Letter from Shenzhen(logicmag.io)
logicmag.io
Letter from Shenzhen
https://logicmag.io/04-letter-from-shenzhen/
63 comments
Sorry but just because an article or opinion piece does not make censorship the central point of an article does not mean it is a piece of propaganda. I've been to China, while many people are certainly annoyed by the control, most seemed to be so for purely pragmatic reasons. "It hinders business, I can't get what I want", and so forth. Rarely have I seen someone go into a lengthy speech about government overreach or free speech. You simply should recognise that this is fairly low on the list of priorities of people in the country, most just want to get on with their lives. We should allow people to talk about the Chinese tech ecosystem without having to pay their due to Western audiences in the foreword.
The ubiquity of smartphone consumer technology is portrayed fairly accurately. You really can do almost anything with your phone in almost any place (although I can't speak personally about rural areas, I've heard people mention it a lot, especially in the last tow to three years.)
The open source edge that China has is primarily in hardware, not software, especially in Shenzhen. The knock-off culture allows you to bring something to the market or have something manufactured in virtually no time at very low cost. It is still primarily a manufacturing city rather than a services city, although that seems to be changing.
The ubiquity of smartphone consumer technology is portrayed fairly accurately. You really can do almost anything with your phone in almost any place (although I can't speak personally about rural areas, I've heard people mention it a lot, especially in the last tow to three years.)
The open source edge that China has is primarily in hardware, not software, especially in Shenzhen. The knock-off culture allows you to bring something to the market or have something manufactured in virtually no time at very low cost. It is still primarily a manufacturing city rather than a services city, although that seems to be changing.
> Rarely have I seen someone go into a lengthy speech about government overreach or free speech.
It's almost like people who live under constant monitoring by a totalitarian government understand that trash-talking that government can quickly get them into trouble.
It's almost like people who live under constant monitoring by a totalitarian government understand that trash-talking that government can quickly get them into trouble.
I'm talking about personal conversations, including conversations abroad.
You're displaying a patronizing attitude. Values differ between countries, not everyone who disagrees with your fundamental priorities of what constitutes good governance is somehow too afraid to speak the truth.
You're displaying a patronizing attitude. Values differ between countries, not everyone who disagrees with your fundamental priorities of what constitutes good governance is somehow too afraid to speak the truth.
> Sorry but just because an article or opinion piece does not make censorship the central point of an article does not mean it is a piece of propaganda.
Very true. However, I didn't claim that censorship should be the central point of the article. I simply noted that it was barely mentioned at all.
> Rarely have I seen someone go into a lengthy speech about government overreach or free speech.
I'm not really sure what this demonstrates -- this can hardly be surprising in a country which provides no way for ordinary citizens to participate in government, has no history of its citizens doing so, and actively discourages them attempting to. That being said, it's certainly believable that freedom is not high on the list of priorities for the average Chinese citizen, but again, I never said that it was.
> We should allow people to talk about the Chinese tech ecosystem without having to pay their due to Western audiences in the foreword.
Another refutation of a claim that I never made.
As to the rest of your post, I agree! I've spent some time in China and was really amazed at how connected it was and how much could be accomplished with just a phone. I was mostly in the cities, but I also went out to the countryside and for the most part everything just worked, and everyone had WeChatPay and AliPay :)
Very true. However, I didn't claim that censorship should be the central point of the article. I simply noted that it was barely mentioned at all.
> Rarely have I seen someone go into a lengthy speech about government overreach or free speech.
I'm not really sure what this demonstrates -- this can hardly be surprising in a country which provides no way for ordinary citizens to participate in government, has no history of its citizens doing so, and actively discourages them attempting to. That being said, it's certainly believable that freedom is not high on the list of priorities for the average Chinese citizen, but again, I never said that it was.
> We should allow people to talk about the Chinese tech ecosystem without having to pay their due to Western audiences in the foreword.
Another refutation of a claim that I never made.
