☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆
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4·1 day agoThe sources I use are mainstream western sources. Just because you don’t like what these sources show does make them invalid.
I disagree with the notion that human rights are a problem in China compared to the west. First of all, we have to clarify what we mean by rights here. The types of rights people in the west enjoy are poorly defined and largely ephemeral such as the right to free speech. This is no more than jester’s privilege where you’re allowed to scream into the void, but you typically cannot translate that into any tangible action.
For example, people in the US have the right to vote and to elect politicians. Yet, the tangible outcome is that the political system represents the interests of the ruling capital owning class and not the voting majority. As Eric Li put it, the biggest difference in the political systems between China and US is that in America, you can change the political parties but you can’t change policies. In China, you can’t change the party but you can change policies.
The US also practices modern day slavery which violates fundamental human rights even as the west defines them.
The ongoing genocide in Gaza is another great example. Majority of western public opposes this atrocity, but the regimes they live under actively facilitate the continuation of the atrocities. Here, not only the rights of the citizens of the west are nowhere to be found, but it’s also the rights of people living outside the west that are being trampled. The west is responsible for destruction of many countries in the past decades, and by extension the rights of millions of people who lived in them.
Furthermore, the western conception of human rights focuses on positive freedoms while largely ignoring the importance of negative freedoms, such as freedom from poverty and the fear of illness or a lack of financial security in old age. These are tangible, real-world freedoms that directly impact our quality of life. This brings us to the subject of liberal ideology and the fact that it is directly at odds with meaningful human rights.
Liberalism consists of two main parts. First is political liberalism which focuses on wholesome ideas such as individual freedoms and democracy. Second is economic liberalism which centers around free markets, private property, and wealth accumulation. These two aspects form a contradiction. Political liberalism purports to support everyone’s freedom, while economic liberalism enshrines private property rights as sacred in laws and constitutions, effectively removing them from political debate.
As a result, liberalism justifies the use of state violence to safeguard property rights, over supporting ordinary people, which contradicts the promises of fairness and equality. Private property is seen as a key part of individual freedom under liberalism, and this provides the foundational justification for the rich to keep their wealth while ignoring the needs of everyone else. Thus, the talk of freedom and democracy ends up being nothing more than a fig leaf to provide cover for justifying capitalist relations.
On the other hand, people in China enjoy genuine human rights, like right to housing, education, and healthcare. 90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
In fact, people in China enjoy high levels of social mobility in general https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html
Student debt in China is virtually non-existent because education is not run for profit. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jlim/2016/08/29/why-china-doesnt-have-a-student-debt-problem/
China massively invests in public infrastructure. They used more concrete in 3 years than US in all of 20th century https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2014/12/05/china-used-more-concrete-in-3-years-than-the-u-s-used-in-the-entire-20th-century-infographic/
China also built 27,000km of high speed rail in a decade https://www.railjournal.com/passenger/high-speed/ten-years-27000km-china-celebrates-a-decade-of-high-speed/
All these things translate into tangible freedoms allowing people to live their lives to the fullest. Freedom can be seen as the measure of personal agency an individual enjoys within the framework of society. A good measure of whether people genuinely feel free is to look at what people of the country have to say on the subject. Even as mainstream western media openly admits, people in China overwhelmingly see their system as being democratic, and the government enjoys broad public trust and support.
- https://www.newsweek.com/most-china-call-their-nation-democracy-most-us-say-america-isnt-1711176
- https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2021/0218/Vilified-abroad-popular-at-home-China-s-Communist-Party-at-100
- https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-26/which-nations-are-democracies-some-citizens-might-disagree
- https://web.archive.org/web/20230511041927/https://6389062.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6389062/Canva images/Democracy Perception Index 2023.pdf
- https://www.tbsnews.net/world/china-more-democratic-america-say-people-98686
- https://web.archive.org/web/20201229132410/https://en.news-front.info/2020/06/27/studies-have-shown-that-china-is-more-democratic-than-the-united-states-russia-is-nearby-and-ukraine-is-at-the-bottom/
Looks like it’s just the prototype at the moment. A couple of links with some details here
For sure, technology is self reinforcing in nature. All the investments China made work together to allow them to build bigger and better things going forward.
Meanwhile, there’s little indication that Chinese system is prone to insane leaders. If you look at the history of leadership in PRC, it’s been competent and very much sane throughout its history. A big reason for it is that there’s an arduous and highly competitive selection process for moving up in the system. A random yahoo with a bunch of money can’t just become the president of China.
