BazzaRama

What a bad blogger I’ve been in the last year. I started a post on November 6, 2022 (quoted below), but never finished it.

Moving to Ventura

It’s been two months since my last post, but who’s counting? In the meantime, autumn started in the northern hemisphere, my Mom had her 85th birthday, and I did not purchase any new Apple kit … yet. I did install the new operating system versions for iPhone, iPad, Watch, and TV when they became available. And this weekend, I moved to Ventura.

No, not that Ventura, this Ventura.

I installed macOS 13 Ventura on the two M1 Macs in our house. It has been the smoothest macOS upgrade in all my years of using a Macintosh computer. There have been some glitches and gotchas, but the process of upgrading couldn’t have been easier. It only took about an hour from the time I launched the installer until each Mac was up and running in Ventura. I have not tried all the new features yet, but I’ve got some time to learn all about them before the next version of macOS drops in the fall of 2023.

Now, Apple’s fall 2023 iPhone event has come and gone and the release of macOS 14 Sonoma is only nine days away. It looks like the first full weekend in October may be a window of opportunity to install it on at least my M1 Mac mini, since I do get a paid holiday on October 9.

So much has transpired in the last year. The tech sector alone has seen some transformative and disruptive advancements, especially in the area of generative “AI”, such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Adobe Firefly, to name just three. It seems like every company large and small is jumping on the “AI” bandwagon. I have tried some of them and found use cases in both writing and image generation that provide some time savings, inspiration, and solid starting points for my own creative efforts. And, I admit, they are rather fun.

But can we agree on one thing? These generative “AI” systems are not really artificial intelligence. There is no real intelligence, per se. There is no discernment or consciousness behind the curtain pulling the levers and spinning the dials that ultimately spit out the word or images in response to our prompts. These systems are algorithmic and rely on large data sets to predict the next word or construct the image. I would really like to see the initialization “AI” replaced with “LLM” (for large language models) or something similar. Will machines one day become sentient and self-aware like in so many of our science fiction musings? Who knows, perhaps. In the meantime, let’s save “AI” for use when that day actually comes.

In other news, the new iPhone 15 and 15 Pro models are available to order, as are the new Apple Watches Series 9 and Ultra 2. If you would like the watch the video from the September 12 “Wonderlust” event, you can find it on YouTube, on Apple’s website, and in the AppleTV app on any device that supports it.

That’s all for today as I have a regularly scheduled FaceTime call and some other items on my checklist for today before the day’s end. Hopefully, I will post again before this time next year.