As to the rest of your post, I agree! I've spent some time in China and was really amazed at how connected it was and how much could be accomplished with just a phone. I was mostly in the cities, but I also went out to the countryside and for the most part everything just worked, and everyone had WeChatPay and AliPay :)
Problem is, while you can get most of the hardware documentation you'll need from the vendor you buy your chips from (despite them not technically being allowed to redistribute it), you generally can't recompile radio baseband software for that 3G SOC you just bought, leaving you with something that can't be customized at its core. Want to optimize radio wakeups to increase battery life on your device? Good luck, you'll need to rewrite the baseband yourself!
I think the benefits of open source in the hardware space aren't perfectly analogous to software. As you point out, due to the fixed and somewhat opaque nature of hardware, changing hardware yourself is far from trivial, what the Shenzhen ecosystem does allow for however is faster iteration within the market itself.
More steps of trial and error within shorter time, more things are being recycled, more people get their hands on designs and so forth. This doesn't always directly make things more customizable, but it does increase the pace at which the ecosystem moves.
More steps of trial and error within shorter time, more things are being recycled, more people get their hands on designs and so forth. This doesn't always directly make things more customizable, but it does increase the pace at which the ecosystem moves.
The problem I see is that those iterations are constrained to not touch core parts of the hardware due to the lack of code and documentation being out there in public. Working with existing SOCs in different ways than their manufacturers ever thought possible is pretty common, many in the Linux-Sunxi community have pushed the envelope on how little power some SOCs can use, made possible in part by hardware features like a tiny, slow, power sipping RISC core that was on most Allwinner chips but was never leveraged before.
They have a great firewall? Wow, I've never ever heard about that one before. Please tell me more!
....because every time you report on something positive going on in China you have to enumerate every single negative thing they do or ever did to impose how far superior we still are and completely burry what the article was actually about.
Just imagine every time some article about startups and silicon valley pops up there's someone in the comments going "but what about Guantanamo bay!"
....because every time you report on something positive going on in China you have to enumerate every single negative thing they do or ever did to impose how far superior we still are and completely burry what the article was actually about.
Just imagine every time some article about startups and silicon valley pops up there's someone in the comments going "but what about Guantanamo bay!"
The sarcasm here isn't necessary. I wasn't claiming that it was the author's duty to educate the reader about the Great Firewall, government censorship and invasion of privacy, copyright law in China, or anything else. Obviously, most everyone reading this is aware of those things at least to some degree. But leaving them out of any serious discussion of the differences between the technology economy of China versus the US is a glaring omission.
This is especially true when it seems to be simply ignoring elephants in the room, such as in the oblique references to security/privacy or copyright law, or claiming that talking about censorship is "unfashionable". For another example, the article spends a good deal of time talking about WeChat, one of several unicorn technology companies which, while certainly it's been very innovative in its history, likely only exists in large part due to the blockage of Facebook and Twitter.
This isn't knee-jerk sinophobia, this is pointing out some pretty obvious holes in the discussion here and speculating as to the reason for them. Of course, the overall tone of the article is rather fawning, but this is Hacker News so that's nothing out of the ordinary.
This is especially true when it seems to be simply ignoring elephants in the room, such as in the oblique references to security/privacy or copyright law, or claiming that talking about censorship is "unfashionable". For another example, the article spends a good deal of time talking about WeChat, one of several unicorn technology companies which, while certainly it's been very innovative in its history, likely only exists in large part due to the blockage of Facebook and Twitter.
This isn't knee-jerk sinophobia, this is pointing out some pretty obvious holes in the discussion here and speculating as to the reason for them. Of course, the overall tone of the article is rather fawning, but this is Hacker News so that's nothing out of the ordinary.
I wouldn't call Shanzhai open source, its generally much more akin to being where you can obtain documentation on hardware (and the proprietary software stacks they run) from the same vendor on the street you bought the device from with no NDAs or other paperwork.
There is no way for the end customer to rebuild these blobs and make a blobless Mediatek phone for example, the best your going to get is creativity around the edges, where extra parts and separate bits of software are tacked on after the fact. Honestly, if more of these products shipped with source code, they'd be much easier to secure and extend, but that lesson has yet to come to pass in China.
There is no way for the end customer to rebuild these blobs and make a blobless Mediatek phone for example, the best your going to get is creativity around the edges, where extra parts and separate bits of software are tacked on after the fact. Honestly, if more of these products shipped with source code, they'd be much easier to secure and extend, but that lesson has yet to come to pass in China.
