Export Controls on Advanced Computing and Semiconductor Manufacturing Items | Hacker News Reader

Export Controls on Advanced Computing and Semiconductor Manufacturing Items

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67 pointsKaibeezy72 comments

With all these restrictions, I begin to wonder: where is this “free market” economy that we so advocate to other countries? I get the need for regulations and restrictions, sure, but at some point, where is free in all of this? Also, do these sanctions even work on large, diversified economies? Eventually, the local substitutes will be developed and, at that point, it will cut off the (large) market for western companies.

What?

Who says that there's "free market"? it does not exist

Free market ends when important stuff starts being affected unless actors arent rational.

Curious when did the US gov officially advocate for free markets last?

Trans pacific partnership ?

US has been increasing its central bank interventions, while China has been reducing them. They'll reach an equilibrium soon.

Free market and democracy ends when it does not serve the interest of US.

The Free Market does not exist. It has been shown that the big banks can do whatever they want and if they make bad decisions and take risks that end up costing them billions the government will come and bail them out.

how does this prevent anything, a sanctioned country can create shell companies in near by countries and resell it back to themselves right?

Avoiding sanctions has penalties for both the companies that enable it and the companies that are sanctioned.

Does that matter for a disposable shell?

It might to the originating company who dealt with said shell company.

And any individuals involved. Unless it is a full blown covert operation run by the intelligence service of a country under embaego. In that case some of the ivvolved people will get decorations and promotions, if successful.

DOJ has ramped up it's efforts this year to identify sanction and export control violations with a focus on shell companies

https://www.akingump.com/en/insights/alerts/doj-focuses-on-c...

At a minimum, it increases the costs of accessing the sanctioned goods.

This is basically the goal of this stuff, not to stop it but to slow it.

That's not true. At least not in the US. It gives legal over sight so that investigation can occur, and places legal responsibility on builders and buyers such that they'd be culpable if they are connected even accidentally to exporting restricted items.

Honestly I think efficient market hypothesis is overreaching here

Isn't this the motto of security in general? "There are no roadblocks, only speed bump." (obviously you can make pretty powerful speed bumps that make you essentially stop but hey, you could try to crack AES256 if you're willing to spend astronomical time)

Yeah, they can. But then that is illegal and the authorities are on the lookout for it.

One among the leaked wikileak messages was a communication from the state department to their german counterparts to warn them that a company trying to buy fiber optic gyroscopes from a german company is actually north korea.

When my friends were building a micro satelite as a university project in Hungary the local secret service showed up uninvited. They were absolutely friendly, geeked out with them about the project, and asked the group to upgrade their alarm system. Even recommended a brand. They also gave them tips on which countries better to avoided when they travel with the satelite to the launch pad.

How did they hear about their project? In short we don’t know. The speculation is that they got a tip that someone is buying space related hardware at this adress from a partner agency and they have been asked to check them out if they are a legit operation or a shell company smuggling parts.

Watchers be watching, and there is an extensive aparatus for this.

As a creator of something restricted you are responsible for not selling to shell companies. You are required to do due diligence on everyone you sell to, and who they sell to ensure things never get to a shell company. Convince the courts you did your best and you are okay, but you need to be able to show you tried hard to prevent it.

This can be tricky. As an American I can sell to Canada but not Cuba. I cannot sell to someone in Canada who resells to Cuba. Someone in Canada is legally required to lie to me if I ask if they will resell to Cuba. Therefore asking Canadians if they resell to Cuba is not enough to show I did due diligence to ensure my stuff doesn't go to Cuba. (My information on US/Cuba relations are 10-15 years out of date, but the example is good even though I'm not sure if it applies anymore)

Yes, they can. But it's not going to end well:

https://www.nu.nl/economie/6285728/drie-jaar-cel-geeist-tege...

The USA is at least as good at discovering these tricks as the Dutch are.

