| Issue 2305 - Thursday 3 April 2025 | The News | Did the Trump admin use AI to calculate tariffs? | He did it. Donald Trump has put minimum 10% tariff on most goods imported into the US, mark an end to this era of free trade (Reuters). The actual tariff amount varies: Australia got the minimum 10%, Canada got 25% and China got 34% in addition to its already existing rate so it’s actually at 54% (BBC). How did Trump arrive at these numbers? Well, X user @krishnanrohit asked a bunch of AI chatbots how to come up with tariffs to correct trade deficits and… they literally all gave the same answer as the Trump administration. Also, the US closed the de minimis exception used by ecommerce companies like Temu and Shein which made packages valued at less than $800 duty-free. Here’s a handy tracker for following prices (CBS News) which shows that vehicles and raw construction materials have already been going up. There are big implications for tech and we’ll start to see the effects trickle in over the coming days, weeks and months, but it ain’t looking good folks. |  | rohit @krishnanrohit |  |
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This might be the first large-scale application of AI technology to geopolitics.. 4o, o3 high, Gemini 2.5 pro, Claude 3.7, Grok all give the same answer to the question on how to impose tariffs easily. | |     | | | 12:14 AM • Apr 3, 2025 | | | | | | 1.01K Likes 180 Retweets | 50 Replies |
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| Nintendo Switch 2 is unveiled | Speaking of international imports, Nintendo has unveiled its Switch successor, the Switch 2 (Engadget). It’s coming out on June 5 and will cost $700 in Australia (SMH, $) — a price that I’ve seen people speculate may have already priced in tariffs (Bluesky). It’s bigger with a better screen, 4K support and a slightly different design. It seems like Nintendo is stepping up its online capabilities with built in voice chat (Vooks) and the ability to play GameCube games online (Engadget). And, of course, there’s a new Mario Kart (YouTube), Donkey Kong (YouTube), Mario Party (YouTube), pretty much all the usual suspects.
For people who aren’t super interested in gaming, you might enjoy Nintendo’s clever solution to scalpers: you can only pre-order if you’ve got 50 hours of playtime on your existing Switch (TechRadar). It’s not perfect, but it’s a pretty elegant way to frustrate people who are just trying to sell them for a profit and also to reward your biggest fans. | Here’s Nintendo’s full preso in case you wanted to see the whole thing: |  | Nintendo Direct: Nintendo Switch 2 – 4.2.2025 |
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| More bad news for Australia’s gaming industries | Australia’s largest game developer PlaySide is laying off employees (Bluesky). There’s no info about how many redundancies yet. In 2023 there were 220 Australian staff working for the studio, which created popular games like Age of Darkness: Final Stand and has titles including MOUSE: P.I. For Hire and a Game of Throne video game slated for future release.
Recent stats suggest that there’s been the tiniest increase in employment across the Australian game development industry and a steady amount of income (GamesHub) but, by all accounts, the vibes are pretty dire locally. The federal government does throw some cash at the industry through things like Screen Australia and with its digital game offset which, despite being introduced two years ago, is still not operational (InnovationAus, $). |  | @lukeplunkett.com |
| Leftovers | Rednote used to spread false claims about ‘wicked’ policy on Chinese Australians and citizenship (Guardian Australia) Canva shocks employees with AI-related job cuts (AFR, $) Hitting the brakes: Sales of plug in hybrids under cloud as tax cut ends (The Driven) What Australians flying to the US need to know about phone and device searches at the border (Guardian Australia) Roblox gives parents more power over children’s activity on gaming platform (The Guardian) European Commission takes aim at end-to-end encryption and proposes Europol become an EU FBI (The Record) AI bots strain Wikimedia as bandwidth surges 50% (Ars Technica) 438 crypto masterminds are responsible for the majority of pump-and-dump crypto coin schemes globally, researchers find (TechRadar) Waltz and staff used Gmail for government communications, officials say (WaPo, $) This is how China skirts U.S. chip bans (Rest of World) Elon Musk's Grok is making it easier to dunk on someone (Business Insider) Amazon targets next week launch for first Kuiper internet satellites (ITNews) ‘TikTok America,’ Amazon, and other rumors about who might buy TikTok (The Verge) Trump Tells Inner Circle That Musk Will Leave Soon (Politico)
| | Oh, Also | Which of these chickens is more remorseless? | I have no idea how I stumbled across this but I invite you to compare these painted chickens at Clickens. |  | Clickens |
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