eXtensions - Saturday 21 February 2025
By Graham K. Rogers
Two-thirds of the Supreme Court - later called unpatriotic - decided that the way tariffs had been imposed was not legal. Refunds due - but watch how this is done. The White House brought in a new blanket 10% tariff. Coming soon, a new Apple experience - new Macs anyone? Silverstone upgrades 5G capabilities for all year connectivity. AI overconfidence may kill.
Two-thirds of the Supreme Court finally grew a spine and decided that tariffs imposed by the current president were not lawful. Needless to say the reaction from the White House was one of anger: "unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution". The opinions of the 6 Justices appear to me to be the total opposite of that. Their perceived disloyalty is to an individual, and that is not how the US Constitution works.
The Treasury will now have to figure out how to refund all that illegal taxation; and remember that US companies and individuals paid, not the foreign entities. However, it is widely reported that the family of Howard Lutnick (Commerce Secretary)"bought up all the tariff refund rights for pennies" (X posting). This is also mentioned in another message and several others have now appeared with similar information. Surely Lutnick wouldn't have planned this? . . .
Expecting rejection following the Justices reactions to legal arguments that were put forward, there was a Plan B. Now a 10% tariff is to be imposed on all countries. As Andrew Orr (AppleInsider) explains, that has undone some good work by Apple in the way it used the supply chain (among other tricks) to hedge its bets. They must now come up with some new creativity to absorb that new tariff.
Officially, it will only be in force for 150 days (Jeremy Gray, PetaPixel), but it can be extended by Congress, unless Congress finds its teeth. As Gray comments, the Vice-president called this "lawlessness from the Court". Whatever Congress decides, it will take years for the damage done to foreign relations (and opinions) to return to what they were, if ever.
Although plenty of rumors have been put out in the last couple of weeks, it was all speculation until Tuesday morning (Thai time) when I saw that Apple had invited influencers to a simultaneous "experience" in New York, London and Shanghai. Hartley Charlton has the time as 0900 for New York, which is 2100 here. It is interesting that as well as London, Shanghai is included as one of the locations, showing how important the Chinese market is to Apple (not the current US political establishment of course) and this strongly hints at an iPhone component in the announcements.
Apple shows the company logo, split into colored disks, ranging from yellow through green to blue. That alone hints at a colored product lineup, and speculation before this announcement had suggested that the long-rumored, lower price, MacBook would come in a number of finishes, including pink. There is also a possibility of the iPhone 17e which would make sense of the Shanghai location. Charlton writes of the antcipated imminent products, "including the iPhone 17e, MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, eighth-generation, iPad Air, 12th-generation iPad, and more." He adds a new Studio Display and the cheaper MacBook are also possibles.
There is no information on streaming this "experience", and Apple has no release shown in its newsroom. In his report, Malcolm Owen (AppleInsider) writes that "There is no sign of any streaming activity for the event, which reduces the chances of it being a big hardware release" but why go to the expense of inviting journalists to these locations and setting up simultaneous events. He does also write, "They want to show something off, that's for sure." Ed Hardy (Cult of Mac) suggests that with the 3 locations running simultaneously, "the company likely views the March 4 announcements as more significant than a routine product refresh."
When I lived in the UK, I was based not far from Silverstone: a 40-minute drive from my mother's house, or from my own home near Bedford. I attended all manner of club and international race meetings there and was a member of the Silverstone Club, with its premises just outside Woodcote Corner (before it was defanged). Driving up either by car or motorcycle, I would watch some of the major races from inside the circuit, usually close to Abbey Curve, before the circuit saw major changes.
I was there in 1973 when Jody Scheckter caused an accident at Woodcote Corner which put 11 of the cars out of the race. The clear-up took ages and far away from the loudspeakers and other communication, we had no idea what had happened. There were of course no mobile phones then, although one regular at the Club had a radio phone in his Ferrari. Joe O'Halloran (Computer Weekly) reports that the circuit is linking with "Boldyn Networks to deliver a major connectivity upgrade" that will replace the temporary systems and provide a permanent 5G link to give those at the circuit "seamless connectivity all year round". As a lot of teams are based there, and testing takes place throughout the year, this upgrade will be of great help to the circuit and to the race fans who brave all weathers.
In December I linked to an article on Tom's Hardware that reported on a robust glass-based system from SPhotonix that could store 360TB of data, for up to 13.8 billion years. In my musings I looked at how disks had evolved over the years - when I first used PCs regularly, we had no hard disks, but everything was kept running on twin 5.25" floppy disks. Plus ça change. This week, Nicola Davis (Guardian) has a look at glass as a data storage medium as developed by a Microsoft research team. This sounds somewhat similar to the solution from SPhotonix, although the numbers are presented differently.
In science, great minds often think alike. Indeed, solid state electronics was being investigated by several groups in Europe and the USA around the time of the Second World War, but the team from Bell Labs filed the first patent. The Guardian piece links to a scholarly article in Nature by the Microsoft Research Team at Cambridge (which lists over 40 members). This is not a particularly difficult read. This team cite "4.8 TB in a 120 mm square, 2 mm thick piece of glass" with a lifetime exceeding some 10,000 years.
Those of you who read my comments regularly (and I am grateful) will be aware of my concern for how AI is being taken up with much enthusiasm. Some people I know thinks it is the answer to all their prayers and brush away any concerns. It is like talking to an addict. Although I accept that there are many ways in which AI can help with research, I think the guardrails may not be strong enough. My main worry stems from the use of AI in academic writing: those whose work I see do not have the skills or experience to see that the output they accept without question, has some serious flaws that many native speakers can detect with little effort.
Ian Sample (Guardian) reports on words of warning from Michael Wooldridge, who claims that the race for AI "has raised the risk of a Hindenburg-style disaster" - one that would irrevocably damage confidence in technology. He notes that "AI chatbots failed in unpredictable ways and had no idea when they were wrong, but were designed to provide confident answers regardless".
Wooldridge uses an example from Star Trek when (as happened a number of times) the AI that Spock was using answered that there was insufficient data. That is what some good teachers do when faced with a question. The teacher should not waffle. Instead, a good approach is to say, I do not know. I will find out, and do just that for the next class. The AI used currently does not do that. It provides answers with a total confidence that does not leave any room for error. A disaster waiting to happen.
Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs. After 3 years writing a column in the Life supplement, he is now no longer associated with the Bangkok Post. He can be followed on X (@extensions_th). The RSS feed for the articles is http://www.extensions.in.th/ext_link.xml - copy and paste into your feed reader. No AI was used in writing this item.
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