Tag: appearance

An Appearance on the TWiT Network!

I had a fun time chatting about my local AI experiments with Leo Laporte on his Intelligent Machines show. This show used to be called “This Week in Google.” Also on the show was Father Robert Ballecer (who I bump into at CES frequently) and Jeff Jarvis who I first met when I was working on my journalism startup back in 2009.

Check it out here!

Leo was most interested in my latest Local AI experiment that involved re-purposing an old Nvidia Tesla V100 data center card into something that can work on a desktop PC. You can check out my video on that topic here!

I also talked about how good local AI has become for practical applications like document analysis or managing personal data. Local models are effective, grounded, and largely free of hallucinations seen in older models. My favorites at the moment are Gemma 31B and Qwen 3.8 27B. Both are “dense” models that run at usable speeds (around 20-25 tk/s) even with large 96k context windows.

One of the projects I’m working on is building a virtual “Chief of Staff” that manages all of the balls I have in the air running my business, serving my community on the school board and a few other activities I’m involved with. That will be the subject of an upcoming video once I have it working the way I’d like it to work. Stay tuned!

Fact Checking Warnings about Apple’s “NameDrop” Feature

I appeared on my local Fox affiliate today after a number of law enforcement agencies expressed concern about Apple’s new NameDrop feature.

NameDrop allows two iPhones in close proximity to share contact information. Here’s what most of the Facebook posts I’m seeing today leave out about how the feature works:

1. Both phones need to be unlocked. Your phone won’t transmit your contact info when locked.

2. In order to transmit contact information you need to push a button on your phone to send contact information to the other phone.

3. This only works when the phones are in close proximity, pretty much touching each other.

For users concerned about their phone leaking information I suggest spending some time in the “Privacy and Security” settings to see which apps have access to your private information, location data and more.