplanes were doing those things and much more. Computer software can move a lot faster than airplane engineering. One of the major complaints about the current version of ChatGPT is that it frequently comes up with “facts” that are simply wrong or even invented. What happens when that is reduced or fixed?

This has taken off all over the internet. Just some of the many stories:

The Register: BOFH

The Register is a Brit technology news publication. One of its features is the BOFH (Bastard Operator from Hell) and his young helper the PFY (Pimply-Faced Youth).

HR has asked the BOFH for all emails (including sent, deleted, and archived emails) for some kind of investigation. BOFH asks for more information on what they need:

“Okay, no problems. Now, do you want his personal email as well?”

“People shouldn’t be using company email for personal business.”

“Yeah sure, and they shouldn’t be using the company photocopiers to check on the progress of suspicious moles on their arses either – but we all do it.”

“What?”

“Not our OWN photocopiers obviously. No, I use the one up in Human Resources.”

https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/17/bofh_2022_episode_11/

HTTP Cats

This is a little techie, but funny. The point is that when your browser asks for a web page, the computer that sends the web page back to you includes a three-digit status code. The first digit says whether the request is in progress, was successful, had a client or server error etc. From Wikipedia:

  • 1xx informational response – the request was received, continuing process
  • 2xx successful – the request was successfully received, understood, and accepted
  • 3xx redirection – further action needs to be taken in order to complete the request
  • 4xx client error – the request contains bad syntax or cannot be fulfilled
  • 5xx server error – the server failed to fulfill an apparently valid request

Anyway, this site will supply a cat picture (yes!) for each return code: https://http.cat/. Click on the picture for an expanded picture. Example: 400 = Bad Request:

How to reduce Facebook tracking

Let’s face it. You’re not paying for Facebook, right? Therefore you are not the customer. You are the product.

Facebook even tracks you when you are on non-Facebook sites so they can sell your information to advertisers.

Here are seven steps to stop Facebook tracking, starting with the nuclear option. ((Each step has details in the article.))

1. Quit Facebook and Instagram

2. Change these Facebook privacy settings

3. Limit app tracking on your phone

4. Bolster your Web browser

5. Block more app trackers

6. Obscure your email

7. Tell companies to stop selling your data

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/29/stop-facebook-tracking/. About 1,400 words.

Deepfakes

Artificial intelligence programs can modify video to show actors speaking a fluent foreign language…

This AI makes Robert De Niro perform lines in flawless German

…The technology has been used to create fake celebrity porn and damaging revenge-porn clips targeting women. Experts worry that deepfakes showing a famous person in a compromising situation might spread misinformation and sway an election.

Article: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/05/robert-de-niro-speaks-fluent-german-in-taxi-driver-thanks-to-ai/.

Making chips: 20,000,000,000,000 parts

That’s twenty trillion. You have no idea how much goes into making a modern microchip.

Long Answer: If a company wants to make the most advanced chips in the world, they need to purchase an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography tool from ASML, which has a monopoly…

One EUV tool requires:

5,000 suppliers provide 100,000 parts, 3,000 cables, 40,000 bolts and 2 kilometers of hosing. The tool weighs about 180,000 kilograms (200 tonnes), and ships in 40 containers spread over 20 trucks and three cargo planes…. That is just one tool. To make a chip, a factory needs 200+ tools… The mirrors guiding this light are ground so precisely that, if scaled to the size of Germany, they would have no bumps bigger than a millimeter.

https://semiliterate.substack.com/p/why-cant-china-just-reverse-engineer. (Note, “BLUF” at the start means “Bottom Line Up Front.”)

[emoji words]

Emoji have their place… to express emotions, not facts or verbs. I dislike using them in place of words because they tend to be seriously ambiguous, and we have these things called “words” that we have been developing for millenia and which are much less ambiguous. We’ve had ideographic written languages and we’ve gotten rid of most of them.

I had this late-night text discussion…

Girlfriend:

       Why are there no hug emoji

Me:

   🫂 🤗

       But they could be ambiguous. I prefer words.

Girlfriend:

   🛌

       #notambiguous

Me:

       “F*** me now.”

Girlfriend:

   🤦🏻‍♀️

Me:

       “Wasp on my forehead!!!”

Girlfriend:

   🏃‍♀️

Me:

       “Time for a jog!”

Girlfriend:

   💩

Me:

       “Pooping makes me happy!”

Girlfriend:

   👽👾🤖

Me:

       “I’m going to eat your soul.”