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>> No. 20811 Anonymous
14th June 2016
Tuesday 1:35 am
20811 Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp6F_ApUq-c

It is really impressive. Would be nice to have something similar in the UK. All we are really known for is finances based in London.
Expand all images.
>> No. 20813 Anonymous
14th June 2016
Tuesday 3:33 am
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Really interesting video. Having said that, I'm not so sure we should or indeed could compete with China in manufacturing. The sheer supply of cheap labour they have just makes that impossible.

It's not true that the UK is only known for finance (though it is a disproportionately large slice of the pie). We have a large number of high-end software and electronics companies located in and around London, Cambridge and Edinburgh in particular, in part due to connections to the universities in these locations, many of which are world-leaders in their industries. To give one example, a number of UK companies are leading the way in cloud computing and virtualisation technologies currently. As far as I'm aware, China is not a leading competitor in these areas.

Another recent example is British steel. The Welsh steel was not competitive with China at all despite best efforts, in part due to labour differences and exacerbated by the large transport costs involved (most of the iron ore has to be imported, which is hugely inefficient). Contrast that to the high-end steel industry around Sheffield that produces hardened steels using a variety of metallurgical processes, and is still going strong because China simply isn't competitive at the high-end of the market.

Ultimately, we cannot compete with China in the areas it dominates, but then again we don't need to.
>> No. 20814 Anonymous
14th June 2016
Tuesday 12:16 pm
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>>20813

>Really interesting video. Having said that, I'm not so sure we should or indeed could compete with China in manufacturing. The sheer supply of cheap labour they have just makes that impossible.

Not really. It's a trade-off between labour and capital. Cheap labour is an important factor in low-tech, low-value manufacturing, but it isn't significant at the high end. Foxconn is laying off workers at a drastic rate because of rising wages in Guangdong and improvements in automation.

There are much cheaper places than Shenzhen to find low-skilled labour. Factory workers in Shenzhen earn more than twice as much as those in Sichuan or Jiangsu, and three to four times more than most workers in Bangladesh or laplanderstan.

Shenzhen dominates because of logistics. All the skills and materials you need are available on your doorstep. As mentioned in the video, what takes a month in the UK takes a few days in Shenzhen.

China poses a substantial threat to western tech firms, because they are quickly moving up the value chain. Companies like Xiaomi, Lenovo and Huawei are directly competing with western businesses on their own terms. China isn't just making stuff any more - it's developing and marketing products directly to consumers. The high end of the market that the west relies on is constantly shrinking as Chinese companies invest in R&D, training and automation.

This is most visible in completely new markets like drones and e-cigarettes. China dominated these sectors from the outset, cutting western firms out of the market completely. Someone buying a drone neither knows nor cares that DJI, Walkera and ImmersionRC are headquartered in Guangdong, they just know that those companies make the best products. Even if the cost of labour in China and America was completely equal, western companies wouldn't stand a chance in these markets - they don't have the speed and agility to compete.
>> No. 20815 Anonymous
14th June 2016
Tuesday 4:57 pm
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>>20814
Completely agree on the logistics front, again this is the reason why Welsh steel isn't profitable when other countries can have foundries close to supplies of iron ore and coke (the fuel not the drink).

But this is all related to hardware, to manufacturing actual physical pieces of tech. The tech industry is much more than just hardware though, and the areas the UK and other western countries dominate tend to be further towards developing high-level software, and the associated testing and support. It's true that China may be catching up with their own R&D but their still a long way behind western R&D going on in companies, universities and institutes. We dominate in everything from condensed matter physics of chip design right up to algorithm design and implementation. Why else do you think so many Chinese students travel halfway across the world to get a degree from a UK university as opposed to Chinese ones?

As a result, the high-end is not shrinking but shifting as we are able to push higher into areas the Chinese are still miles behind on, such as virtualisation, whilst they're playing catch-up.
>> No. 20816 Anonymous
14th June 2016
Tuesday 5:15 pm
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>>20814
Another thing that just occurred to me is quantum computing. A lot of the research for possible technologies for qubit design and quantum algorithms is coming out of UK universities at the moment, even though it is mostly large American multinationals like IBM and Google who are leading the way on creating functional quantum computers. A lot of people are rightly skeptical about the possibilities of quantum computing, but there's no denying the remarkable progress (pic related - Google's D-Wave has shown up to 10^8 times speedup using quantum computation).