> It has become unfashionable to talk about censorship and surveillance in many intelligentsia circles in China
Uh... "unfashionable" is one way of putting it, yes. Perhaps the word "dangerous" would fit better. -.-
(You can get disappeared for being too uppity on such topics.)
Uh... "unfashionable" is one way of putting it, yes. Perhaps the word "dangerous" would fit better. -.-
(You can get disappeared for being too uppity on such topics.)
It's like the #1 rule of fight club.
> the time it takes to create, design, or build a new product decreases day by day
This part really struck me. Outside of building websites, it feels like the opposite has happened in the US over the past 30 years or so.
This part really struck me. Outside of building websites, it feels like the opposite has happened in the US over the past 30 years or so.
This is the most incredible thing about China. The numbers are very clear: there are about 10_000 companies are being formed each day in China [1]. The government is actually investing heavily in these new firms and they receive all kind of economic, political and social support. Meanwhile in the US and much of the West new firm formation continues to plummet [2] and labor fluidity has collapsed leading to stuck wages [3].
You can see by the comments in this thread how much this state of affairs frightens people and of course all positive news out of China must be propaganda. It's unfortunate but all signs indicate this will likely continue until it's too late and Silicon Valley finds itself on the outside looking in.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13793288
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/business/economy/startup-...
[3] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/feds/2016/files/2...
You can see by the comments in this thread how much this state of affairs frightens people and of course all positive news out of China must be propaganda. It's unfortunate but all signs indicate this will likely continue until it's too late and Silicon Valley finds itself on the outside looking in.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13793288
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/business/economy/startup-...
[3] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/feds/2016/files/2...
Definitely not. I've been building hardware since I was in middle school and it has never been easier than it is now.
What has happened that may make it seem that way is that the things people want to build are far more complex than 30 years ago. But even accounting for that, the level of effort is far less now.
What has happened that may make it seem that way is that the things people want to build are far more complex than 30 years ago. But even accounting for that, the level of effort is far less now.
For a companion piece I highly recommend this hour long vid by Wired about Shenzhen. It's worth your time: https://youtu.be/SGJ5cZnoodY
Things that stood out to me was the maker mindset was so prevalent and competitve that it had filtered down to the buyers. So someone cobbles together some new widget for their phone and starts to sell it. Other people see it selling a nd copy it, but they make modifications. Shoppers see it for the first time and decide they want one with a purple strap, so they shop around until they find it or find someone who will make it that way.
This is where the hoverboard fad bubbled up but also how and why it "flamed" out. I think it's a fascinating testbed for technology and creativity and economics.
Things that stood out to me was the maker mindset was so prevalent and competitve that it had filtered down to the buyers. So someone cobbles together some new widget for their phone and starts to sell it. Other people see it selling a nd copy it, but they make modifications. Shoppers see it for the first time and decide they want one with a purple strap, so they shop around until they find it or find someone who will make it that way.
This is where the hoverboard fad bubbled up but also how and why it "flamed" out. I think it's a fascinating testbed for technology and creativity and economics.
How can an outsider leverage this spirit to get something manufactured? I’ve got some stupid products that I just want to exist, things in the hover board vein, but haven’t found anyone who I can work with to take the idea to small batch manufacturing and get it tested in a marketplace. When I recently tried ordering custom sized rolls of paper tape from various Chinese manufactures of paper products, I ended up going with a company in the states because it was simpler to coordinate requirements and they didn’t require a hundred thousand roll minimum run
The truth is that it is hard as a foreigner. It is sort of like if you wanted to leverage Silicon Valley without speaking English or having a degree. Things are "leaking" out of Shenzhen from time to time, but it is still a pretty isolated from the west.
In addition to the Wired documentary I would also recommend bunnie's blog and Strange Parts.
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4266 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw
In addition to the Wired documentary I would also recommend bunnie's blog and Strange Parts.
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4266 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw
Censorship and surveillance kills enthusiasm and entrepreneurial spirit. China is about to put the clamps on what is driving their success and growth, it was only a matter of time. Totalitarianism will always kill itself.
