Re: 2023-04-24 MUGOO Zoom iMeeting

[DavidR]

1 - News and Views - new tech arrivals to share with the group
Marc recently upgraded to 10 Gigabit Ethernet and has noticed a significant performance boost across his entire system.

David has ordered a Mac Mini M2 Pro, to be delivered on May 1st.  He currently has two other Mac Minis on his desk (2007 with macOS 10.6.8 and late 2014 with 10.14.6), each running older programs no longer available in the newer Apple silicon environments.  Marc pointed out that it's possible to run such older versions of macOS on separate virtual machines in emulation mode using a program such as Parallels, without having to reboot and no perceptible lag at all.

Graham mentioned that he has a 40 year old portable Sony shortwave radio which is still better than anything that you can buy today.  Newer is not necessarily better.
             
2 - AI Update - with David Rhynas
At the January meeting David had provided a presentation on several significant developments in the realm of Artificial Intelligence:
    ChatGPT, chatbot built on top of a family of OpenAI's large language models;
    VALL-E, language model that can clone your voice from a 3 second audio clip; 
    DALL-E, that can generate digital images from natural language prompts. 

Because things are moving so quickly, we thought it would be appropriate to provide a few headline updates since that time.  These include refinement of the grandparent scam where fraudsters can now mimic family member voices, the introduction of OpenAI's much enhanced GPT4, Elon Musk's open letter to pause development while regulations catch up, an AI image winning the Sony World Photograhy Competition and novel ways that you can use ChatGPT for work.  You can view David's presentation deck and remarks here[https://mugoo.com/bigfiles/coming-soon.txt].

In the post discussion, Marc mentioned that he has used ChatGPT to come up with a first draft of Executive summaries for 20 of his technical papers.  Not always spot on but still a time saver.  A good technical writer is still worth his or her weight in gold, but some such jobs are now in jeopardy.

Ian used to work for Volleyball Canada and ChatGPT came back with some nonsense when asked to write his biography, an example of so-called hallucination.

When asked whether ChatGPT works in in other languages, Neil remarked that ChatGPT has been able to teach itself Bengali!

ChatGPT has mined a lot of personal data and is still banned in Italy due to privacy concerns.

Graham has been watching an interesting TV series The Capture on Amazon Prime.  Part of the premise is that Cambridge Analytics and ChatGPT "take over the world."  AI is becoming part of our pop culture.
                                 
3 - This-and-that on my Mac - with Ross Slade
Ross presented Part 1 of useful, inexpensive non-Apple apps that can make everyday tasks more efficient.

Bartender is an award-winning app for macOS that enhances your menu bar, giving you better control over your menu bar items, what's displayed, and when, with menu bar items only showing when you need them.  It improves workflow with quick reveal, search, custom hotkeys and triggers, and more. https://www.macbartender.com

Paste is like a time machine for your clipboard. It makes it easy to instantly find and access any text, link, image, or file you've ever copied on any of your macOS or iOS devices via iCloud;  essentially the clipboard as it should be. https://pasteapp.io

Shottr is screenshot tool for those who care about pixels.  It enables scrolling screenshots your on mac, marking up a screenshot,  picking a colour, zooming in on your pixels, bluring things.  As an example, a 15 page scrolling book preview on Amazon can be captured with a single click. https://shottr.cc

AppCleaner is a small application which allows you to thoroughly uninstall unwanted apps.  Installing an application distributes many files throughout your System using space across your Hard Drive.  AppCleaner finds all these small files and safely deletes them.  Smart Delete will remind you about the other hidden bits when you drag an app to the trash.  https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/  There was some discussion on whether this app is able to locate stuff that CleanMyMac does not ... to be determined.

You can view his presentation deck and remarks here[https://mugoo.com/bigfiles/coming-soon.txt].