China made its first computer in 1958 and its first 1 megaflop computer in 1973, so yes, their nascence of computer programming preceded the Cultural Revolution, about 10 years after the West.
It was also a Cold War. My father-in-law and mother-in-law were both gifted mathematicians and mainframe programmers. She also designed CPUs. She is a sweet sweet person and a major badass. She is my hero. She’s in her 80s and was more accomplished in her 20s than you and I put together will ever be.
A generation of gifted, and hard working graduates emerged out of the bitter ashes of the cultural revolution. Their delayed entry to tertiary education and the circumstances behind it gave added impetus to their desire to study and gain knowledge.
I've met several across different disciplines and two (at least) in computer science and networking. When the barriers for travel came down, many studied and worked abroad, I met some in Edinburgh at the end of the 70s who worked in advanced language areas (think the foundations of ML) formal methods, CSP, you-name-it. People like these in networking (I subsequently know and worked with in governance contexts) built and led the chinese academic internet. These people are now senior academics in the Chinese academy of science. They're serious, smart people.
There was also a late 1970s VLSI boom in China. It's why they were so successful in the 80s and 90s outsourcing chip commercialization space.
So to my own knowledge if not "in" the cultural revolution certainly very rapidly afterwards assuming you take its run up into the 70s.
The Great Cultural Revolution were the Golden Age of PRC. The economy grew rapidly. If you had the Little Red Book, you could take a free train to join the Great Rally held at Beijing.
Hundreds of thousands of micro-computers had been built during that period. For example, there were many used in the textile factories. Workers there were encouraged to learn programming. They wrote programs to control the weaving machines.
After Capitalist Roaders seize the power through a palace coup, they told everybody that, the Great Cultural Revolution wrecked the economy. So most were ditched.
As programmer shortage emeraged in the 1980s, Capitalist Roaders start promoting "grab toddlers to computers".
I could believe it, the timespan should be 1966-1976, so maybe in late 70s. I know a lot of automation software was being written in my Eastern European socialist country in assembly language around 1974. I think mostly for 6800-based chips like probably MOS 6502.
That's always the case for through stations, I believe. However even terminus stations don't have their platforms locked to a fixed destination. Milan Central station has 24 platforms and each of them hosts multiple routes. Rome Termini has 32 platforms, same thing. You can monitor departures at this link, if you are very patient to keep track of them
I mean, most of my friends (especially the artists but also software devs) seem to hate AI with a passion: sometimes because of the ethical bankruptcy, other times because of the amount of slop it produces and how in your face it is due to the hype cycle, other times due to a belief that it more or less leads to brainrot and atrophy of cognitive abilities.
I'm really struggling with this one. I think AI (generative and not) is surely fascinating. I should by rights be all up in it. I could definitely get it, I don't think I'm stupid in terms of technology. Regardless of the damage the laser-focus on one thing might (or might not) be doing to rest of industry (and the effect on society, which to be honest, I am conflicted on if we can blame the technology). And yet so much of it is all so...tedious and fake somehow, and just even keeping up with headlines is exhausting let along engaging with every LinkedIn "next huge thing that if you don't do you should find a bridge to live under soon".
It's like that guy who tells you constantly how rich and cool he is. Bro, if you're that cool, let your cool speak for itself. But I'm not sure I want to lend you a grand for your new car.
It's all very much the crypto bubble all over again, at this point. Same hype, same "get in now before you're left behind" (this is almost a sure signal that something is an unsustainable bubble; sustainable growth doesn't require this type of scaremongering recruitment), same level of completely unrealistic promises, same grifters (in some cases, literally the same people).
Hating a tool? And software developers with emotions ? (I get it for the artists :-p)
In my opinion AI makes visible more structural issues that were always there, but we could ignore. People addicted to various stuff (being substances or social networks or watching sports), social communities disappearing (no more going to the pub, stay at home with your TV), growing inequality (because capital is not taxed as labor), strange beliefs (all the conspiracy theories, which existed before) and others.
Find a use for the new tool to improve the situation if you can, but I think that hating tools can lead you on dark paths.
The slop is real. Especially when I see promoters of platforms for vibe coders. They don't understand the implications of lack of security in potentially viral apps. It's easy to consider them as WMDs.
People have the same password across services. They share personal information. In a geopolitical climate as today's, where the currency of war is disruption, it can wreak havoc.
What does that mean? Like in a practical sense - russia declares war on ukraine… next step is? Move towards a multipolar equilibrium? How? How long does that take.