It doesn't. If anything China is teaching the world that it is perfectly possible to have thriving entrepreneurial spirit under censorship and surveillance. This would be hard to accept for people in western world but we are learning that not only democracy is overrated but also freedom of expression is not the pre-condition for the economic progress. Historically, we have had several authoritarian regimes where science, art and economy flurished and freedom of expression was limited. In fact, virtually all regimes before 1600s would fall in to this mold. The Grand China Experiment is showing cracks in our dearly help beliefs and frankly its quite scary.
What kind of "censorship" though? Wouldn't excessive patent laws and lawsuits be a kind of censorship?
By that token, the average Chinese person is more free than they would have been 50 years ago. I don't think people realize how restrictive China was back then and how free they are now.
Sure, they still have a long way to go, but to say that they are getting "less free" is incorrect.
Ask any Chinese if they would rather live under Mao vs living now.
By that token, the average Chinese person is more free than they would have been 50 years ago. I don't think people realize how restrictive China was back then and how free they are now.
Sure, they still have a long way to go, but to say that they are getting "less free" is incorrect.
Ask any Chinese if they would rather live under Mao vs living now.
Why do you think this will happen? Why isn’t China the counterexample?
Maybe it is really capitalism, not democracy, that determines the long-term success of a society. That’s bad news for people who care about freedom, but it might be true.
Maybe it is really capitalism, not democracy, that determines the long-term success of a society. That’s bad news for people who care about freedom, but it might be true.
I think comparing this culture to open source is doing a disservice to open source.
"Open Source" in the West has developed a code of ethics around transparency, crediting authors, and contributing back. A lot of it is done without compensation out of joy.
Fly-by-night companies that just scrape together a bunch of ideas and parts from competitors and ship an MVP are not "open source". They're a proprietary startup. Moreover, some companies are deliberately selling fraudulent products, including those harmful to human health.
Secondly, while the scanning of cards and displaying of Facial database entries might be impressive to you (the author), you know what's impressive to me? That the Japanese operated the first Shinkansen in 1964, and since that time, there's been effectively zero accidents due to manufacturing flaws or human error in routine service. When the Shinkansen is late or early by a few seconds, it is national news.
Copying technology is easy, copying safety culture is much more difficult. How likely is it that all of the fancy investments in surveillance databases and wireless entry for China's trains, will also have deeply invested in the same quality assurance that the Shinkansen has?
One of the problems the author doesn't mention is the 差不多 culture that leads not to just copying, but lazy copying of the originals. I once looked at buying a Chinese brand of Louboutin-like shoes for wife, until I read dozens of online reviews about how the stitching or glue came out after a few weeks. However, the manufacturer bragged about how they studied in Italy and adopted Italian techniques of hand stitching.
There are a few brands these days that have evolved and have adopted a safety or quality culture, DJI for example, is a standout example of a Chinese company innovating on brand, quality, industrial design, fit-and-finish. I think China may need a much stronger domestic legal tort system and a few class action consumer lawsuits under it's belt, before a lot of the snakeoil is cleared away.
(And yes, there are a lot of snakeoil companies in the US shipping MVPs and broken products. It's a matter of degree though. This is present in many countries, but for example, I would trust a Japanese manufacturer over an American or Chinese manufacturer.)
"Open Source" in the West has developed a code of ethics around transparency, crediting authors, and contributing back. A lot of it is done without compensation out of joy.
Fly-by-night companies that just scrape together a bunch of ideas and parts from competitors and ship an MVP are not "open source". They're a proprietary startup. Moreover, some companies are deliberately selling fraudulent products, including those harmful to human health.
Secondly, while the scanning of cards and displaying of Facial database entries might be impressive to you (the author), you know what's impressive to me? That the Japanese operated the first Shinkansen in 1964, and since that time, there's been effectively zero accidents due to manufacturing flaws or human error in routine service. When the Shinkansen is late or early by a few seconds, it is national news.
Copying technology is easy, copying safety culture is much more difficult. How likely is it that all of the fancy investments in surveillance databases and wireless entry for China's trains, will also have deeply invested in the same quality assurance that the Shinkansen has?
