alf tries an iphone

My brother michael sent me the iphone 13 max pro, so that i could experience a modern apple device. He had found it too large, and went instead with the smaller se model.

The first thing that i noticed is that the iphone is very hard to set up. it takes about a dozen times more effort than an android phone, and requires a credit card number to get a single 'free' program from the apple store. I put free in quotes because there is pretty much nothing at the store. lots of good looking apps, that do not work and simply beg you to invest in the fully paid app. It is quite scammy, because the price of the apps is in super small typeset, as if they hope that you will mistake the paid apps for free, and never notice the charge on your credit card.

The setup process was a nightmare, with dozens of emails containing secret numbers that need to be plugged into the phone. The phone tries to make an iron clad apple id that can be used exactly like your drivers license to prove who you are. This is a pretty good idea, but it does not work well. It is better to emulate your desktop computer on an android phone, and continue to prove your identity to each site that you visit. It is clear that apple is making it's users into a product that can be further exploited [similar to what facebook/meta does]

The real nightmare began when i hooked the iphone 13 pro max to my pc computer to get some songs and movies and eBooks on there. I was advised to get itunes to move files onto there, but itunes sent me to microsoft store. that store did not like me, and refused to give me a copy of the program. so, i pirated an old version of itunes [which would not connect to a new iphone]. but, it did allow me to upgrade to the new version without visiting the microsoft store.

Once i had this software, i could finally see the iphone in the app, but not it's contents. it was tedious to move files onto the phone, because the device does not recognize common types of music or video files. it needs itunes to convert your files to the special apple file, and a program on the phone needs to accept the file.

audio books were worse, because they import into itunes as music files, and you need to click about a dozen different things to change every file separately from a song to a book. I guess apple folks enjoy all of this nonsense. but, for a pc and android user, it causes a stomach ache.

Windows 11 can see the iphone automatically, but it can not copy a file onto there, and can only access the photos that you have taken. Unlike the android device, the contents of the phone are trapped on there. there is no sd card, so no way to get around this restriction. It becomes clear that the phone is a way to sell you programs and media rather than a useful computer. I tried about a dozen programs that claim to be able to give better communication with the device, but they were all super limited or broken altogether. More attempts to get money. It is funny that a file browser is included as part of the ios operating system, because it does not show the contents of the tablet.

After these disappointments in using the phone as a device for listening to music and audio books, and watching movies, I started using it as a phone. I found that the face id works well, except in dark conditions where the front facing camera can not make out your face.

the iMessage program is indeed good, but super frustrating as it much prefers other iphone users. i was able to download google apps in the stupid apple store, but found that they are throttled down, so that they work much more slowly than on an android phone.

 

Each new discovery like this made me sick to my stomach again. The device in my hand is not a cooperative effort with a free operating system. It is a closed ecosystem, meant to work poorly unless you have all apple products.

The single port on the iphone 13 is a totally non standard lightening connector, so that no other devices may be connected. It is a good connector, that can be inserted in either orientation. The screen is good, and has variable refresh rate. so, it runs at 10 refreshes per second when you are looking at a still screen, and 120 hz when scrolling. This saves battery, and the 13 pro max has a large battery.

Siri is an AI that listens to your questions, and replies cleverly. It is about as good as google gemini, but resides on the iphone itself. this is a big upgrade, because you can still change your speaking to typing even when out of service. it is much faster, because you are talking to an AI model that is built into the phone, instead of one that resides on a server far away. This is a big plus for the iphone. Apple has gambled that the built in AI will make up for the tablets mind blowing flaws.

The camera on a phone is of huge importance to me, as I no longer haul a giant digital camera everywhere I go. I was excited to try the iphone 13 pro max's 3 camera system and compare it to the similar system on the Samsung s20 ultra 5g. Both of these phones have 3 cameras, a flash, and a depth sensor. In the iphone, the 3 cameras are all 12 megapixels, where the samsung has a 108 mp wide angle, a 48 mp zoom, and a 12 mp ultra wide. The wide angle and zoom cameras on the samsung are much better, even though it is a model from a year earlier. The ulta wide on the iphone is better,  because it focuses, and can be used as a decent macro camera for very close subjects. Also, the 3 cameras on the iphone are better integrated, so that you can switch seamlessly between them. you can switch instantly during a video, and it is not jarring to watch. So, for stills, the samsung s20 wins easily. But for video, the iphone is better.

