AppleZulu
About
- Username
- AppleZulu
- Joined
- Visits
- 258
- Last Active
- Roles
- member
- Points
- 9,143
- Badges
- 2
- Posts
- 2,521
Reactions
-
Trump's new China trade deal is still bad for US business & consumers
kellie said:hmurchison said:30 years ago people took the the streets in states across the US to protest the move towards globalization with protests agains NAFTA and WTO and now the predictable results are here and the US politicians most who were adults back in the mid 90s themselves are telling the citizens they should pay more for what their mistake. There is no accountability for what was an obvious bad move. Citizens did not cause the trade imbalance in fact it cost us in lost jobs.It’s a fair criticism that Democrats have also bought into the corporatist globalism that incentivized shipping American jobs overseas. What’s ridiculous is believing that Republicans, led by billionaire Donald Trump, are the people who will fix that for you. -
Trump's new China trade deal is still bad for US business & consumers
Xed said:mentorsemblem said:
While campaigning for his second term as US president, Trump pledged even larger tariffs than his first term, including 60% on China, 100% on Mexico, and 20% on all other countries. He also proposed tariffs to penalize US companies that outsourced manufacturing, such as a 200% tariff on John Deere.AppleZulu said:Trade deficits were nowhere on anyone’s radar during the election that took place only months ago. Nobody voted for this.
....
- Universal baseline tariffs on most foreign products, which will increase incrementally if other countries manipulate their currency or "otherwise engage in unfair trading practices", and lowering taxes. Revoking China's Most Favored Nation trade status, gradually stopping all Chinese imports of essential goods, stopping American companies from investing in China, and banning federal contracts for any company that outsources to China.
- Decreasing trade deficits, especially with China.
.... -
Trump's new China trade deal is still bad for US business & consumers
Stabitha_Christie said:9secondkox2 said:avidthinker said:9secondkox2 said:Mike Wuerthele said:9secondkox2 said:Mike Wuerthele said:9secondkox2 said:Interesting article.As we’ve seen in this admin, things are always in motion and never stuck in the mud.So we will see how these deals turn out for the long term benefit of America.But one thing is for certain: something msjor had to be done. Constantly losing ground to other nations was not sustainable. Sure, you might get a cheaper iPhone today, but you may not even be able to get an iPhone tomorrow.I’ll take long term over short term any day.
If he really wanted to restore manufacturing to the US, he'd fund education to the maximum extent possible. We do not have the manufacturing manpower base or educated populace needed to do this!
He and his party are doing the opposite.
"Things are always in motion" is not a good thing for international trade relations or US businesses that don't know what to expect, or budget for, on a day-to-day basis.Is it possible it doesn’t work as hoped? Sure. We live in an uncertain and imperfect world full of people acting in bad faith, etc. but is it worth a shot? 100%. The alternative is to continue to decline. One way it’s much closer to certainty of success is if one group of people stop attacking the guy every time he breathes, and gets behind what’s obviously a noble goal, things would go much smoother and have a better outcome.Manpower is fully available. Have you looked at the unemployment rates? Education is a matter of training. Unfortunately, much of what passes for education today has little to do with reading, writing, and arithmetic. That’s thanks to a partisan led federal education department. The states do a better job. Almost anyone can learn how to do repetitive things, no matter how detailed. The key is starting. Sure it takes time. But it never happens unless you start. A lot of unemployed people today would love to have these jobs.Things being in motion refers to the agility of the current admin and their near unprecedented ability to pivot in an instant, constantly evaluating and executing. Not just rolling with something bevause they already were heading in that direction. If it’s not advancing favorably, the smart thing to do is pivot. And keeping things in motion also helps guard against letting bad faith heads of state pin them down to bad deals.China is tough. Bevause of the usa pressing the “easy button” decades ago, we have built up an enemy into being a major force on the world stage. It will not be easy to wean off of the “cheap” Chinese manufacturing, but it will be the wise thing to get started on. If not, the ISA will just keep declining until it’s no longer the superpower it has been. If the answer is not what the President is doing, it’s certainly not also the status quo - or worse, pouring even more money into our adversaries - or even other economies in general.
