fancl20

As a Chinese who have a lot of live/working experience in both systems just provide some clarifications for this comment: most Chinese people don't understand the difference between politicians and bureaucrats because as the country invented the bureaucracy thousands years ago there is never a clear difference between them. The parent comment is talking about the country is running by bureaucrats which IMO is irrelevant to this topic.

Yes the policy quickly gathered enough public backlash and has been cancelled

I think it's well documented that modern bureaucracy is at least inspired by China's bureaucratic machinery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Service_(United_Kingdom)

Under Charles Grant, the East India Company established the East India Company College at Haileybury near London, to train administrators, in 1806. The college was established on recommendation of officials in China who had seen the imperial examination system. In government, a civil service, replacing patronage with examination, similar to the Chinese system, was advocated a number of times over the next several decades.[10]

William Ewart Gladstone, in 1850, an opposition member, sought a more efficient system based on expertise rather than favouritism. The East India Company provided a model for Stafford Northcote, private Secretary to Gladstone who, with Charles Trevelyan, drafted the key report in 1854.[11]

And western countries accepted it as part of the base assumption how government should work, then nobody points to its origin since now it's so obvious (from modern perspective).

Thanks. Fixed table scrolling.

(not sure which border from the table element. will try to figue out later)

Update: also fixed. Thanks again :)

I feel like there is a part more difficult to be captured in technical definition. ECS designs usually pay more attention to seperate data and logic because systems are constantly updating data (world state) regardless there is an event or not. In the case of k8s the specs create a target world state and kubelet/controller constantly update the current world state (status) so a control system can be created.

China didn’t increase defense budget accordingly and for now still sticking to the same gdp percentage (around 1.5%) so the spiral hasn’t started yet (surprisingly).

Also China is always aggressive to DPP which isn’t something new and US government well understood the reason and used to assure China they will deter DPP’s independence agenda (if you’re familiar with that history. also https://www.foreignaffairs.com/taiwan/taiwan-china-true-sour...). Unfortunately there isn’t much political room now in US for that kind of assurance.

This misconception is common among US official/think tanks especially related to DOD because the way Chinese government operated is so counter-intuitive from US perspective (probably many other governments). It's actually same as how China makes economics policy: First assess the "inevitable" future, than make a plan to better adapt to that future (e.g. Battery, EV, Solar...actually a lot more examples before those). This means China is constantly making policies considered "ineffective" because in many cases they don't have a clear goal (build the capbility for the sake of the build). On contrast US sets a clear goal first and build the capbility accordingly, which means you build the capbility for a purpose.

For some reason people can't translate the same process when talking about military capbility. The current assessment from China probably is some version of "China will be regard as superpower. to be regarded as a credible superpower, credible superpower level army is required". While most US officials think China builds this military power for a concrete goal (why spend money if you don't plan to use it?).

This misconception at least has been communicated by some US intellectuals many times though I think it's not very effective under current geopolitical climate.

The belief of "I should" is one of the core part for Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD, not confused with OCD). The behaviour is largely driven by the anxiety of "fail to e.g. be citizen" and sometimes is considered a little extreme from others' view.

If you borrow in your own currency there's no real constraints. The trade-off is fiscal deficit = printing money and may cause inflation. Then higher interest rates will put pressure on economic growth.

WTO, IMF have yearly reports and IIRC one of U.S. Central bank branch have published report about this. TL;DR version is there's a trade flow reshuffle but China's trade percentage barely changed. As most traditional economic theories suggested and predicted, China sells more to ASEAN, South America and they sell more to U.S.

There's a liquidity issue for some heavily in debt local governments. It's also much complex because central government is taking this as a chance to pushing unwelcome structural changes. There's a quick fix have been done before - central government can simply swap local with central government debt and they still have a lot of fiscal room to do so. But many economists are against the approach this time because there's a issue long aware that central government doesn't actually able to control local government's budget but their debt considered backed by central government's unlimited credit.

What make things worse is the political incentive is local government has to grow economy and they can achieve that by borrowing money for investment. Even if the investment return is almost 0 there's a short term GDP boost (just think it as giving money to local workers, similar to Civilian Conservation Corps).

So now what they are pushing is force local government sell unused state assets they owned, cutting civil servant (hurting local consumption and local GDP), limiting their borrowing capacity and all other government reforms. Most importantly they want to break the expectations that local government debts are back by central government which distorted the market a lot in past decades.

I think https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009159418 has a different framing of the issue. There's a fundamental conflicts between policy implementation and policy effectiveness.

If policy is designed locally or at least allowed to be adapted to the local context, it could be more effective but with the possibility of inconsistency; Otherwise the policy is implemented flawlessly but with the cost of effectiveness because of lacking local context.

Any attempt of increasing legibility means a policy being implemented consistently across different contexts so everyone can assume the same thing regardless of the context, and, as expected, not able to incorporate the complexity of local social orders.

I heard they switched to fully use a recommending system for search (don't know how it works today but feels like that's still the case), which means there is there is no real search happening and you query is used as a hint, not a search query (which relativeness matters more).

At that time PDD is promoting the idea you buy what they think you will buy. PDD's search is barely functioning at that time and their bussiness model is solely relying on recommending system.

Though I'm not sure how much Alibaba's decision is affected by PDD because the story I heard is more driven by their internal politics. I feel like that's really a weird product decision for Alibaba and to me doesn't make a lot of sense.

From what I heard from engineers working for Alibaba, my understanding is that they are fighting with their own bureaucracy structure for quite long time to make any effective decision, at same time facing fierce compitition from JD and PDD. At some stage they released new prodect to compete with PDD every few months while still keep losing in their core e-commerce bussiness till now. All these were before government cracking down their financial business.

