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The issue will be if it is channeled into effective investments or into graft. Pork is definitely an issue in the west. In China it’s next level. The other iss

The issue will be if it is channeled into effective investments or into graft. Pork is definitely an issue in the west. In China it’s next level. The other issue is that hundreds of billions is peanuts compared to free market and global governmental investment. It’s akin to the US government saying they’re going to develop their own operating systems and architectures via subcontractors. Most people would assume it’s doomed instantly. I sort of expect this is window dressing and isn’t practically meaningful. Telling an entire mega-enterprise like a major nations bureaucracy to somehow get all their software and processes onto a bespoke architecture and operating system is absurd. The software ecosystem doesn’t exist, and the existing software used today obviously doesn’t run on the new stack. If they actually enforced this processes would need to degenerate to paper trails for a decade or more as everything is either cross compiled and debugged or rewritten from scratch. That seems absurdly unlikely.

woooooo 3y ago
Xiaomi and Huawei already distribute billions of devices not using Intel. You could take their phones, right now, plug in a keyboard and monitor and call it a workstation.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  This is government computer use. I assume their ERP software stacks don’t run on a cell phone.
  - woooooo 3y ago
    Server portions probably run on Linux, though, which the phone also runs. And most business software written in the last 25 years assumes a web browser for a client. Yes, there's a lot of software outside that box but quite a lot in it, we're not talking about the soviets starting from first principles.
tredre3 3y ago
> It’s akin to the US government saying they’re going to develop their own operating systems and architectures via subcontractors. Most people would assume it’s doomed instantly. > In China it’s next level. And yet, somehow, China gets things done and the USA doesn't. I honestly don't know how much corruption goes on and how much grifting there is in those processes, but their infrastructure, manufacturing, and overall tech are literally next level compared to America. I have no worries they'll achieve their goal of CPU independence.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  > China gets things done and the USA doesn't. Because graft and corruption works - look at the rise of fabrication in China despite just about every single vendor other than SMIC or YMTC collapsing due to misappropriation of funds and embezzlement (eg. Tsinghua Unigroup) The American military procurement system is extremely ossified by regulations made in the aftermath of the 1980s-90s procurement corruption scandals [0] Ironically, the US holds its lawmakers to a higher standard around graft than those in peer countries like France (Chirac, de Villipen, Mitterand), Israel (Netanyahu, Deri), Germany (Von der Leyden, Scholz), Canada (Bombardier, LaValle), or the UK (Johnson, Sunak), let alone countries like China. This has lead to compliance overload which severely narrows down the potential pool of vendors. For example, on the cybersecurity side - no startup even attempts to become FedRAMP certified until they are at Series E or above, as it's a multi-year process that swamps your platform and development team, and costs around $7-10M ime. Yet FedRAMP is nowhere near as painful as other procurement and compliance systems that other parts of the Defense industry need to face. [0] - https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/09/america-weapons-china-00100373 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/09/america-we...
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  China is largely a success story for foreign investment. Its prowess is almost entirely borrowed/extorted/stolen with little to no domestic expertise. I don’t mean this out of spite, but the best and brightest of China have left and leave. Very few repatriate and with the current climate that’s not reversing it’s accelerating. Most of the high tech in China is actually western, Japanese, Korean, or Taiwanese expertise and built staffed with Chinese labor. It’s certainly true their infrastructure as far as rail goes and other mass investment is top notch, but it’s not very productive. It’s also incomparable to compare China, which has only recently developed its infrastructure, to nations who have been building their modern infrastructure for over a hundred years. Legacy can weigh anyone down in so far as adoption. But last time I checked you don’t find self driving cars tooling the streets of China, all their top fabrication equipment is imported, and all of their official statistics of growth etc are almost entirely fabricated to the extent it’s unknowable how progressed they are other than it’s not as much as they claim. The flight of foreign investment out of China is going to be sobering as it accelerates faster and faster. The Silk Road projects are bankrupt, the real estate bubble is finally popping, etc. My real worry is the upcoming instability leads to military adventurism.

woooooo 3y ago

Xiaomi and Huawei already distribute billions of devices not using Intel. You could take their phones, right now, plug in a keyboard and monitor and call it a workstation.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
This is government computer use. I assume their ERP software stacks don’t run on a cell phone.
- woooooo 3y ago
  Server portions probably run on Linux, though, which the phone also runs. And most business software written in the last 25 years assumes a web browser for a client. Yes, there's a lot of software outside that box but quite a lot in it, we're not talking about the soviets starting from first principles.

tredre3 3y ago

> It’s akin to the US government saying they’re going to develop their own operating systems and architectures via subcontractors. Most people would assume it’s doomed instantly. > In China it’s next level. And yet, somehow, China gets things done and the USA doesn't. I honestly don't know how much corruption goes on and how much grifting there is in those processes, but their infrastructure, manufacturing, and overall tech are literally next level compared to America. I have no worries they'll achieve their goal of CPU independence.

alephnerd 3y ago
> China gets things done and the USA doesn't. Because graft and corruption works - look at the rise of fabrication in China despite just about every single vendor other than SMIC or YMTC collapsing due to misappropriation of funds and embezzlement (eg. Tsinghua Unigroup) The American military procurement system is extremely ossified by regulations made in the aftermath of the 1980s-90s procurement corruption scandals [0] Ironically, the US holds its lawmakers to a higher standard around graft than those in peer countries like France (Chirac, de Villipen, Mitterand), Israel (Netanyahu, Deri), Germany (Von der Leyden, Scholz), Canada (Bombardier, LaValle), or the UK (Johnson, Sunak), let alone countries like China. This has lead to compliance overload which severely narrows down the potential pool of vendors. For example, on the cybersecurity side - no startup even attempts to become FedRAMP certified until they are at Series E or above, as it's a multi-year process that swamps your platform and development team, and costs around $7-10M ime. Yet FedRAMP is nowhere near as painful as other procurement and compliance systems that other parts of the Defense industry need to face. [0] - https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/09/america-weapons-china-00100373 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/09/america-we...
fnordpiglet 3y ago
China is largely a success story for foreign investment. Its prowess is almost entirely borrowed/extorted/stolen with little to no domestic expertise. I don’t mean this out of spite, but the best and brightest of China have left and leave. Very few repatriate and with the current climate that’s not reversing it’s accelerating. Most of the high tech in China is actually western, Japanese, Korean, or Taiwanese expertise and built staffed with Chinese labor. It’s certainly true their infrastructure as far as rail goes and other mass investment is top notch, but it’s not very productive. It’s also incomparable to compare China, which has only recently developed its infrastructure, to nations who have been building their modern infrastructure for over a hundred years. Legacy can weigh anyone down in so far as adoption. But last time I checked you don’t find self driving cars tooling the streets of China, all their top fabrication equipment is imported, and all of their official statistics of growth etc are almost entirely fabricated to the extent it’s unknowable how progressed they are other than it’s not as much as they claim. The flight of foreign investment out of China is going to be sobering as it accelerates faster and faster. The Silk Road projects are bankrupt, the real estate bubble is finally popping, etc. My real worry is the upcoming instability leads to military adventurism.