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Comment by zerohp | Hacker News Reader

The US government has been setting the ceiling on performance that can be exported since the beginning of the computer industry.

This is not really new but NVidia was caught by a surprise change in the limits.

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It's not just the US government, it's many civilized governments doing these sort of things. And in this particular case this european is grateful for it because it is not about setting ceilings or hindering industry, it's about preventing the abuse of dual use goods. In other words; Not being fsckd by our own stuff.

Other examples can be found here: https://www.wassenaar.org/app/uploads/2021/12/Public-Docs-Vo...

"civilized governments"? how that works?

I think they mean by "civilized governments" governments who don't have military officers as ministers. Nothing to do with civilization.

So, you think that the original intention was to say "civilian governments".

You are very generous with your interpretations, I admire your optimism in how civilized comments in Internet are.

Doing so is one of the guidelines here:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Along with this one:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

They are all honestly pretty great: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Nah. Your interpretation is undoubtedly correct. I've been on HN 12 years now and I've become used to the increase in Western chauvinism over the recent years – mostly all of it led by US sentiment. The implication above is that the US is part of the civilized world (colloquially called "The West") and that China (and presumably Russia, and Iran, and Venezuela, and Cuba, et al) are part of the uncivilized world.

See, for instance, on this page where Hume speaks of civilized versus uncivilized forms of government: “This chapter examines Hume's conception of government. It considers three forms of government that Hume distinguishes: barbarous monarchy, civilized monarchy, and free government (with its two subdivisions, limited monarchy and republic).” So civilized is contrasted with barbarous. https://academic.oup.com/book/12307/chapter-abstract/1618482...

You'd think with SMIC demonstrating 7nm production ( as detailed in depth in this video by Asianometry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQGnwKBxAKk ) you'd think that the US had gotten the hint that the tech cat is out of the bag – or the tech genie has escaped the lamp or whatever metaphor you prefer … A comparison of SMIC's 7nm process versus the competition: https://www.techinsights.com/blog/smic-7nm-truly-7nm-technol...

My prediction is that SMIC joins TSMC, Intel, Global Foundries, and Samsung at the top tier of semiconductor manufacturing by 2030, along with an ecosystem of Chinese design and manufacturing companies. In doing so the West's stranglehold on other companies like Huawei will be over. If Russia can survive the punitive Western sanctions until then it'll no longer be hampered by lack of access to high-end Western technology.

Yes, absolutely.

I hate it when I have to check if my hobby projects hit Wassenaar limits or not.

They often do! Hobby drones, GRBL hobby CNCs, hobby micrcontrollers and SBCs, open-source SDR projects, etc. will often exceed the performance of devices that were ITAR restricted a decade or two ago. And "a decade or two ago" is a generous expectation for lethargic legislative, regulatory, or judicial systems to evolve.

Yes, in the 70s and 80s, it made sense to say that 5-axis NCs systems that can cut Inconel turboprops for ICBMs should be export controlled; those were multi-million-dollar flagships of the biggest and best manufacturers and were key to the country's military edge. Now you can get one shipped from China for a couple thousand dollars, with servo loop times, encoder and linear scale resolution, memory capacity, processor speed, axis counts, etc. that are better than the originals that cost a thousand times more half a century ago.

Today, it's true that the A100 is a cutting edge, shockingly powerful, uniquely capable processor. You can do machine learning/computer vision projects with it that you can't do with any other technology. Eighty gigabytes! 256 GB/s per package! Almost 20 teraflops of FP32! Compared to the GPU in the desktop you bought 8 years ago, yes, these are huge. But if you plot interconnect bandwidth, memory size, core counts, price, and so on, and extrapolate forward... yeah, your little hobby Kubernetes cluster of 2030-era Raspberry Pi equivalents will probably be at a performance level that's export controlled.

>it's many civilized governments...

China not civilized?

And before human rights becomes the main talking point: Guantanamo.

It's a gradient. How you throw things down on that is up to you. Guantanamo vs. reeducation and labor camps. Paying judges to help keep the local juvenile prison full vs. harvesting organs from prisoners. Suppression of free speech and the media vs. whatever we see on Twitter daily.

Civilized or not is up to your perspective.

