It could also be based on what Grok is being fed from the users... IIRC, there was an early AI bot from Microsoft intended to have the mentality of a young teen, and within a couple days, the bot was a racist slut just from interactions.

It depends on how the bot takes in the information it is interacting with, not necessarily the directions of a single person...

I mean, someone asks, "What's going on with the farmer's in South Africa?" and the bot has seen all the unhinged posts about the topic, and injects that information into the position.

It's not necessarily malice, but yet another example of why I generally don't trust AI platforms and would reject actions based on AI results without external validation.

I'm inclined to give the guy slightly more credit. I do think that he talks off the cuff more than most politicians we are used to. I also think that he works from strategy as opposed to pre-planning everything.

This is not that I agree with everything he does. I'm saying the guy is human, impulsive, narcissistic as well as capable of being charismatic and joking. The tariff bombs were likely about negotiation from strength from the beginning.

I'm not really surprised. Most things most people buy most often (food) is largely domestically produced. It also takes a while to fully affect supply chains and the announcements were well ahead of the actual tariffs. Beyond this, we trade with a lot of countries that aren't china, where 10% isn't that hard to split the difference between margins and consumer pricing.

Some products either are/were or just starting to see the effects. Another month or two and there might have been some interesting changes. Personally, I'm mixed as I've thought for a long time that tariffs would be better than income taxes. While a $3000 iPhone example may seem really bad, it's not something people should be buying every year even... Appliances used to measure their lives in decades and people expected that. Heavy tariffs may have reset those expectations a bit, and given room for more domestic options with time.

I was pretty sure it was mostly about taking an obscene position in order to negotiate to something fair. If you start off negotiating from a "fair" position, you will lose in the end.

Just my own take.

I can only really speak for myself... I've largely avoided Apple's ecosystem, even though I do use an M1 Air for my personal laptop, and have had assigned macbook pros in prior work. My work itself isn't specifically for Apple products or deployed on Apple hardware. It's mostly backend services and web based front ends. For better and worse, the web is the application framework to rule them all.

My personal feelings towards Apple are mixed. I don't like their locked down environments, even if the last phone I loaded a custom ROM on what my old Nexus 6p about a decade ago, I like having the option. I like being able to side load one-off applications from source if I choose to.

I've got similar, and even worse opinions of Google. In my personal use, I have relied on a "Manifest v2" based plugin that is yet to be updated to "Manifest v3" and Google actively disabled it, even loading in developer mode, so settings clear every single time. I'm not sure I have it in me to update, but I may make one for the small functionality I use myself. It kind of sucks really.

In the end, I don't like walled gardens to begin with, and I don't like excessive rent-seeking behavior. I'm not sure where I stand with Valve over Apple, but I feel that Valve has generated a lot of good will with what they do with their resources and give back into the developer community itself. They also aren't required.

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