vaxman

Lots of things can be safely made in China, like textiles.

$5T Apple does a reasonable job of ensuring its devices are safely produced in China.

But BMCs need to run on Western chipsets and China-made SoCs should be restricted from mission critical applications and infrastructure outside of China. Products involved in transportation (like scooters and bikes) or that have lethal potential (like lawnmowers) need a higher level of review than UL and CE now. AI can help.

Walmart https://www.foxbusiness.com/retail/walmart-vows-not-use-cust...

Now we need Uber to commit to it.

H-1B was not blocked on substance (of the policy), but on technical grounds.

While here, kudos to Apple for picking a strong* CEO. https://youtu.be/NfqJ_zszkYM

[*] - True innovation comes from critical thinking, which is contraindicated by certain circumstances during ontogeny. In 2027, nobody is gone [sic] buy watches that that watch ('er listen), ear phones with built-in "urinal cams" and with a whopping 35 P/E, is it really wise to sell a folding phone instead of one that gains features as you dock them together? Shouldn't we have had M1-based Rpi science kits for armies of kids and tinkerers to run their projects with? If innovation is lacking, is it really that hard to simply copy/paste a DRAM fab (down to the blueprints and equipment SKUs) from SK into a corner of the Mojave?

$ RUN/DETACHED https://youtu.be/lPk5DqhsbAM

There is an entire WORLD that lives in your computer below the operating system (eg, OpenWRT). For example, in your Raspberry Pi 5, there is a chip called the VideoCore GPU and it contains a big blob of code known only to Raspberry Pi Foundation and, perhaps, Five Eyes. The Chinese processors are like that too!

Even if you have the source and build system to recreate the exact binary blob and can reload it with Jedec or whatever, there is another world below the firmware...called microcode. Some of the microcode comes from the FAB preloaded! Even if you can get the source code for the microcode and somehow read it out and verify it is the same, you guessed it...there is another world below that [1 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/380555600_Trustwort... ] [2 https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3579856.3582837 ] [3 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7546493 also https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A2%3A-Analog-Malicious... ]

> Their exact warning to me was that those who don’t adopt it now “are gonna find themselves in a tough position later.”

A long time ago Apple learned that even the very best software people in industry, those top-of-class graduates from the most esteemed universities with pedigrees like "invented malloc" were stumbling at learning to program the original Macs. Before Apple acquired NeXT, reading "Inside Mac" all day and all night would not help as much as owning Steve Jasik's "THE Debugger" a fridge full of Code Red, gaining "organic knowledge" in ways that are not taught in a textbook and impossible if you are mid-career with a family. The Internet wasn't really a cheat code yet either. You couldn't hire someone to teach you such things. While this obviously was very (very!) Bad to the Sales and Marketing organizations hoping to sell more Macs (as DOS was continuing to advance into large institutions), it was awesome for the Mac bros who had that organic knowledge. But Steve returned towing NeXT and Avi's team of actual computer scientists and the deeply entrenched Boomer Mac Bros were not down with most real computer science and "sluffed off" (to become painters or whatever) like old skin. So first the mid-managers saw that shifting the platform in undocumented ways caused unproductive people to quit, then they saw that shifting the platform in documented ways caused people to quit and they thought "What an awesome way to get rid of unproductive people that you don't want around." This was great until they became so bold as to produce "The Crusty Talk" for WWDC one year and put it in terms that EEOC could begin to understand. EEOC is more about retraining the experienced workers rather than laying them off and hiring less experienced workers to learn something New. (It sounds completely crazy to people that came after the Boomers, but accept that point as fact, for now.) One can begin to imagine why that video isn't on Apple's website anymore. Back to Liquid Sluff, I mean Liquid Glass: Wasn't the whole transition to SwiftUI supposed to be about enabling the less experienced (and cheaper!) New generation (I think they are called "blue hairs" though that seems counter intuitive) to takeover from the traditional seasoned professionals building in Objective C? SwiftUI doesn't seem to have worked if they can't flip a switch at the operating system and make all the apps built with it render in "Liquid Glass" without developer intervention! Now comes the quote "they'll find themselves in a tough position" and it all makes sense...it's probably more worker sluffing.

