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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1886 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 18, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Here is one for you - Chinese failures. We write a lot about china successes in the culture war topic and it is not undeserved. But what about the other areas - that are structural, important, the government is keen on them succeeding, but they fail. So far the only thing that comes to my mind is civilian aerospace. They are way behind, rely on western parts, doesn't seem to be able to be waned off them and everything is way behind schedule. And that in a moment in which the lead times for delivery of aircraft approach 10 years. The market is hungry, China wants to provide, but they can't.

Software.

China is so ahead on physical manufacturing and speed of deployment that it's easy to forget that they're bad at software.

Granted, everyone is bad at software, except the US, and even then only arguably. But with China, the mismatch between increasingly higher tech manufacturing and deficits in software is incredibly obvious.

In theory, the need to get everything past the CCP to get approval should allow for greater proliferation of unifying standards. In practice, software is such a kludge and such a mess in practice that the kind of outside-the-box innovative thinking and creative problem solving America kind of selects for by design is quite lacking.

I hear good things about their AI labs right now, but in terms of what normal, everyday people engage with, I think their software is terrible.

That, and their website UI is designed around entirely different principles than the rest of the world, principles I find completely atrocious. The fact that it works for them somehow kind of blows my mind a bit.

Can you elaborate a bit? Because at the current year of the lord almost every user software that is not open source is utter shit or in the process of turning to shit fast. The software on the chinese devices is as crappy as the one on the rest.

And to me it seems that they are quite capable of writing industrial software for their own needs.

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