| ▲ | jmyeet 7 hours ago | |
Anyone who is unironically saying China attacking Taiwan is a real threat (eg The Anthropic CEO quoted in the article) is either simply echoing the administration's painting of China as a geopolitical bogeyman or they're just ignorant of geopolitics, likely because they're projecting American economic imperialism onto China. I'm glad the article dismissed this as a threat because it isn't one. The official policy of the US is the One China policy. You'll see this described as "strategic ambiguity". That's another way of saying that the official policy is simply to lie about supporting Taiwan's independence. China can only hurt their position by taking military action against Taiwan. Also, it's highly debatable if they even have the military capability to invade Taiwan. Naval blockade? Sure. But to what end? China is going to make their own chips. They'll just hire the right people to replicate EUV lithography. The article brought up nuclear weapons. It's a good analogy. At the end of WW2 the thinking of the US military was that the USSR would take 20+ years to get the bomb if they ever got it. It took 4 years. The gap with the hydrogen bomb was even less. Western chauvinism in policy circles completely underestimates China's capacity to catch up in lithography. Not selling the best chips to China created a captive market for Chinese chipmakers. I also think TSMC is being understandably cautious in not expanding their CapEx. AI companies really should focus on an economic use case for AI more than worry that foundry capacity will somehow limit a theoretical future AI use case. | ||
| ▲ | reducesuffering 5 hours ago | parent [-] | |
jmyeet: "Putin is in the wrong here but there are no good guys. US rhetoric on this has predicted a full-scale invasion that hasn't come to fruition multiple times and the media just laps it up. It's reminiscent of the WMD justification for invading Iraq. It's straight up Manufacturing Consent [1]. However, Putin has a point: extending NATO membership to Ukraine is an overtly hostile act by the US and NATO member states. Putin no more wants NATO bases in the Ukraine than the US would want Chinese or Russian military bases in Canada or Mexico. But Russia is not and never was going to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It would destroy Russia. Trying to do this in Afghanistan, a substantially smaller and less developed country, played a significant factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia wants a buffer between it and NATO and access to the Black Sea. That's it." | ||