avon b7

Thatguy2 said:

Time to come out of your news bubble. China shutting down majority of factories calling it a worker holiday. With no wages of course and no idea when or if factories will reopen. Factory owners all over tik tok selling equipment showing the devastation. Two more weeks and 80% of factories will close. Four two six weeks Chinese economic collapse. Most Chinese companies receiving nothing but order cancellations. Chinese are terrified. Those videos are shocking. I had no idea their economy could be brought down so fast. 

China isn't shutting down a majority of factories.

Less than 15% of China's global exports go to the US. 

Some factories are likely to slow down production for a time. Some might even close. This happens all the time - everywhere!

But, think about what you are saying. How will those products be replaced within the US market? If the US can make them at all it can't do be done overnight. It definitely can't be done for lower main street pricing.

By your very own logic that must mean that US employees involved with transporting those goods, storing those good and selling those goods will also have less work and therefore the risk of being laid off.

China has made it clear. There are no winners in a trade war. 

libertyandfree said:

avon b7 said:

libertyandfree said:

DAalseth said:

The US needs stuff from China more than China needs ANYTHING from the US.
I expect there may be exemptions for Amazon, Apple and Walmart. But the hundreds of thousands of small stores, local stores, regional stores, that are the heart of the economy will be massacred. 

As someone pointed out yesterday, this whole scrap is above all making China look like the reliable, stable, rational, trustworthy partner. That is going to be the most harmful thing coming out of this for the US.

China needs money from the US to run their economy.  The US is by far their biggest customer whereas we are mostly consumers of their products - many of them not essential for daily life.  Yes, some small businesses rely on their cheap Chinese products but they will have to adapt in the short term - you don’t fold because some segments get hurt.  If the US stops buying the Chinese goods then China must sell them elsewhere, or shutter factories, which floods the market and crashes their prices.  Forgotten in all this is the massive theft by China on IP which was being reversed by the first Trump administration and then was unexplainable dropped by the Biden administration.  This needs to be corrected as well and this requires the Chinese govt to enforce.  

What happened with agriculture in his last term? China quickly pivoted away to Brazil. Lobsters from Maine? China went to Canada.

China is in a situation - provoked by the US - where mutual trade is severely impacted. 

They won't go crawling to Trump and they've made that very clear. 

They will continue to get rid of US debt but with a common sense approach. They will tighten restrictions on critical minerals/rare earths. They could even switch away from Boeing to Airbus as a symbolic move. They will strengthen BRICS+ deals as well as tempt the EU. 

At the end of the day it is Trump who started everything and it is Trump who will have to fix it. 

He blinked first with the 90 day pause. Now he will have to blink again. 

 You obviously do not know how these negotiations work.  The so called blink has 90 countries negotiating and if that’s a blink then blink away.  The whole world knows China is the bully when it comes to trade and fairness, did you somehow miss this? 

'90 countries' rounds out to a nice one country per day. 'Negotiating' does not mean 'agreement' and there is only one country that means much in hard-dollar terms: China. 

Yet China isn't one of the supposed 90. I very much doubt 90 is even a correct figure anyway 

Trump and his troupe denied there would be any standing down on their position but just hours later we got just that. 

The exact same (or even better) results could have been attained by just talking to trading partners and setting out the game plan. 

What we got instead was trillions kicked off of the global financial system, uncertainty, bonds rising, trust irreparably harmed, recession indicators rising and threats to sovereign nations about being taken over by force. 

Tariffs themselves (used adequately) aren't a problem. Trump and his particular Trump tariffs are. 

libertyandfree said:

DAalseth said:

The US needs stuff from China more than China needs ANYTHING from the US.
I expect there may be exemptions for Amazon, Apple and Walmart. But the hundreds of thousands of small stores, local stores, regional stores, that are the heart of the economy will be massacred. 

As someone pointed out yesterday, this whole scrap is above all making China look like the reliable, stable, rational, trustworthy partner. That is going to be the most harmful thing coming out of this for the US.

China needs money from the US to run their economy.  The US is by far their biggest customer whereas we are mostly consumers of their products - many of them not essential for daily life.  Yes, some small businesses rely on their cheap Chinese products but they will have to adapt in the short term - you don’t fold because some segments get hurt.  If the US stops buying the Chinese goods then China must sell them elsewhere, or shutter factories, which floods the market and crashes their prices.  Forgotten in all this is the massive theft by China on IP which was being reversed by the first Trump administration and then was unexplainable dropped by the Biden administration.  This needs to be corrected as well and this requires the Chinese govt to enforce.  

What happened with agriculture in his last term? China quickly pivoted away to Brazil. Lobsters from Maine? China went to Canada.

China is in a situation - provoked by the US - where mutual trade is severely impacted. 

