Author Archives: Mikołaj Sapek

14 December 2022
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US blow against Chinese processor manufacturing sector.

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From the year 2018 there is a trade war going on between the US and China. It was initiated by then-President Donald Trump as a response to China’s aggressive and anti-American policies. For several years now, China has had ambitions to become the world’s dominant country, its economic development in recent years has been very intense, and its population also works in its favor. In 2021, Americans banned Chinese giant Huawei from selling and operating on their soil due to suspicions of collecting data on American citizens. All these steps indicated the U.S. approach to the Chinese and were intended to frighten the Chinese and strengthen the American position in the world, but they were not on the same scale as those of October 7 of this year, the U.S. Department of Commerce introduced a new package of regulations governing the export of certain types of processors and inputs to the People’s Republic of China.

U.S. intensifies assault on China chip ambitions - Nikkei Asia

Why is it so important?  Because it also comprehensively regulated the export of tools (machinery and software) for production located in China, as well as cooperation with Chinese entities producing apparatus of this type. The law also requires licenses to be obtained by U.S. citizens and residents who wish to “encourage the development or manufacture” of specific processor types in the PRC. Advanced DRAM and NAND memory and semiconductors with transistor sizes of less than 14 to 16 nanometers, which are employed in the development of artificial intelligence, supercomputers, contemporary military systems, as well as cutting-edge consumer electronics, are included in the limits.

Why are the Americans sanctioning the Chinese in this way?

This is because the Chinese have not yet developed the technology to produce the latest generation of processors and their production is based on Western companies and their specialists. The main producer of processors in the world is Taiwan, other important countries are, of course, the United States but also the Netherlands. However, under the new rule, license requests from global firms producing processors in the PRC, particularly for export markets, would be taken into account. The goal of US politicians is to prevent a severe upheaval of how the world’s supply networks operate. Among others, the Korean corporation SK hynix and the Taiwanese powerhouse TSMC have received temporary licenses (typically valid for one year) to continue using American equipment in China. These companies claim no appreciable impact to their business operations in the PRC.

The US Department of Commerce claims that Washington coordinated the law’s introduction with important allies. The effects of the Americans’ decision were immediately apparent through the suspension of operations of many Chinese companies. Leading semiconductor businesses’ stock values on local exchanges as well as those of Asian suppliers exporting to the PRC have both decreased because of the limitations. Several specialist semiconductor tool production and maintenance businesses, including the US-based Applied Materials, the Dutch ASML subsidiaries with US locations, KLA Corporation, and Lam Research, have stopped working with Chinese contractors. They have immediately stopped delivering machines and cutting off all contact with PRC clients while also removing their technicians from Chinese enterprises “waiting for the determination of the effects of the sanctions.” Chinese business portals have reported that a wave of layoffs among managers and researchers with American citizenship has resulted from the limitations (usually of Chinese or Taiwanese origin). This has started to result in disruptions to the supply chain. The emerging consensus of industry experts, however, says that China’s latest-generation semiconductor industry is expected to collapse dramatically, at least in the short term.

This situation is another example of escalation between China and the U.S., given that China claims rights to Taiwan, which is currently the largest producer of processors and semiconductors, it clearly indicates a place to which attention must be paid in the future and which may become the next field of military action after Ukraine.

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7 December 2022
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Business

What’s happening at Apple factories in China?

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Workers fled the manufacturing campus in Zhengzhou, the capital of the central province of Henan, last month because of concerns about Covid, which marked the beginning of the problems. As a result of the staff shortage, bonuses were provided to employees. However, this week there were protests because the freshly hired personnel felt the management had broken their word. The workers were eventually given money to quit and go after tussling with security guards wearing biohazard suits. According to analysts, the difficulties faced by Foxconn, a major Apple supplier and the owner of the factory, will hasten the process of diversification away from China and toward nations like India. The Zhengzhou plant is one of the key ones for Apple. the Potential cost to Apple of this shutdown and turmoil in lost iPhone sales is about $1 billion per week. Now roughly 5% of iPhone 14 sales are likely off the table due to these brutal shutdowns in China. According to CNN Business “Based on our analysis, we believe iPhone 14 Pro shortages have gotten much worse over the last week with very low inventories,” he wrote. “We believe many Apple Stores now have iPhone 14 Pro shortages … of up to 25%-30% below normal heading into a typical December”.

Apple stated earlier this month that Covid limitations in China will “temporarily disrupt” the distribution of its most recent iPhone series. It said that its Zhengzhou assembly plant, which regularly employs about 200,000 people, was “currently working at severely reduced capacity” due to restrictions imposed by Covid.

