[HN Gopher] Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V
___________________________________________________________________
Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V
Author : vitplister
Score : 161 points
Date : 2023-11-06 14:54 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bunniestudios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bunniestudios.com)
| tromp wrote:
| Site is partially hugged to death. It has a copy of a letter that
| Andrew 'bunnie' Huang sent
|
| > Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V
|
| > A bipartisan group of 18 lawmakers in the US Congress have
| recently amplified a request to the White House and the Secretary
| of Commerce to place restrictions on Americans working with
| RISC-V (see also the initial request from the Senate) in order to
| prevent China from gaining dominance in CPU technology.
|
| > The request is facially misguided; any restrictions would only
| serve to reduce American participation in an important emerging
| technology, while bolstering ARM's position as an incumbent near-
| monopoly provider of embedded CPUs.
|
| > When the first report came out, I hoped it was just a blip that
| would go away, but with the broader bi-partisan group asking for
| restrictions, I felt I could no longer just stand by and watch: I
| am an active participant in the RISC-V ecosystem. I'm also
| subject to US law.
|
| > I did the one thing any American can do, which is write a
| letter summarizing my thoughts on the issue, and sending it to
| the White House, Department of Commerce, and the relevant members
| of Congress
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| Does anyone know what restrictions have actually been proposed?
| Media reporting on it is uselessly vague.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Looks like what they want is to stop Americans from
| collaborating on RISC-V with any PRC company:
|
| Oct 6 (Reuters) - In a new front in the U.S.-China tech war,
| President Joe Biden's administration is facing pressure from
| some lawmakers to restrict American companies from working on a
| freely available chip technology widely used in China - a move
| that could upend how the global technology industry
| collaborates across borders.
|
| At issue is RISC-V, pronounced "risk five," an open-source
| technology that competes with costly proprietary technology
| from British semiconductor and software design company Arm
| Holdings (O9Ty.F). RISC-V can be used as a key ingredient for
| anything from a smartphone chip to advanced processors for
| artificial intelligence.
|
| Some lawmakers - including two Republican House of
| Representatives committee chairmen, Republican Senator Marco
| Rubio and Democratic Senator Mark Warner - are urging Biden's
| administration to take action regarding RISC-V, citing national
| security grounds.
|
| The lawmakers expressed concerns that Beijing is exploiting a
| culture of open collaboration among American companies to
| advance its own semiconductor industry, which could erode the
| current U.S. lead in the chip field and help China modernize
| its military. Their comments represent the first major effort
| to put constraints on work by U.S. companies on RISC-V.
|
| Representative Mike Gallagher, chairman of the House select
| committee on China, said in a statement to Reuters that the
| Commerce Department needs to "require any American person or
| company to receive an export license prior to engaging with PRC
| (People's Republic of China) entities on RISC-V technology."
|
| Such calls to regulate RISC-V are the latest in the U.S.-China
| battle over chip technology that escalated last year with
| sweeping export restrictions that the Biden administration has
| told China it will update this month.
|
| "The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is abusing RISC-V to get
| around U.S. dominance of the intellectual property needed to
| design chips. U.S. persons should not be supporting a PRC tech
| transfer strategy that serves to degrade U.S. export control
| laws," Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the House
| Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement to Reuters.
|
| McCaul said he wants action from the Bureau of Industry and
| Security, the part of the Commerce Department that oversees
| export-control regulations, and would pursue legislation if
| that does not materialize.
|
| The bureau "is constantly reviewing the technology landscape
| and threat environment, and continually assessing how best to
| apply our export control policies to protect national security
| and safeguard core technologies," a Commerce Department
| spokesperson said in a statement.
|
| "Communist China is developing open-source chip architecture to
| dodge our sanctions and grow its chip industry," Rubio said in
| a statement to Reuters. "If we don't broaden our export
| controls to include this threat, China will one day surpass us
| as the global leader in chip design."
|
| "I fear that our export-control laws are not equipped to deal
| with the challenge of open-source software - whether in
| advanced semiconductor designs like RISC-V or in the area of AI
| - and a dramatic paradigm shift is needed," Warner said in a
| statement to Reuters.
|
| RISC-V is overseen by a Swiss-based nonprofit foundation that
| coordinates efforts among for-profit companies to develop the
| technology.
|
| The RISC-V technology came from labs at the University of
| California, Berkeley, and later benefited from funding by the
| Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
| Its creators have compared it to Ethernet, USB and even the
| internet, which are freely available and draw on contributions
| from around the world to make innovation faster and cheaper.
| whelp_24 wrote:
| Are these senators invested in ARM?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| These senators believe the Earth is 6000 years old. Their
| worldview doesn't get any more rational from there.
