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There's little reason to develop compilers or programming languages when so many already exist. China's total population will indeed not be growing, but they'l

There's little reason to develop compilers or programming languages when so many already exist. China's total population will indeed not be growing, but they'll soon be getting their first third- and fourth-generation engineers. It takes time to establish an engineering culture from nothing, and I think their capability is likely to increase even if their population decreases. There'll be quite many people in China anyway. When it comes to ML there really are very many publications by Chinese authors, and many are very good. I'd even say that some of their work is underappreciated. I can't judge as carefully when it comes to materials science, but it seems similar there. I think Chinese industry is very different from that in Europe, the US or Russia-- jumping to something I understand, for example, they're competing on volume in things like synthetic crystals. They're selling what seems like good hydrothermal quartz in dimensions 20x30x30 mm for 56.5 USD. When I contacted Western and Russian companies about that kind of thing, they have neither an interest in selling nor gave me a price. Meanwhile, these guys are selling it on the internet for basically no money. I think they'll only get better at technology and volume is its own thing.

huijzer 4y ago
> There's little reason to develop compilers or programming languages when so many already exist. Ah, so it was probably not necessary in hindsight for Apple to develop LLVM and Swift and for Google to develop Go and Jax? At the time those projects were created, there were already many compilers and programming languages. > When it comes to ML there really are very many publications by Chinese authors, and many are very good. I'd even say that some of their work is underappreciated. Why are the publications good? > I think Chinese industry is very different from that in Europe, the US or Russia-- Why would that be, apart from the one anecdotal example that you give?
- impossiblefork 4y ago
  >Ah, so it was probably not necessary in hindsight for Apple to develop LLVM and Swift and for Google to develop Go and Jax? At the time those projects were created, there were already many compilers and programming languages. JAX is great, but it isn't a language as such. It's a kind of generalized tensorflow. I'd instead characterize it as a framework. Go, and probably Rust are languages that were needed before their invention, similarly with Erlang. But not they exist. Similarly, Google went for Linux when they wanted to develop Android, they didn't decide to make their own OS from scratch. LLVM I don't know what to say about-- it's probably critical to the companies that need specialized languages for their hardware to have something with the right license and the right modularity, so it's probably an enabler for things like CUDA and there may well be a path to performance through understanding compilers and processors together etc., so compiler understanding is probably quite important, but now that it exists NVIDIA doesn't make their own, they use LLVM. >Why are the publications good? I've seen some solve interesting problems, some that contain new mathematics, etc.-- they're good in the same way that ML publications from the US or Germany or any other country are good. There are even some good ones that no one cares about because they're written very badly. >Why would that be, apart from the one anecdotal example that you give? They seem to have actual effective competition between firms, even for fun stuff like synthetic crystals and to be trying to reach any market where they can sell them. This competition means that some industrial vitamins (weird things like synthetic crystals with specialized applications, etc) aren't locked up in B2B-only-and-we-have-to-be-partners relationships and can actually be bought for reasonable cost. If you sliced the crystal they make for jewellery applications you'll probably find that it has worse Q-values than what's made in Europe or Japan, but at least you can buy crystals to slice and fiddle with things yourself.

huijzer 4y ago

> There's little reason to develop compilers or programming languages when so many already exist. Ah, so it was probably not necessary in hindsight for Apple to develop LLVM and Swift and for Google to develop Go and Jax? At the time those projects were created, there were already many compilers and programming languages. > When it comes to ML there really are very many publications by Chinese authors, and many are very good. I'd even say that some of their work is underappreciated. Why are the publications good? > I think Chinese industry is very different from that in Europe, the US or Russia-- Why would that be, apart from the one anecdotal example that you give?

impossiblefork 4y ago
>Ah, so it was probably not necessary in hindsight for Apple to develop LLVM and Swift and for Google to develop Go and Jax? At the time those projects were created, there were already many compilers and programming languages. JAX is great, but it isn't a language as such. It's a kind of generalized tensorflow. I'd instead characterize it as a framework. Go, and probably Rust are languages that were needed before their invention, similarly with Erlang. But not they exist. Similarly, Google went for Linux when they wanted to develop Android, they didn't decide to make their own OS from scratch. LLVM I don't know what to say about-- it's probably critical to the companies that need specialized languages for their hardware to have something with the right license and the right modularity, so it's probably an enabler for things like CUDA and there may well be a path to performance through understanding compilers and processors together etc., so compiler understanding is probably quite important, but now that it exists NVIDIA doesn't make their own, they use LLVM. >Why are the publications good? I've seen some solve interesting problems, some that contain new mathematics, etc.-- they're good in the same way that ML publications from the US or Germany or any other country are good. There are even some good ones that no one cares about because they're written very badly. >Why would that be, apart from the one anecdotal example that you give? They seem to have actual effective competition between firms, even for fun stuff like synthetic crystals and to be trying to reach any market where they can sell them. This competition means that some industrial vitamins (weird things like synthetic crystals with specialized applications, etc) aren't locked up in B2B-only-and-we-have-to-be-partners relationships and can actually be bought for reasonable cost. If you sliced the crystal they make for jewellery applications you'll probably find that it has worse Q-values than what's made in Europe or Japan, but at least you can buy crystals to slice and fiddle with things yourself.