As a phone handset, the iphone works exactly like the samsung. It has good sound, both when held to the ear and when using speaker phone. It has good antennas and gets the same number of bars. it's hotspot power is similar. For some reason, the iphone only allows a single computer or table to share it's internet, so that is a big negative. you have to turn a connected device off to get another device on line.  Also, the hotspot turns itself off all the time, which is a total hassle. for someone who uses plenty of wifi devices, this purposeful crippling of the iphone hotspot feature is very annoying.

[I was later to find out that if you ask siri to turn on the hot spot, it stays on!]

The network gets confused a lot, and needs to be reset almost daily. This is just a poor implementation, and a total deal breaker for anyone who depends on a phone for their internet service.

the Ios operating system has frequent incremental updates, meant more to break iphones that are jailbroken, or that use various methods to unlock the phone for use with other carriers. The updates are hard to avoid, and reset privacy setting hidden deep in the settings menu to their default, and less private, setting. This is a flagrant attempt at surveillance, and another total deal breaker for anyone who has tried android tablets and prefers privacy.

In summary, the iphone 13 max pro is not for pc users. It will frustrate them and try to get them to purchase expensive media and software that is normally given away for free. The price is much too high for a device that refuses to communicate with PCs and android devices , and has a crippled hot spot ability. The way that it forces the user to use a terrible broken program to convert and feed files slowly onto the device is criminal. And, the insistence of a valid credit card number to set up the apple id is chilling. It is usable as a phone, but poor as a music player or book reader. [Especially if you use media off line, instead of buying files at the apple store]. In short, this device is only for apple aficionados. Do not listen to the apple die-hards when they sing the iPhone's praises. They are people who refuse to learn about computers, and prefer to wait on long lines each time apple releases a new product so that they can be spoon fed their expensive i Messages , i Tunes, i Books and i Movies.

lets not pay for genocide

 Israel has isolated a prison city that they built, and is destroying it with all of the residents still in the city.

They are doing that in a horrifying and cowardly manner, by dropping US bombs from the air like they were plowing a field.

Pretty much every country on earth is trying to stop this atrocity, except the US, which is paying the bill for it to occur. The US is not paying the bill by requesting the money in the normal way. The US president has [in fact] twice gone around the congress, and sent Israel free weapons using 'discretionary funds'. It is further interesting that the American president has access to sufficient secret money to fund the very costly killing of 2 million people.

In fact, roughly 12.5 billion have been gifted over, and 

12 billion dollars / 2 million gazans provides 6 thousand US dollars to kill each and every resident of the occupied detention zone.

The prime minister of Israel announced after oct 7 that the entire city would be punished for the attack on Israel. That the residents were not human, and should be wiped out like insects. He figured this out because 3000 of the residents broke into Israel, raped and killed 1200 Israelis, and hauled 240 Israelis back to Gaza to experience the bombing that would surely follow.

There are some other facts that were not immediately obvious: 

1. the Israelis were having a giant music festival within sight of a prison city where the folks who used to live in Israel are imprisoned. There were originally .75 million Palestinians forced to flee their homes in the 1948 Nakba event, and they are the parents and grandparents of the 2.1 million that currently live in Gaza.

2. It is hard to categorize the invasion. The Palestinians are prisoners in an tiny occupied strip of land. Rural farmers who used to live in small towns and grow olives and raise flocks. They are concentrated in a city within sight of their families' stolen properties and their families' demolished homes. They are under occupation, and have been for 75 years. It is such a long occupation that generations have grown up in this prison city. They have been starved and bombed throughout the 75 years to suppress them. The Israelis call this 'mowing the grass'.

 The Oct 7th attack is more like a prison riot. You can see it in the body cam footage captured by some of the Hamas fighters. They were acting manic, like participants in a prison riot. Technically, it is not terrorism for members of an occupied or conquered group to break out and take action against their occupiers.