| bunnie wrote:
| The concern is that the restrictions would follow the pattern
| of existing rules around semiconductor equipment and fabricated
| chips [1].
|
| They are fairly broad and stipulate that US persons cannot
| transfer technology to any company on an entity list. iirc
| there was a clarification to the rule that also put a burden on
| US persons to confirm that they aren't working with a trading
| front or shell company for the listed entities, which makes any
| interaction potentially hazardous, because how are you even
| supposed to check for that?
|
| Note that violations of these rules can "include up to 20 years
| of imprisonment and up to $1 million in fines per violation, or
| both" [2]. And the use of "US persons" language means that it's
| not just companies, it's individual developers too.
|
| If you read the text of the rules, they restrict any kind of
| technology transfer to these companies. In the case of selling
| fabrication equipment, that's...fairly clear cut. Don't sell
| stuff to people on the list, and your deal was probably a few
| million dollars anyways so you can afford lawyers to research
| if you're dealing with a shell company.
|
| But the concern is for RISC-V "technology transfer", what
| happens if you push to a git repository, and...someone from one
| of these entities pulls your commits? Are you now liable? What
| if you give a lecture on RISC-V, and someone from one of these
| entities was in attendance?
|
| Or perhaps you're in charge of crafting an IP strategy for your
| SoC company. If you pick RISC-V, the ambiguous and changing
| rules around who you can license your products to is
| problematic; a client you have today could end up being banned
| tomorrow. Whereas if you license an ARM core, you don't have to
| worry about going to jail. It then becomes a no-brainer to just
| license the ARM core.
|
| Basically, the concern is they will copy/paste the existing
| rules that are somewhat more tightly confined because they
| apply to atoms, but instead insert language referring to bits
| and ideas.
|
| [1]
| https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/10/13/2022-21...
|
| [2] https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/enforcement/oee/penalties
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Mostly ones that defy constitutional guarantees of free speech.
| deutschepost wrote:
| Wasn't RISC-V developed in the US? And the first company to
| produce chips with this ISA, SiFive is US based too.
|
| Why would it make sense to ban it in the US? They literally
| invented it.
| SllX wrote:
| It doesn't.
|
| Right now we're having an anti-PRC moment. There are good and
| intelligent ways to have that moment, and there bad and stupid
| ways to have that moment. This is one of the latter, but
| Congress is a deliberative body within a free democracy so
| we're going to see all of it.
| wmf wrote:
| The concern is that open-sourcing processor design knowledge
| will create a "reverse brain drain", allowing other countries
| (especially the boogeyman China) to catch up. It's nonsense in
| a globalized world.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| This is basically ARM lobbying to hamper their challenger.
| There is no legitimate reason for it. (That doesn't mean we
| don't still need to fight it.)
| 0xDEF wrote:
| Something to look out for in recent years are cultist
| grassroot investors who organize on Reddit and Twitter to
| influence politicians to do something that is favorable to
| their stock and harass journalists and YouTubers who report
| critically and harm their stock.
|
| r/TeslaInvestors and r/AMD_Stock are some of the worst. I can
| easily imagine some in the latter organizing to get RISC-V
| banned in the US.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Eh. RISC-V isn't really competing with AMD64, which is high
| performance processors that can natively run x86 binaries,
| neither of which RISC-V would do any time soon. And if
| there were they would most likely be made _by_ AMD, who
| would then make money selling them.
|
| The loser from RISC-V is clearly ARM because it's not
| nearly as hard to produce a low-power processor with mid-
| level performance, which is the core of ARM's market but
| RISC-V allows the vendors to avoid paying for the ARM
| license. And unlike x86, most existing ARM software isn't
| distributed as third party binaries tied to a particular
| architecture and could easily be recompiled for something
| else.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Wonder how much of the pro-Elon nonsense I see here, on
| Twitter and Reddit is just stockholders who got rich off of
| Tesla. I like to think that there is some sophisticated
| automated ML system Elon has got running to find and
| respond to haters....but then I saw that Youtube video
| discussing the poor code at Tesla so I dont know what to
| think anymore.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| It's pretty obvious what causes this for both companies.
| You have companies that were previously in a precarious
| position, which attracts interest from short sellers who
| think the company will fail, but instead the company
| makes money. Then all the people holding a short position
| get desperate to drive the stock price down so they can
| close their position without losing their shirts, so they
| keep attacking the company well past the point that there
| is no reasonable expectation they're going to go bankrupt
| anymore.
