Comments by "Siana Gearz" (@SianaGearz) on "Asianometry"
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@ffls775 There's a large semiconductor industry, yes, automotive, industrial, power semiconductors, sensor devices, specialised stuff. But maybe a little too focused on legacy products and a little aging if my impression is correct? A lot of these are long running products though that don't change all that much decade by decade, new engineering insight has been drying up because the product is well polished, and the well-worn processes are better than fresh ones for a number of things. Legacy customers too, the likes of Toyota and Aisin don't necessarily like change. But just go ahead look through product catalogue of Toshiba semiconductor, Rohm and Renesas, these should be the largest ones. A number of smaller companies are now in Taiwanese hand but should still be manufacturing in Japan i guess.
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@tomlxyz There was a shortage incoming. There hasn't been enough capacity provisioning to meet demand medium term. Even without the bursts in demand due to work-from-home and crypto boom(s), the capacity would run out shortly anyway, maybe not in late 2020, but in just a couple years. Every year, people need slightly more flash storage, more cloud servers, more this and more that, now fridges have computers too for some unfathomable reason.
Overprovisioned capacity is, to an extent, a good thing. Sure it just costs money when it's not needed, but not having capacity when it's urgently needed can be even more devastating. Whole industries depend on this capacity being present.
Besides, the big growth cycle right now isn't actually that big relative to the existing size of the industry.
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Oof that topic. Unfortunately the research is reeeeally shaky, and the public understanding of it is even worse. Odds are, if you've heard of microplastics, the only thing you've heard is that you eat 5g worth of plastic every week in form of microplastics. It seemed like it required a little explanation to me, so i followed where it came from.
The figure actually comes from a private report done to the WWF Singapore by scientists of University of Newcastle AU. Then, WWF produced pamphlets with the wording that people "could be ingesting approximately 5 grams of plastic every week on average".
Subsequently the scientists, Kala Senathirajah et al produced their own paper with the underlying methods and conclusions. The paper has two halves basically, first they estimate the number of particles an average human ingests, and the sources and pathways of it, it's meta-study or a survey of existing research and it's actually pretty good, it comes up with a figure of 2000 particles a week with a confidence window of an order of magnitude.
Continued in the next comment because i'm running out of comment length.
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Continued...
The second half of the paper estimates the weight then, by fitting different solid shapes of up to 1mm in size (wat) to the number of particles, and... well it's really a load of handwaving at that point. The study authors themselves give their confidence range of between approximately 0.1g/week and 5.6g/week, with their best-effort estimate being 0.7g/week. And given their methods, i think they are undercounting their confidence interval, i think it's much worse than that, with several orders of magnitude of actual confidence. Really with existing data, no good statement could be made on how much plastic in terms of weight one ingests. That WWF chose to run with a 5g figure should tell you something. They presumably requested this estimate and then they took something near to the upper bound and ran with it, it's purely a scare tactic to drum up more funding. Which i'm a little ambivalent on, given yeah more funding is needed; but i wouldn't entrust WWF with it. It erodes the public trust into science and eco activism both, since it's fundamentally a dishonest tactic; someone at WWF will pat themselves on the back for a successful campaign, for winning a battle, while edging closer to lose the war.
I also think lack of good weight data is not entirely a coincidence, due to limited relevance of bulk weight of small particulate, as environmental erosion and chemical interaction are surface based. For weight, what you want to know is how much (macro)plastic you put into the ocean, and that's hardly a secret. Microscopic surface estimates are difficult, but particle count might just be a good enough proxy. Just not for weight. Like you request useless data, you get useless conclusions.
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I do think the world, especially US&Europe has done a MASSIVE mistake by not treating the disease in the first few weeks as if it was exceptionally dangerous and super deadly, just to err on the side of caution, a very temporary true zero case goal. Maybe it could have been stopped dead in its tracks and we would have avoided the whole everything that followed. This is something i advocated back in Feb-March 2020 but i'm a nobody, i decide nothing, and indeed i have no relevant professional background or advanced knowledge, but then, it's not like politicians put epidemiologists in the driving seat on this either; i saw no opportunity that it could have worked several months later as the situation developed.
In turn China having to deal with the issue now, is from it being reimported from the rest of the world. Developing world got it from the first world, and there it kept mutating and couldn't be stopped.
As to longer term policies, i don't have a strong definitive opinion. It pains me to see people die, and it pains me that some people are so dumb as to bring themselves and people they encounter in easily avoidable increased danger; but the even semi lockdown state with limited freedom is also insanely depressing and has consequences as well, as it goes on for months and years.
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I don't know for certain, but as far as i can see here from Europe, diminishingly little or not at all? Chinese semiconductors and rest of the world are like a semi permeable space, like, Chinese stuff has some availability (some product lines are canned) but all the US, Euro, JP, even Taiwan companies have pretty much ZERO availability of trailing edge chips. Chinese electronics companies use Chinese stuff and classic global stuff, after all they learn from the rest, non-Chinese companies use non-Chinese stuff almost exclusively, with very little spilling in, say via Diodes Inc acquisitions and this and that, but really nothing all too important there. These days people around the globe are starting to familiarise themselves with Chinese domestic chips in part even just to have an alternative available, and Chinese companies are starting to write English datasheets more than they used to.
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I don't see GPUs being obsolete in near future.
What happened with soundcards is that they grew ever more complex, synthesizers, gaming 3D audio, all the stuff. Actual processing power. But then, CPUs outran them and it made more sense to just integrate a simple dumb soundchip on the mainboard. By the way, Intel killed HD Audio interface (i2s multichannel + i2c command) that was used previously, now onboard audio is USB. I actually find that exciting, maybe we'll see Crystal (Cirrus Logic) or Burr-Brown return. Crystal is gearing up for sure.
Now, CPU progress is slowing down, but GPUs are still trending up in performance, growing with software (game) requirements, into monsters which far outstrip the power budget of the CPU package. Memory interface of the CPU is unfortunate for them too. For sure i see a possible distant future where everything is an SoC, but not yet, not in the next 5 years. Anyone who says they can see longer than that into the future probably lies.
Now main GPU uses besides game are crypto and AI, and these are of course just waiting for ASICs to catch up.
But indeed as far as standard office computers, laptops as well, no need for a dedicated GPU, but been that way for decades.
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