Yes ideally we’d live in a world where this bullshit doesn’t happen. But it does happen, so our choices are to respond with the tools we have NOW or not respond at all.
That aside, US electorates has decided to award another term for Trump. FYI at that point Trump is not an unknown dark horse candidate anymore and he even won the popular vote. Last time a GOP president won popular vote was 20 years ago.
So it's very fair to attribute the so called erraticness to what American want in general instead of attributing it to Putin or other non American.
>Xi admin remains petulantly opposed to what it derisively terms as "Welfarism"
The joke I heard that Xi welfare mindset is much closer to Reagan than other welfare states. However I say it's not entirely wrong. Freebies and welfare including very generous pension is really addictive policy and no electorates would be willing to sap them out much less going cold turkey.
The chicken will come home to roost when it's time to upgrade your tech, industry or infrastructure but you don't have adequate capital to do that.
While there are issues with populism induced freebies, China's social welfare spent is anemic for the size of economy it is.
Almost all social welfare has been devolved to the state level, but state level spend and incentives are overwhelmingly spent on large capex projects that align with larger initiatives (eg. the EV price wars with dozens of SoEs jumping into the fray despite the overwhelming majority of the Chinese EV industry being won over by private sector BYD).
That's tens of billions of dollars of capex per province just on one initiative that has turned into a price war that is forcing central level intervention. It's the same misaligned incentive structures that lead to the construction boom and bust in during the 2015-20 period, the overzealous Zero COVID enforcement, and the subsequently haphazard end to Zero COVID.
Most provinces are heavily indebted and lack a robust enough capital market to raise from in the way you can get local and state bonds in the US, or municipal bonds in much of the EU.
The Xi admin's policies is the equivalent of America having Reaganism during the 1950s-80s. Reaganism was bad for the US, but at least the US had a higher human capital by the 1980s thanks to New Deal (1930s-1950s) and Great Deal (1960s-70s) policies for a generation.
The kinds of people who had sympathy for solving spatial inequality in China are no longer represented after Li's passing, and this kind of petulant opposition to welfare expansion with no data to show otherwise is what will trip up China longterm if something does not change in the next 3-5 years.
The kinds of policies being pushed by the Xi admin currently are similar to those from a decade ago, yet China is a much older society than it was 10 years ago, and as I pointed out elsewhere, a society where the median household is much poorer than it's peers at GDP per capita (and even significantly below in the case of Thailand).
This is the same point the Economist article is getting at - a country where 10-20 million people are earning European and American level salaries but with almost half a billion people with Indian or Vietnamese levels of household incomes is an underperforming society if spending cannot be unlocked because the bottom half of society is saving heavily for a rainy day due to a limited to nonexistent social safety net.
And now that most of China is at Thailand level ages, there just isn't much room for convergent development using an export model.
If a social safety net expansion comparable to the Great Deal isn't initiated by 2029-30, I truly cannot see how a 4-5% GDP growth rate can be sustained over a long enough time period to converge with a Japan, Korea, or Western Europe, let alone the US.
They do provide a safety net but you have to move into the cities. They can't afford to build a comparable one for the rural areas too as rural productivity is too low and they can't realistically induce skilled people to move into impoverished rural areas.
Even the urban safety net is gated behind getting an urban hukou which has income requirements and stable residency requirements - both of which are difficult for the bottom half of society becuase of the chicken-and-egg situation. But the added issue is migrants on a rural hukou do not want to give up their rural hukou because oftentimes this means losing the right to any rural landholdings they may have - which for someone earning Yuan 2,000 to 4,000 a month doing gig work on Meituan is basically their only appreciating asset if the local prefecture decides to say expand a road or create an LGFV and thus entitling them to some (relatively) decent compensation.
This is the crux of the issue. There are very table stakes reforms that the central and provincial can conduct to help alleviate inequality, yet the bulk of spending is essentially expended on capex investments or subsidizes, which while great for building high value industries aren't generating a significant number of jobs because those industries require a college education.
No provincial government will work on expanding a social safety net without it becoming a priority at the Central level because everyone wants to climb the ladder, and there just isn't much fiscal leeway to expand that without central intervention.
> They can't afford to build a comparable one for the rural areas too as rural productivity is too low
That didn't stop Thailand or Malaysia. They might not have the same GDP per capita as China, but the median household disposable income of both is significantly higher (1.5x in the case of Thailand and 2.5x in the case of Malaysia).
Unlike both Thailand and Malaysia, the central government in China has much more leeway to expand the welfare net if it was a priority.
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