|
| That makes the company's supporters intolerant of
| criticism because they've been conditioned to expect
| criticism to be in bad faith. Which continues even after
| the short sellers have given up or been eviscerated by
| margin calls.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I wonder how much of the anti-Elon posts I see here, on
| Twitter and Reddit are just NPCs who have been told to
| hate a person and regurgitate talking points designed in
| a lab. I'm pretty sure the answer is 80-90%. I'm also not
| an Elon fanboy nor have I ever owned Tesla. It just
| really woke me up seeing the entire internet flip against
| Elon so quickly and it having been so obviously
| inorganic.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| SiFive launched a chinese subsidiary (StarFive) in
| 2017/2018. And they just announced they were giving
| designs for some of their high-end cores to Sophgo (a
| company out of Beijing.) My guess is US administrators
| want SiFive to apply for export licenses before they do
| this again. I pretty much agree w/ Bunnie on this
| one. I lived through the Crypto(graphy) Wars of 90s
| and still have my "Sink Clipper" poster around here
| somewhere. If US companies are trying to sell
| products and services based on technology they can't
| export, but foreign countries can easily replicate, the
| only thing you're doing is making them (US tech
| companies) operate at a disadvantage. If we
| were worried about foreign tech dominance, then maybe we
| could do what foreign countries do: a. Develop a
| national industrial policy. b. Pay for kids to
| get EE degrees. (or hell, pay for kids to get
| business or art degrees.) c. Subsidize the chip
| manufacturing sector the same way we subsidize
| farmers or petroleum marketers. d. Force Samsung
| and TSMC (both foreign countries) to form joint
| ventures with US firms where US countries own
| at least 51% of the JV. Claiming they can close
| the Pandora's Box of semiconductor manufacturing
| knowledge this late in the game makes them (US
| Lawmakers) look incompetent. If they wanted to "save US
| chip manufacturing" they should have done something in
| the 1970s when TI was building manufacturing plants in
| Malaysia and Thailand.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Samsung and TSMC may be in foreign countries, but the key
| thing is both South Korea and Taiwan are very closely aligned
| with the United States for defense.
|
| This concern is less about the chips being made here, but
| controlling the ability for enemy powers to get a hold of
| them. Consider that "bombing the TSMC facilities" has been
| considered a possible plan if Taiwan is invaded, because a
| key goal is ensuring China doesn't control that capability.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"enemy powers"
|
| Do you trade with the enemy? That's a traitor's domain. Or
| they're rather competitors you are not happy with and
| scared that they beat you at the game? Get off you butt and
| do something productive then.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Do you trade with the enemy? That's a traitor's domain.
| Or they're rather competitors you are not happy with and
| scared that they beat you at the game?
|
| Both can be true at the same time, e.g. Europe buying gas
| and oil from Russia. _Realpolitik_ is often very messy to
| navigate, not made easier by the fact that we have
| collectively decided to tie our fates to Russia (for
| cheap energy) and China (for cheap production) and that
| decision is coming back home with a vengeance.
|
| If you are looking for traitors, start with those who
| thought "change by trade" in the 90s/early 00s was a good
| idea - and check their paychecks. At least here in
| Germany, we know that disgraced former Chancellor
| Schroder is a Russian asset (literally, he got a high-
| paid job for Rosneft, most likely as a thank-you for
| pushing through Nord Stream), unfortunately he was clever
| enough to never implicate himself in a criminally
| chargeable manner.
| kragen wrote:
| moscow is _literally in europe_
| photonbeam wrote:
| The majority of russia isnt tho
| kragen wrote:
| unless you count by population instead of tundra area or
| something
|
| by population it is
| kps wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy
| butlerm wrote:
| As I understand it, the U.S. does not subsidize petroleum
| marketers, or at least not very much. Oil companies are
| generally taxed on net income after expenses and
| depreciation, same as all other businesses.
|
| Plus depletion, which like depreciation reflects the value of
| an asset going down over time, making the company in question
| worth less than it would be otherwise, i.e. the book value is
| going down.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| You probably want to review this:
|
| https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-
| content/uploads/2023/03/budget...
|
| The Janet-and-John bit is covered by Reuters:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/biden-budget-
| targets...
|
| "Calculating the cost of U.S. subsidies for the fossil fuel
| industry is complex because the incentives stretch across
| the U.S. tax code, but estimates range from $10 to $50
| billion per year."
|
| "U.S. oil and gas subsidies include provisions ranging from
| incentives for domestic production, write-offs and
| deductions tied to foreign production and income, and
| approved accounting methods that can reduce the stated
| taxable value of assets."
|
| "One specific U.S. tax break on domestic production, for
| example, called intangible drilling costs, allows producers
| to deduct a majority of their costs from drilling new
| wells. The Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan panel
| of Congress, has estimated that eliminating it could
| generate $13 billion for the public coffers over 10 years."