This isn't about stopping them all but Frontier was built with 37,888 GPUs. Have fun sourcing export controlled GPUs at that scale. By the time you do you're two generations behind.

author of SemiAnalysis on these new rules: https://twitter.com/dylan522p/status/1714289567174730115

Or https://nitter.net/dylan522p/status/1714289567174730115

it's good that the US is now using sticks, not just carrots when dealing with China and it's growing geopolitical power. I just hope that we still give thrift to carrots, the stick makes carrots look better. we'd all do better in a more liberal China

Do they people making these decisions not know that Huawei offers A100 equivalent GPUs and CUDA like framework called Mindspore that has over 2 million developers ?

Pushing the Chinese tech giants like Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu to work and grow this platform is the opposite of what these sanctions intend to achieve. What an own goal!

Completely agree, tbh both decisions (sanctions and no sanctions) have certain bad implications. But imho sanctions are much more dangerous in the long run for the US foreign policy.

It is unclear.

Perhaps they think that Huawei / smic is constrained on how much they can produce.

As an armchair observer, China and businesses within it seem to have the general upper hand when it comes to production of most of anything. One popular tag line is that they lack true innovative IP type work but I'd say that's highly debatable. When it comes to pretty much any sort of physical production, the US seems at a disadvantage largely due to leadership and ownership direction starting from many decades ago.

I disassemble most things I get from china. There is a lot of engineering innovation, but the innovation isn't aimed at the user of the device. The innovation is in ways to make a functional device with fewer manufacturing steps, cheaper.

However, one day those engineering minds will divert their attention from making devices cheaper and more efficient towards making the same devices perform better and have more features. At that point, the consumer will see the innovation.

Both the US and China are working to decouple their economies long term, starting with the most critical sectors first. Both sides are aware that there are short term consequences and some of their businesses may suffer but that in the long run decoupling will be better for their respective countries.

>> in the long run decoupling will be better for their respective countries

Globalization and collaboration making a huge difference in pace of the progress. Segregation and compartmentalization are very bad for everyone in a long run.

probably yes. although that's a bit of an article of faith. in analogy, I wonder how much progress and innovation, and general world progress, has resulted from opening the internet to include Russia, for example. Sometimes including actors that do not conform to certain ethical standards and trust worthy behaviors, leads to spreading infection and danger to the world.

Another analogy: Incorporating cancer cells into the body rather than sanctioning their growth, is a sure path to death.

this is not a directly equate China to cancer, especially the Chinese people to cancer. That's clearly incorrect. however, I do think it is correct to expect our trading partners to eventually establish trust with each other, on the geopolitical sphere, and if that fails to appear, it makes sense to diversify our strategic resources and partnerships

> Sometimes including actors that do not conform to certain ethical standards and trust worthy behaviors, leads to spreading infection and danger to the world.

The Chinese people are fine. You can see some great projects on GitHub for example. I hear Shenzen is something special.

The CCP is the problem, not the Chinese generally

I have no way to make that distinction. By virtual of living under the CCP, the Chinese people are also implicated as unethical and untrustworthy.

You don't find classifying and treating a whole group of people the same... bigatory?

You don't think there are Chinese that want a different governance model for their country?

I don't have a choice. I never deal with individuals in China, only the country as a whole.

I know many Chinese are not happy with their government. However I cannot do anything to help them.

How do you not have a choice in how you view and treat others?

Generally inappropriate broad over generalization.

Like most people not in China, I never deal with individual people, just the country. I see nothing inappropriate about my generalization, please go into more detail so I can figure out what you are talking about.

You just painted 1B+ people with the same broad brush, on account of something that they likely had very little choice in. Unacceptable, really.

The Chinese are a great people. I want them to succeed. I know many tremendous individuals from Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Its the CCP that is the problem. I will say this plainly: Freedom for Hong Kong. Freedom for Taiwan.

I think I said that clearly, but apologies if it came out that way.

> I will say this plainly: Freedom for Hong Kong. Freedom for Taiwan.

Freedom for China would be nice too.

"I wonder how much progress and innovation, and general world progress, has resulted from opening the internet to include Russia, for example."