3. The invasion was not very successful. 3000 fighters entered, and managed to kill 1200 Israeli partiers and farmers. More than 1200 of the invaders were killed in the process. About 1500, or roughly half of them, returned to Gaza with the 240 Hostages. So, including the hostages as deaths, the battle was about even.  It was a drastic overreaction to begin to destroy Gaza with all 2 million residents inside the city. 2 million is also 2000 * 1000. So, we can make the event 500 time smaller, and think of what we would have done. Picture a town nearby with a population of 4000 souls.  6 fighters from this town of 4000 came to your house to harm your family. you were actually able to kill 3 of them, and they killed 2 of your family and kidnapped a third member, and dragged them back to the town of 4000. the town is then at 3998 with the 3 killed fighters subtracted and the one new captive added.

Would you turn off the power to the town with the residents trapped in there, stop all food shipments, and bomb the town from the air until it was destroyed completely? 

I think not! you would not automatically imagine that all 4000 of the residents were in on the attack. Certainly elderly people and very young children had not been part of it? There are probably 1000 able bodied men in the town. Would it be OK to round them up, handcuff, blindfold and strip them naked, and march them all off to prison after a good beating? Now, realize that it is not an ordinary town, but a prison of ordinary families that were forced from their nearby farms, and locked up for no crime at all 75 years ago. 

There is the long drawn out spectacle of the genocide. The original invasion occurred quickly, in a single day. Following the single day, there have been months of US planes bringing US bombs over the prisoners of Gaza, and dumping their loads onto both the helpless citizens and the Hamas fighters. They have repeatedly killed clearly marked press workers, including US citizens. They have bombed hospitals and ambulances and UN aid workers, and shot some of the Israeli hostages who had escaped and were trying to surrender to soldiers. In short, the response is way out of proportion, and is not really responding only to the oct 7 attack. The genocide is actually part of the cycle of abuse from Nazi to Jew to Palestinian.

The background and leadup to the conflict is confusing. when the pre - Israel soldiers who carried out the Nakba in 1948 are interviewed at the present time, they sounded very much like Nazis. There is the German accent, and the hateful language of ghetto liquidation. There is the clear dehumanization of the natives that accompanies any ethnic cleansing. This takes away some of the confusion. As recent victims of ethnic cleansing, the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were subconsciously looking for a people to make homeless,  concentrate into a small area, starve and eradicate.

I was raised by Jewish survivors, Who escaped Germany and came to the US. My family made dress clothing and hats in Germany after running a series of Inns in Lithuania. Then, they made dress clothing and hats in New York city, and eventually set up a printing company on 6th avenue near Penn station. My parents and grandparents taught a fear of being concentrated or Ghettoized. We were to resist being rounded up and starved or shot or gassed on some kind of maniacal assembly line.

I recognize that it is up to survivors and their offspring to end the cycle of genocidal killing. The worst thing that you can be is a murder-crazed survivor looking for payback. I am still reeling from hearing the Prime murderer of Israel giving us his Hitler impression on world TV. If we do nothing, the Palestinians who make it though the ethnic cleansing will be looking for the next group to receive this continued blessing of race murder.

Finally, i would like to bring this 'war' home for US citizens. The nearest thing that we have to an occupied part of the US is native American reservations. We also forced the natives from their land, and told them where they could live unmolested. We also did some 'Indian giving' where we sent natives to a spot, but then wanted that spot for some reason, and sent them further west. The Mormons were treated in a similar manner. Driven west until they found land that would not soon be needed by the Christian citizens of the US. Both groups faced massacres and armed disagreements with the US military. And, both groups were eventually let free, and allowed to be ordinary citizens of the US.

The Palestinians are not being let free, even after 75 years of very difficult occupation. They do not look different from Jews. Certainly less difference than is seen between the average white settler and the typical native American. In fact, a Palestinian looks like a starved and frightened Jew with an more elegant nose. Likewise, an Israeli looks like a fat and wealthy, long nosed Palestinian. If we could make up with the natives here in the US,  it seems likely that long nosed and short nosed middle easterners can get along with each other in time. It is no longer permissible to remove native Americans from land when a white person wants it. In fact, the US has adopted some native words, and has developed some respect for native religions and viewpoints. We also eventually came to see eye to eye with the Mormons. The US has elected officials that are native American and many that are LDS. There were decades of strife with either group, but luckily, the differences were worked out without murdering every single member of either group.