|
| "Another, the percentage depletion tax break, which allows
| independent producers to recover development costs of
| declining oil gas and coal reserves, could generate about
| $12.9 billion in revenue over 10 years, according to the
| panel."
|
| Yes. We subsidize the Petro industry.
| slaw wrote:
| Are tax deductions really subsidizes?
| error9348 wrote:
| Letter in question
|
| https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites...
| bitwize wrote:
| Oh noes! The Chinese are using some tech. Better prevent American
| companies from competing with them!
| TinkersW wrote:
| The fact that RISC-V jumped to Switzerland after being funded by
| the US during its development makes me inclined to say screw
| RISC-V.
|
| It also makes RISC-V foreign just as the author complains that
| ARM is foreign.
|
| I think placing restrictions on Americans working with PRC on
| RISC-V related stuff is a pretty reasonable thing to do.
| sschueller wrote:
| Let's ban AI research too and be left behind. /s
|
| I see this as short sighted anti China fear mongering but China
| is now at a point where is can invotate itself with out the
| help of "western" tech.
| whelp_24 wrote:
| I mean Altman is working on that one...
| ertian wrote:
| This makes the move to Switzerland look prescient.
| colinsane wrote:
| > The fact that RISC-V jumped to Switzerland after being funded
| by the US during its development makes me inclined to say screw
| RISC-V.
|
| are you perhaps referring to some specific company in the
| RISC-V space? or are you _actually_ saying "damn, foreign
| actors embraced an idea we originated, guess i've gotta flip
| positions and decide the idea of an open ISA is bad now"?
| kragen wrote:
| they are referring to the industry consortium that defines
| risc-v, which is in switzerland because its legislators don't
| pull dumb stunts like this
| kmeisthax wrote:
| China should stop stealing our IP and create their own technology
|
| wait no not like that
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Those darn'd Chinese training a bunch of engineers,
| participating in a global industry, producing a product at
| rock-bottom prices and then not forgetting everything they had
| to learn to help the rest of the world make chips! Dang Them!
| Symmetry wrote:
| The British to the Americans in 1850 or to the Germans in 1850
| or the Americans to the Japanese in 1900.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| It's amazing that the move of RISC-V Foundation to Switzerland
| (as RISC-V International) was actually called for.
|
| Even more amazing is US lawmakers _continuing_ to try & shoot
| the US in the foot.
|
| RISC-V is now globally developed, that ship has sailed. Same for
| products based on it. The US can't prevent its 'proliferation'.
| Only reduce the degree to which US entities are part of, and
| profit from that.
|
| Are US lawmakers _that_ dumb? (ok I guess that 's a rhetorical
| question).
| andrewflnr wrote:
| The practical question is, do US lawmakers believe their voters
| are that dumb? (Mostly yes)
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Nah, they really are this uninformed for the most part (there
| are notable exceptions of course). Story time! I went to law
| school in DC. One of my classmates worked as a staffer in the
| office of a prominent (leadership-level) congressperson (she
| was from his district). She had also done an internship with
| the UN. This congressperson had made public statements about
| defunding the UN and blah blah blah. He took her out to lunch
| one day and asked her to explain what the UN was and how it
| worked in the 30 minutes they had so he could field questions
| he was getting about his public statements.
| bluGill wrote:
| You don't have to fall back to that. It isn't possible to
| know all the issues facing national attention. Someone puts
| in a good/scary story about something and it is really hard
| to see why that story is wrong. Often the story isn't even
| wrong, it is just not the complete picture and the evils of
| what the story misses out on are even worse. There are a bit
| over 500 people with power in DC, they cannot possibly debate
| all the possible issues that come up.
|
| China learning from US contributions to Risc-v are not a good
| thing. However the obvious proposed solution wouldn't stop
| China from learning (it might delay them a few months, but
| they have plenty of smart engineers who can figure this out),
| and so will harm the US more.
| FpUser wrote:
| 1) - US lawmakers believe
|
| 2) - Mostly yes
|
| 3) - both
|
| Which one of 3?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| The US has no direct referendums at the national level so it
| doesnt matter what voters think in the near term, or long
| term for that matter
| DangitBobby wrote:
| US lawmakers are just a mouthpiece for whoever is paying them.
| beebmam wrote:
| I think this discounts the genuine political opinions that
| many elected officials in the US government have, especially
| about the new cold war with China.