I'm with you on "China is tough." But, that's about all in this few paragraphs that I agree with. High tech US manufacturing that the CHIPS act started is not going well, and that's been years. The US has been cutting funding to education in a bipartisan effort for half a century. No education effort. No "Almost anyone can learn how to do repetitive things, no matter how detailed" effort.Look up "No child left behind" and where we are now, and which administration started the requirement to educate for tests, not for learning, and tell me it's a partisan-led federal education department. The states do not do a better job, and there's no realistic way you can say that.Penalizing US businesses and therefore US consumers to do this isn't the way to do it. Not funding education and further cutting for the umpteenth time with the big beautiful bill is not the way to do it.Could it work? Maybe. Is it likely to? No.It's more likely to crush small businesses in favor of the big ones, and drive the middle class deeper into debt.I’ll agree to disagree. As far as who turns out to be right? We shall see.
But I gotta say that I really enjoy seeing you twist your brain into a mental pretzel trying to rationalize the decisions of someone who "doesn't know what the fuck they're doing." (TacoMan's words, not mine)
The difference, of course, is that while Biden himself was faltering, the big policies his administration was putting forth were solid. Biden supporters were mainly fearful that his age created a vulnerability that could lead to Trump’s reelection, which it did. That notwithstanding, while Trump 45’s infrastructure bill was always two weeks away, Biden passed a generational infrastructure bill that still has Republican members of Congress who voted against it showing up to groundbreakings and ribbon-cuttings in their districts, pretending they were all for it. After Putin invaded Ukraine, Biden pulled NATO back together (after Trump weakened and threatened to pull the US out) with such strength that Russia still hasn’t achieved the win that they thought would only take a few weeks. (Both sadly and darkly hilariously, NATO leaders finally figured out that heaping praise and compliments on Trump was all it takes to get him to flip and suddenly support the alliance, at least for now.)
Now we have our friend here ..trying not only to attribute coherence where there is none not only to the person, but to the policies and administration. It’s not just that President Trump can’t coherently explain his tariff policy in speeches or to the press, it’s that the policy itself is every bit as incoherent as he is, and that his cabinet and lieutenants were all selected for loyalty, not expertise or competence, and are thus attempting to implement whatever he says at the moment, which is why the policies are as incoherent as the president.
So here, as the reality of inconsistency and incoherence becomes nearly impossible to explain away, our friend applies we shall see brand lipstick to that pig and then leans hard on the urgency that something had to be done, and at least this is something. That of course falls apart, too, because there was no urgency required here. Trade deficits were nowhere on anyone’s radar during the election that took place only months ago. Nobody voted for this. In fact, they voted for the opposite: economic stability and lower prices in the face of lingering inflation. There was no international incident or economic crisis since November that suddenly made urgent trade policy action necessary. No, the whole tariff regime is a product of Donald Trump’s mind, either as an obsession, or as a distraction from other, even more awful things his administration is doing, or most likely, both. There’s just no explaining any of that away. -
Siri Chatbot prototype nears ChatGPT quality, but hallucinates more than Apple wants
In a nutshell, this explains why Apple is “behind” with AI, but actually isn’t.
It’s remarkable the consistency with which this pattern repeats, yet even people who consider themselves Apple enthusiasts don’t see it. Tech competitors “race ahead” with an iteration of some technology, while Apple seemingly languishes. Apple is doomed. Then Apple comes out “late” with their version of it, and the initial peanut gallery reception pronounces it too little, too late.
Then within a couple of years, Apple’s version is the gold standard and the others -those cutting-edge innovators- race to catch up, because “first” is often also “half-baked.”
