This week’s CBC Marketplace episode seems to be a banger! Will watch after work.

I don’t see how this is going to work for the US (tech giants). The Asian countries where these data centers are located aren’t going to enforce such a rule. They’re far more dependent on China than on the US, and even if they do agree, they’ll allow another loophole (for example, access from a different country that Alibaba and friends use as a proxy). So the existing compute capacity isn’t going to disappear and Alibaba and friends will keep using it to build new models released for free for at least a few more years. If they need new capacity and can’t get their hands on Nvidia chips, they’ll just start doing what Chairman Xi has been telling them to do all along - use domestic chips, which, from what I read, are already starting to work, even if they’re not as efficient as Nvidia’s. And efficiency isn’t a problem - China has a ton of green energy and 21st-century energy infrastructure. So I don’t see how the US can stop, or even meaningfully slow down, the development of Chinese models.

I think they’re going to run into hard limits in the current American political-economic model that they can’t get around. (The market model where everyone optimizes for maximum margin and doesn’t cooperate with other parts of the economy through the state.) The Chinese model runs on much lower margins and if they can’t stop it physically by limiting resources, the only way to compete would be to drop the margins, and that would cause a massive economic reorg of the US, probably political too.

Good.

Use the hardware to keep R&D pace with US models while pushing domestic hardware adoption for inference. Gives us free models to run while doing it.

They’re moving from cheaper (more exploited labour) in Thailand, Vietnam to more expensive (less exploited) labour in China for lower chip costs:

HP and Asus are moving some PC production from Thailand and Vietnam back to China as AI-driven component costs climb The work is going to Chinese assemblers like Luxshare and Huaqin rather than Taiwan’s server-focused ODMs, partly for access to Chinese memory TrendForce expects the share of notebooks built outside China to slip from 24% to 21% this year, with no sign yet of cheaper PCs as a result of said move back to the country

Previously they had moved prod from China to Vietnam and Co as Chinese wages kept rising.

Would be interesting to see who the reinstalled CEO will be in this context.

Debian btw

☝️☝️

There’s been enough investigative journalism into this for at least a year if not more, shell companies in Singapore and all.

Also the Chinese gov’t has been blocking imports in China for a while in order to force domestic chip use.

I don’t understand, sue NVIDIA for what? Turning a blind eye to smuggling made NVIDIA shareholders money.

Reads “panic”

Looks inside:

5%

People have always had to strike for a fair share. Firms do not pay what is “fair” according to the profits they workers earn them. They pay what’s “fair” in the labour market they get people from. Where “fair” is as low as they can get away with.

It’s terrible.

Hm. This says their 17nm DDR5 yields have surpassed 90%. HBM3E yields appears to be low. Are you talking abt HBM?

4F2 targets 10nm DRAM which doesn’t require ASML’s most advanced stuff - EUV, AFAIK. It’s done with DUV which China has plenty of and they also got some domestic machines coming out this year. I see info that Micron has pivoted away from 4F2 but SK and Samsung are actively developing it for their next processes. Do you have anything that shows otherwise? If they’re still developing it, why would they do it if 4F2 is worse than 6F2?

Have you seen the investment in fossil fuels. 😄

He has to go and the Proton workers have to form a union.

I didn’t call it a minor fluctuation - I called it the opposite. By minor fluctuations I was referring to articles that say “Google lost X billions from its market cap”, then you look inside and you find a 1% move. 12% seems very significant, and thanks for your explanation of why that’s significant.

How’re you solving the web page fetch blocking problem? Lots of pages return nothing to my Playwright instance. When the pages load, the result is fabulous.

Shares of Google parent company Alphabet sank Thursday by 12.6%

Okay, unlike most drummed up bullshit articles that make big noise over minor fluctuations, this ain’t nothing.

Anyone know what happened?

That still means the same thing though. If they’re planning to take billions of debt, they and their lender think they’re either making good money today or they’d be making it in the future. Or in other words they can either pay their workers more today or in the future. 😁