Most of the people I know in the industry think Alibaba is one of the least efficient big tech company in China compare to e.g Tencent, Baidu, Bytedance, Huawei. They all have somewhat similar bureaucracy burden as big corp but not at the level of Alibaba. Their problem is much complex than pointing the finger at Chinese government to explain everything.

I think what you decribed is birdbath. RayNeo X2 and INMO (Air2 or Go) use waveguide display as the "see through screens" you described. It doesn't seem to be radically better than or even as good as RayNeo X2 Lite, scheduled to release in 2024, so it's not that unreal. (Or if they are targeting single color display then INMO Go is a closer comparison)

It’s a little funny but redlines / final warnings have a “different meaning” in PRC’s diplomatic language e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_final_warning

The actual diplomatic language for war is “勿谓言之不预” (from official diplomatic channels) and they use “core interests” for a vaguely defined redlines: https://www.strategictranslation.org/glossary/core-interests

So yes, cross “redlines” won’t trigger a war with PRC. And ignoring final warning is also fine.

To be fair Chinese government does encourage Chinese companies manufacturing/investing abroad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Out_policy). From companies' perspective the issue is always high cost (compare to China) and lack of experience.

(BTW the tech industry is not destroyed by any means. Since the goal at that time was anti-monopoly...it did limit the market power of top players though hard to tell its net utility)

This happened a lot in other industries if not every, like IEM (Chi-fi), PC gaming handheld, mechanical keyboard, smartphone, 3d printer, solar pannel...At this point it feels a combination of abundant manufacturing know-how, strong entrepreneur culture, fast pace decision making, government policy, fierce market competition and all other reasons creates a synchronizing effect that always causes overcapacity + racing to bottom.

Ironically Chinese government has quite a lot experience handling overcapacity, sometimes caused by them sometimes not :/

It’s inevitable because of the CCP’s leadership and the objective conditions by their analysis. Remember CCP is an ideological party which means core party members do believe CCP as a party is more important than anyone including Xi. All decisions are made because the party’s ideology, not because anyone’s personal decision.

It doesn’t make sense from outside the party as I said so I think your feeling is probably why Kevin Rudd is lobbying in both U.S and Australia for better understanding the situation.

Also you can only go so far ideologically before stopped by the reality (or vice versa in realism because ideology is a larger part of our self-identity). A more ideological CCP only means they are more willing to afford the cost, push as far as they can, and retreat a little bit after over doing it. IMO cost-benefit analysis (or usually, who is the winner / the winning scenario) isn’t very helpful in such context because that’s not CCP’s calculation.

I think his point is not that this being the underlying goal. Instead the China’s foreign policy is designed based on the analysis that inevitably at some point, China will be the predominant power in Asia. The policy is not designed to realize the goal, but prepare / accommodate the inevitable future (which makes no sense from a cost-benefit model because you do something for the sake of its result).

one can't help but noticed Xi's much more conciliatory tone in the past few month

It maybe more relates to the fact that diplomas advocating for a more hawkish foreign policy being slowly wiped out from the power centre after mid 2021. Though a full swing policy change may only possible after the first plenary session of the 20th Central Committee (which was October 2022).

Xi never hides that he is just reading what was decided within the party for many of these foreign policies. SCMP has reported that during the Xi-Biden meeting for any issue not directly related to China, he will read the notes.

It's not that clear and much more complex. If you follows the whole history of China's foreign policy, it's surprisingly consistent and the focus is never "competing with someone".

To the topic of ‘Wolf Warriors’, the policy dropped as early as May 2021 so it's highly possible that the change itself is not economic related (https://thediplomat.com/2022/01/is-china-putting-wolf-warrio...). The targeted audience (of the foreign policy) may not be the West, but global south. There is a paper (I'm too lazy to find the link) claim that the ‘Wolf Warriors’ rhetoric used by China's diplomats in non-west country doesn't change much.

If you are intrested in the changes under Xi, Kevin Rudd has a series of deep analysis: https://viet-studies.net/kinhte/WorldAccordingtoXi_FA.pdf. Generally China's decision making process doesn't care too much about winning or competing or any particular goal especially in short term. They are based on long-term analisys of "what will happen inevitably" and back track from that conclusion. Many of these decisions make no sense from West's perspective under a cost-benefit analysis.

In most cases HP

It's not invented by zig: https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/struct_initializati...

Although more widely used.

Those projects have real difficulties to retain enough developers even to keep lights on. And even higher-ups want, they can’t force allocate developers (in Google’s current power structure) other than providing some incentives including promotion.

The end result is a doom loop that if the team can’t retain enough staffing, developers will be overwhelmed by the boring maintenance work, which leads to more team transfers. They do use contractors to mitigate the issue but IMO it doesn’t work in every case.

Part of the problem is when you are in that position it’s also easy to move to other interesting projects internally.

Then the real choice is between doing boring maintenance or useful new things at same pay.

Just do their best to comply the EU law so they can keep operating? https://www.reuters.com/technology/tiktok-ceo-eus-vestager-c...

Yes I’m… hmmm you can contact me by my id at gmail if you want :)

Yeah and they failed to report to China's MIIT within the time window... https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-halts-alibaba-cybersecuri...

(To be clear the obligation is not they have to report to Chinese government first. They just totally forgot to tell the government agency for coordinating these kind of security incident cross companies)

I read the news again and the new structure still seems very similar to the company structure of Alphabet or Tencent. Is there anything I missed here?

I guess because package managers (apt, nix, ..) build around the idea of shared libraries, while bazel assume statically built.

TBH it’s hard to say which operate model is better anyway. They are simply incompatible :)

Related topic: https://youtu.be/Pzl1B7nB9Kc