6 ms·

As a hardware guy, and someone who loves coming up with fun product ideas, China is the ASI LLM of the hardware world. Like don't even bother trying to compete,

As a hardware guy, and someone who loves coming up with fun product ideas, China is the ASI LLM of the hardware world. Like don't even bother trying to compete, they are faster, cheaper, have better yield, and don't really need to be profitable. Imagine what the software industry would look like if an LLM could look at any completed software product, and a few weeks to a month later have made a perfect copy of it. It would totally kill any drive you have to make a product. That's the current reality of hardware in the western world. About 5 or 6 years ago I developed a product that cost me $75 in parts per unit (probably $60 if I could get to scale). The Chinese counterparts competing in the same category cost $70. I needed to sell at $200 to make a profit. People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too. Those $800 Chinese printers are extremely capable after all.

motorest 1y ago
> People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too. What problem do you think needs fixing?
- clarionbell 1y ago
  Dependence on foreign power with potentially misaligned goal? Collapse of manufacturing sector, leading to rise in poverty?
  - ninetyninenine 1y ago
    There is no misaligned goal. China isn’t out to destroy the US. It’s more jealousy of being overpowered. It’s sad but I think this is ultimately the brutal truth we have to accept. There’s no other logical outlook on this. Literally if left to its own devices China isn’t interested in the war. The US is out to do everything to stop Chinas ascendency to become the new world power. And of course both sides as a result will increase military presence but neither side wants to engage in war.
    - mrguyorama 1y ago
      Why have they built innovative Taiwan invasion barges if they do not want war? Building weapons to sink American carriers and boats and having a limited nuclear arsenal can be seen as trying to prevent the US from being able to blockade China from it's food and energy imports. But there is no possible way to wave away the literal Taiwan invasion barges and the planning they signal. That's not something you build unless you plan on invading your island neighbor.
      - ninetyninenine 1y ago
        They want Taiwan. That's for sure. But they don't want war. War is a last resort action they will go to, to get Taiwan. But war with the US? They don't want it and are trying to avoid it at all costs. Taiwan is none of the US's business right? The war here is in actuality really just the US starting it. The US in the end will have to make a choice here. Do we fuck with China and Taiwan or do we not? So in short. They want Taiwan. War can happen because the US is trying to start war. So the barges you see are in preperation for that.
        dvdkon 1y ago
        Do you mean they don't "want war with the US"? Because right now you seem to be saying that China "doesn't want war, they just want to annex another sovereign country". Likewise, I wouldn't describe having defensive allies as "trying to start war". That's starting to sound like the Russian "we're only bombing them because they didn't immediately surrender, so it's their fault" school of thought.
        ninetyninenine 1y ago
        >Do you mean they don't "want war with the US"? Because right now you seem to be saying that China "doesn't want war, they just want to annex another sovereign country". From Chinas point of view it's not another sovereign country. But from the US pov, it's a pawn they can use to fuck with China as much as possible to stop the ascendency to power. Also the US doesn't recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country. They never fucking did. >Likewise, I wouldn't describe having defensive allies as "trying to start war". That's starting to sound like the Russian "we're only bombing them because they didn't immediately surrender, so it's their fault" school of thought. Taiwan was never an ally. I'm Taiwanese. I know. The USA doesn't give a flying fuck about Taiwan. Like I said the UN and the US never recognized Taiwan as a sovereign country and the US has NOT promised to back Taiwan in the event of a take over. Two things America cares about: Technology and Power. So right now you're busy extracting OUR technology by making us build unprofitable chip factories on your soil AND you're refusing to allow China to have that technology as well. It is WELL KNOWN among taiwanese people that the US factories are fucking useless from a profit perspective. Either way. War is not possible. If China and the US go to war, rest assured if the China starts losing, they're going to prevent loss by slaughtering everyone in DC with a nuclear bomb. The losing country in it's desperation will turn to nukes. Even the US can do that. Imagine Chinese troops at the doorstep of the whitehouse, what will trump do? Nuke half of China that's what. So war technically won't happen. Nobody in actuallity wants it. It's all sabre rattling.
