dewme
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Apple supplier Pegatron says tariffs will mean third world-style shortages for US
Although I’m 100% against the tariffs because they are ignoring the value proposition that free trade helps foster, I’m at the point now where I’m waiting to see what actually will happen rather than speculating about what might happen.I firmly believe that in America, especially during “peaceful“ times, that capitalism always trumps nationalism and idealism. As the bottom line impacts of the tariffs and isolationism start to become apparent there will be greater pressure from the elite to back off the measures that hurt their bottom line. We’re already seeing it happening.It’s almost always about money and power. Those who have power also have the money. Forget about Musk being the richest person on the planet. Putin is clearly richer than Musk, but he’s not going to flaunt it like Musk does.A lot of what’s happening now is driven by those in power and their elite buddies trying to acquire even more wealth. The attacks on culture, immigration, intellectualism, acceptance of alternative lifestyles, and liberal democracy in general are actually cheap and soft targets. That rhetoric gets votes from an unfortunately large percentage of voters. Those votes secure the positions of the people in power who own an obscenely disproportionate share of the wealth compared to the other 99.9 percent of Americans.When policies and executive actions by an unstable leader inflict harm on the elites, actions will be taken to stop their bleeding. If we’re lucky we may also benefit in some smaller ways by relieving them from their disproportionately tiny wounds.
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What you should know about Apple's switch from rsync to openrsync
Very interesting.I’m surprised that Apple’s legal department didn’t deal with this concern earlier. GPL has long been a slippery slope for creating legal issues that can potentially result in your proprietary product code being opened up to public use. This has been the case for close to 20 years. I recall the Linksys WRT54G router being in the crosshairs until they caved and released their product source code.Every product I worked on after the Linksys case had to go through the legal team to ensure we were not exposed.Please keep these deeper level technical articles coming. I’m really enjoying them.
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Trump gives Apple a giant break with wide-ranging tariff exemptions
Don’t worry about it, there are plenty more screws in our future.charlesn said:Oh, F*CK ME with this announcement! Trump promised me a great manufacturing job screwing in tiny screws on the iPhone and now he just pulls the rug out from under that dream?! Promises made and broken! Who the hell is gonna pay me back now for the expensive set of precision screwdrivers I bought?!
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Apple stock bloodbath continues after China applies retaliatory tariffs
Agreed. You could have also added that sales taxes are, always have been, and always will be a regressive form of taxation, which means consumers with lower incomes pay a higher proportion of their income to sales taxes compared to higher income individuals.Stabitha_Christie said:lwr32 said:
Tax cuts mean more money in our pockets to spend, which in turn means more sales tax we’re paying. Where does the sales tax go?foregoneconclusion said:
LOL...are you aware of the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act? That was a bill that passed Congress and was signed by Hoover. Notice that it's CONGRESS that is levying the tariffs and not Herbert Hoover. Which means Trump doesn't have the power to levy tariffs under the Constitution either. The current administration is trying to claim that the national debt has created a national emergency that gives him the power to do it himself. But that is obvious b.s. considering Trump wants to make the $2 trillion tax cut from 2017 permanent + add trillions more in new tax cuts. All of that will explode the national debt to new heights.ilarynx said:
Not an option, according to the Constitution.foregoneconclusion said:The governor of California is going to call Trump’s bluff by ignoring the federal tariff and negotiate directly with other countries on tariffs. Seems like a decent strategy considering that the Trump tariffs are entirely dependent on the claim that the national debt has created a national emergency that gives the president the power to levy tariffs. In other words, the White House is likely violating the law and California is going to respond in kind.Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution explicitly says, “The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, … but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.”
I strongly recommend reading the U.S. Constitution. Frequently. You can't preserve, protect, or defend, something you don't know.
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs
Basically CA is saying "if you're going to pretend to have the authority to negotiate tariffs by yourself then we're going to pretend that we can do that as well".
First off, to answer your question, and seriously, how do you not already know the answer to that? Sales taxes go to the states and local jurisdictions, not the federal government. So your implication that if we cut taxes, the money will just get taxed anyway and end up back with the federal government is just incorrect.You are also incorrect about the money from tax cuts going into the economy via spending. I make more than I spend. If I were to get a tax cut, 100% of the money would go into savings. I am by no means alone in that, and given that tax cuts tend to prioritize people who may way more than I do, your claim that tax cuts just get spent and taxed is just incorrect.
I’ve always been reluctant to comment about politically oriented topics on the this forum. Personally, I believe that politics is a highly transmissible mental health condition, in many ways comparable to a disease. Unfortunately, at the present time the single most consequential thing affecting Apple, the focus of this forum, is the destructive influence that has resulted from politics. The continued profitability of Apple at the present and long term is more affected by politics than how quickly Apple can bring the M5 or their next generation modem to market.