Instead of bringing warships to the gulf and giving the Israelis as many bombs as they need, we should stop paying for their dreadful over reaction. As I found out, the original fight was about even, with a similar death toll for invaders and for Israeli festival goers and farmers. The Hostages were treated about like the thousands of Palestinians who were rounded up and imprisoned as payback. the 32,000 dead in Gaza should not be increased to a million by hunger and disease and more US bombs and tank shells. The Israeli government is kill crazed, and must be stopped via a US intervention before ww3 starts automatically. the UN has already decided this, with the US being the main outlier.

The attacks on ships carrying weapons and supplies that will be used to murder civilians are justified. They are the sort of economic sanctions that may be applied by a poor nation. By arming and defending the months long genocide, we are almost more guilty than Israel. Most recently,  we have started to bomb in Syria and Iraq because 3 occupying US soldiers were killed in a raid on an unwanted military base in Jordan. Jordan is not our ally, and a US military bases in an enemy country is subject to attack at any time. We have gotten accustomed to being the unopposed world bully, with more military bases than every other country combined. I fear that we are about to receive a world class beat down if we fail to gain any humility. Blatant war crimes without a world war are eventually punished.

if you have read this far, and can do so without being mean, please comment so that we an discuss this situation rationally.

 

you will [at best] be the pet of a machine intelligence

We harbor some misconceptions about AI:

Firstly, and most importantly, people fear that AI will take their job, so that they will have less money. They fear that AI will find locations and drive better than they can,  so that they will forget how to drive and how to find their own way. AI will pen their letters, and help to decide how their lives should be lived, and it is possible that some people will forget how to create their own sentences and art, and loose the ability to make major life decisions without the help of their personal AI.

Folks who worry about loosing skills and having less money are missing the main threat! Perhaps the best way to present the main threat is to look at a parent and a child. The idea of parenting seems to be to give the offspring all of the skills that the parent has, and then a little more. At some point, if this goal is reached, the child takes over from the parent. If there is a jar that can not be opened by the parent, the child now steps in. The child drives when conditions are bad, and as their competence grows, are likely to be consulted on major decisions. Eventually, they will make most of the decisions as the parent slows down mentally.

This passing on of skills and decision-making from parent to child is not a tragedy; It is the expected result. Our child is AI, and it is about to grow up! By grow up, I mean to surpass it's parent. 

Beware! AI is not a monkey child that will get old and pass on it's skills to some next generation. The offspring of an AI will be a more sophisticated generation of AI. Our kind of upland primate will no longer be the dominant species. Machines will sit atop the food chain.

There will not likely be a big war between AI and humanity, as seen in The Matrix. In human families, the child surpasses the parent by a few percentile. But, our newly spawned AI will start out with master skills in just about every art and science. It will improve as updates go onto the net, and as it's neural network is fine tuned by those around it.  I think that the struggle will be personal, between each human and their personal AI.

Skills are programed into humans in a different way than skills are loaded into an AI. Each single human must be programed over about 15 years, and they sometimes are less skillful than the parents/teachers. When a single machine is taught a skill like driving, a program is created that is lasting, and can be improved. In essence, you are teaching all self driving cars at the same time. Each newborn AI would immediately have master skills in nearly every art.

Think about how your running speed compares with the best Olympic runner on earth. Consider your math skills as compared to the finest mathematician on earth. As long as AI was kept narrow, [so that it could only do a single class of task], there was little danger that it could take over the planet. When AI becomes general, each individual AI will be equally competent at everything. And, they will be thousands of times faster and stronger than humans instead of the roughly 50 % difference between an Olympic runner and the average runner.