Since mid-October, the Zhengzhou campus has been dealing with a Covid epidemic that has alarmed its staff. Early in November, videos of individuals fleeing Zhengzhou on foot became widespread on Chinese social media, causing Foxconn to take more aggressive tactics to get its employees back.

This is not the first time there have been protests at Foxconn plants, we have seen such situations in the past. Such protests have happened before, as well as cases of suicide, the first cases of suicides were reported as early as 2011, according to Newsweek: “On Tuesday, another – already the tenth this year – worker committed suicide by throwing himself from a window in Shenzhen in southern China, where the plant, which employs 400,000 people, is located. In addition, there were two suicide attempts.” At the time, apple’s response to these events was to install suicide prevention nets at all plants, as you can see years later working conditions have not improved. Currently, we are hearing from China about the prevailing protests there against the “ZERO COVID” Policy, these are the first protests on such a scale in a long time, and so far, it is unknown what will come of it due to the widespread censorship and control of Chinese society.

Who will be the biggest beneficiary of the current situation, definitely India, which has long been in competition with the Chinese government. In an effort to diversify its supply chain and move away from China, Apple began producing the iPhone 14 in India even before this week’s protests.

The statement, which occurred at a time when US IT giants were looking for alternatives to China, which had served as the world’s factory for decades, signaled a significant shift in the company’s approach. Apple, due to Covid’s strict policy in China, wanted to increase production in countries such as Vietnam and India. He anticipated that Foxconn’s manufacturing of iPhones in India will increase by at least 150% in 2023 compared to 2022 and that the long-term objective would be to export between 40 and 45 percent of such phones from India, up from less than 4 percent at the moment, but even so, in the end, it is Apple and not the employees who will benefit the most.

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23 November 2022
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Can an image created by AI still be considered as art?

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Development of AI image generators accelerated a lot in recent years, currently, we can choose from various options like DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. The level of advancement is incredible, you can create whatever you can imagine moreover these programs potentially can create something which no man could imagine, and here we come to the subject of the article.

On August 25 Jason M. Allen won the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition there would be nothing strange about it if it weren’t for the fact that his work has been created by Artificial intelligence. Other participants accused Allen of cheating, arguing that he break the rules, but Allen justified what he had done. A.I. was used to construct his work, which was submitted under the name “Jason M. Allen via Midjourney,” he said, and he denied misleading anybody about its creation.“I won’t apologize for it, he declared, I won and followed all the regulations” but my goal is not to prove the author’s guilt or innocence I would like to focus on what can be considered art these days.

Most of the objections to the author focused on the statement that a computer-generated image cannot be considered art because it was not created by a human being. Similar opinions could be heard at the time when cameras and taking pictures with them became widespread. Many painters recoiled at the invention of the camera, which they saw as a debasement of human artistry. (Charles Baudelaire, the 19th-century French poet and art critic, called photography “art’s most mor­tal enemy.”) In the 20th century, digital editing tools and computer-assisted design programs were similarly dismissed by purists for requiring too little skill of their human collaborators. Some artists defended Mr. Allen by arguing that using artificial intelligence (A.I.) to create a piece was identical to using Photoshop or other digital image-manipulation tools and that human creativity was still needed to come up with the appropriate prompts to produce the art.

In my opinion, a lot of people who criticize images generated by AI think that the image generates itself without human help, from a certain point of view this is right, but I would treat such programs as a tool in the hands of the artist just as the chisel is a necessary tool for the sculptor. AI artists are simply the result of technological and cultural developments around the world. But I also see a potential problem with the development of this technology, already artificial intelligence can affect the dissemination of information in the form of deep fakes, which are already indistinguishable to the untrained eye, the same danger exists in the case of images that will be created by artificial intelligence, for example, falsification of photographs forgery of works of art or intellectual works.

In conclusion, I believe that machine-generated images as much as possible can be considered art, it is simply a new, emerging branch of art.

Finally, I would like to show you what can be created with this program in five minutes. below is the text I used to get this image.

“Great Cathedral in which people are located. It is bright, the cathedral is built in a modern style”

Sources:

Midjourney discord

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_art

https://beincrypto.com/ai-art-wins-art-competition-invokes-metaverse-social-media-melts-down/

9 November 2022
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Business

Why did Apple remove chargers and earphones from iPhone Box?

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Did anybody still remember that Apple get rid of accessories from iPhone boxes 2 years ago and how big controversies this decision caused? Currently, there are probably few people who remember it anymore, but why apple decided to take this step? This topic is a little bit difficult so let me start from the beginning.

