Category Archives: Call Me a Geek

The things I do and think about computers.

My First Encounter with an AI

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Finding a saved then forgotten file in my Dropbox reminds me of my first interaction with an AI system a little over a year ago.

Back in March 2023, I started getting emails from Google inviting me to try their new AI system, Bard. I was curious so after receiving too many (in my opinion) invitations, I gave it a try.

March, 2023

I wanted to see what it would tell me about a topic I knew a little about: Haiku. Here’s my annotated exchange, which I saved in a text file on March 26, 2023:

Me: What can you tell me about haiku?

Bard:
A haiku is a Japanese poetic form consisting of three unrhymed lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively. Haiku often contain imagery and focus on nature or the seasons. The first line of a haiku introduces the subject, the second line develops the subject, and the third line provides a conclusion or resolution.

Haiku are thought to have originated in Japan in the 17th century. The earliest known haiku was written by Matsuo Bashō, a Japanese poet who is considered to be one of the greatest haiku masters. Bashō’s haiku often focused on the beauty of nature and the fleeting nature of life.

Haiku have become increasingly popular in the West in recent years. Many people enjoy the challenge of writing a haiku that is both concise and meaningful. Haiku can also be used as a form of meditation, as they can help us to focus on the present moment and to appreciate the simple things in life.

Here is an example of a haiku:

A single frog
Jumps into the ancient pond—
The sound of water.

This haiku by Bashō is a classic example of the form. It introduces the subject (a frog) in the first line, develops the subject in the second line (by describing the frog’s jump into the pond), and provides a conclusion or resolution in the third line (by describing the sound of the water).

Haiku can be a beautiful and meaningful way to express ourselves. If you are interested in learning more about haiku, there are many resources available online and in libraries.

I liked the definition of haiku that Bard provided, although I wasn’t sure about the phrase “Haiku have become.” Is haiku singular or plural? Bard used the singular form — “a haiku” — in the next paragraph. I don’t know and it isn’t what I focused on.

Instead, I focused in on the syllable count, which I was taught was important in a well-formed haiku. 5-7-5.

Me: Your example does not have five syllables in the first line.

Bard:
I apologize for the error in my previous response. Here is an example of a 5-syllable haiku:

Snow falls in silence.
The world is transformed into
A winter wonderland.

What bard could have pointed out was that it was a translation from Japanese to English, which I assume it was. Instead, it provided a new example with a problem in the last line.

Me.: Your new example does not have five syllables in the third line.

Bard:
You’re right, it doesn’t. I’m still under development, and I’m always learning. Thank you for your patience as I continue to improve.

I let it go.

June, 2024

Today, after finding that file on my computer, I decided to blog about it. After writing and formatting the first half of this post, I went back to Bard, which is now Gemini, and tried the same prompts. Note the differences, which I think are important.

Me: What can you tell me about haiku?

Gemini:
Haiku are a traditional Japanese form of short poetry. Here’s a quick rundown:

  • Structure: Haiku consist of three lines, traditionally with 17 syllables. The first line has 5 syllables, the second line 7 syllables, and the third line 5 syllables again (5-7-5).
  • Origin: They originated in Japan and are rooted in older forms of Japanese poetry.
  • Focus: Haiku typically focus on nature and capturing a fleeting moment or image.
  • Modern haiku: While the 5-7-5 syllable structure is a common guideline, modern haiku in English sometimes stray from this to focus more on capturing the essence of the haiku tradition.

Well, this was a better description that took into consideration many people’s belief that syllable count doesn’t matter. But it (cowardly) did not provide an example. So I asked for one.

Me: Can you give me an example of haiku?

Gemini:
Absolutely! Here’s a famous haiku by Matsuo Basho, a renowned haiku poet:

Old pond / A frog jumps in
The sound of water (5-7-5)

How interesting! It gave me a different translation of the same haiku? And it specifically indicated the syllable count.

Me: Your example does not have five syllables in the first line or seven syllables in the second line.

Gemini:
You’re absolutely right, I apologize for the mistake. Here’s a different haiku example that adheres to the 5-7-5 syllable structure:

Summer sun warms skin,
Cicadas sing their loud song,
Daylight fades too soon. (5-7-5)

I had no problem with this haiku written in the traditional style. In fact, I actually liked it.

Me: Very good. Thank you.

Gemini:
I’m glad I could help! Is there anything else you’d like to know about haiku, or would you like me to try writing one for you?