One of the problems the author doesn't mention is the 差不多 culture that leads not to just copying, but lazy copying of the originals. I once looked at buying a Chinese brand of Louboutin-like shoes for wife, until I read dozens of online reviews about how the stitching or glue came out after a few weeks. However, the manufacturer bragged about how they studied in Italy and adopted Italian techniques of hand stitching.
There are a few brands these days that have evolved and have adopted a safety or quality culture, DJI for example, is a standout example of a Chinese company innovating on brand, quality, industrial design, fit-and-finish. I think China may need a much stronger domestic legal tort system and a few class action consumer lawsuits under it's belt, before a lot of the snakeoil is cleared away.
(And yes, there are a lot of snakeoil companies in the US shipping MVPs and broken products. It's a matter of degree though. This is present in many countries, but for example, I would trust a Japanese manufacturer over an American or Chinese manufacturer.)
Go ahead and keep dismissing them as copycats, or thieves, or snake-oil salesmen while they continue to get better and better at what they are doing. By the time you realize what is really going on, they will have already won.
> When the Shinkansen is late or early by a few seconds, it is national news.
By the way, I was on a pretty late shinkansen last year and it was not on the news. And there have been accidents, including a derailment, although the safety record is excellent overall. There are also examples of pretty bad accidents on the local Japanese trains caused by drivers taking risks in order to avoid being late. Why are you exaggerating about the competence of the Japanese rail system?
> When the Shinkansen is late or early by a few seconds, it is national news.
By the way, I was on a pretty late shinkansen last year and it was not on the news. And there have been accidents, including a derailment, although the safety record is excellent overall. There are also examples of pretty bad accidents on the local Japanese trains caused by drivers taking risks in order to avoid being late. Why are you exaggerating about the competence of the Japanese rail system?
I didn't dismiss them, as I pointed out, there are examples of exemplary Chinese companies that have innovated, and at high quality (e.g. DJI) They are getting much better, but Shenzhen's get rich quick MVP culture isn't how the Germans or Japanese got to high quality products, and it isn't open source ethos. Most of the stuff being produced is not being done with the goal of sharing with others, it's being done for rapacious reasons.
No one's exaggerating the competence of Japanese rail, look at the safety record of the Shinkansen going back to 1964, it is the best in the world. Corner cutting in Chinese manufacturing is well known, as it is today. Yes, it will get better in the future, just as the US started out as an IP thief stealing from Britain and corner cutting in the US is still a problem, but the way it improved is by having a rigorous, transparent legal system and regulatory framework, so that bad actors who defraud the community can be punished.
If you're a Western company manufacturing something in China, and you literally don't have boots on the ground locally to oversee quality control, what's the probability you production runs will have bad yields or other problems that will be hidden and covered up, or that you'll be ripped off and receive relief if they mess up, or worse, that if your product becomes a success, it own't just be stolen in the middle of the night? Are we just going to say "oh, that's open source, if some guys raid your factory in the middle of the night and you find some of your cutting machinery missing in the morning?"
This isn't about pooh poohing the accomplishments of Shenzhen, it's about hoping for the judicial and regulatory framework to mature, so if that if say, someone sells your kid a gadget with flaky lead paint, someone somewhere will get sued and not abscond off to a Yacht with their money parked in a overseas shelter. Silicon Valley isn't perfect, but if Apple sells me a phone that gives my kid cancer, you can be sure they'll be taken to court. Or if I hire a guy in SV to work on my product, and he downloads the entire software, quits, and then opens up a shop to sell a copy of it the next week, he'll probably be going to jail.
We don't rely on 关系 here, we rely on legally enforceable agreements to hold people accountable and increase trust. To me, the ICO bubble exhibited the same problems. Fly by nights springing up, most of them copies, some with completely fake businesses, taking in a bunch of customers, and then delivering either something shoddy, or disappearing with the money.
No one's exaggerating the competence of Japanese rail, look at the safety record of the Shinkansen going back to 1964, it is the best in the world. Corner cutting in Chinese manufacturing is well known, as it is today. Yes, it will get better in the future, just as the US started out as an IP thief stealing from Britain and corner cutting in the US is still a problem, but the way it improved is by having a rigorous, transparent legal system and regulatory framework, so that bad actors who defraud the community can be punished.
