Mac Power Users 702: Unbridled Enthusiasm, with Chuck Joiner

Chuck Joiner has been covering Apple since 2000 and has been a user longer than that. He joins Stephen and me on this episode of Mac Power Users to talk about what makes the Apple community special, how the company’s tools enable its users, and some of his favorite apps and services.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

  • 1Password: Never forget a password again.
  • SaneBox: Stop drowning in email!
  • MacPaw: Introducing Moonlock, the new cybersecurity division at MacPaw, and the upgraded CleanMyMac Malware removal module.
  • Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code MPU.

SaneBox For a Fit and Trim Inbox (Sponsor)

Is your inbox fit and trim? SaneBox, MacSparky’s sponsor this week, will help you clean out your inbox. With their Deep Clean feature, you can trim your inbox in no time. 

Email Deep Clean quickly sorts and deletes unnecessary emails in bulk. You don’t have to go through your emails individually to delete them. SaneBox’s AI will look for emails older than a date you have decided on, and you’ll get an analysis on the senders that take up the most storage. You can decide what is no longer relevant and choose what goes in the trash. Declutter your email and get some storage space back. 

Clean up and free up your inbox with SaneBox. Sign up for a free trial and give it a try. As a friend of MacSparky, you’ll get a $10 credit you can use towards a SaneBox subscription. Spend less time on email and more time on what really matters. 

Specific vs. General Artificial Intelligence

The most recent episode of the Ezra Klein podcast includes an interview with Google’s head of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, whose AlphaFold project was able to use artificial intelligence to predict the shape of proteins essential for addressing numerous genetic diseases, drug development, and vaccines.

Before the AlphaFold project, human scientists, after decades of work, had solved around 150,000 proteins. Once AlphaFold got rolling, it solved 200 million protein shapes, nearly all proteins known, in about a year.

I enjoyed the interview because it focused on Artificial Intelligence to solve specific problems (like protein folds) instead of one all-knowing AI that can do anything. At some point in the future, a more generic AI will be useful, but for now, these smaller specific AI projects seem the best path. They can help us solve complex problems while at the same time being constrained to just those problems while we humans figure out the big-picture implications of artificial intelligence.