In 2020 Apple announced that from now on all iPhones (old and new) will be sold without the charger, Apple’s decision was bolstered by arguments about caring for the environment. One of the main ones was to reduce the amount of plastic produced by apple products but if we think about this twice it doesn’t make sense because the amount of plastic they were supposed to reduce will now be spent on the product of separate boxes for chargers, where is the sense in that? The public mostly accepted this change (as if it had any other choice) probably such an attitude of consumers is influenced by increasing awareness of environmental pollution, of course, there were voices of criticism, but it did not affect the actions of the world’s most expensive company.

 So let’s answer the question of why they did it, if you don’t know what’s at stake then it’s all about money. According to phonearena.com “Apple by reducing the size of the boxes that the iPhone comes in, 70% more devices could fit on a shipping pallet”.  The Daily Mail claims that Apple has already saved £5 billion by removing the charger and the EarPods from the package. That comes to almost $6.5 billion. When Apple took the accessories out of the iPhone packaging, the price of it’s handsets did not change. At the same time, many iPhone customers who wanted to fast charge their iPhones had to pay an additional $19 for a 20W charger and an additional $19 for new EarPods since they only had the 5W adapters that came in the box with prior versions. So not only does apple save on shipping, but it also makes money on accessories.

Here we come to an interesting twist because apple has indeed contributed to environmental protection but a little in a different but equally important way, as stated phonearena.com “Apple could mail more phones to customers at once if there were more boxes on a pallet. Apple said that by adopting smaller packaging, it would be able to cut its annual carbon emissions by 2 million metric tons. That would be the same as removing 500,000 automobiles from the road”. Isn’t this a good argument for removing chargers from boxes, in my opinion, yes, I don’t know why apple didn’t use this argument to support its decision. It would have avoided criticism and preserved the good reputation of the company.

Another interesting consequence of apple’s move is the behavior of other companies in the technology market, among Samsung quietly announcing it publicly removed chargers in the latest Samsung models. Whether they also wanted to optimize shipping costs like an apple or simply had to adapt to the decision of the Cupertino giant, I do not know, but it certainly shows the power and influence of their decisions on the technology market. 

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27 October 2022
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Are wind turbines harmful to environment ?

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There is no definitive answer to this question as the effects of wind turbines on the environment can vary depending on a number of factors, such as the location of the turbines, the size of the turbines, and the number of turbines. Some studies have shown that wind turbines can have negative effects on the environment, such as noise pollution, visual pollution, bird mortality also how sa storage of used turbines may seem strange or controversial to many, as they are buried in fields and covered with soil. What is intresting wind turbine blades can be even longer than the wings of a Boeing 747. It may seem strange, but this is how we dispose of waste from old wind turbines, it is not a way that seems healthy for the environment, this is because the turbine wings are made of fiber-reinforced polymers (FRP), most often glass, carbon, aramid and basalt, unfortunately, this makes them non-recyclable, hence the idea to store them in such a way. By 2024, 70,000 tons of materials from the blades alone will be discarded in Germany alone, where 30,000 wind turbines are now in use. The turning point is anticipated to occur in 2021 when a support program that began in 2000 will conclude its 20-year period of government subsidies for the first turbines covered by it. After that, the majority of these units will be disassembled, which can cause financial difficulties for the businesses that run them. The industry that promotes wind energy believes that extending the “life” of the turbines is the best course of action for delaying the issue until efficient recycling techniques are discovered. The next step is to integrate remnants from decommissioned windmills into urban areas, as has been done, for instance, in Denmark and the Netherlands where they were utilized to create bus stops, benches, tables, and playground equipment. The toxic dust that is released when cutting FRP makes it challenging to implement this approach on a large scale. On the other hand, pyrolysis and the recovery of fibers for use in the creation of adhesives, paints, and concrete through the chemical processing of polymers to create plastic pellets for use in buildings are still in the early stages of development. Storing used shovels in landfills or burning them in fires is the least preferable option, especially in light of the stringent environmental standards put out by recent EU rules. Previously, dismantled wind power plants were sold to markets in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, Russia, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. However, as these markets’ needs continue to grow, they are less and less interested in acquiring outdated technology due to the higher operating costs associated with such plants.

The federal and state governments are being urged by the German Federal Environment Agency to establish regulations and procedures for recycling outdated turbines as soon as feasible. Work on similar regulations is underway in other countries.

Other studies have shown that wind turbines can have positive effects on the environment, such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions and providing renewable Energy also the cost of production of turbines is relatively cheaper than other sources. I personally think that turbines are not the best choice if we are talking about renewable energy sources, but they are significantly better than coal-fired power plants.   

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