If you're a Western company manufacturing something in China, and you literally don't have boots on the ground locally to oversee quality control, what's the probability you production runs will have bad yields or other problems that will be hidden and covered up, or that you'll be ripped off and receive relief if they mess up, or worse, that if your product becomes a success, it own't just be stolen in the middle of the night? Are we just going to say "oh, that's open source, if some guys raid your factory in the middle of the night and you find some of your cutting machinery missing in the morning?"
This isn't about pooh poohing the accomplishments of Shenzhen, it's about hoping for the judicial and regulatory framework to mature, so if that if say, someone sells your kid a gadget with flaky lead paint, someone somewhere will get sued and not abscond off to a Yacht with their money parked in a overseas shelter. Silicon Valley isn't perfect, but if Apple sells me a phone that gives my kid cancer, you can be sure they'll be taken to court. Or if I hire a guy in SV to work on my product, and he downloads the entire software, quits, and then opens up a shop to sell a copy of it the next week, he'll probably be going to jail.
We don't rely on 关系 here, we rely on legally enforceable agreements to hold people accountable and increase trust. To me, the ICO bubble exhibited the same problems. Fly by nights springing up, most of them copies, some with completely fake businesses, taking in a bunch of customers, and then delivering either something shoddy, or disappearing with the money.
To those that are unfamiliar with the Chinese terms,
- 差不多 culture (Chàbùduō) = Fail Fast, Fail Often Culture
- rely on 关系 here (Guānxì) = rely on the old boy network here
- 差不多 culture (Chàbùduō) = Fail Fast, Fail Often Culture
- rely on 关系 here (Guānxì) = rely on the old boy network here
I don't think "差不多" means "Fail Fast, Fail Often".
差不多 literally means "not much difference". It's usually used by Chinese workers to dismiss shortfalls in quality/quantity that are, in their view, inconsequential. I'm also not sure it's prevalent enough to be a "culture", though I remember reading several-year-old blog posts about it.
差不多 literally means "not much difference". It's usually used by Chinese workers to dismiss shortfalls in quality/quantity that are, in their view, inconsequential. I'm also not sure it's prevalent enough to be a "culture", though I remember reading several-year-old blog posts about it.
I think of it as a guy building a shelf. He hangs the shelf, puts a level on it, and it's clearly not level, but only off by say, 2 degrees. Job done. Pay me. I won't mention to the person who hired me that it's off-spec.
To be fair, this happens all the time in the US, that's why we have building codes, building inspectors, etc.
To be fair, this happens all the time in the US, that's why we have building codes, building inspectors, etc.
Where did they dismiss them? What’s with the attitude?
I think Shanzhai in many ways is a better representation of the hacker spirit than open source these days. Many successful open source projects are essentially copies of other software, including things like Linux and Git. It is only these days, when people get paid to work on open source and abandoning things on Github is more the rule than the exception, that copying has become a bad thing.
Shanzai doesn't benefit me if I have to reverse engineer competitors. The point of open source is that forking is not a bug, it's a feature. All of the clones of Linux used to make other distributions or products are in fact, the whole point of the enterprise.
Now, which Shanzai company is openingly publishing their source, Solidworks files, EDA assets so I can quickly fork their problem and make a slight tweak and ship a new version? Yes, it's in the hacker spirit, in a sense, because hackers basically find whatever things necessary to glue together a solution. But it is not in the spirit of say, the Homebrew computing club, or other famous hacker communities that kicked off the computer revolution, because these clubs actually shared their designs and intended for other people to be able to build their own.
My point is, someone who is making a product by taking someone else's product, cloning most of it, changing a few bits, and then selling it, without publishing their changes so that others can replicate it, is not doing open source, and they are a more of a 'Hustler' than a 'Hacker', when I take the definition of Hacker to mean in the sense of Steve Levy's _Hackers_, or say, Richard Stallman, or the members of the Homebrew Club of the 70s and 80s. (or the modern Maker movement)
To what extent, are Shenzhen hackers documenting their methods, publishing their sources, and assisting others to replicate what they've done? I see a lot of fly-by-night entrepreneurial activity, attempts to get rich quick, and while that is needed activity, I want to see more evidence of a culture of sharing information and being community minded before I'd be willing to say it is equivalent to the open source movement or old-skool hackers.
