Huawei launches first laptops using home-grown HarmonyOS (opens in new tab)

> I would never buy a Chinese tech device, you are buying a surveillance system to allow its government to spy on you.

There is no public evidence that Chinese consumer tech has ever been used to spy for the Chinese government. None. Meanwhile, the USA has been caught running mass surveillance programmes like PRISM and tapping the phones of its own allies. That is confirmed. And yet it is the USA making the most noise, spreading fear about Chinese tech. People only seem to worry when the device doesn’t have a US brand on it. You can be a patriot, but don’t be naïve. Believing unproven claims while ignoring confirmed facts is not critical thinking.

  > Still, I would never buy a Chinese tech device, you are buying a surveillance system to allow its government to spy on you.

i would tend to agree in general, but more and more this seems less the sole domain of chinese tech the way things are going (though maybe im just paranoid)

> you are buying a Chinese surveillance system to allow the Chinese government to spy on you

ftfy

> opportunity cost

What was the opportunity cost in this equation? A substantially smaller bailout for their commercial real estate market?

> [The idea is to make them spend resources developing their own technology] on our terms (emphasis added)

What terms did we dictate? Timelines? Trade?

How does America or the West emerge ahead here?

> They were always going to do this, they just had to do it faster than they otherwise wanted to, which has an opportunity cost.

It will pay itself and offset those costs once they reach breakeven and start selling their equal or better tech in the international market, displacing the incumbents.

what a lot of people don't get about china is their tech sector is build on intense internal competition; its a specific goal of the industrial policy....

Modern microkernels deliver stability, security, performance (look it up if you want the details). Back when I did CS we were talking about this as the next big thing in operating systems. It didn't happen - common operating systems instead expanded in scope, started to include things like a web browser and supporting a gazallion pieces of hardware, rather than trying to "do things right".

The game changer part is of course in terms of the broader tech war. What we have here might be a consumer operating system that is technologically better than what is on offer from Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Built by a vilified Chinese company.

The hurd never moved beyond Mach, a pre-liedtke microkernel.

Unless it does, it is unlikely there'll ever be a year of the hurd desktop.

Statements like this are just lazy justifications, born out of the desire to reinforce a certain world view, rather than genuine effort to understand.

Much has already been said about why Huawei is not simply a state apparatus, so I won't repeat that. The point I rather want to make is this: having a factually wrong image of the counterparty is dangerous, especially if you view the counterparty as an enemy (justified or not).

If you care about advancing your material interests, then you might want to emulate what you believe makes the counterparty successful (in this case, the belief that they're a state apparatus). But when you find out that the emulation yields bad results because your image of the counterparty was wrong in the first place, you will have wasted a bunch of time and resources. It's in your interest to get your world view right the first time aroubd.

This is an interesting comment.

It makes me wonder why the Pentagon, with a US$1 trillion budget and being a critical piece of the US state apparatus, could not create a solution like that in recent years.