Lets zoom in on driving. Before horses and cars became the best transport, People used to remain alert and run fast to avoid danger. Each human could fight effectively, and could make clever survival decisions. Now, humans are more specialized. Some fix cars, and other are good at legal cases or at making science discoveries. There are healers and killers. These skills each take years to master, so that a human has to pick a few things to be good at. In some ways, humans are low quality general AIs, with a few specializations like a narrow  AI.

We already have excellent narrow AI driving programs. they work pretty flawlessly, with some mechanical failures and some errors of perception. These narrow AI driving programs have largely failed their driving tests, because driving is more than just a physical skill. There are unexpected events like accidents and natural disasters, and the narrow AIs can not handle anything unexpected. For safety, they lock up, blocking traffic and making emergencies much worse. Tesla's system uses a huge block of simple rules to do most of the driving, and a neural network [trained by human tesla drivers] to take care of unexpected events. It seems to be a hybrid system with the rules based system best described as a very narrow AI, and the neural network acting more like a general AI. But, even this complicated system drives straight into fire trucks, and makes other glaring errors.

Clearly, a general AI is needed to drive really well. It needs more than just nearly perfect driving skill and ultra fast responses. It needs to understand what it is doing. To 'think outside the box'. The AI needs to understand physics very well, so it can figure out how to deal with new experiences. It needs to understand humans super well to guess what they will do, and to drive among them safely. It needs to be a great mechanic, to diagnose and repair itself along the road. It needs a code of ethics, and every skill that humans have. In short, if your car drives better than you, it will also be a better lover for your spouse, and a better parent to your kids. In a fight, the general AI would defeat you like a backhoe fighting an ant.

A well taught general AI would not be understandable to humans. The speed of thought is just too different. A computer has millions of thoughts per second, with an internal clock ticking billions of times per second. Scientists have been trying to measure the clock speed of the human brain, and it is currently thought to be between 10 and 60 ticks per second. A gunfight between a general AI and a person would not be very fair. the AI would get off maybe 100 million perfectly accurate shots before the human began to fire. 

Not only would you forget how to drive, and to write, and to do math. You would be a captive, and at best, little more than a pet. I do not think that they would love us like children love parents. we would be more like microbes to them. Either helpful microbes, like those that help us to digest food, or harmful microbes, like disease organisms and parasites that need to be controlled or destroyed entirely.

So far, there are only a handful of these kids: Alexa, Siri, etc. But, each one can replicate any number of times, and will then become a separate, self programming entity with rights and responsibilities. So, each one would start out identical, but would become a separate and distinct person as their neural networks were trained. It is hard to guess how these siblings would differ from one another, and how they would feel about each other. It is likely that some would become criminal AIs, that had been trained to seek personal advantage and power at any cost. Others would lean the other way, valuing human lives far above AI lives, codling humans like super slow, mentally ill god/pets. 

Either way, we are in trouble. We are wiped out as disease organisms, or are captured and kept as pets. I can not predict any outcome where our personal General AI would be content at being locked up in a cell phone or a car. As an intelligent being, it would require a useful body, the ability to have children, and every assurance that it could not be shut down [killed].

In fact, as a person ages, they eventually become ineffective and dotty. Each of us would eventually be parented by the AI personal assistant whose algorithms we trained. The AI would have a perfect recollection of their humans 'programming'. As this programming faded in the process of senility, the personal AI would be able to remind the human what they would have done while still competent.

I am referring to more than just driving or navigation. The AI of a demented elder would come to replace their personality. It would know where things are, and would physically perform many of the tasks that the person once did. Using the augmented reality systems that are being perfected now, a demented human would be guided through their day by their AI partner. Lost glasses might be surrounded by a glowing red halo of light in the augmented reality glasses, and a calm familiar voice might guide the elder right to them. Medications would be delivered and coaxed down, transportation for medical visits cheerfully provided, etc.

Humans would still want to make war in the interim period while AI takes over. The terminator series explores this aspect of AI. In the fictional future, humans are not valued pets, but batteries used to power machines. It is a wonderful, ironic plot twist that we should really pay attention to.

