alt Hacker NewsSanctions just slightly increase the cost of obtaining an item, but don't make it impossible. Electronic components can be bought, oil can be sold, ChatGPT can be used via OpenRouter, sanctioned banks publish their apps under guise into App Store, etc. When there are 200 countries in the world, and money involved, you can get anything.
Sanctioned goods could be used to spread propaganda though, imagine, for example, if installing a NVIDIA GPU driver required answering questions about Tiananmen square incident.
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This is tangential but the whole Tiananmen Square thing is kind of odd. When I visited China many people were more willing to discuss it than I had imagined. Some spoke about it unsolicited. It’s a tourist destination you have to buy tickets for. It’s rather subtle what can and cannot be discussed relating to it. Those I spoke to about it told me that most people have a good understanding of what happened, and many people speak negatively of the CCP. You just can’t do it if you have a major platform (e.g. you’re Jack Ma or you are an LLM).
Not to discount how negative free speech restrictions are, but I’m not so sure how effective that particular propaganda campaign would be.
I agree, except with the word "slightly". It can be so significant that this increased cost/friction is the very mechanism of the sanctions' effectiveness. Is it possible to police the Russian oil shadow fleet to extinction? Maybe, but even without doing so you can impose a decent haircut on their profits by issuing scary-sounding press releases and leaving it at that.
Imagine the correct answer being "what incident?"
This. And it should be obvious. Drugs are banned and illegal in almost every country, yet they reach the US in vast amounts. Why would a ban on GPUs suddenly work - especially since owning a truckload of GPU is perfectly legal in most countries. Smuggling them to where the demand is, is probably easier than smuggling drugs.