  - the_af 1y ago
    > Dependence on foreign power with potentially misaligned goal? Collapse of manufacturing sector, leading to rise in poverty? Note that this has been the reality of countries in the Third World who aligned themselves with the US, a foreign power whose interests were misaligned with theirs. The US is now having a taste of their own medicine.
    - ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
      Now? The lower and middle class in the US has been dealing with this for decades.
    - M2Ys4U 1y ago
      Not just the third world. Plenty of first-world countries too.
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  Being entirely dependent on Chinese manufacturing to make anything. This also has the downstream effect of no one young learning how to make stuff, which then leaves you as a society that is forced to buy everything from China, and puts China in an excellent position to rug pull American society if they want. I can tell your first hand, that the engineers in the hardware/physical product space probably have an average age of 58 years old. That's very bad.
  - motorest 1y ago
    > Being entirely dependent on Chinese manufacturing to make anything. I'm sorry, it's very hard to take this sort of concern seriously. The express goal of US's take on neoliberalism was to dump all manufacturing onto countries like China while abusing IP to prevent anyone else, China included, from ever being able to compete. Now that the rules that the US abused to stifle innovation are being used by someone else to protect their own investment, you suddenly cry foul? The US needs to put on their big boy pants and figure out ways to compete in the same terms that everyone else had to endure, just like the whole world was forced to learn how to deal with that. If someone else has the IP you need, pay them. Or do you honestly expect that arbitrary rules are only acceptable if they clearly benefit you alone?
    - phatskat 1y ago
      > Now that the rules that the US abused to stifle innovation are being used by someone else to protect their own investment, you suddenly cry foul? I don’t know about the person you replied to, but I think a lot of us have watched US factories closing down and moving to other counties in the last couple decades and it’s just been a constantly disappointing train wreck. Auto manufacturing moving to Mexico and Canada, various factories shutting down because they can’t compete with foreign prices or volume, and politicians who happily didn’t care beyond lip service - the only reason it matters to any politician now is because trump brought attention to it (though accidentally) with the stupid tariff business. The people who actually could’ve done something have sat here for the last few decades and been largely inactive other than giving deals to Big Tech to open data centers while making empty promises about “bringing jobs back” because no one was offering the kind of kickbacks that Bezos and Musk can throw around, and now they’re only making any stink because it looks better than not.
fidotron 1y ago
> People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too. I mean, people can argue about how misguided it is, but this is one of the key motivations for the tariff arguments now going on.
toddmorey 1y ago
That software reality you describe is not too far off. Not with LLMs alone, but definitely seen the software copy machines accelerate. Any novel idea launched on an app store that sees any traction or attention will be flooded with close imitations in weeks.
- ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
  This was already reality before LLMs. If you put a successful game on any app store, expect Chinese and Korean clones of it within 2 weeks.
megaloblasto 1y ago
I have a feeling that soon, proprietary software won't be a business moat at all. No mater the complexity of your software, it will be too easy to replicate. That could be a good thing for open source. One way of staying ahead of your competition is to control the most popular open source repo.
- lunar-whitey 1y ago
  Proprietary software has not been a business moat for decades. The moats are their complements: hardware, networks and protocols (including humans), data and formats.
  - oblio 1y ago
    True, but that hasn't stopped big companies from not open sourcing the crown jewels, just for good measure. Apple post 2011 has never open sourced their UI toolkits, Google has never open sourced their search engine, etc.
    - lunar-whitey 1y ago
      The code for both of these is largely a liability. You cannot market a competitive offering in the OS or search spaces with code alone.
      - oblio 1y ago
        It's so much of a liability that Google and Apple don't dare release it, even 27+ years and 14+ years after the original release.
