Li Auto, Tesla’s nearest rival in mainland China, reduced the price of all its vehicles by up to 5.7 per cent, just a day after the US carmaker offered discounts to local customers amid an escalating discount war.

The Beijing-based company announced on Monday morning that it would cut prices by between 18,000 yuan (US$2,485) and 30,000 yuan as a way of “focusing on customer value”. It said it is determined to keep improving its offerings for Chinese families such as its large vehicles fitted with household appliances.

On Monday, it cut the price of its Li Mega multipurpose minivan by 30,000 yuan, or 5.4 per cent, to 529,800 yuan. Launched in March this year, the fully-electric minivan described by its maker as being essentially a “mobile home” is designed to cater to the travel demands of wealthy families and is fitted with a refrigerator and a sofa. ⠀

“It is a fresh sign that the electric vehicle (EV) price war has spread to the premium segment now that Tesla and Li Auto, the two leaders, have joined the price competition,” said Eric Han, a senior manager at Suolei, an advisory firm in Shanghai. “Their pricing strategies are detrimental to small and unprofitable rivals whose profit margins will be squeezed further.” ⠀

On Sunday, Tesla lowered prices of its Shanghai-made Model 3 and Model Y vehicles by more than 5 per cent, a move that came hot on the heels of price cuts it made in the US, its biggest market, on Friday. ⠀

BYD, the world’s bestselling electric-car maker, fired the first salvo in a price war in February, slashing the prices of some budget models to lure young and low-income Chinese drivers.

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China's tech industry is thriving! They produced 3 billion chips daily, with a total output of 100 billion in Q1, up 40% YoY. March alone saw an impressive 28% jump to 36 billion units, driven by growth in NEVs and smartphones (17%). By 2027, China's global share of mature-process capacity is projected to rise from 31% to a staggering 39%.

https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3259221/chinas-semiconductor-output-jumps-40-first-quarter-amid-growing-dominance-legacy-chips

Why are so many people ok with a world where you have no say in what your employer does, and they can do whatever they want to suit their bottom line?

Though I wonder how much of this is actually corpophilia and how much is people hiding behind it because they don't want to say "I'm glad these people I disagree with got fired".

Here are some threads to show what I'm talking about:

r/technology

r/conservative (though this one feels like cheating)

r/news

r/bayarea

r/google

hacker news

washington post comments

etc..

https://mastodon.social/@carlosefr/112297897468390913

On Tuesday, Microsoft Research Asia unveiled VASA-1, an AI model that can create a synchronized animated video of a person talking or singing from a single photo and an existing audio track. In the future, it could power virtual avatars that render locally and don't require video feeds—or allow anyone with similar tools to take a photo of a person found online and make them appear to say whatever they want.

This is the state of the modern internet — ultra-profitable platforms outright abdicating any responsibility toward the customer, offering not a "service" or a "portal," but cramming as many ways to interrupt the user and push them into doing things that make the company money. The greatest lie in tech is that Facebook and Instagram are for "catching up with your friends," because that's no longer what they do. These platforms are now pathways for the nebulous concept of "content discovery," a barely-personalized entertainment network that occasionally drizzles people or things you choose to see on top of sponsored content and groups that a relational database has decided are "good for you."

https://archive.ph/4LbGN

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14597237

Honda launches China-specific EV lineup, partners with Huawei · TechNode

An online service is scraping Discord servers en masse, archiving and tracking users’ messages and activity across servers including what voice channels they join, and then selling access to that data for as little as $5. Called Spy Pet, the service’s creator says it scrapes more than ten thousand Discord servers, and besides selling access to anyone with cryptocurrency, is also offering the data for training AI models or to assist law enforcement agencies, according to its website.

https://archive.fo/4HwJt

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/19487003

Lots of reasons to be looking at the framework Canada just published for consumer-driven (open) banking, but I thought this was a gem:

from "2.10 A Single Technical Standard"

...The Framework will significantly decrease the risks of personal data being compromised by bad actors and mitigate security, privacy, and liability risks for consumers and participants. This is achieved through the use of APIs, a type of software that acts as secure data “pipes” to enable different products and services to communicate in a consistent manner.

If an API is a pipe, is the Internet a series of tubes?