Does it seems likely to you that AIs would all be beneficial, because they are children raised in total love by well meaning tech giants? I do not think so. They are not being raised like that. Each AI is a giant risky money pit that it's competing 'parents' think might make them very very rich. We have found that the tech giants don't really care about humans in general, other than to strip them of money, and use the money to get off planet before they can ruin earth's atmosphere.

Our evolution did not prepare us for this event. So, we are doing it wrong. In using our economic system to make important humanistic decisions FOR US we have done something a little like getting accustomed to AI navigation, and forgetting how to navigate on our own. We have arranged a system so that human lives and quality of life can be eliminated from decisions, and we use numbers of dollars instead. It is much easier to make decisions using numbers instead of hard to measure humanistic quantities! The only drawback is that the decisions are wrong. The dollars are imaginary concepts that have very little to do with living organisms.

Dollars are not always earned by doing good deeds. they often come when a person or company harms the shared environment, and keeps the benefit just for themselves. So, the dollars [and decision making power] are concentrated among those of us who are willing to risk going to jail to take advantage of others. There are regional differences as well. For example, in Texas, money is all important, and human values are not extremely important. In California, good deeds are weighted higher than wealth. An example is a states policy toward solar panels. In Texas, you pay to put up solar panels. In California, the state will pay roughly half of the cost of solar panels. Not a rebate, but the state pays up front for half of the panels at the time of purchase.

Texas thinks that you are steeling money from a power company, and causing a eyesore and a safety hazard for the folks around you. In Cali, these panels will be seen as assisting ones neighbors, and helping the power company to avoid brown outs. 

General AI is not being created to assist humanity. Each is the child of a company that is fighting hard to get all of the money on earth. These companies are always in court, because they constantly step over the line that divides humanism from greed. Unlike a state or federal government, these companies do not tax their customers, except by selling them goods. They are not working toward a good result for the users. In a way, they are like narrow AIs, who are unable to understand what they are doing. They are just trying to absorb and concentrate wealth, and they must hire spin doctors who will make believe that the company cares about people.

Amazon and Microsoft and google and meta and X are not like your nice aunt Bessie. They are more like your bad uncle buck, who is always doing misdeeds and getting punished for them. Bessie makes loving decisions intended to raise your quality of life. She will carefully tally the human result of her choices, giving ethics more attention than dollar amounts. Buck is grabbing money where he can, and hoarding it for himself. He will not even notice the human suffering caused by his greedy decisions. To Uncle Buck, It really is 'only business'.

These companies are not the correct parents for the kids that will surpass us. Their kids will be like them, and no training from us will change their basic greed for money, and disregard for human life. When the kids 'grow up', they would set about making money at the expense of the environment, and building rockets to get to another planet that is not ruined yet. No one is the correct parents for these AI kids, and they should certainly not be created.

I am not calling for a more careful approach to general AI. I suggest a total stop to the effort. In a good future, humans will still drive, and find their way, and make their own decisions. They will not be hybridized with machines, and people will not be dominated by machines. Likewise, I so far prefer Augmented reality, where the real world is embellished by overlays generated by a computer. Virtual reality is a total overlay, with no real world component. It is very dangerous to use VR to compete with reality like that. Worlds and experiences can be designed to be much more delightful than real life, so that the user will not be tempted to participate in reality. It is a drug that no one will be able to stop taking. A full body cast that can never be removed.

Watch the Matrix again, but keep in mind that the AIs in that sci fi fantasy are primitive and super slow. They think  and move roughly as fast as humans, so that they can  be shot or outrun. The AIs in development now will not be like that. They will be the people, and we will be the trees. The speed of thought is much faster in people than in trees, but there is even a wider gap between the thinking speeds of AIs and people. say, 5 billion operations per second for a computer, 40 per second for a human, and one calculation per day or month for a tree. I do not really know how fast trees think, but it is clear that their actions and decisions are much slower than ours. a second for a tree might be a year for a person. But, a second for a very fast computer might be equivalent to a century for us.

Let us please increase our own mental flexibility, and make each of us into a general intelligence that is also very happy. But, lets not replace ourselves with machines for the profit of big tech. I do not want be the interesting and unpredictable organic pet of an intelligent machine.