Monday, January 12, 2026

AI FTW




What with all the Sturm und Drang about AI's hallucinations, I thought I'd weigh in.

Long story short: If you keep your requests to technical stuff, like how to do this that and the other on your iPhone, you'll be in seventh heaven with a chatbot.

My flavor of the moment is Perplexity Pro, which I subscribed to early last year for $20/month.

Best money I spent all year.

But I digress.

I may be a dyed in the wool Apple fanboi from the get-go but I'm also a TechnoDolt©®@, which means I routinely have problems getting my phone/iPad/Mac/Watch to do what I want them to do.

Yes, Apple has Help pages — thousands of them — with all the answers but good luck finding the right one, with language you can understand and detailed instructions you can actually follow.

That's where Perplexity Pro intervenes: I tell it or type in what it is I want to do and it takes maybe 30 seconds to search all those Apple Help pages and a zillion others before spitting out an easy to follow set of instructions in language I can understand, along with alternate approaches in case the first doesn't work.

Almost always — at least 95% of the time — the directions work.

I'm talking about stuff like how to add/remove stuff from my phone's Control Center and reorganize it: I spent a fair amount of time trying on my own before conceding defeat.

You instantly know if your AI is hallucinating because if it were, its instructions wouldn't work.

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