Now, which Shanzai company is openingly publishing their source, Solidworks files, EDA assets so I can quickly fork their problem and make a slight tweak and ship a new version? Yes, it's in the hacker spirit, in a sense, because hackers basically find whatever things necessary to glue together a solution. But it is not in the spirit of say, the Homebrew computing club, or other famous hacker communities that kicked off the computer revolution, because these clubs actually shared their designs and intended for other people to be able to build their own.
My point is, someone who is making a product by taking someone else's product, cloning most of it, changing a few bits, and then selling it, without publishing their changes so that others can replicate it, is not doing open source, and they are a more of a 'Hustler' than a 'Hacker', when I take the definition of Hacker to mean in the sense of Steve Levy's _Hackers_, or say, Richard Stallman, or the members of the Homebrew Club of the 70s and 80s. (or the modern Maker movement)
To what extent, are Shenzhen hackers documenting their methods, publishing their sources, and assisting others to replicate what they've done? I see a lot of fly-by-night entrepreneurial activity, attempts to get rich quick, and while that is needed activity, I want to see more evidence of a culture of sharing information and being community minded before I'd be willing to say it is equivalent to the open source movement or old-skool hackers.
Open source isn't necessarily a big thing in DIY cultures. They might be cloning something, but they are cloning it for their own process. Even if you could get the design files chances are you couldn't produce it especially not in low numbers. It is more like, say, GNU vs. BSD.
I like maker culture, but it can also be disappointing. A lot of it is just selling breakout boards and components at huge markups.
I like maker culture, but it can also be disappointing. A lot of it is just selling breakout boards and components at huge markups.
> It is more like, say, GNU vs. BSD.
Not really. Both GNU and BSD projects publish their source, so others can pick it up and reuse it with minimal effort.
From this article, it doesn't seem like these hardware people are really doing the hardware equivalent.
> I like maker culture, but it can also be disappointing. A lot of it is just selling breakout boards and components at huge markups.
Agreed.
Not really. Both GNU and BSD projects publish their source, so others can pick it up and reuse it with minimal effort.
From this article, it doesn't seem like these hardware people are really doing the hardware equivalent.
> I like maker culture, but it can also be disappointing. A lot of it is just selling breakout boards and components at huge markups.
Agreed.
Maybe it was a bad example. What I mean is that GNU and BSD are implementation of similar things in different ecosystems. The same is often true of tooling and libraries for different programming languages.
I don't think it is really possible describe the difference in a few paragraphs. In open source, as was said, "forking is not a bug". But what is forked is only the source code, not the project. You are still dependent on whoever has the most mind share in that project. Things like Shanzhai is about forking the project and making it on your own terms.
You can argue that open source encourages mindless copying. If you fork a large project you are using their chosen language, build system, code design, project structure, maintenance schedule etc. Yes, you can have your own project, but it is hard to compete in the sense of actually having control. Especially if the project is being run by people who get paid by companies to work and you can't really make money on the activity yourself.
That is my point on the hacker spirit vs. open source. If the homebrew computer club would have been happy with getting schematics to some mainframe and making plug-in cards, history would probably look a lot different. And yes, I think the hacker spirit and open source overlaps. It just isn't necessarily the same thing.
I don't think it is really possible describe the difference in a few paragraphs. In open source, as was said, "forking is not a bug". But what is forked is only the source code, not the project. You are still dependent on whoever has the most mind share in that project. Things like Shanzhai is about forking the project and making it on your own terms.
You can argue that open source encourages mindless copying. If you fork a large project you are using their chosen language, build system, code design, project structure, maintenance schedule etc. Yes, you can have your own project, but it is hard to compete in the sense of actually having control. Especially if the project is being run by people who get paid by companies to work and you can't really make money on the activity yourself.
That is my point on the hacker spirit vs. open source. If the homebrew computer club would have been happy with getting schematics to some mainframe and making plug-in cards, history would probably look a lot different. And yes, I think the hacker spirit and open source overlaps. It just isn't necessarily the same thing.