It apparently didn’t realize that it just did that. [insert eyeroll emoji here]

Me: No, thank you.

Gemini:
You’re welcome!
If you ever have any other questions, feel free to ask.

Is AI Worth It?

Despite this second encounter, I still believe using AI to teach and assist us in writing tasks is a big mistake. Not only is it prone to errors — even today! — but it consumes huge amounts of electrical power in a world already suffering from the effects of power generation on climate and air quality.

I could waste spend the rest of the day coming up with examples that showcase AI’s shortcomings, but so many people already have. I don’t understand why anyone would want to rely on a system that is clearly not ready for prime time and can do more harm than good.

I don’t want to live in a world where “intelligent” systems are telling us to put glue on pizza or eat rocks for their mineral content. Do you?

Deleting the Duplicates

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As I try to get my 43,000-photo library under control, I find photos from my life.

R22 with Stagecoach
This isn’t one of the duplicates, but it is one of the oldest photos in my Photo Library. Shot in 2002 with a Canon Powershot 300 camera, it shows my first helicopter, a Robinson R22 Beta II, parked in my hangar. That is an authentic 1800s stagecoach behind it; I got the hangar, in part, because I agreed to store the stagecoach. That same stagecoach is now on display at the Desert Caballeros Western Museum in Wickenburg, AZ.

I’m in the midst of a big project to downsize my computer setup. For years — heck, since I started computing in 1984 — I’ve always had a desktop computer. When I began writing books about how to use computers in the 1990s, I added a second desktop. And then a third when I started writing books about Windows. After a while, those extra computers turned into more practical (and space saving) laptops. When I started traveling, the Mac laptop went with me. Eventually, I stopped writing about windows and ditched the PC laptop. But that left me with a desktop and laptop Mac. (And an iPad, but that serves an entirely different purpose.)

I’m traveling more and more these days and my current Mac desktop — a loaded 2007 27″ iMac — was giving me a lot of trouble. Slow performance, weird error messages, system lockups. It definitely needed help, but since I mostly used my laptop — a stripped down 2021 13″ MacBook Air — I just didn’t get around to tracking down the problem. The only thing I really used the iMac for was video editing and when I got burned out doing that, I hardly used it at all.

Now, as I plan for an extended journey on my boat, I started to think long and hard about why I actually had a desktop computer. I loved the big screen — and the second 24″ monitor set up beside it — but it certainly would not fit on my boat. Besides, did I need it? Apple had just released a new 15″ MacBook Air with a faster processor and SSD hard disk. After a lot of thought, I realized that a machine like that could probably replace my current laptop and the desktop computer that was giving me so much grief. When I learned that Apple would give me a $500 credit toward the purchase of the new computer if I traded in the old one — which had only cost $1,000 two years before — it was a no-brainer. I took the plunge.

Moving the Files

Unfortunately, the problems with the iMac came to a head as I was getting ready to make the new computer purchase. I’d connected my iPhone to the iMac to manually copy the 3000+ photos I’d shot during my 5 months on the boat from December 2022 through April 2023. For some reason, about half the photos were copied to the iMac and deleted from my phone and I couldn’t get the iMac to take the rest.

Insert long boring story about troubleshooting here. Actually, no. You don’t want to read it any more than I want to write it.

Rosie and Lily
One of the duplicates: my dog Rosie, front and center, while Lily’s attention is elsewhere behind her. This was shot at Roche Harbor in September 2022.

I eventually used Disk Utility to determine that there were directory issues on the iMac’s main hard disk. It would need to be reformatted to be fixed. By that time, of course, Finder had stopped working and I couldn’t do a damn thing on the iMac, let alone open the Photos app to see if the missing pictures were actually there.

I had two backups. One was a Time Machine backup, but I didn’t trust its integrity enough to rely on it for restoring my data. The other was a SuperDuper! backup that basically duplicated the disk. It was a few days old and I couldn’t remember whether I’d made it before or after copying those photos.

Understand that I wasn’t very worried about the rest of the data on the computer. My important documents either live on or are backed up to the Cloud. I mostly use Dropbox for the important stuff, but I had some other stuff floating around on various other clouds that I had free space on. I also had very important stuff backed up to my web server at my ISP.

It was the pictures that concerned me. Judging from what was missing from my phone, it looked as if trip photos from December through at least February were missing. The only place they currently existed was in the Photos app library on that sick iMac hard disk. (If they were there at all.)