Who cares...at this point, Apple's whole operating system is going to be reduced to an API manifest for LLMs to ingest and WWDC will probably become even more of a non-technical VC event than it already is. (Oh wait, it's. a. video.) Maybe... just maybe, someday they will start to pick winners and losers in the LLM world by messing with the API manifest just like they messed with the SDKs for the human devs over the past 50 years :D I think SEC might be faster to catch that than EEOC ever would.

[cue https://youtu.be/Bwwd3hmA6zs]

The Spirit of this law __must__ also now apply to SoCs produced by non-allied nations that feature USFCC-approved RF microelectronics, such as __ESP32__ Here's to hoping USFCC gets around to also reflecting this in the Letters of this law sooner, rather than later.

[cue https://youtu.be/EnIm71jRb_o]

Are we in the Cathedral or the Bazaar now? I get that confused. Everyone upload their code to GitHub --keep your truth (philosophically AND mathematically) in the Cloud ;) Oh and don't forget to document your critical thinking, on Slack. It goes much deeper tho.

[cue the POS https://youtu.be/SP-gN1zoI28]

At the outset of the fastest increase in interest rates in 40 years, Fed Chairman Powell explicitly stated that the Fed would not mind seeing what he viewed as inflated home prices fall substantially.

While there are other initiatives underway to make purchasing homes more affordable, they likely won't come to fruition before supply reaches a tipping point that causes rapid and sustained downward pressure on home prices. People buying now could be trying to catch a falling knife and end up owing more than their homes are worth.

Won't China seize Apple's assets after it attacks Taiwan? Isn't one of the first things to happen in a kinetic conflict that TSMC permanently loses its domestic production capacity (so China does not gain it)? From there, wouldn't we evacuate millions of people by sea and then say "Goodbye" and watch their police Jimmy Lai those who remain? [If it all happens,] Apple could certainly reconstitute, but probably not in the productive lifetime of its current C-suite. Maybe after a while Samsung will offer to boot iOS on some of its models, or maybe the whole smart phone trend fades.

IBM plunges? Anthropic? COBOL? Is Deirdra Bosa somehow involved in this?

Consider that back in the day, we once had a situation where the shared runtime library supporting a programming language on Megabank's PROD cluster was updated from something like 4.1.1 to 4.1.2 after months on its TEST cluster, plus lots of formal meetings, planning, pages of signatures, contingencies, extra ops people onsite, etc. --and Megabank still proceeded to loose more than ten grand per minute after pressing [Return] on that update. At least a dozen people lost their jobs at the following Friday morning meeting. It turned out that a subtle change in the vendor's implementation of a floating point function was not caught because testing didn't consider enough digits of precision. Mind you NO CODE WAS CHANGED, only a dynamically linked runtime library SUPPLIED BY THE COMPUTER MANUFACTURER --not a third party. Point being (no pun intended), when you go monkeying around with stable production systems that are doing On Line Transaction Processing (OLTP), "bad things" happen, treasure and careers are in jeopardy --and COBOL Life is all about what goes on inside of those systems.

Anthropic is great at gorilla marketing with all their PuRe BS and AI hype. Bottom line for the young peeps here:

1. There is really NO WAY IN HELL that any CIO at a credible Financial Institution will ever authorize a hallucinating chatbot to convert their core logic from COBOL to Python and Go.

2. The only way such institutions "escape" COBOL is through M&A (data --not code-- exported to the new entity's system).

3. As far as COBOL devs tapping out, that happened a very long time ago. (How many of you knew that COBOL was codeveloped by the late mathematician US Navy Rear Admiral "Amazing" Grace Hopper who also invented the first compiler?) COBOL is a simple computer language from a simpler time that enabled non-tech professionals from adjacent fields (like Accounting) to become application programmers (or "implementors" in the parlance of that era). Making minor changes to COBOL code such as PIC layouts and COMPUTE statements is no big deal that requires waking up a 95 year old, the problem is strictly related to production change control (like what version of the compiler and runtimes are you using to rebuild the production binary, etc.) and that isn't even specific to COBOL, except that it is better understood with more modern languages like C (but still remains an alien concept to almost an entire generation that entered the trade after 1997 due to all of the senior level people outside of a handful of tech companies being forced to crack open their 401Ks and move on to other fields during the dot-com crash).