More like US prison system vs Chinese “camps”. One look at the numbers shows which of those is more oppressive. This includes things like slave labour: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-wo...

It's impossible to quantify oppressive. We don't know much about Chinese labor camps or re-education centers.

Even if we did, how do you measure up acts done in these places against one another? Is making license plates for pennies in the US better or worse than making t-shirts in Xinjiang? Is being wrongfully thrown in prison due to a prejudice judge seeing your only skin color worse than being thrown into prison for being Muslim who refuses to shave their beard?

As a US prisoner I was worked until my hands bled, regularly forced to do things declared torture by the USA courts. Feel free to complain to the prison guard in charge of the complaints process. You have no access to the courts until you have exhausted the prison complaints process. Complain, and you will be placed in a cell with some unsavory characters, your room will be 'shaken down' every day, including your cellies stuff, and it will be made known the shakedown is due to your bucking the system. Your cellies will make sure you stop complaining and their cell stops getting tore up. The USA system is all for looks, but is impossible to actually get any access to remedy once you are on the inside and no longer in the world.

FYI: Things like fast food franchise remodels regularly have American forced labour doing a lot of the CAD/CAM work. If you eat at American franchise restaurants, you support American prisoner slave labour. [edit] here is a pretty government website promoting you to use slave labour: https://www.unicor.gov/Category.aspx?iStore=UNI&idCategory=1...

here is the US Constitution 13th Amendment banning slavery:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

I agree it’s hard to quantify, and I agree US prisons aren’t really worse than Chinese ones. Rather, I believe they are roughly the same. Thus, condemning out one without even mentioning the other is simply dishonest. Especially when the condemning side is the competing perpetrator, as is usually the case with anti-Chinese propaganda.

How can you say they are the same when we have so little information on the prisons in China?

I’m assuming the claims from anti-Chinese propaganda - Zenz et al - are true. It’s still not worse from what’s happening in US.

Again, wholly subjective. I'd say it's much worse. It's also hard to take anyone seriously who has 50 Cent Army in their profile when it comes to issues on China.

Given that US is imprisoning many more people, for largely commercial (slavery) and racial reasons, how is China worse? I'm genuinely interested in your arguments here.

Is the US imprisoning more? I wasn't aware we had accurate numbers on camps in Xinjiang and prisons in China.

Let me know when anyone is actually allowed to verify what is happening there, until then comparisons are useless.

They are using civilized torture in Guantanamo, you know.

How many organs were civilizationally harvested there?

What specifically is the downside of allowing export?

I expect there is a real answer and a PR answer to this question; The PR answer has something to do with missile guidance and crypto currency. But the real answer i fear is that limiting import/export allows wars to start more easily.

I worked with a company that upgraded a mainframe cluster not located in the USA. The upgrade topped out a collective rating of that user's installed computing power allowance given for civilian purposes. So, to do the upgrade, US Export controls required the client to decommission some older nodes and that had to be witnessed by US Consular representatives walked through the whole process taking video and photographic evidence. And the agreed method of decommissioning was to haul these old nodes out in to a deserted area and run bulldozers over them in a pit. Not joking. Wish I kept some of the photos though.

> user's installed computing power allowance given for civilian purposes

I don't know what this means. Would you explain?

ITAR has limits on processing power that can be exported: supercomputers have "dual use" and can be used for military applications, such as simulating nuclear explosions or designing hypersonic weaponry, e.t.c.

Parent poster likely worked for a US company that was doing a customer upgrade abroad (i.e. exporting US technology) that would have tipped the cluster compute capacity above the permissible limits, unless some older nodes were decommissioned and destroyed.

Correct.

When was this done previously?

You can go down the rabbit hole at federalregister.gov. Here's a couple places where they talk about it:

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-B/chapter-VII... https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2006/04/24/06-3647...

You'll probably have to dig quite a bit to find the latest rules and regulations.

These regulations go back to at least the Export Control Act of 1968. Every CPU/GPU maker would have a legal team that understands these rules.

Hmm I’ll have to check that out, thanks for sharing

In many (most?) manufacturing industries there is an upper limit on export product performance. If you make steel, there are a bunch of types/grades subject to limits related to their use in nuclear technology. If you make microphones there is a limit on those that might be used in sonar arrays. Certainly all manner of limits exist in aerospace. Even game consoles have been limited (Iran). This is not an unusual regulation.