|
| It's worth noting that China spends more money lobbying the
| US government than any other country on earth:
| https://www.opensecrets.org/fara/countries
| DangitBobby wrote:
| My trust in US lawmakers practically no longer exists. Now
| whenever they make a questionable decision, the first thing
| I try to understand is who stands to make money off of it.
| If lawmakers have genuine policy opinions that's wonderful,
| but they have a big PR problem from decades of corruption
| to address.
| lolinder wrote:
| > Are US lawmakers that dumb?
|
| I posted the numbers as a top level comment here [0], but the
| short version is that a lot of the signatories of this letter
| received (small) donations from Intel in the last election
| cycle.
|
| My best guess is that Intel is actively lobbying against RISC-V
| using China as the boogeyman, and that these lawmakers were
| persuaded (sincerely or otherwise) to treat RISC-V as a threat.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38166311
| addicted wrote:
| I think the donations part of it isn't even that important.
|
| If you think about how legislation does (and can) work,
| lawmakers, even if they were the most gifted people on the
| planet, obviously are not experts on everything. As a result
| they have to rely on others.
|
| But who should those others be? When it comes to something
| like chip manufacturing, you're down to essentially 1 major
| U.S. company in this area that can provide guidance.
|
| One could argue they could go to academics, but a single
| academic is good for going deep into a specific area and not
| so good at cross concerns.
|
| And bringing together all those people is effort.
|
| On the other hand you have Intel that's got scores of
| researchers, marketing experts, and lobbyists who are
| basically giving you high quality data and information for
| free.
|
| Even without money and therefore outright corruption playing
| any role, companies like these have an outsized influence on
| lawmakers for absolutely practical reasons.
| lolinder wrote:
| Yes, while political donations in general are a concern to
| me, I think in this case the donations themselves are
| fairly innocuous. What the donations tell me is not that
| Intel bribed these representatives, it's that Intel
| identified these representatives as ones that would be
| particularly pliable to their _legal_ persuasion efforts.
|
| It's true that Intel has a lot of natural strengths for its
| lobbying efforts, but some representatives are going to be
| easier to persuade than others.
| ajross wrote:
| RISC-V is much more of a threat to ARM microcontroller
| vendors (STMicro, NXP, Atmel et. al.) than it is to Intel.
| There is almost zero overlap in products/markets between
| RISC-V and x86. Even as you go up the stack, vendors like ARM
| International would care first (as it impacts mobile SOC
| licenses). Frankly even Apple probably cares more than Intel
| does.
| lolinder wrote:
| Apple just switched to ARM away from Intel, and I'm sure
| Intel is very concerned others will follow their lead. If
| ARM is at risk from RISC-V, then Intel is as well,
| transitively.
|
| That there is zero overlap now does not mean it will stay
| that way, as Apple demonstrated so well.
| ajross wrote:
| Yeah, but there's no product. There's no RISC-V CPU
| targetted at laptop or datacenter users that Intel would
| be worried about, but there absolutely are from ARM
| vendors.
|
| So... how would hurting RISC-V, which _helps_ ARM, be
| good for Intel? It 's not. Pick a different boogeyman
| basically, Intel isn't the one here.
| lolinder wrote:
| There was no competitive ARM CPU targeting laptop or
| datacenter users either, until Apple up and made one.
|
| For Intel to ignore RISC-V right now would be to
| completely neglect the lessons of Apple Silicon. They
| appear to have waited until there was an actual product
| taking their market share before taking ARM seriously. I
| expect them to learn from that and not wait for a product
| this time.
| error503 wrote:
| ARM in the datacentre was somewhat of a hot topic for a
| while before Apple released their laptop CPUs; Amazon
| launched the first Gravitron to GA in 2018. Ampere
| launched publicly available ARM server CPUs in 2020,
| around the same time as Apple. Alibaba Cloud launched
| their instances based on their own CPU in 2021, as did
| Oracle (based on Ampere's CPUs).
|
| Given the years of engineering effort involved in getting
| any of these projects to release, this definitely looks
| like an industry shift, not something driven by Apple.
|
| Perhaps Intel's thinking here is that competition with
| ARM will drive innovation and cost-downs in that space,
| which will bleed 'up' and make their own competition's
| (mostly ARM) products even more competitive.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I don't know why you are fixated on looking at the market
| today.
|
| If ARM can scale up from cortex m-series to Apple M3 Pro
| Ultra Max... then why couldn't RISC-V?
| ajross wrote:
| But by that logic Intel should be lobbying the government
| to outlaw every CPU architecture, or every competing
| product, or... every product they might conceivably want
| to compete with. The same logic works for every product!
| Or every company! It's all specious.
