ISSUE 23.45 • 2026-11-09 COPILOT By Will Fastie Microsoft’s handling of Copilot has been messy from the start. This isn’t exactly news. Copilot has been a moving target for the past three years, and the dance probably isn’t over yet. The most recent manifestation of this was the collapse of the Windows Copilot App, which […]

RATIONAL AI By Michael A. Covington AI companies measure usage in “tokens.” What are those, and how can we control how many we’re using? Before you ask that, you may wonder whether it’s even worth counting things that are priced at a few dollars per million, or even a few cents per million. How would […]

Many of us are writing fewer and fewer checks. I write one to my hairdresser and that’s about it. Today I read a headline that our dear friend, AI, is starting to make life impossible for banking institutions. Major U.S. banks are detecting third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, raising concerns that automated tools could […]

Saw two stories today: Getty Images files for bankruptcy after AI pressures Character.ai filed for bankruptcy Meanwhile, there are some comments over the misinterpretation of the $80 billion loss on Anthropic. But here’s the thing — it’s an accounting thing. About $72 billion was a noncash accounting charge related to convertible bonds and other fundraising […]

SOFTWARE By Will Fastie I hardly know where to start. This is a remarkable development. It should not have come as a surprise. Based on the rapid pace of AI, it was inevitable. It’s just that we are suddenly confronted with a situation we have not seen before. ArtCraft has used AI to develop almost […]

COMMENTARY By Amy Babinchak I am a known person in the Great Lakes sailing community, at least in some circles. Recently, I was asked to identify a fish from a photograph taken in northern Lake Michigan. This seemed a reasonable assignment, but I didn’t recognize the fish. I can identify a lot of Great Lakes […]

The other day, a reader posed an interesting question about how one can tell whether they have inadvertently installed AI on their computer.  Most of the time, we know when we are installing or using AI. We download Claude. We launch perplexity.ai. In Office we look for the colorful icon and launch Copilot. In an […]

I have an Alexa auto echo device in my car mainly for asking Alexa questions like “Hey, Alexa what’s the seven-day weather forecast?”  Yes, I realize it’s obvious we’re in a late heat wave here in California just at the start of fall, but somehow hearing that by Sunday this will break makes it easier […]

WINDOWS 11 By Nathan Segal Microsoft Paint is a basic image editor which has been bundled with Windows since 1985. Originally delivered with Windows 1.0, the early versions included basic drawing tools and support for color, a few brushes, shapes, text tools, and just a little more. It could open, edit, and save images to […]

TAME YOUR TECH By Susan Bradley Is technology getting too complicated? The other day, a coworker needed assistance to replace his Internet modem. Rather than renting it from the ISP, he had purchased it years ago and then never replaced it. The modem started acting up. We happened to have a newer replacement device that […]

The other day, Microsoft quietly got rid of RSS feeds that allowed many of us to monitor new and changed Knowledge Base postings for Microsoft. I’m not sure whether this is due to the concern of AI scraping content. However, Reddit is retiring RSS feeds to deal with that same concern. One of the folks […]

APPLE By Will Fastie I can’t remember the last time I was this confused. Apple’s marketers are messing with my head. On September 16, I posted a quick note to the blog venting my frustration over learning that Apple AI was not supported by my iPhone 17e — despite earlier information from Apple suggesting otherwise. […]

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 […]