> If you make steel, there are a bunch of types/grades subject to limits related to their use in nuclear technology.

Assuming said steel is actually of the quality it's certified as [0]

[0] https://asiatimes.com/2017/10/nuclear-tentacles-kobe-steel/

There are all kinds of things subject to export restrictions:

https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/regulations/export-adminis...

For example, high resolution analog to digital converters have restrictions. In the past strong cryptography even had restrictions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

Even travel for US citizens was restricted. I have relatives who were in the semiconductor and aerospace industries during the 1980s. They were advised by the government to not attempt to travel to the Eastern Bloc. Some kinda related reading:

https://academic.oup.com/dh/article-abstract/43/1/57/5068654...

I knew about the previous cryptography restrictions, but I also knew that the Supreme Court overruled them by ruling (as I understand it) that “code is speech”. I’ll have to check out the other links though

Not the Supreme Court, the Ninth Circuit in a subsequently-withdrawn opinion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States

(Because the opinion was withdrawn, it's "persuasive" but not "binding".)

Good catch

This brings back memories of a t-shirt I had that had big red letters on it "Export Controlled" and an implementation of RSA in perl on it.

    #!/usr/local/bin/perl -s-- -export-a-crypto-sardine -RSA-6-line-PERL-fish
    '\~.         __......--------~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~-------....____
     \  ~.__---~';($k,$n)=@ARGV;$m=unpack(H.$w,$m."\0"x$w),$_=`echo  "[o~~-._
      \  ]s!16do$w 2+4Oi0$d*-^1[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*La1=z\U$n%0]SX$k"[$m*]"\E[     ~.
      /  ]s!szlXx++p"|dc`,s/^.|\W//g,print pack('H*',$_)while read(STDIN,$m," .'
     /  .-~~--.._" +($w=2*$d-1+length($n||die"$0 [-d] k n\n")&~1)/2);'  __..-~
    ,/.~         ~~~~----........._______________________.......-----~~'

The opposite was of course done when the US sold a ton of Xeon Phi accelerators to China when they built the Tianhe-2 supercomputer.

My favourite conspiracy theory is that this was done deliberately by the US, since Xeon Phi was a large pile of steaming turd, so the Chinese wasted money on a machine with high theoretical FLOPS but crappy real world performance, and also wasted the time of their scientists and programmers who were porting code to a programming paradigm that went nowhere fast.

Intel processors were always a waste of money.

US tried to block PlayStation 2s from going to China as they were too powerful: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/review/0...

Apple made a fairly big deal of the fact that the G5 processor, when they started putting it into their machines (or maybe it was when they went to dual G5s?), had just recently stopped being export-controlled by virtue of being classified as a "supercomputer".

(What really happened was that the Feds revised the definition of "supercomputer", and suddenly the G5 configuration they were using didn't qualify anymore... it had nothing to do with anything Apple did, except perhaps lobbying for it so they could build computers in China.)

Close, but it was actually the G4 where they started doing that.

They made a big deal about it in their commercials at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoxvLq0dFvw

There was also a ban export of strong cryptography. So Java couldn’t use string ciphers and algorithms without adding some additional jar which basically just turned the `enableStrongEncryption` flag on. This isn’t necessary anymore but I don’t know what changed legally.

I believe this is what changed legally: > One of EFF's first major legal victories was Bernstein v. Department of Justice, a landmark case that resulted in establishing code as speech and changed United States export regulations on encryption software, paving the way for international e-commerce

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...

Let's not forget that these policies fostered the development of encryption in Canada, Australia and other countries (See SSLEay for example). So it ended up being counter-productive. The simplest way to stop competition is to subsidize a product. In this case, offer the tools openly.

Check out the limitations ITAR places on exported electronics.

Since the creation of the United States of America. One famous in the computer era is the banning of encryption algorithm.

Truly a surprise change. The new requirements do not appear to be published in the Federal Register, which is a massive screwup that potentially renders the requirements illegal and invalid. My contacts in the trade compliance world are aghast.

Will be interesting to see if Nvidia challenges it.

a surprise for everyone except Nancy Pelosi’s husband who unwound his Nvidia positions early, avoiding by exposure to this news

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