----

Ken Lay died an innocent man --he had a heart attack before his sentencing. He was brought down by whistleblowers. Hang tough peeps. Fight. Back. Against. AI. Bullshitters. https://youtu.be/qJiALpiqpk8

OpenAI is not worth $860B to anyone other than to the companies hoping to inflate their own valuations by selling it goods and services, at least until OpenAI inevitably goes to zero and its assets are acquired for substantially less than $30B. It simply does not cost $30B to build an OpenAI competitor and the opportunity cost of building one also isn't approaching $30B (unless one accounts for the stock hit from investor FOMO over such a delay, as, for example, Apple knows all too well).

If OpenAI were one of many companies generally promoting the increased use of GPUs in industry, thereby developing the market that nVidia operates in, that would be one thing, but $30B, to one company, that then gets spent on nVidia purchases? Just, No. nVidia will get into a lot of trouble for doing this kind of deal that undermines confidence in the entire stock market.

1. Yes, replacing millions of employees with autocomplete running on nuclear powered vector processing units is totally ridiculous on its face,

2. but Perception is Reality in business

3. and FOMO is real.

Hence, the AI money machine https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1ppla7o/oc...

Even though many of these players are not publicly traded, they're clearly manipulating the public equity markets with their funky receivables and equity swaps, inadvertently creating what has become the largest "company" in the history of the World and setting us all up for a Greater Depression. https://d0k5l7l4820swi.archive.is/3GCs7/463302388f7f218ff374...

Like the USSR before it, China is a force to be reckoned with and certainly we need to increase national productivity and workforce participation in order to keep up with our debt, but this is not how we countered Sputnik as the memories of the 1930s and two World Wars were still top of mind. Look your children in the eyes and ask if the risk that's being put upon us is worth ...them. https://youtu.be/lNXTKVxOmfk

No crash yet, just a bunch of lawless stock manipulation by people raising money to feed gear to their LLMs. It's scaring students into other fields due to the attempt by these AI grifters to convert CS salaries into token purchases as they rob their customers with AI slop. This lack of jobs/graduates went on for six years after the 2000 dot-com crash(es), yielding the current dystopia of middle-aged web developers that don't know what a page fault is. All things being equal, we come out the other end in 2032 with vibe coders?

But all things aren't equal. Our country is deeply in debt and it is no longer clear to me that the government will reign in that stock manipulation activity before it crashes the market because it still believes, almost in desperation, the false narrative that by spending $600b on capEx, the grifters are going to exponentially increase GDP with magic AI productivity gains, thereby keeping the national debt at bay. This kind of setup could lead to a Greater Depression when they're proven wrong. Greater in the sense that people no longer know how to be that poor, not that they were particularly good at it in 1929. Way worse than 2001, and let me tell you...

"I'll take one." --watt hour that is :D https://youtu.be/5Bt_QVQexnI

@2:44 https://youtu.be/eegOQ3ErbFk those are bank owners .. don't (ever) ask me how I know

Maybe have a look at this video from 1987. After sidelining Steve, John Sculley came up with the term PDA and intended to evolve that vision as the mission of Apple, beginning with the breakthrough Apple Newton that ran on DEC's revolutionary StrongARM chip (that was based on ARM's IP that Apple co-developed).

https://youtu.be/umJsITGzXd0 (I cannot find any of the old ATG videos featuring Agent Pierre online which was the same concept only shorter, less boring and funny.)

PS: One of the first things Steve did upon returning to Apple after a decade was to reciprocate by KILLLING OFF Sculley's baby (Apple Newton). As far as its replacement (iPad) that reportedly was developed (but not released) before iPhone, it really has always been a dumpster fire software wise (but the same can't really be said of the iPhone variant, which was brilliant for a phone form factor, at least for a while there), not because Apple didn't have capability to do a tablet right, but because of Apple's INTERNAL POLITICS (like https://youtu.be/J7al_Gpolb8?t=2286]) FWIW, I sense now that Apple is finally about to unify macOS and i{Pad}OS for its upcoming generation of devices and shift to multi-modal UX, getting us back to Sculley's original PDA vision.

A: The cardiovascular impact of caffeine on blood circulation through the brain and its stimulation of the enteric nervous system.

*-Gradey

..was totally expecting this article to be written in Chinese, because it is an active attack vector being used to infiltrate western IT infrastructure by pre-loading spyware into the boot loaders, then clicked the article and the link opened to Cyrillic characters. Of course, APT29 is doing this too, but their agents aren't thought to be in the supply chain, so they have to infect the products after installation (using traditional hacking techniques). Look at how Intel ME and AMD PSP work and presume that something similar is in the latest Allwinner, Rockchip, Alibaba, and Nuclei, etc.. chips. To the Chinese, this seems fair because "the other Party" is doing it. Not arguing that it isn't, just that most customers have their head in the sand denying it is happening (even using them in IPKVMs!)