Politics has always been a destructive force that impedes human progress by attacking intellectualism, freedom of belief, freedom of thought, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, freedom of self-determination, and humanity itself. These are all things that that have allowed Apple, many other innovators, and humanity itself to grow, progress, and prosper. The challenge isn’t to make America great again, as in some self indulgent and distorted recollection of the past, it’s to make America greater in the future than it is today so we leave our children and grandchildren better off than we are now. To have all these grandpas-in-charge trying to force our children and grandchildren to relive their vision of what was great (in their mind) somewhere in the distant past is fundamentally broken and a consequence of a mental health condition called politics.
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Apple confirms that Apple Intelligence Siri features are taking longer than expected
I know that nobody wants to hear it, but developing software is incredibly difficult. If you look at the way hardware has been scaling up over the past decade alone, it's absolutely phenomenal. I'm not implying that hardware is not extremely complex, it is anything but, especially with increased specialization with CPUs, GPUs, TPUs, NPUs, cache logic, etc. In these areas the complexity has increased in each functional domain, but the numbers shoot up massively as a result of parallelism.charlesn said:CNBC is reporting that the Siri improvements are now delayed til 2026. That's the headline of the article currently running on the website. This (obviously) would mean an entire year of additional delay beyond a launch date that was already pushed out nine months from when A.I. Siri was first announced. My "Apple memory" goes back to roughly 1990 and I can't ever recall something like this happening before--a product announced for debut nine months later (that in itself is rare enough) and then blowing by that debut date by a full year. So I guess AI Siri now debuts in time for its sweet sixteen--but you really have to wonder if Apple is ever going to be able to fix Siri. smh. $166 billon in cash on hand and we can't do this? For context: just Apple's cash, if it were a separate company, would rank #90 on the list of the 100 most valuable companies.Once a specialized hardware design is built out in one of these areas, optimized, verified and validated, it is repeated numerous times over to achieve greater parallelism and multiprocessing capability and capacity that scales out as far as the fabrication technology and physics allow it to. The M3 Ultra's 180+ billion transistors attest to the massive scaling that is possible. But once it's certified as being done, it's done.
Software at all levels including, machine level, microcode, firmware, drivers, kernel, system, application, etc., are all built to take advantage of the capabilities provided by the software layers below them and ultimately the hardware. The software layers can be changed tremendously over the life of the underlying hardware.At each software layer there are humans involved in generating the requirements, designs, carrying out the implementation, testing every function, testing every component, testing every library and executable, and integrating all of the pieces together. Humans make mistakes. Bugs don't crawl into the code from the swampy surroundings, humans create them.
While hardware logic can be tested and verified to be correct, or at least certified to meet the specified requirements and perform exactly as intended, humans and the software they create can pretty much do anything, with variations between which human is doing what things. You really can't certify ahead of time that any developer is going to produce the same output and behaviors given a defined set of inputs and requirements. Heck, you can't even assume the human generated requirements are correct in all cases.
The massive parallelism provided by the hardware just makes things a lot more difficult for software developers. There are specialized teams that are tasked with building specific pieces and parts of the software solution, but every team still has a great deal of complexity to tame, and bringing together all of artifacts from each team into a coherent solution is also very challenging. Parallelism at the hardware layer has been around for much longer than the majority of software developers have been able to take advantage of it. In a lot of cases the problems to be solved that would benefit from the available parallelism were few and far between. This is no longer the case.
With AI the nature of programming has changed in many ways. In the past, developing software mostly involved solving problems that had a deterministic and logical solution. It was correct or it was incorrect. You could put together a logical truth table and determine for a given set of inputs all of the possible and finite outcomes. AI isn't constrained to a finite set of logically provable outcomes based on logically provable inputs. It's largely driven by probabilistic outcomes driven with massive numbers of inputs that are also subject to probabilistic behaviors, all of which are constantly evolving.
In my opinion, AI has moved a lot of the cognitive burden for coming up with a "correct" solution from the software development team to the software specification team that now must include mathematicians, data scientists, social scientists, computer scientists, statisticians, linguists, human factors engineers, and even psychologists.It's not fair to say that Apple's software development teams, their leaders, or the leadership team are not up to snuff because they can no longer deliver software in the same manner and timeframe's that they were doing when AI/ML and Apple Intelligence were not in the picture.The software development teams are a crucial part of the machine, but with Apple Intelligence they are by far not the only critical part of the machine. Software development at any level involves two high level areas of concern. The one we tend to focus on is the software team always "building things right." But the other high level area of concern is "building the right things." With Apple Intelligence a lot more of the burden has moved to the latter concern, and the "right thing" is a lot more fuzzy. Once Apple regroups and settles on “what” they want Siri to be, their software teams will be fully capable of making it happen and deciding “how” to do it. The boundary between who is responsible for the “what” and the “how” has plagued software development since day one.