I was worried.

Insert more geeky computer-fixing tasks here. No, not really. I’ve already written more about this than I wanted to.

End of long story: I was able to copy all of my Home folder to an external hard disk. So I now had three backups of my data and could move forward to put them on my new MacBook Air, which, by this time had arrived and already received files from my old laptop. That old laptop was already in Apple’s hands.

As I still struggle to understand how the Photos app on Mac OS works with my iPhone to collect photos behind the scenes, I did the simple thing: I copied my 500+ GB (not a typo) Photo Library file from the backup to the new computer’s Photos folder. When the disks stopped whirling, I wound up with a 43,000-photo library on my new computer.

And that entire computer is backed up throughout the day every day to the Cloud. (Yes, I’ll add Time Machine and SuperDuper! backups when I start traveling and have sketchy Internet access.)

Colorado San Juan ConfluenceThis was one of the first duplicates, from 2006. It’s an aerial view of the confluence of the Colorado and San Juan Rivers over Lake Powell. If the water levels get anywhere near this high again by next year, I’ll be putting my boat in the lake for a few months in autumn 2024.

Deleting the Duplicates

Duplicates
Here’s an image from Photos showing some duplicates. I’ve already gotten rid of at least half of them. These photos are from a cruise to Alaska I took back in 2019 on a 70-foot, 90 year old wooden boat.

And that brings me to what I really wanted to write about here: deleting the duplicates. You see, the Photos app has a feature where it’ll go through the database of photos and videos and identify duplicate images. It then displays them side by side and offers a button (that looks like a link) to merge them.

Of course, I didn’t know how it worked at first. When I clicked the sidebar item labeled duplicates, Photos dutifully began looking for duplicates among the 43,00+ images. I waited. Nothing happened. I had chores in town so I left it to do its thing.

When I returned, the computer was sleeping. I woke it up and did some other stuff before I remembered the task I’d given it. I switched to Photos and saw that it had found more than 2,000 duplicates. That’s when I learned that I’d have to go through them one by one to delete them. I settled down with my dinner to start the task.

And that’s when I started seeing my life flash before my eyes.

Well, not really. Not in that dramatic you’re-about-to-die sort of way.

Instead, it was random photos, in chronological order, from my past. It started with aerial shots I’d taken — or maybe my wasband or a client had taken? — from my old helicopter over Lake Powell in 2006 and progressed to various photos shot since then. Some of them were great snapshots of amazing places while others were mundane photos of my dog or a sunset or builders using a forklift to bring huge sheets of sheetrock through the door on my deck into my home under construction. They were snapshots of my life, taking me through the years.

David B
This is the David B, a 70-foot, 90-year-old wooden boat I cruised on, with just 3 other passengers, from Bellingham WA to Ketchikan AK in 2019. I captured this image with my drone.

I don’t know why some photos were duplicated and others weren’t. I do know that there are more duplicates in later years than in earlier years — but then again, there are also more photos from later years. The photos from 2006, for example, would have come from an actual camera. I had a Canon G5 digital camera in those days; my Nikon was a film camera. It wasn’t until my trip to Alaska in 2007 that I finally bought my first DSLR. And even then, those photos would have to be manually added to iPhoto (in those days) on my Mac.

What the hell?

It’s hard to believe that I used to write books about using Mac computers when I barely have a clue about how the “new” Mac OS features work. Truth of the matter is, when I stopped writing about Mac OS, I stopped updating the OS regularly. I became a mere user, and not even one who cared about running the latest and greatest version of the OS. My iMac is still running Maverick; I resisted upgrading to that as long as I could.

What does that mean? It means that there are a lot of Mac OS features that I simply don’t use or understand these days. How Photos and my iPhone work together is a perfect example — they’re obviously doing something together that I don’t know about. I’ve come a long way — mostly down — from knowing how everything works. It’s weird and it bothers me a bit, but in the grand scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter. I spend far less time in front of a computer than I did for the 20+ years I wrote about them.

And that’s kind of nice.

But nowadays, almost all the photos I take are taken with my iPhone. Why not, right? It has a great camera. I take photos every day — sometimes dozens of them. I suspect that in more recent years my phone started uploading them to iCloud which then somehow put them on my iMac. Or maybe when I got home and was connected to the network and my iMac was turned on, some sort of transfer happened. I don’t know (and yes, that bothers me.) When I manually added them using a cable — yes, I’m old school — I got duplicates.