- kristofferR 1y ago
  > One way of staying ahead of your competition is to control the most popular open source repo. How so? I'm not sure what benefits that bestows the repo owner. Meta may run the React Native repo, for example, but I'm not sure how that is impacting Microsoft (who use React Native more and more, including deeply embedded in Windows) competitively negatively in any way.
ajmurmann 1y ago
To be fair there is a lot of talk about "bringing manufacturing back". IMO what the government is doing in that regard is more than misguided but other efforts exist. I'm optimistic about efforts like https://californiaforever.com/solano-foundry/ https://californiaforever.com/solano-foundry/. Permitting reform is a key piece which they work around, synergy from physical proximity is another. Both are addressed by the Solano Foundry project. One might see US labor cost as a disadvantage but with automation I don't think it matters that much. Jobs have been mostly lost to automation, rather than to China and that so only continue.
- ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
  California Forever is a weird network state I wouldn't wish to be a part of.
- anon-3988 1y ago
  > To be fair there is a lot of talk about "bringing manufacturing back". The reality is that you will also have to bring back less worker protection to make this competitive. The way I see it, it doesn't matter how good you are, if you have invest in R&D, China will simply spend 1/10 of the effort to copy it and produce it for less. What is your recourse here? I am pretty sure they are working their damnest to copy semiconductor manufacturing and if they can fully scale that up I can safely say the West is screwed technologically.
  - nine_k 1y ago
    Military and government buy locally produced things, for a good reason. This allows some industries to re-shore. Retail customers sometimes buy something not based on price and quality alone, but due to fashion and other such considerations. This works, but only when people have enough discretionary income to spend on such self-expression. Quite many people can't afford the luxury.
  - WillPostForFood 1y ago
    China will simply spend 1/10 of the effort to copy it and produce it for less. What is your recourse here? Tariffs?
slightwinder 1y ago
> Imagine what the software industry would look like if an LLM could look at any completed software product, and a few weeks to a month later have made a perfect copy of it. Humans have always done that, some are even low enough and blatantly copy the original apps assets & code. LLM is only speeding this up. > People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too. It's competition. It's in the nature of capitalism to support this. Of course, it sucks to be the one losing. And it's harmful if the winner-side is cheating. But it's not like there is a viable solution for this in a divided world full of Nations. You can't have everything cheap, and fair.
pessimizer 1y ago
I'm sorry, but isn't this a job for tariffs? Tariffs are how you impose an artificial cost on some exporter who is using an unfair subsidy, whether slave labor, bad environmental regulation, non-enforcement of the intellectual property system of the importing country, etc... all the way down to simple direct subsidy and willingness to take a loss in order to ruin the importing country's domestic industry. The fair, civilized way to deal with that is with tariffs. You don't argue, you just impose a tariff. They can counter-tariff and you say "see if we care you don't even import from us," or "maybe we thought we were tougher than we were, we can't even make magnets." Instead, you get a bunch of grandstanding politicians talking about how unfair everything is, and don't do a thing about it other than whip up nationalist aggression between the two countries (that also offers economic opportunity in arming them.) Or, if that changes for a moment, and somebody sins against "free trade," the same people who were complaining about how China steals everything going: "but you can't impose tariffs, because then I couldn't import as cheaply from China!"
- ohdeargodno 1y ago
  Tariffs only work if you have alternatives you can buy. China is the only reasonable source of procurement on the vast majority of goods in the world.
martin-t 1y ago
> It would totally kill any drive you have to make a product. That is already how I feel about LLMs being trained on my AGPL code to produce proprietary code and do so for money. And that's just today's shitty LLM. My condolences for you as a HW person who deals with an actually competent abuser of the system.
lm28469 1y ago
> Those $800 Chinese printers are extremely capable after all. I got my bambu a1 for ~300 euros during the latest sales, I'm still kind of shocked at how good it is for the price. I can't remember the last time I was that impressed by a piece of hardware