Off the top of my head -- nginx which is by some metrics the most popular web server[0]. Or Kotlin -- the programming language that Google recommends for writing Android apps[1].

"Sometimes including actors that do not conform to certain ethical standards and trust worthy behaviors, leads to spreading infection and danger to the world."

Could you tell how have you come to this way of thinking about a whole nation?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nginx

[1] https://developer.android.com/kotlin/first

And are a preliminary to war.

yes we are already amidst Cold War II.

> in the long run decoupling will be better for their respective countries.

That's populism seeping into the mind. Globle trade and collaboration have raised many people from poverty. It's how China and the US got to where they are today.

Decoupling increases the likelihood of confrontation. The US did similar to this with Japan just before WW2

True, but what can you do. China is not showing signs today of being a good long term partner, so the US feels forced to escalate, and in return China does more. 15 years ago I thought that China would improve, but with Xi in power I no longer do. Only time will tell, but things are not looking: in the worst cases coupling would be even worse.

Coupling means the cost of war is much hirer, especially for the people's daily lives

Coupling has a big impact on deterrence and not going to war in the first place. If you want war, then advocate for the regressive isolationist polices. If you don't want war, then look for places where we can collaborate, like climate change and trade

Yes. But also the U.S. sees no way to influence the faction of China to the ways of the U.S. influence traditionally worked in China (unlike how China can influence the U.S. politics). So the cooperation game quickly becomes a game of one benefactor. It is a bad situation we are in but the U.S. cannot solely determines the outcome. China must have some structural changes to convince otherwise influence is possible.

US and USSR were decoupled in the Cold War; US and China will probably be decoupled in Cold War II.

Decoupling economies is step 1 to war.

Perhaps still 30 years away... but I think it will happen, and a war between two nuclear nations won't be pretty (although I doubt it'll actually be a nuclear war)

Demographically I'm not sure China will be in a position to fight a war with the US in 30 years?

The minorites who will be the majority will not be committed to imperialism and empire building like the current Caucasians who are in charge of the US.

I don't think a 2050 war between developed economies will involve many people... It'll be drove vs drone mostly.

It'll be a test of the economies of the nations to see who can build most high tech drones quickest and who can do R&D fastest to outclass the enemies inventions. Drone aircraft, ships, missiles, bombs.

I hope that as soon as one side has clearly better and more drones, the other will surrender, ideally before substantial loss of life.

Starting from a population 3x higher, it may not matter...

Cold War II has already started

The decoupling is vastly overblown and likely impossible.

Success rates may differ.

Do you know that AMD makes powerful GPUs that even have a general purpose programming interface called ROCm? Now try to persuade ML practitioners to switch to that ftom NVidia GPUs and CUDA.

And what would happen if Nvidia got banned? ROCm would take over. All the development resources would be going into that.

That's probably what's going to happen in China.

ROCm likely won't take over, because of its flaws. Eventually, of course, either it or something else, would emerge as a solution.

But it will take time. Buying time is what this ban is trying to achieve. Slowing down the rivals.

I think you overestimate how long such a change would take.

If Nvidia was banned tomorrow, I think within 6 months another leader would emerge and be supported by all the big libraries.

ROCm is already supported by Pytorch apparently.

https://pytorch.org/blog/experience-power-pytorch-2.0/

My understanding is that while it is theoretically supported, the vast majority of random pytorch projects you find on GitHub will need tweaks before they'll run in ROCm

They don't really need to be pushed, the CCP has set their own goals and agenda

https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/new-chinese-ambition...

That being said, decoupling increases the chances of a hot war. All this stuff is a lot like the 30s that scored humans a second world war.

"this idea is mine, I cannot let you have this idea"

the idea fits in a digital format.

they're literally building scarcity for the future, right now.

Does China set export controls on things that are basically consumer goods?

Because today's A100 is going to be used for playing video games tomorrow.

Important to slow down China's innovation rate - the maintenance of the rules based order depends on it

What's the alternative to a "ruled based order"?

It's newspeak.

Thanks

The old order (essentially pre WWII) where countries could do entirely as they wanted.

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