S11E10 – Build Your Own Tools With AI

Episode Summary

Mike opened the show back from a trip to his daughter’s graduation and spent the first segment on how AI lets ordinary people customize their phones and computers without technical skill. He gave examples of a phone widget built by voice request, a browser plugin that removes YouTube Shorts, and a local AI that tracked down why a PC kept rebooting overnight.

The middle of the show covered the risks of AI that agrees with everything you say, followed by the Canvas education platform breach and what it shows about backups and network security. Mike also gave his view on paid consumer antivirus.

The last segment was about quantum computing, which Mike said is now closer than the long-standing ten-year estimate, and how worried people should be about AI. No listeners called in this week.

Topics Covered

Customizing technology with AI

Mike described Google’s new feature that builds custom phone widgets from a spoken request, and said he had an AI write a browser plugin that removes YouTube Shorts. He said he asked a local AI why his PC rebooted every night, and it read the logs, found the program responsible and offered to disable it. His point was that these tools let people do things they would once have paid a technician for. He also said he plans to put together a Zoom-style class on using AI the right and safe way.

AI that tells you what you want to hear

Mike said he does not like ChatGPT because it is overly optimistic and tells users their ideas are great. He retold a story about a man who, over months of chatting with ChatGPT, became convinced he had invented a new form of mathematics that could break cryptography, while mathematicians told him it did not work. Mike said AIs predict the next word rather than compute reliably, and that he set a rule in his own AI never to say yes just to please him.

The Canvas ransom and basic defenses

Mike said Canvas, the school platform, was hacked, affecting 275 million users, and reportedly paid a $10 million ransom. He said the stolen data was mostly student and teacher interactions rather than passwords or birth dates, and criticized paying, since the thieves still hold the data. His advice was good backups, keeping sensitive systems separate from each other, and better network gear.

Antivirus and routers

Mike recommended using the built-in Windows or Mac protection instead of paid consumer antivirus such as Norton or McAfee, which he called a false sense of security. He said the money is better spent on a business-class router and strong backups, or on enterprise endpoint protection at roughly $20 to $30 a month per machine if someone wants automatic ransomware remediation. He also said to be very careful about installing apps from links on a phone, and that pasting a suspicious email into an AI is a quick way to check it.

Quantum computing

Mike said quantum computing has been described as ten years away for a long time but is now maybe five. He explained that error correction now lets quantum machines run for days instead of hours. He described a medical company using a hybrid setup with supercomputers in Japan to model large protein molecules, work he said would have taken conventional computers thousands of years. He said BMW has a contract with the same company for battery and alloy research. The security worry is that no password will be safe once quantum computers are real.

Calls

No listeners called in this episode.