|
| In point of fact, and I'll just say it again: this is
| dumb. Intel isn't remotely the most likely candidate here
| (again, my read is that on balance they'd love to see ARM
| competitors get some pressure on the other side). Trying
| to claim otherwise is just engaging in platform flamery
| nonsense. The logic doesn't work.
| fweimer wrote:
| Intel employees have been contributing RISC-V patches to GCC
| for quite some time, and continue to do so. Here's one from
| today: https://inbox.sourceware.org/gcc-
| patches/20231106141623.3076...
|
| Intel is also a member of RISC-V International:
| https://riscv.org/members/
|
| I get that Intel is a very big company, but that kind of
| disconnect would be rather extreme.
| darklycan51 wrote:
| It's so beyond dumb that they think this in any way is related
| to national security, this has the potential very literally
| create some huge troubles for the US in the future...
| olalonde wrote:
| It blows my mind that the US keeps treating China, its biggest
| trade partner, as an enemy. There is no way that China would ever
| initiate a war against the US. It feels like, if anything, this
| insistence on treating China as an enemy _increases_ risk for the
| US.
| trynumber9 wrote:
| The assumption is that they will initiate a real war against
| Taiwan at some point. The result of that assumption is to
| prepare by slowly phasing out trade where possible rather than
| waiting for it all to happen at once when they do invade.
| tbihl wrote:
| And the result of that preparation is that both sides are
| less entangled with one another and thus (theoretically) more
| ready to be at war with one another.
|
| Anyway, the chain of who-started-it doesn't have a first
| link. There is no value-free way to assess it all..
| TinkersW wrote:
| Repeatedly implying you will attack Taiwan is a pretty
| clear first link.
| olalonde wrote:
| Taiwan isn't a US state as far as I know. The US doesn't
| even recognize Taiwan as a sovereign state.
| throwaway626 wrote:
| The US has a clear interest in preventing reunification
| with the mainland, regardless of the island's legal
| status.
| tbihl wrote:
| It's true, the US sold Taiwan down the river to drive a
| wedge between USSR and PRC, then spent decades telling
| ourselves that PRC would become a nice, (post-Christian)
| liberal democracy if they just became rich enough. That
| didn't happen.
| derefr wrote:
| China would never _directly_ initiate a war against the US;
| China's long-term goals have nothing to do with militarily
| weakening the US, and are rather more focused on a global
| hegemony achieved by economically cornering emerging markets.
|
| However, there are a number of actions China could take against
| countries _other than_ the US, where the US would either feel
| obligated to initiate war against China in response; or where
| US _voters_ might _demand_ the US go to war against China in
| response.
|
| (And Chinese military analysts are very aware of all of these,
| drawing big red lines around these parts of strategy-space.
| Though they're also always _re-measuring_ where these lines
| land -- American public sentiment can waver such that today 's
| "unforgivable" action might be tomorrow's "barely tolerable"
| action.)
|
| There are also a number of actions China could take against its
| _own_ citizens, that could "require" the initiation of war
| against them according to various treaties signed by the US, or
| even according to "international customary law."
|
| Re: the Genocide Convention:
|
| > Importantly, the Convention establishes on State Parties the
| obligation to take measures to prevent and to punish the crime
| of genocide, including by enacting relevant legislation and
| punishing perpetrators, "whether they are constitutionally
| responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals"
| (Article IV). That obligation, in addition to the prohibition
| not to commit genocide, _have been considered as norms of
| international customary law and therefore, binding on all
| States, whether or not they have ratified the Genocide
| Convention_.
|
| (I.e. a country being clearly labelable as actively committing
| genocide, historically has been, and continues to be,
| justification for the initiation of a world war where all
| previously-neutral countries ally together to invade and stop
| them from doing this.)
| KRAKRISMOTT wrote:
| > _(I.e. a country being clearly labelable as actively
| committing genocide, historically has been, and continues to
| be, justification for the initiation of a world war where all
| previously-neutral countries ally together to invade and stop
| them from doing this.)_
|
| They are a nuclear armed state (since the 60s) with launch
| vehicles and submarines, nobody is going to go to war with
| them over their own domestic crimes. A land war in Asia
| against a nuclear armed emerging superpower with a good
| percentage of the world's population is practically suicidal.
|
| International customary law only matter if you have the
| firepower to back it up.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Look at the latest iteration of Army doctrine. It says it's
| meant to refocus us on being able to fight peer or near-peer
| nations. It's very clearly targeted at China alone.
| bluGill wrote:
| 15 years ago I would have agreed with you. However with XI in
| power and the way he is turning the country I no longer can
| agree. XI isn't stupid - he won't start a war tomorrow - but he
| is building up both the military power needed to start a war in
| 10 years, and the international political climate to make that
| less harmful to China if he does.