Anyway, the plan is to remove all the duplicates first and then go through all the photos, delete the ones that are crap, and pull the ones I don’t need off my computer for storage on some sort of archival media. Probably hard disk drives (duplicated, of course) and/or CD-ROM discs. The goal is to get that 43,000+ photo library down to a more manageable 5,000 photos. And I suspect that’ll take a long, long time.

Until then, I’ll enjoy this look back through the last 10 to 15 years of my life, which have been full of travel and adventure and all kinds of new and exciting things.

Do It Now at Roche Harbor
The last of the duplicates is this great sunset shot from September 2022 at Roche Harbor. It was my first trip in Do It Now, a two-day cruise from Olympia and San Juan Island for the Ranger Tugs/Cutwater Rendezvous. This photo was shot the evening before I started the trip back to Olympia, just me and my pups.

Back It Up, Folks!

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If you’re not backing up your important data, you’re just waiting to lose it.

I was chatting with a fellow pilot the other day about archiving all the videos we accumulate with our GoPro cameras.

“I went to the store and bought a 5 TB hard drive for under $100,” he told me. “Every single photo or movie I ever recorded is on that disk.”

“How often do you back it up?” I asked.

He looked at me blankly. The truth is, he didn’t have a backup for it. He had every photo on one hard disk drive and it wasn’t backed up.

Hard Disk Crashes Happen

I’ve lived through more hard disk crashes than the average person. I’ve even lost a manuscript to a hard disk crash. I think it was that loss that taught me how important it is to back up every file I don’t want to lose.

As I type this, my 5 year old iMac is copying files from its internal hard disk to a backup disk. The iMac has been acting funky for a while and it got to the point where it just wasn’t functioning at all. I booted from the internal recovery disk and ran Disk First Aid on it. It found sectors it couldn’t fix. When I restarted from the normal startup disk, Finder wouldn’t work. For those of you who use Windows and don’t know Mac OS, it’s as if Windows won’t open anything for you. The solution was to go back into Recovery mode, make a new startup disk on an external hard disk, restart the Mac from that, and back up all my important files onto that new hard disk.

You might say, “Maria! Didn’t you already have a backup?”

To that, I say, of course I did. I actually have TWO backups of the entire going bad hard disk. But how can I possibly know if both of them are good when the source is bad? Why take chances? I’ll copy all the files over to make a third backup I know is good. Then I’ll reformat the bad drive and, hopefully, the problems will go away. Then I can reinstall the data files on the newly formatted hard drive. Or, in this case, on the computer I bought to replace it anyway. (I need to get that old iMac running to trade it in for the maximum cash back.)

As for backups of the new computer — a brand new 15″ MacBook Air I got to replace a 2 year old 13″ MacBook Air and the 5 year old 27″ iMac — I’ll periodically back up to an external hard disk, but I’ll also likely back up to the cloud. It’s not something I want to do, but it’s a good and reliable solution and I’m already paying for that cloud space. It would be dumb not to do it.

My Media Storage Solution

Going back to my GoPro and other media situation…

My media file archives and backups work like this: Each year, I buy a pair of 2 TB portable hard disks. I name one for the year and one for the year followed by BU. So this year’s disks are 2023 and 2023 BU. As I travel about, I copy all of my photos and videos from my phone, my Nikon, my GoPro, and my DJI drone to the hard disk for that year, organized by date. So a folder containing the videos from a flight I do today might be named 061923 Wenatchee Flight. When I get home from my travels, I use an app like SuperDuper to synchronize the two hard disks, using the primary one as the source. So if I add or remove files on that primary disk, those changes are automatically reflected on the backup disk.

Understand that the video files I accumulate are huge and take up a ton of storage space. The more I have, the more disk space I need. I’m trying very hard to keep total storage per year under 2 T, but this year I wound up buying 5 T drives because that’s all I could find. I’ll still just put one year’s worth of files on it.

If any of my original or backup disks go bad, I still have the other disk for that year. To lose a whole year’s worth of media, I’d have to lose both disks, which are seldom in the same location for any considerable length of time. To lose all my media, I’d have to lose all of my disks — there are about 6 years’ worth at this point so that’s 12 hard disks.

My friend, in my opinion, is putting all of his eggs in one basket — and that is never a good idea if you don’t want to lose all your eggs.