The unity part is essential. If a project can't start and finish within a single electoral cycle, then you can be sure it'll eventually be deliberately hobbled for the party political headlines. In a US context, the only projects that can successfully bridge the electoral cycle are MIC projects - because there's political unity for them.

Chinese Quant firms were contacted by the government and told that they were dangerously close to being parasites in that they didn't produce anything useful while soaking up a ton of resources needed by the nation (eg electricity and mathematicians). The Quants had to find a way to justify their existence. How though? One decided to commit some of its compute and a lot of its brains to an AI project. The brains liked this very much because it was cutting edge interesting work rather than, well, parasitical financial engineering. That project was eventually spun-off and became DeepSeek.

Dangerous business to be in these days. Not a chance they'll ever receive another government grant.

...to drop the stupid car and focus on personal air transport - single passenger fully automated commute from home to the roof of your office.

You're welcome.

The chat shows and newspapers were full of it - what will we do with all our spare time with 40 years of retirement ahead of us? Those stories ended when the Cold War ended. From then on it was all about working until we drop.

The way things are going, tomorrow there'll be a story saying that China is engaging in unfair trade because it hasn't bought enough of our chips.

There's a retired diplomat from India who recently said that the US has been treating allies and enemies like this for 30 years - what's new is that Trump says it out loud instead of behind closed doors.

20 years ago, but now there are computers within the CPU & GPU. These on-chip computers provide remote management systems controlling the actual CPU/GPU and they DO phone home.

...find myself going hmmm to the things Marx said about capital vs labour.

It's something that the idealistic young rage about, then something they snort at when climbing the corporate ladder, and finally they look in the rearview mirror and see the patterns for what they are.

Select the excuse that won't get you sacked:

1. 1. It was "cyber espionage" by "state backed" "threat actors"
2. 2. I didn't patch it, shrug.

They were asking $800m for a file sharing service with revenue coming from serving an ad during downloads. 30 years too late. LOL.

Chinese companies were happily churning out 20nm chips for washing machines, then someone in Washington thought it'd be a great idea to sanction Chinese semiconductors for, um, reasons. The Chinese government noticed and within six months it rolled out a plan: By 2030 have a world leading full stack semiconductor industry using 100% Chinese owned IP from top to bottom.

Because of our sanctions in just four years we're going to have the world's undisputed leader in mass production churning out semiconductors in quantities and at prices that'll make semiconductor investment in the west a money losing proposition. The only solution for the west is to put up a wall preventing the import of Chinese semiconductors, but the problem is that the west no longer makes anything that the rest of the world can't get from China faster, cheaper and better.

The western semiconductor industry knows its in deep trouble.

Reinforcing your point, here's his IEEE writeup (ends 2008):

Research paper credits

Engineering credits

In case it's not clear, the "asian companies" are Japanese and Korean, not Chinese. The post-collusion strategy is to co-opt the regulators and hype the strategic sovereignty argument. Different strategy but with the same objective: monopolisation allowing the incumbents to charge more and supply less without fear of new entrants competing with them.