motorest 1y ago

> People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too. What problem do you think needs fixing?

clarionbell 1y ago
Dependence on foreign power with potentially misaligned goal? Collapse of manufacturing sector, leading to rise in poverty?
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  There is no misaligned goal. China isn’t out to destroy the US. It’s more jealousy of being overpowered. It’s sad but I think this is ultimately the brutal truth we have to accept. There’s no other logical outlook on this. Literally if left to its own devices China isn’t interested in the war. The US is out to do everything to stop Chinas ascendency to become the new world power. And of course both sides as a result will increase military presence but neither side wants to engage in war.
  - mrguyorama 1y ago
    Why have they built innovative Taiwan invasion barges if they do not want war? Building weapons to sink American carriers and boats and having a limited nuclear arsenal can be seen as trying to prevent the US from being able to blockade China from it's food and energy imports. But there is no possible way to wave away the literal Taiwan invasion barges and the planning they signal. That's not something you build unless you plan on invading your island neighbor.
    - ninetyninenine 1y ago
      They want Taiwan. That's for sure. But they don't want war. War is a last resort action they will go to, to get Taiwan. But war with the US? They don't want it and are trying to avoid it at all costs. Taiwan is none of the US's business right? The war here is in actuality really just the US starting it. The US in the end will have to make a choice here. Do we fuck with China and Taiwan or do we not? So in short. They want Taiwan. War can happen because the US is trying to start war. So the barges you see are in preperation for that.
      - dvdkon 1y ago
        Do you mean they don't "want war with the US"? Because right now you seem to be saying that China "doesn't want war, they just want to annex another sovereign country". Likewise, I wouldn't describe having defensive allies as "trying to start war". That's starting to sound like the Russian "we're only bombing them because they didn't immediately surrender, so it's their fault" school of thought.
        ninetyninenine 1y ago
        >Do you mean they don't "want war with the US"? Because right now you seem to be saying that China "doesn't want war, they just want to annex another sovereign country". From Chinas point of view it's not another sovereign country. But from the US pov, it's a pawn they can use to fuck with China as much as possible to stop the ascendency to power. Also the US doesn't recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country. They never fucking did. >Likewise, I wouldn't describe having defensive allies as "trying to start war". That's starting to sound like the Russian "we're only bombing them because they didn't immediately surrender, so it's their fault" school of thought. Taiwan was never an ally. I'm Taiwanese. I know. The USA doesn't give a flying fuck about Taiwan. Like I said the UN and the US never recognized Taiwan as a sovereign country and the US has NOT promised to back Taiwan in the event of a take over. Two things America cares about: Technology and Power. So right now you're busy extracting OUR technology by making us build unprofitable chip factories on your soil AND you're refusing to allow China to have that technology as well. It is WELL KNOWN among taiwanese people that the US factories are fucking useless from a profit perspective. Either way. War is not possible. If China and the US go to war, rest assured if the China starts losing, they're going to prevent loss by slaughtering everyone in DC with a nuclear bomb. The losing country in it's desperation will turn to nukes. Even the US can do that. Imagine Chinese troops at the doorstep of the whitehouse, what will trump do? Nuke half of China that's what. So war technically won't happen. Nobody in actuallity wants it. It's all sabre rattling.
- the_af 1y ago
  > Dependence on foreign power with potentially misaligned goal? Collapse of manufacturing sector, leading to rise in poverty? Note that this has been the reality of countries in the Third World who aligned themselves with the US, a foreign power whose interests were misaligned with theirs. The US is now having a taste of their own medicine.
  - ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
    Now? The lower and middle class in the US has been dealing with this for decades.
  - M2Ys4U 1y ago
    Not just the third world. Plenty of first-world countries too.
Workaccount2 1y ago
Being entirely dependent on Chinese manufacturing to make anything. This also has the downstream effect of no one young learning how to make stuff, which then leaves you as a society that is forced to buy everything from China, and puts China in an excellent position to rug pull American society if they want. I can tell your first hand, that the engineers in the hardware/physical product space probably have an average age of 58 years old. That's very bad.
- motorest 1y ago
  > Being entirely dependent on Chinese manufacturing to make anything. I'm sorry, it's very hard to take this sort of concern seriously. The express goal of US's take on neoliberalism was to dump all manufacturing onto countries like China while abusing IP to prevent anyone else, China included, from ever being able to compete. Now that the rules that the US abused to stifle innovation are being used by someone else to protect their own investment, you suddenly cry foul? The US needs to put on their big boy pants and figure out ways to compete in the same terms that everyone else had to endure, just like the whole world was forced to learn how to deal with that. If someone else has the IP you need, pay them. Or do you honestly expect that arbitrary rules are only acceptable if they clearly benefit you alone?
  - phatskat 1y ago
    > Now that the rules that the US abused to stifle innovation are being used by someone else to protect their own investment, you suddenly cry foul? I don’t know about the person you replied to, but I think a lot of us have watched US factories closing down and moving to other counties in the last couple decades and it’s just been a constantly disappointing train wreck. Auto manufacturing moving to Mexico and Canada, various factories shutting down because they can’t compete with foreign prices or volume, and politicians who happily didn’t care beyond lip service - the only reason it matters to any politician now is because trump brought attention to it (though accidentally) with the stupid tariff business. The people who actually could’ve done something have sat here for the last few decades and been largely inactive other than giving deals to Big Tech to open data centers while making empty promises about “bringing jobs back” because no one was offering the kind of kickbacks that Bezos and Musk can throw around, and now they’re only making any stink because it looks better than not.

fidotron 1y ago

> People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too. I mean, people can argue about how misguided it is, but this is one of the key motivations for the tariff arguments now going on.

toddmorey 1y ago

That software reality you describe is not too far off. Not with LLMs alone, but definitely seen the software copy machines accelerate. Any novel idea launched on an app store that sees any traction or attention will be flooded with close imitations in weeks.

ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
This was already reality before LLMs. If you put a successful game on any app store, expect Chinese and Korean clones of it within 2 weeks.

megaloblasto 1y ago

I have a feeling that soon, proprietary software won't be a business moat at all. No mater the complexity of your software, it will be too easy to replicate. That could be a good thing for open source. One way of staying ahead of your competition is to control the most popular open source repo.

lunar-whitey 1y ago
Proprietary software has not been a business moat for decades. The moats are their complements: hardware, networks and protocols (including humans), data and formats.
- oblio 1y ago
  True, but that hasn't stopped big companies from not open sourcing the crown jewels, just for good measure. Apple post 2011 has never open sourced their UI toolkits, Google has never open sourced their search engine, etc.
  - lunar-whitey 1y ago
    The code for both of these is largely a liability. You cannot market a competitive offering in the OS or search spaces with code alone.
    - oblio 1y ago
      It's so much of a liability that Google and Apple don't dare release it, even 27+ years and 14+ years after the original release.
kristofferR 1y ago
> One way of staying ahead of your competition is to control the most popular open source repo. How so? I'm not sure what benefits that bestows the repo owner. Meta may run the React Native repo, for example, but I'm not sure how that is impacting Microsoft (who use React Native more and more, including deeply embedded in Windows) competitively negatively in any way.

ajmurmann 1y ago

To be fair there is a lot of talk about "bringing manufacturing back". IMO what the government is doing in that regard is more than misguided but other efforts exist. I'm optimistic about efforts like https://californiaforever.com/solano-foundry/ https://californiaforever.com/solano-foundry/. Permitting reform is a key piece which they work around, synergy from physical proximity is another. Both are addressed by the Solano Foundry project. One might see US labor cost as a disadvantage but with automation I don't think it matters that much. Jobs have been mostly lost to automation, rather than to China and that so only continue.

ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
California Forever is a weird network state I wouldn't wish to be a part of.
anon-3988 1y ago
> To be fair there is a lot of talk about "bringing manufacturing back". The reality is that you will also have to bring back less worker protection to make this competitive. The way I see it, it doesn't matter how good you are, if you have invest in R&D, China will simply spend 1/10 of the effort to copy it and produce it for less. What is your recourse here? I am pretty sure they are working their damnest to copy semiconductor manufacturing and if they can fully scale that up I can safely say the West is screwed technologically.
- nine_k 1y ago
  Military and government buy locally produced things, for a good reason. This allows some industries to re-shore. Retail customers sometimes buy something not based on price and quality alone, but due to fashion and other such considerations. This works, but only when people have enough discretionary income to spend on such self-expression. Quite many people can't afford the luxury.
- WillPostForFood 1y ago
  China will simply spend 1/10 of the effort to copy it and produce it for less. What is your recourse here? Tariffs?

slightwinder 1y ago

> Imagine what the software industry would look like if an LLM could look at any completed software product, and a few weeks to a month later have made a perfect copy of it. Humans have always done that, some are even low enough and blatantly copy the original apps assets & code. LLM is only speeding this up. > People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too. It's competition. It's in the nature of capitalism to support this. Of course, it sucks to be the one losing. And it's harmful if the winner-side is cheating. But it's not like there is a viable solution for this in a divided world full of Nations. You can't have everything cheap, and fair.

pessimizer 1y ago

I'm sorry, but isn't this a job for tariffs? Tariffs are how you impose an artificial cost on some exporter who is using an unfair subsidy, whether slave labor, bad environmental regulation, non-enforcement of the intellectual property system of the importing country, etc... all the way down to simple direct subsidy and willingness to take a loss in order to ruin the importing country's domestic industry. The fair, civilized way to deal with that is with tariffs. You don't argue, you just impose a tariff. They can counter-tariff and you say "see if we care you don't even import from us," or "maybe we thought we were tougher than we were, we can't even make magnets." Instead, you get a bunch of grandstanding politicians talking about how unfair everything is, and don't do a thing about it other than whip up nationalist aggression between the two countries (that also offers economic opportunity in arming them.) Or, if that changes for a moment, and somebody sins against "free trade," the same people who were complaining about how China steals everything going: "but you can't impose tariffs, because then I couldn't import as cheaply from China!"

ohdeargodno 1y ago
Tariffs only work if you have alternatives you can buy. China is the only reasonable source of procurement on the vast majority of goods in the world.

martin-t 1y ago

> It would totally kill any drive you have to make a product. That is already how I feel about LLMs being trained on my AGPL code to produce proprietary code and do so for money. And that's just today's shitty LLM. My condolences for you as a HW person who deals with an actually competent abuser of the system.

lm28469 1y ago

> Those $800 Chinese printers are extremely capable after all. I got my bambu a1 for ~300 euros during the latest sales, I'm still kind of shocked at how good it is for the price. I can't remember the last time I was that impressed by a piece of hardware