ISSUE 23.38 • 2026-09-21 RATIONAL AI By Michael A. Covington Pope Leo XIV has issued an encyclical about digital culture and artificial intelligence. In what follows, I’ll summarize what computer professionals need to know about it, referencing its sections for those who want to dig deeper. I won’t address religious or political claims, theology, whether […]

LEGAL BRIEF By Max Stul Oppenheimer, Esq. If I had to guess, I’d say that the majority of people are tired of hearing about AI and have yet to see any significant benefits. I myself am tired of getting erroneous answers from a chatbot, responding “that’s wrong,” and getting back “you were right to question […]

I installed iOS 27 on my iPhone today, and I’m ticked off. What makes me mad is that Cupertino is hiding the Apple Intelligence ball. Read the specs on Apple’s iPhone 17e page, and you will see Apple Intelligence listed as a feature, albeit with a footnote. Here’s footnote 15 (out of 18): Available on […]

ISSUE 23.37 • 2026-09-14 PATCH WATCH By Susan Bradley Is AI pushing us to patch faster? Recently, I sat down with Richard Campbell of the RunAsRadio podcast to talk about patching, security, and whether we should patch faster just because of AI. I made the point that vulnerability counts do not equate to exploitation. The […]

ISSUE 23.36 • 2026-09-07 PUBLIC DEFENDER By Brian Livingston Spirit Airlines, an ultra-low-cost carrier that served nearly 90 destinations in the US, Latin America, and the Caribbean, went bankrupt and ceased all flight operations on May 2, 2026. Google, the search giant, won a competitive bidding process and will pay $10 million to buy Spirit’s […]

COMMENTARY By Will Fastie Join me for a few excursions into my life. I was checking my contract the other day, and I realized it has no clause specifying exactly what I must write about for this newsletter. In fact, it doesn’t say anything at all about me writing! Editing? Yes. Writing? No. Freedom! Free […]

PUBLIC DEFENDER By Brian Livingston Realistic-looking videos that are the most-often recommended by the popular TikTok social media app regarding health care contain no real people 40 percent of the time, a new analysis of the site’s mini-movies has found. Many of TikTok’s top-rated videos on every topic are AI-generated but look exactly like actual […]

The latest in AI wars has to do with AI being used by attackers. There is a recent case in which a company that used to provide a chatbot app for teenagers pivoted to being a platform for machine learning. The firm is called Hugging Face. To me, that’s a non-serious company name. But what […]

I often see voice recognition software being touted as a way around keyboard issues. But the brick wall I see is spreadsheets.  Telling Excel what do to versus DOING it, it’s just something I can’t see being efficient. Recently on a list I saw someone tout this tool called Wispr flow. For the record it […]

COMMENTARY By Will Fastie AI could ruin YouTube, not only for viewers but also for creators. YouTube has been a tremendously useful resource over the years, for both entertainment and education. Want to learn how to hammer a nail into a board? Tens of thousands of videos. Want to learn how to use Blackmagic Design’s […]

Back when I started accounting, the electronic spreadsheet, while not new, was not as entrenched as it is now. Over time, the spreadsheet has become so much part of the business day to day needs that it’s inconceivable that we can live without it. Initially it had its faults and bugs. But now, it’s just […]

ISSUE 23.26 • 2026-06-29 MICROSOFT 365 By Peter Deegan Give AI a chance to help you with any Excel or spreadsheet app. AI can greatly speed up your time spent working on a workbook — rom explaining functions and improving formulas to making a full sheet from your description. Any version of Excel, including perpetual […]

AI By Matthew S. Smith This might be hard to believe, but we’re now at least four years into the era of AI large language models — and perhaps up to nine, depending on your definition. OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released in 2022, GPT-3 was released in 2020, and the paper that defined the transformer architecture […]