|
| Only time will tell of course, but right now I'm cautious about
| China as they may be willing to bite their trade partners in
| the future.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| The thing that blows my mind is that you're blaming the US for
| the situation. Google China's behavior in the South China Sea
| to get an idea of the problem. Or it using trade as retaliation
| against Australia, Lithuania and others. The list goes on from
| there.
|
| Trade with China has always thought to be a democratising
| force, instead US has funded is country that is aggressively
| arming itself against it and becoming a threat to a civil rules
| based international order. Your 'no way' sounds pretty naive
| when the evidence points to China walking the path to exactly
| that. They have stated in not so many words that they will
| invade Taiwan, and walk right up to that line on a daily basis,
| and when that happens China will be at war with the US and the
| west generally.
| tbihl wrote:
| >The thing that blows my mind is that you're blaming the US
| for the situation
|
| OTOH, the US should be blamed, since we backed the communists
| past KMT to victory in the civil war... Play stupid games and
| so on.
| zelon88 wrote:
| So correct me if I'm wrong, but you'll still be allowed to push
| public commits to a public RISC-V related repo, but you'll need a
| special government license to resolve issues opened by anyone
| related to China?
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| That's my assumption as well
| Qem wrote:
| People will need to publish commits in book form again, like
| the Phil Zimmerman did with PGP, to have freedom of expression.
|
| See: https://philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/BookPreface.html
|
| I'm picturing RISC-V processors being sold in boxes that are
| actually small bible-like books with ornate binding, full of
| paper printed source code, with small hollows inside where the
| chips fit.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| When discussing a highly technical issue such as this you have to
| be careful to use the correct terminology:
|
| This is some dumb shit.
| lolinder wrote:
| The numbers aren't large, but it's worth noting that 7 out of 18
| signatories of the original letter received donatations from
| Intel's PAC in 2022 [0]:
|
| Mike Gallagher: $6000
|
| Marco Rubio: $2500
|
| Haley Stevens: $2000
|
| Carlos Gimenez: $5000
|
| Darin LaHood: $7000
|
| Andy Barr: $2000
|
| Ashley Hinson: $10000
|
| Total: $34500
|
| [0] https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-
| pacs...
| rany_ wrote:
| I sure hope they aren't that cheap.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Buying politicians, other than the ones that are in the
| headlines every day, is astonishingly cheap.
| lolinder wrote:
| As I understand it, the donation is not the price of
| legislation, it's the price to get your foot in the door for
| additional lobbying efforts later.
|
| If a lobbyist connected to a donor requests a meeting, they
| get it, and if the lobbyist can then make a convincing enough
| case (preferably legally but sometimes otherwise) they can
| get action in their favor.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Headlines so weird, you have to click...
|
| I was thinking to myself, there's no way that someone's acting
| like it's 1988 again, and we have to embargo this from leaving
| the country for fear Saddam Hussein will use it to construct a 50
| megaflops supercomputer with which to pre-calculate artillery
| firing solution tables.
|
| Then I clicked, and it really is that dumb. Way to go Congress.
| tcgv wrote:
| While I strongly agree with the blog post and letter, I believe
| the letter would be more effective if it spent more time
| explaining how the proposed restrictions will most likely
| backfire, i.e., put the US in a less advantageous position to
| defend its dominance in CPU technology with regard to China.
|
| No politician or regulator would like to be labelled as someone
| who favored a foreign competitor country.
| m12k wrote:
| "Any barrier for US persons' participation will only slow
| American progress in developing and adopting this technology.
| It will have an effect opposite of that intended by lawmakers."
|
| Sounds like the letter/blog post already does make this point?
| tcgv wrote:
| It does. However, if this point were more central to the
| letter, it would have a greater impact on the reader. For
| instance, explicitly demonstrating the numerous ways in which
| American progress could be impeded, explaining how China and
| Chinese business owners could get ahead in RISC-V technology,
| and maybe drawing an analogy with the restrictions imposed on
| federal funding for stem cell research that affected the US
| in the global landscape [1], among other examples.
|
| Frequently, politicians prioritize their personal agendas and
| interests, so it's essential to thoroughly address those
| aspects.
|
| PS: I'm not a US national, so I'm only analyzing the topic
| rather than engaging in it.
|
| [1] https://hsci.harvard.edu/impact-federal-policy-global-
| compet...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > This has long been a trade-off of American innovation
| philosophy: we can freely exercise our First Amendment rights to
| share ideas, creating a vibrant intellectual exchange, even at
| the risk of others benefiting from reading our textbooks,
| journals and patents.
