I'm from New Zealand (and live there again now), but I've traveled in Ukraine a little, including Dnipropetrovsk (as it was still called at the time in 2014), previously I believe the largest "closed city" in the USSR and the place a lot of aerospace technology was made. The other previously closed city I've been to is Chernogolovka, not far (20km) from "Starry City". My ex-gf (1996-2004) grew up in Chernogolovka before moving to NZ in 1994, her parents were chemical engineers there. Now the town is perhaps best known for a line of soft drinks.

I worked on compilers & JITs for Samsung R&D in Moscow from July 2014 to March 2018, living there from April 2015. I visited old friends/colleagues there at New Year 2020.

I don't intend to visit Russia again any time soon, for obvious reasons, but I'm thinking about spending some time in Odesa (and spending my remote-working salary there) as soon as it is practical.

I've been following democracy in Ukraine, and the fight against the left-over USSR culture of corruption, for a long time. Here's a video I captured (at home in NZ) from a webcam in Ukraine showing my friend Natalia voting in Kryvyi Rih (where I spent a week in 2014) in the October 2012 elections.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tbGrcqHKFY

Ok, that's a very long diversion from the topic. Just want to show I didn't suddenly become an expert on Ukraine or Russia or UA/RU relations on February 24 2022 )))

> Systems, you mentioned, are from my view, something in best case 2017 year desktop technology on steroids for West

The SG2042 is very much like the Graviton 1 that went into production (A1 instances) at AWS in November 2018, just over five years ago. The biggest difference is the SG2042 has 64 cores while the Graviton has 16. The C910 and A72 cores are very similar designs.

Note that the RISC-V instruction set did not yet officially exist until July 2019, and it takes around five years to design a CPU core and get it into a chip in a system, you can buy.

MUCH faster RISC-V SBCs using the SG2380 are coming out late this year, at Arm A78 level. That doesn't exist yet in Arm SBCs. The first A76 RK3588 boards were in around May 2022, and the Raspberry Pi 5 arrived at customers in bulk only around 2-3 months ago.

When the SG2380 arrives later in the year RISC-V will be less than 2.5 years behind ARM.

Sure, both are behind Intel and AMD at present. That's going to change by about 2026. There are multiple companies in the USA with Apple M* level RISC-V chips under development, several of them employing senior ex-Apple designers, and all of them with a lot of people with recent Intel and AMD experience.

Btw, I also have access to an Elbrus, which I've experimented with, so I've got some idea about them too. I also had many colleagues at Samsung who previously worked on Elbrus compilers at MCST.

    Mac-mini:~ bruce$ ssh elbrus
    brucehoult@sumireko:~$ uname -a
    Linux sumireko 5.4.0-6.9-e8c2 #1 SMP Mon Mar 6 23:32:47 MSK 2023 e2k E8C2 Elbrus-MCST GNU/Linux
    brucehoult@sumireko:~$ head /proc/cpuinfo 
    processor       : 0
    vendor_id       : Elbrus-MCST
    cpu family      : 5
    model           : 9
    model name      : E8C2
    revision        : 2
    cpu MHz         : 1200
    bogomips        : 2400.00
    
    processor       : 1
    brucehoult@sumireko:~$ date
    ?? ???  7 08:10:41 MSK 2024

"I am from an ex-Soviet city too, by the way."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20322435

EDIT: forgot to mention that Moscow is not a typical Russian city. You won't make a big mistake if you consider it a separate country. Whatever you observe in Moscow is specific to Moscow only. The state of the roads/public transportation across the country at large is (reportedly) not much better than it used to be in USSR (on average).

Not, like, some part of it, but almost all of it.

But putting politics aside, Moscow itself is actually a gem — at least, it was before the war (now when many bright people have fled the country, I guess it is no more). It is a vibrant, dense, high-tech, urbanist city. The problem is that it is basically (and maybe also St. Petersburg) is the only livable city in Russia. The wealth centralization in Russia is just incredible. Even within Moscow itself it follows the same centralization pattern — the only livable districts in Moscow are the central ones, all peripheral is trash.

So that Tucker Carlson guy basically enjoyed that tiny 0.01% of Russia that is actually cool (and serves as a showcase for foreigners), but hey, how about the rest 99.99%?..

P.S. couldn't read the whole article, it is under the paywall.

A foreigner will say, but St. Petersburg is an important port city. How could the main road link between the port and the capital be in such a sorry state? The answer lies in the Russian way of doing things. Russia has an excellent train network, and goods mainly travel from the port to the capital by train. Roads serve those areas which are not important enough to have trains, so when you take a road trip in Russia, you are choosing to travel off the beaten track in the back of beyond. Charming and full of natural beauty, but also full of poverty just the same as you would see on an indian reserve in the USA. Only the natives live in such places in Russia, clinging to the traditional way of life of their ancestors. You look at these people and see white faces like those of you and your neighbors and you are confused because you are used to seeing brown faces on the aboriginals. But in Russia, the white faces ARE the aboriginals, living in this land since before the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago when all of Europe was under a thick sheet of ice.

Russia is a very big place, and the government cannot afford to spend its money everywhere and anywhere. In order to make Kazan and Sochi into modern cities that are productive and desirable places to live, they have to neglect some other places. In a vast territory that means that most of the villages are neglected. But there are lots of people who like it that way because they want to live in the forest, breathe fresh air, collect mushrooms and berries, etc. It is their traditional way of life since time immemorial.