They won't go crawling to Trump and they've made that very clear. 

They will continue to get rid of US debt but with a common sense approach. They will tighten restrictions on critical minerals/rare earths. They could even switch away from Boeing to Airbus as a symbolic move. They will strengthen BRICS+ deals as well as tempt the EU. 

At the end of the day it is Trump who started everything and it is Trump who will have to fix it. 

He blinked first with the 90 day pause. Now he will have to blink again. 

tht said:

mpantone said:

It's hard to teach an old dog new tricks and
This isn't entirely Giannandrea's fault. Ultimately Apple failed in putting someone responsible for maintaining and improving Siri after their acquisition and now that hopping about the AI bandwagon is a top priority, a decade's worth of neglect has come back to bite them hard. Apple created their current conundrum by mismanaging Siri for years before they handed Giannandrea the torch.
…
Someday Apple will put out a useful Siri but it will trail the competition for several more years. It's notable that Apple Maps has never caught up to Google Maps especially when you look at the two side-by-side in many places outside of the USA.

My pet hypothesis is that Siri was Scott Forstall’s baby. He pushed for the acquisition of SRI or Siri and lead the integration of it into iOS. After Forstall was fired, nobody wanted it and Apple only did the minimum to keep it going as a feature in their products. There wasn’t anyone in leadership to push it forward. 

Giannandrea was not passionate about it either after getting ownership of the service. Either that, or he simply wasn’t able to get improvements into production. Obviously bad either way. 

There are good reasons to be skeptical of voice interfaces. It’s not like in TV or movies, like the Star Trek ship computer or Tony Stark’s Jarvis. These pop-culture AI voice interfaces are basically magic, where you say something, in like 10 words, and the computer will design and build an tachyon field generator for you. 

Voice interfaces are high cognitive load, vague low density interfaces. They will generally suck for anything of mild complexity or more. People will revert to written language and pointing device (WIMP) interfaces to do most everything as it is easier, less taxing and faster. This is one of the reasons that all the voice digital assistants failed or didn’t take off. 

Apple knows this. They take a rather slow approach on voice interfaces? Other companies? They have all failed, right? The Sam Altman, Jony Ive voice gadget interface will also fail. 

The success (?) of LLM chatbots is all based on WIMP. You need to have a keyboard and display for to be useful. Even here, I sometimes think that this or that person spent an hour written a productive prompt input to get a chatbot to write a piece of code or text when they could have done the same or better job doing it themselves for an hour. 

It's important to keep everything in context and perspective. 

Voice assistants have improved, continue to improve and will improve well into the future because, ultimately, things like Jarvis are the future.

Voice is a key interface in smart vehicles and any situation where your hands are busy or when you are away from other input mechanisms.

Luckily, in AI, natural language processing and generation are seeing incredible improvements on a daily basis. That is the basics of getting something in and out of voice assistants. In between we have the query processing functions, 'reasoning' and the data pool.

It's all coming along at a healthy pace and even if things still aren't perfect they are very usable. That can't be said of Siri. 

Siri has basically been in stagnation mode for years and we always knew things weren't as good as they should be. For example, Siri should have been universal across all Apple devices and not give the impression of there being multiple Siri 'personalities' depending on the device you are aiming the query at. Rumours of management issues have also been constant.

On the purely AI front it's clear to me that Apple was caught well off guard and that is a management issue more than a technical issue. 

This past weekend I had a friend over and she's been off work for two years battling with some lower limb issues. She is still being paid but her national insurance contributions aren't being paid by her employer so she now has payment gaps. She will have to cover that herself but her local union and the social security office seem perplexed by her current situation. It is all quite complex so we decided to throw a  voice query at Perplexity Pro and see what it returned. A bit of a wild card but we were running around in circles. 

It took less than five seconds to answer the query in a clear and concise manner including the necessary timeframes, penalisation situation and even returned the name of the government form she had to use to get things looked at including the postal address and internet links.

I don't use Perplexity Pro as a voice assistant obviously, but that is where we are going with these LLM's which are everimproving and we are seeing new advances released almost daily. The Dream 7b (Diffusion Reasoning Model) just got a lot of attention. Google one day, Meta another, Microsoft...

Not perfect but absolutely usable for many people. Siri isn't in the same league. 

So now tariffs are 'PAUSED' LOL (bar the 10% base tariff) for 90 days while China gets theirs upped to 125% for not showing 'RESPECT' to Trump. 

It would be laughable if it weren't so tragic. Cook and every CEO on the planet can't be expected to navigate the whims of the man. 

He is simply not fit for the position he holds.

"Thank you for your attention to this matter!" sounds like a note to the toilet cleaners at Mar-a-Lago.

After all, who knows how sensitive his ass could be after all that kissing.