There was also a Western paper on embedding hidden circuits (and thus functionality/ISAs) into CPUs and activating them in the field (after deployment) by executing a sequence of opcodes resulting in something akin to blowing a fuse on the processor die, thereby making the circuits invisible (to even a microscope) until activated. Those secret opcodes could then disable the chip or jump into a block of secret microcode and alter the program counter to behave in a non-standard manner so we might not easily be able to see what's happening, even if we knew to look. One still would have to deliver that secret sequence of opcodes to trigger such a stealth mode...that could be done via microcode/firmware updates from the manufacturer's website or an OS update, or similar techniques. Interestingly, an unexpected iteration of Chinese SoCs began flooding the markets just as the rest of the World was sustaining a "chip shortage" in a timeframe perfectly aligned with what would have been required to implement such a system after that paper was published.

Air-gapping the customer's devices during installation (to prevent the activation opcode sequence) might not work either. Many Chinese SoCs are used as embedded peripherals simply to add WiFi, Bluetooth and Thread capabilities onto existing designs via a simple UART or doorbell interconnect. This makes it too easy for these Chinese SoCs to also be listening for a Morse-code-like activation signal on a low-frequency band, triggering the backdoor to open (enabling a more conventional remote code execution port or logic debugger exposed via WiFi or BLE for example, or causing malfunction or damage to what's on the GPIO or UART pins). Such low-frequencies could be disguised (think Blue Whale signals) so they might be sent slowly over great distances (or even from floating weather balloons or low earth orbit) without drawing too much suspicion. https://youtu.be/E-gbYjLd93g

Almost positive 'ol Bessent has by now warned Trump that there is an issue with the AI queens breaking 1930s securities reform laws. Last week's stock market and crypto moves have all but sealed the fate of the Bozo No Bozos. They will take down the people involved with the funky purchase orders quietly, except inside of the closed door meetings where they get handled. https://youtu.be/y_z9W_N5Drg

I even understand what Brilliant Pebbles was about.

Only theoretically at this point, though they will tend to speak confidently enough about such untested capabilities so as to cause millions in investment losses to others. One would think a hardware manufacturer that's teetering on the abyss would go full out and implement a vLLM interface (maybe a folder of local models that can be downloaded as components in the Xcode-way and also a router too), but their NIH mentality has them tripping over their own Graydey's. There is nothing special about Apple Silicon except the head start they had and that they're squandering.

Classic Apple; cannot possibly be the same developers (not) doing this kind of thing after all these years, so it must be a systemic issue.

Nope, it's 100% about building the stock valuation of SpaceX for an IPO in the face of significant risk from a cold war its CEO started on X with the U.S. federal government and increasing competition from Blue Origin, Quinfan and Guowang. DOD will play Bedrock vs Grok until there is feature parity and then make a decision not based on the features.

Disclaimer: Not an Elon hater, but far from a sycophant, similar to how I felt about Steve Jobs for 40+ years.

I mean, some people show up to the blow out party three years after it ended, sure. That they're still talking about it 33 years later gives you an indication of what the main event must have been like https://youtu.be/_QST1ZAJ29o

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=675980419469517&vanity=The...

Can’t even imagine what kind of social media influence that DOGE sycophants have on The Hacker News. Makes it tough to post a mainstream account of USDOJ confirming DOGE workers probably have stolen copies of SSA data thru unknown CloudFlare (tunnels) and a recent interview where the founder of DOGE muses about prison.

The SSA database itself is just too valuable ..if what USDOJ says is True, then it is almost a certainty that the data is already vectorized allowing it to be used for a lot more than “voter roll” verification.

Hacker News may have emboldened many to cross the line .. Here they hang on to those that they aspire to be until one day https://youtu.be/wWpvNTIrQdI

It isn’t a duplicate- that’s a Flagged article on a political website. I posted a mainstream media article that extracts the salient points and was broadcast to over a billion people around the world.

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Is the probability non-zero that the properties and characteristics of most Americans born after 1874 are now running in a Colossal simulation?

https://youtu.be/bz5Hjk40FD4 serendipity thoughts