In the news this week, it was exposed that RFK Jr’s “Make America Healthy Again” report was evidently an AI-produced document, replete with hallucinations, most notably in the bibliography, and of course it was. This is what happens when the current cohort of AI models are uncritically used to produce a desired result, without any understanding of how profoundly bad these AI models are. When I read about this in the news, I decided to experiment with it myself. Using MS Copilot -in commercial release as part of MS Word- I picked a subject and asked for a report taking a specific, dubious position on it, with citations and a bibliography. After it dutifully produced the report, I started checking the bibliography, and one after another, failed to find the research papers that Copilot used to back the position taken. I didn’t check all the references, so it’s possible some citations were real, but finding several that weren’t was sufficient to bin the whole thing. It’s bad enough when humans intentionally produce false and misleading information, but when a stock office product will do it for you with no disclaimers or warnings, should that product really be on the market? I also once asked ChatGPT to write a story about green eggs and ham, in the style of Dr. Seuss. It then plaigerized the actual Seuss story, almost verbatim, in a clear abuse of copyright law. This is the stuff that Apple is supposedly trailing behind.
So the report here that Apple is developing AI but, unlike their “cutting edge” competitors, not releasing something that produces unreliable garbage, suggests that no, they’re not behind. They’re just repeating the same pattern again of carefully producing something of high quality and reliability, and in a form that is intuitively useful, rather than a gimmicky demonstration that they can do a thing, whether it’s useful or not. Eventually they’ll release something that consistently produces reliable information, and likely does so while respecting copyright and other intellectual property rights. The test will be that not only will it be unlikely to hallucinate in ways that mislead or embarrass its honest users, it will actually disappoint those with more nefarious intent. When asked to produce a report with dubious or false conclusions, it won’t comply like a sociopathic sycophant. It will respond by telling the user that the reliable data not only doesn’t support the requested position, but actually refutes it. Hopefully this will be a feature that Apple uses to market their AI when it’s released.P.S. As a corollary, the other thing that Apple is likely concerned with (perhaps uniquely so) is AI model collapse. This is the feedback loop where AI training data is scooped up from sources that include AI-produced hallucinations, not only increasing the likelihood that the bad data will be repeated, but reducing any ability for the AI model to discern good data from bad. Collapse occurs when the model is so poisoned with bad data that even superficial users find the model to be consistently wrong and useless. Effectively every query becomes an unamusing version of that game where you playfully ask for “wrong answers only.” Presumably the best way to combat that is to train the AI as you would a human student: start by giving it information sources known to be reliable, and eventually train it to discern those sources on its own. That takes more time. You can’t just dump the entire internet into it and tell it that the patterns repeated the most are most likely correct.
P.P.S. I just repeated the above experiment in Pages, using Apple’s link to Chat GPT. It also produced hallucinated references. I just chased down the first citation in the bibliography it created. Searching for the cited article didn’t turn up anything. I did find the cited journal, went to it and searched for the cited title, got nothing. Searched for the authors, got nothing. Finally, I browsed to find the issue supposedly containing the referenced article, and that article does not exist. So Apple gets demerits for subbing in ChatGPT in their uncharacteristic worry that they not be perceived as being “late.” This part does not fit their usual pattern, with the exception perhaps of their hastened switch to Apple Maps, based largely at first on third-party map data. In the long run, their divorce from Google maps was important, as location services was rapidly becoming a core OS function, not just a sat nav driving convenience that can adequately be left to third party apps. The race to use AI is perhaps analog, but the hopefully temporary inclusion of ChatGPT’s garbage should be as embarrassing as those early Apple Maps with bridges that went underwater, etc. -
Matter 1.4.1 will eventually make it easier to setup your smart home
I've been using a fair collection of Apple Home things for quite a while, and (at least since I eliminated everything Wemo) it all runs pretty reliably and steadily.
That is, except for the couple of times recently when I've tried introducing Matter devices. Then all of a sudden other things start randomly dropping out and getting glitchy. It could be coincidence, but at this point I'm hesitant to play with devices that only work via Matter. Also, I have definitely seen no reason to "upgrade" existing HomeKit devices to the Matter standard. It feels a bit like fixing something that isn't broken.
I imagine there will come a time when avoiding the Matter stuff will become more difficult, and I hope it's more reliable by that point.