FileMakerFeller

AppleInsider said:

The forefront of public perception regarding AI in 2023 is occupied by Microsoft's AI-powered Bing and Google's Bard.

My experience is that ChatGPT is recognised and mentioned much more widely than these two.

The hype about AI is overblown. When I first learned about decision trees (make a list of possible outcomes, assign them a probability and a cost, then calculate to find the "best" option) I was taught that the trick is to get the estimated probability as accurate as possible - that with experience your estimates will get more accurate. The current buzz is happening because people have figured out a way to analyse huge amounts of data and build a bunch of probability lookup tables in a short enough period of time to be feasible and at a low enough cost to be justifiable.

At the end of the day, it's all just computation. The algorithms are not too complicated but the steps are computationally intensive and to understand how it works you need to be comfortable with matrix multiplication and statistics (e.g. this YouTube Video). The thing I really struggle to wrap my head around is why the machine doesn't have to show how it arrived at an answer - all of my teachers were very particular about that part of the process.

9secondkox2 said:

Strengthening the homeland is only a good thing in the face of increasingly adversarial moves by abusive regimes. 

Sigh. You think it's only the USA taking that stance?

Collaboration beats competition every time.

michael madsen said:

Even at 1500$ it’s still useless

For you.

Kind of like how, even at $0 cost, your comment is useless to me but may have value to someone else.

badmonk said:

The stock bounce was a given when Federighi donned his hair helmet and led a parachute drop out of the Phil Shiller piloted Apple plane, best intro to WWDC ever.

As much as I am tempted to deem your statement frivolous, I have watched the stock market long enough to know that a company's stock price is affected no matter how ridiculous the idea.

Hopefully more investors will look at AAPL as still being undervalued.

red oak said:

Excellent summary 

Even if you agree with the end goals,  the communications and execution of this tariff effort has been a complete sh*tshow.   The Admin better start signing great trade deals fast (eg.  IndIa, Taiwan, Japan, etc...) to re-gain momentum or this is going to a disaster.

And, Tim Cook bears major responsibility for backing Apple into a Chinese corner.   Why has he not at least tried to bring more manufacturing to the US?   Either final assembly using state of the art automation,  or pushing harder for parts vendors to do more manufacturing here?      The writing has been on the wall for 10+ years .  Your sitting on $150 billion in cash for fuckin* sake 

It's already a disaster. If the administration manages to sign some "great trade deals" they might just avoid the blame and/or the ire of the citizenry.

As for Tim's direction of Apple... none of this is happening in isolation. For efficiency of manufacture, you want all the components to be manufactured within a reasonable geographic distance of your assembly point (otherwise you're holding excess inventory to reduce the risks and costs of shipment) - this means that any labour cost differential is magnified across all of the components and subcomponents that go into the final product. Even if wages in the US were "only" double those in China, that's a big impact: market forces are such that actively seeking to pay more than double the cost for the same product will see any management team suffer dire consequences. That's why the manufacturing moved overseas in the first place; the cost savings were significant and management teams and investors got rewarded for cost reduction.

There are also arguments made about workforce availability, housing, transport and the sheer volume and variety of components. Apple is not the sole customer for most of the component manufacturers, and while it is an important enough customer to demand great pricing I doubt it has enough sway to demand the location of manufacture (unless it pays substantially more, which as stated above is a self-damaging move).

The way I see it, either the US workforce needs to accept a massive reduction in compensation, the US companies need to accept a massive increase in costs, or the manufacturing jobs remain where they are. Any change to the status quo will need to happen over a long-term timeframe so that the current shortcomings in US capabilities can be addressed.

bloggerblog said:

I don't think Trump knows how to put 'America First', he's creating more enemies than friends.

American share markets first, then catastrophe on the world markets. "I'll be fine," thinks Trump. "My holdings are in real estate."