Consider the road Xi had to walk to get where he is today. Whether you come from a grassroots family or a political family, you have to go through every step. Only in this way, you can reach the top of power.
To get started, you have to own a college degree, at least for most Chinese govt officials. You have to take the national civil service examination and be admitted. In 2019, 92000 people took the exam and 14537 were admitted, with the admission rate of 1.58%.
The ruling party in China is the CPC. In addition, there are 8 other parties. You have to join one of them. If your ideal is to become the supreme leader of China then you join the CPC. You will be one of the 90 million CPC members. They are all your competitors.
Now, you’ve become a grassroots official. Your administrative level is “staff”, while President Xi’s administrative level is “national level principal”. There are 10 levels of gap between you and President Xi. Each level requires several years and multiple examinations.
In China, “Organization Department” at all levels are responsible for the management of civil servants. Every civil servant has to take part in the grade assessment every year. The assessment is usually conducted by your colleagues, subordinates and superiors by voting. The result of the assessment is related to your future.
If you work hard and are lucky enough, you will become the highest official in a district or county. As President Xi did in 1983, he became the highest official in Zhengding County. You have to own the experience to manage hundreds of thousands or even millions of people.
Next, you have to become a city official in charge of industry or agriculture or education or commerce. Then, you become a mayor. It will take you another few years. In 1990, President Xi became the top leader of Fuzhou City, Fujian Province.
Now, if you want to become a governor then you need to repeat your previous work. The difference is that your responsibilities are greater and your work is more onerous. In 2000, President Xi became governor of Fujian Province.
After becoming the governor of a relatively small province, you have to be the governor of a relatively large province. Or you can go to border areas, such as Xinjiang or Tibet. President Hu Jintao, the former leader of China, was once the governor of Tibet.
The Political Bureau is one of the central leading bodies of the CPC. You must be a member of it. Members of the Political Bureau are elected by the plenary session of the Central Committee. It’s your next goal.
Deputies to the National People’s Congress (NPC) are members of the highest organ of state power in China and are elected in accordance with law. You also have to be one of the NPCs.
If you can become a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, it usually consists of seven or nine people, which means that you have entered the core of China’s state power. In 2007, President Xi was elected.
Similarly, different standing committees are responsible for managing different areas of the country. Through fierce competition, you finally become the top leader of China. In 2012, President Xi succeeded. He still spent 40 years on this road!
The above is what anyone who has ambitions to become China’s top leader has to go through. It is based on a strict selection system and the election of deputies to the people’s Congress at all levels.
It makes sense, China started behind technologically and the only way they could catch up was by having a higher rate of technological progress. Now that they’ve caught up, faster rate of advancement necessarily means they’re starting to surpass the west.
The question here is what makes art, is it the effort that goes into the process of producing it or the vision the artist has that matters. I’d argue that what matters is in the eye of the beholder. If you look at an image and it evokes an emotion or a feeling within you, then it’s meaningful to you. How the image was produced hardly matter in my opinion.
I bet MechaHitler was what really cinched the deal.
I can tell you for a fact that they can. However, even managing boilerplate and repetitive code is a huge benefit. Furthermore, these tools are great at combing through code bases and helping you find where you need to make changes in code. If you haven’t actually used these tools in a real project yourself then you don’t really know what they’re capable of.
Indeed, self hosing has to be the way forward.
It depends on the task and the specific LLM. My experience is that they can do a lot of things effectively nowadays, and they’re improving rapidly.
1·5 days agoBurial at Sea/Hymn to the Immortal Wind by MONO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEvpqR6B8ns
Given the reactionary position people in tech are increasingly taking with AI, I think we know the answer to that.
Js is indeed painful. I find the right approach is to simply treat it as a compile target. I’ve worked with ClojureScript when I had to do front end work, and I find it’s a huge improvement because it has sane language semantics. You have things like proper equality, comparison by value, immutable data structures, and so on. It’s not perfect because you still have to deal with stuff like source maps to get errors out of minified bundles, and you have to interop when you deal with Js libraries, but it’s a huge improvement overall I’ve found.
For the same reason Republicans haven’t released the Epstien client list. Many of them and their donors are on the list.
6·7 days agoOne huge impact mass FOSS adoption would have is that there would be a lot less software and hardware churn. Commercial nature of proprietary technology is the main driver for constant upgrade cycles we see. Companies need to constantly sell products to stay in business, and this means you have to deprecate old software and hardware in order to sell new versions of the product.
Windows 11 roll out is a perfect example. Vast majority of Windows 10 users are perfectly happy with the way their computer works currently, they’re not demanding any new features, they just want their computer to continue to work the way it does currently. However, Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 and now they’re forced to buy a new computer to keep doing what they’ve been doing.
