We have such a weird fascination with Tiananmen, like it’s some sort of big gotcha. You can ask actual Chinese citizens and they know about it, and care about it about as much as an American citizen cares about the Kent State massacre.
The only reason we are fascinated with it is because it is a banned topic in chat, in public Chinese forums, and in language models. Yes, you can ask a Chinese about it in a private setting, no, you can’t talk about it with a large group. No, the what aboutism Kent State massacre doesn’t really compare because the US government hasn’t taken down the Wikipedia page on it.
The Chinese government makes the topic fascinating by banning it. Just like banned books in China get a sales boost at street side book sellers, or kids wear something their parents specifically tell them not to wear.
What’s the whataboutism re: Kent State? My point is the average Chinese citizen cares about Tiananmen about as much as the average American cares about Kent State, which is to say not at all.
I guess we can continue to be fascinated by it and Chinese citizens can continue to look at us weird when we speak about it like it’s the secret to immortality or something.
The average Chinese citizen doesn’t care about Kent state because no one is trying to ban talking about it. People here aren’t internet in 6/4/89, they are interested in the CCP’s banning of it. Anything you try to ban will stand out.
Having lived in Beijing for 9 years, Chinese are mostly the same, they are interested in whatever is controversial in the states (if they are interested in the state, since we don’t ban much) and ignore anything else. Ya, you aren’t going to get any points bringing up 6/4, even at PKU (but you can’t go to PKU on 6/4 so don’t worry about that), but you’ll hear plenty of dirty laundry about your country from them, so don’t worry, the conversations will still be good.
Massively different, from the size of the protests (Beijing was not the only city which was experiencing student protests) to the scale of the carnage, to the all-stops attempts to erase the memory of the event.
So for an LLM it's an interesting question about what comprises its training model. How massaged/edited/censored is the input data, in whose service is the cleansing being performed?
That's because Kent State massacre is not a politically incorrect topic in the West. What happens when you ask ChatGPT about a genuinely politically incorrect topic in the West?
So at best the complaint boils down to this: China has the wrong politically incorrect topics and we have the right politically incorrect topics. And of course, once the complaint is reduced to this form, its irrelevance to the topic at hand (LLMs) is evident.
GPT won't let you be a bigot, this model won't discuss the historical fact that thousands of people were murdered by the Chinese state. That's a complete false equivalence.
in the West, "politically incorrect" means that a topic is liable to offend people. examples include HIV rates (LGBT people), racial crime statistics (racial minorities), shari'a (Muslims), etc. in contrast, Tiananmen square is just embarrassing for the CCP. so it seems like you're making a false equivalence.
that seems unlikely. the Streisand effect suggests that censoring a topic sparks interest in it. like, the American public was so skeptical of Jeffery Epstein's apparent suicide that "Epstein didn't kill himself" became a widespread meme, and that's without your Internet connection getting reset if you Google his name. does the Streisand effect just not function in mainland China?
Shaing Yi-Chaing and Liang Mong-Song have some serious beef from the past and they disagreed about SMIC’s direction. Liang made SMIC choose and SMIC chose Liang.
I certainly don't know enough of the politics of what happened to judge any side of the SMIC question.
Shaing Yi-Chaing's accomplishments in copper interconnects alone deserve awe; he was ahead of IBM, and he did it on instinct/"the school of hard knocks."
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Yeah, but by that definition the majority of highly engaged posts are off topic. How are the two major world powers moving toward conflict less relevant than a lot stuff the here? It effects tech, startups, the economy. If it were to catch on fire, the global semiconductor supply chain would be destroyed.
I just think the possibility of war is the most important issue in the world right now. The less people who are aware of the danger or the more people willfully blind to how close the threshold is to being passed, the more likely we'll autopilot into war.
It feels like China’s housing market has to collapse eventually but perhaps buying and holding real estate is as ingrained as buying and holding stock for retirement is in the US.
It just feels incredibly wasteful to have towers of empty apartments, but perhaps I am missing something.
I feel like it's the scale of China. It's apartment complexes empty totaling 4 million homes, sure, but with 1 billion people, say 200 to 400 million homes, that's 1 to 2% of the total. And 60 billion square feet is less than 20 square miles, so really that much in the scale of things.
I volunteer you to go fight in a war after we sink/confiscate another country's vessels.
EDIT: You've edited your response a bunch of times from "hell yeah, I'm ready to die in a war" to whatever it is now. So here you go Internet Tough Guy(tm). Have fun, I guess https://www.goarmy.com/how-to-join.html
blocking is even better because everyone else can read it too, so it just looks like the blocked person had no response to the comment and accepted “defeat”
> You can probably extend this to "Never get the first word."
Amen. From about 1999 to ~2010, I was a practitioner of "don't wait up: somebody's wrong on the internet."
It gradually dawned on me that it was better for my mental health if I just avoided arguments as much as possible. I'm not perfect about it, but I rarely get into pissing matches these days.
Is it lost on you that this specific action is literally in defence of self determination in the context of the entire point of the war. Such an incredibly lazy take.
"Permanently prevented" -- semi manufacturing is an engineering problem, not magic. Engineering problems can be solved, unless you think Chinese people are inherently inferior engineers.
It‘s not that easy to duplicate the institutional knowledge of companies like Zeiss, for example, otherwise they would have a lot of competition already.