I think the parent is saying that the spirit of open source doesn't mean you eschew safety or best practices, but that's what you see in Shenzhen's extreme capitalism.
There are no safety regulations and competition is fierce so people can and will cut corners.
There are no safety regulations and competition is fierce so people can and will cut corners.
If anyone would like to learn more about shenzhen, I have two youtube channels that I like to watch about China. I personally have been to China many times, both rural and modern, and it definitely feels like a different world unlike any other country I've been too
Video sources I like to watch:
Strange parts:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw
Seprenztra (the first western youtuber in china)
https://www.youtube.com/user/serpentza
Video sources I like to watch:
Strange parts:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw
Seprenztra (the first western youtuber in china)
https://www.youtube.com/user/serpentza
I ran an embedded design startup there for a few years, often times I could not push the changes back to the git server(via ssh, openvpn,etc) in USA, basically for small companies there is no guaranteed way to do internet-based development across the pacific ocean, it sucks and I bailed out, you don't really know how painful when you need git-push/git-pull/rsync the most while all you got is tcp-reset/connection-disconnected!
The author of this article makes several claims about how you can get an item remixed by the local shops and how you can skip over the marketing of a major western brand and just buy things almost fresh off the line.
I don't doubt the fact that you can by things in obscure Chinese labels claiming they are from a certain brand, we do that here in my country where mall shops will sell you "original" products that skipped over any official Samsung/Huawei/Etc. vendors. But this entirely just headphones, chargers, batteries, etc.
I'd really like to believe Shenzhen is a place where I can get an existing product remixed with any oddity I'd like but I also want to see a proof of that. Everything that these people ship out overseas to developing countries that resell their products no questions asked are selling smartphone accessories.
I don't doubt the fact that you can by things in obscure Chinese labels claiming they are from a certain brand, we do that here in my country where mall shops will sell you "original" products that skipped over any official Samsung/Huawei/Etc. vendors. But this entirely just headphones, chargers, batteries, etc.
I'd really like to believe Shenzhen is a place where I can get an existing product remixed with any oddity I'd like but I also want to see a proof of that. Everything that these people ship out overseas to developing countries that resell their products no questions asked are selling smartphone accessories.
To me, Shenzhen is simply an orchestrated end-run around the intellectual property of others, with the government looking the other way. While the efforts there are not without sophistication, that sophistication is a small fraction of that intrinsic to the “borrowed” technology.
Scrolling was painful on my iPad Pro.
Is Huaqiangbei still a good place to go to find products for white label or is it basically tapped out now?
This article has almost nothing to do with Shenzhen.
Just an FYI, several of the images in the article are unreasonably large (>3000 pixels on the long side). It's really unnecessary, too - they just don't hold up to close inspection. We're talking like ~20 MB total.
Yes I couldn't read the page due to this issue.
ug, this site disabled the fucking arrow keys. Do you want me to turn off Javascript? Because that's how you get me to turn off Javascript.
fuck people who do this shit.
fuck people who do this shit.
Please not here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
They haven't disabled the arrow keys, you just have to focus on the content area (e.g. by tabbing to it), since only that <div> is scrollable, rather than the full body.
Yea, fuck people who provide free content.
Use a script blocker like uMatrix if it upsets you so much.
Use a script blocker like uMatrix if it upsets you so much.
It never even mentions the Great Firewall (unless I missed it?) and only barely mentions the security and censorship issues involved in writing software in China, even claiming that the reason it’s difficult to talk about security and privacy is because “so much of the grand technological experiment in China is still unfolding.” Right; I’m sure that’s the main reason.
The article also breathlessly mentions that “there are still parts of the rural US without cell phone service, places where you feel untracked and like you might disappear. Yet even in one of the poorest provinces in China, QR codes will follow you from towns to villages.” Even if you assume that’s something that everyone wants, to ignore the implications of having that technology available in a highly invasive police state is irresponsible (in my opinion).
Finally, I thought the line that “its strength is in extreme open-source, which stands in stark contrast to the increasingly proprietary nature of American technology“ is completely laughable in a country as notoriously insecure as China and in an era when use of open source software is probably at an all-time high in the US.
(Edit: added newlines for clarity)