This problem goes away entirely with open source because there is no commercial incentive at play. If a piece of software works, and there is a community of users using it, then it can keep working the way it does indefinitely. Furthermore, in cases where a software project goes in a directions some users don’t like, such as the case with Gnome, then software can be forked by users who want to go in a different direction or preserve original functionality. This is how Cinnamon and Mate projects came about.
Another aspect of the open source dynamic is that there’s an incentive to optimize software. So, you can get continuous performance improvements without having to constantly upgrade your hardware. For most commercial software, there’s little incentive to do that since that costs company money. It’s easier to just expect users to upgrade their hardware if they want better performance.
I would argue that non technical software users would be far better off if they had the option to fund open source software instead of buying commercial versions. Even having to pay equal amounts, the availability of the source puts more power in the hands of the users. For example, building on the example of Gnome, users of an existing software project could also pull funds together to pay developers to add features to the software or change functionality in a particular way.
This is precisely what makes licenses like GPL so valuable in my opinion. It’s a license that ensure the source stays open, and in this way inherently gives more power to the users.
seems fine for me, here’s the content:
Mainland China is on track to surpass Taiwan in semiconductor foundry capacity by 2030, according to a report from Yole Group, underscoring Beijing’s progress in its push for chip self-sufficiency amid ongoing US tech restrictions. The mainland’s share of global foundry capacity is projected to reach 30 per cent by the end of the decade, up from 21 per cent in 2024, the French market research firm said. Taiwan is currently the market leader with a 23 per cent share last year, while mainland China is already ahead of South Korea at 19 per cent, Japan at 13 per cent and the US at 10 per cent. “Mainland China is rapidly becoming a central player,” Yole Group said, attributing the shift to Beijing’s intensified efforts to build a self-sufficient domestic semiconductor ecosystem since Washington launched a tech war that aimed to curb China’s progress in critical areas such as chips and artificial intelligence (AI). Beijing has doubled down on its “whole nation” approach to its self-sufficiency drive. The state-backed China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, known as the “Big Fund”, has successfully fostered the development of key companies such as Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) and Hua Hong Semiconductor, two of the country’s leading wafer foundries. Domestic fabs are set to play a bigger role over the next few years, according to the report, which said local chipmakers accounted for 15 per cent of foundry capacity in 2024. That share will be “significantly more” by 2030, the report said. Chinese chipmakers have been investing heavily in expanding their facilities to meet surging demand from sectors such as automotive and generative AI. China was expected to start three new fab construction projects this year, one-sixth of the world’s total, according to a report published in January by US-based industry association SEMI. China’s self-sufficiency strategy, along with expected demand from automotive and internet-of-things applications, would help boost capacity by 6 per cent for chips made with process nodes between 8 and 45 nanometres, SEMI added. Despite the projected gains, the mainland still trails Taiwan and South Korea in advanced process nodes, which are crucial for producing high-performance chips with greater transistor density. SMIC, China’s top foundry, had difficulty advancing its process nodes from 7-nm to 5-nm, Canadian research firm TechInsights said in a report last month. Two years after its 7-nm chip first appeared in a Huawei Technologies smartphone, “SMIC’s 5nm process node remains elusive,” TechInsights said. The report came after it looked into the chip used in Huawei’s new laptop with a foldable display, which also used 7-nm chips from SMIC. Meanwhile, global leaders Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Samsung Electronics are locked in a race to achieve mass production at the 2-nm node level. TSMC was expected to reach that level this year, while Samsung has reportedly planned to reach the same stage in early 2026.
Yup, it’s frustrating that there’s still no process that’s easy enough for a non techie to go through easily.
I think that’s exactly what’s gonna happen in the long run. Right now we’re in the hype phase of a new technology, but one the hype dies down we’ll start identifying use cases where the tech actually works well. At the same time the tech itself is going to mature, and people will figure out how to work with it effectively.
Yeah basically, a turn key solution where your machine gets wiped and imaged with a Linux distro that does all the basic stuff most people need would be an ideal solution. A good way to look at it would be making sort of a Linux based console for non technical users as opposed to a general purpose computer. Tech people want the latter, but non technical users just want a reliable tool that can reliably handle a few tasks.
I imagine that technical challenge is the whole point as it’s a demonstration that China is capable of building this sort of technology. China exports their technology and infrastructure to other countries in BRICS and BRI, and many of them don’t have any HSR infrastructure at all. China will be able to showcase how this infrastructure works in practice, and offer something no other country can.