|
| Sometimes, we have to re-evaluate our positions. We cannot risk
| supplying our enemies with stuff they can turn around and use as
| weapons against ourselves any more. The sooner broader society
| wakes up and realizes that we, as collective Western nations, are
| _at war_ , the better. It may not be a "conventional" war yet,
| but that doesn't make it less dangerous!
| krispyfi wrote:
| Have you ever read "The Player of Games" by Iain M. Banks? We
| won't win by allowing the enemy to make us more like them.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > We won't win by allowing the enemy to make us more like
| them.
|
| I agree on that when it comes to a ton of the "anti terror"
| measures introduced after 9/11 because these are plain
| bullshit that don't do any objective good, other than annoy
| passengers.
|
| But regarding high tech capability? Not at all. We have to do
| everything we can to impede China's progress there, at all
| costs - because the cost of a Chinese victory would be
| outright catastrophic.
| MeImCounting wrote:
| "'War is a long cliff.' You can avoid the cliff completely,
| you can walk along the top for as long as you have the nerve,
| you can even choose to leap off, and if you only fall a short
| way before you hit a ledge you can always scramble back up
| again. Unless you're just plain invaded, there are always
| choices, and even then, there's usually something you've
| missed -- a choice you didn't make -- that could have avoided
| invasion in the first place. You people still have your
| choices. There's nothing inevitable about it."
|
| -Banks - who ought to be quoted more often, here and
| elsewhere
| kragen wrote:
| he said as he sent the japanese-americans to internment camps
|
| except you aren't at war, you're trying to start one
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > except you aren't at war, you're trying to start one
|
| I would rather like it for there to be _no_ war. The problem
| is, that decision is not mine, it is not ours to make - China
| and Russia did that for us, decades ago, when they decided to
| wage cyber warfare on us: the Chinese mainly in industrial
| espionage, and Russia in terms of propaganda and "ordinary"
| cyber crime. Unfortunately we didn't react on this, to the
| contrary we kept on doing deals with them - all while the few
| opposition in Russia and China got more and more silent or
| outright sent to the gulags.
|
| It was our inaction that allowed Xi and Putin to be where
| they are today, and the cost of stopping both of them got
| incredibly large as a result, like it tends to happen with
| deferring problems to the future. Or to put it figuratively,
| we stood there like a boxing sack while Xi and Putin punched
| in on us.
|
| Side note: The next one to watch on that front is India, IMHO
| - Modi has been going ever more authoritarian for years, has
| zero problem doing deals with Russia, and India is doing
| absolutely _nothing_ to rein in their scam callcenters that
| steal billions of dollars a year, and yet we don 't even take
| care to re-home at least parts of the pharmaceutical industry
| which is causing severe havoc as Europe, especially Germany,
| is dealing with a massive shortage of basic medicine.
| kragen wrote:
| falsely claiming that non-war activities such as propaganda
| are actually war, as you are doing, is an extremely common
| way to try to start wars, and has been for millennia
|
| you must think hn readers are astoundingly dumb
|
| i mean, we are, but not that dumb
|
| if you would like there to be no war, here are a couple of
| things you could try
|
| - don't try to dictate where rulers of foreign countries
| get to be or to stop them from ruling their own countries
|
| - don't exaggerate grievances like your industrial
| espionage nonsense
|
| like, let's suppose there's someone today posting on weibo
| 'It was our inaction that allowed Biden to be where he is
| today, and the cost of stopping him got incredibly large as
| a result, like it tends to happen with deferring problems
| to the future.' in chinese
|
| do you think that hypothetical post makes war more likely
| or less likely
| gumby wrote:
| Bunnie wrote this well by putting the important part right up
| front: "The request is facially misguided; any restrictions would
| only serve to reduce American participation in an important
| emerging technology".
|
| This is a problem the USA experienced (and was widely discussed)
| during the cold war. It's so discouraging to see this self-
| destructive approach being revived.
| pjmlp wrote:
| End of globalisation is coming, ironically forcing countries to
| invest into their technology stacks like during the cold war,
| with plenty of 8 and 16 bit computer clones to chose from.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Bunny's stance would have been reasonable if someone like Jiang
| Zemin or Hu Jintao was in power, but Xi is different.
|
| Not only has Xi blocked the West from accessing China's domestic
| market, but Xi has essentially helped end globalism and started
| decoupling with his foolish wolf warrior diplomatic policy and
| the belligerent nine dash line. Let's also not forget about Xi's
| invasion plans for Taiwan ie we're likely headed for war
| https://youtu.be/plHRRFHZ_f0
|
| You cannot ignore those issues if you want people to take your
| position seriously.
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