If and when such large numbers of qubits can be stabilised for long enough to perform serious computation, the UK and other western nations will be at the forefront of quantum algorithm design.
>> No. 20817 Anonymous
14th June 2016
Tuesday 6:25 pm
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>>20815

>Why else do you think so many Chinese students travel halfway across the world to get a degree from a UK university as opposed to Chinese ones?

Because their parents are rich and they aren't clever enough to get into a Chinese university, for the most part. China doesn't have enough university places to go around, so admission is highly selective.

Very few Chinese families can afford to send their kids to Britain International fees for a three year degree are typically around £50,000 plus living costs. Only about 0.5% of Chinese students come to the UK.

Chinese students going abroad are far from the cream of the crop. They are notorious for cheating, often using ringers to take their entrance tests and write admissions essays. China is much better at detecting and preventing cheating than most foreign universities.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/03/how-sophisticated-test-scams-from-china-are-making-their-way-into-the-us/474474/
http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-cheating-iowa/
>> No. 20818 Anonymous
14th June 2016
Tuesday 6:44 pm
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>>20817
>Because their parents are rich and they aren't clever enough to get into a Chinese university

Sorry to break it to you, but the highest rated Chinese university in The Times' World Rankings is Peking at 42. The UK alone has seven higher ranked unis, including three in the top 10. The lion's share of the remaining places above Peking are taken up by the US and rest of Europe.

Chinese research and higher education has come on leaps and bounds but you don't seriously expect people to believe that Chinese students are choosing Oxbridge, Imperial, UCL etc. over Peking and the rest because their entrance requirements are any less stringent?

Cherry picking examples of Chinese students cheating at tests is not going to convince me. As for the University of Iowa, that is ranked below 200 so it's not like Chinese students are winging their way into MIT or Harvard.
>> No. 20819 Anonymous
14th June 2016
Tuesday 7:32 pm
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>>20815

On the broader topic of R&D, I think you're flatly wrong. China outspends the whole of the EU on R&D by a considerable margin. It could be argued that Britain gets better value for money, but I think you have to look at the long-term trajectory rather than just the present. China's R&D spending doubled between 2008 and 2012 and is forecast to double again by 2020.

I think we severely underestimate the scope of Chinese R&D for a number of reasons. They tend to focus on practical, late-stage research rather than more glamorous but less commercially relevant research. A large proportion of their research output is published in Mandarin and is rarely translated, because the Chinese are fine with the west being unable to read it. There's also a pipeline issue - an increase in spending today might take a decade or more to manifest itself in research outcomes.

China is also perfectly prepared to do things that would be unethical or illegal in the west. Perhaps most significantly, eugenics isn't a dirty word over there. The Beijing Genomics Institute is one of many organisations openly working towards intelligence-selective IVF; they are very, very close to having a marketable service. Neither the government nor the population at large have any significant ethical objections to this. We know that China has been engaged in human breeding programmes for years.

I, for one, welcome our eight foot tall genius overlords.
>> No. 20820 Anonymous
14th June 2016
Tuesday 7:43 pm
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>>20818

There are some Chinese students at elite Western universities, many of whom are fully deserving of their places. That isn't to say that those students are representative of the broader trend.

I have qualms about the relevance of the Times rankings. For example, Tsinghua ranks at 47th, but that's not how a Chinese student would see it - graduating from Tsinghua essentially guarantees you the offer of a prestigious government job. Tsinghua is considerably more selective than any Western university by any reasonable measure.
>> No. 20821 Anonymous
14th June 2016
Tuesday 8:27 pm
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>>20819
The thing with Chinese R&D is it's mostly a by-the-numbers paper churning machine. Much like the rest of their industries really, they focus on sheer scale and not on really pushing the envelope on the cutting edge. By not translating many of their papers and isolating themselves from the rest of the world's research they are not doing themselves any favours.

>>20820
I think you've got the wrong end of the stick mate - the majority of Chinese students are heading here precisely for our elite universities. At Cambridge and Oxford Chinese students vastly outnumber any other group of international students, because their secondary education is second to none but their even the best of their up-and-coming universities lack the pedigree of ours. On the other hand, nobody's going to travel halfway across the world to read Media Studies at an ex-poly.

As for using the Times rankings, they are one of the most respected out there. Of course the precise order varies depending on which rankings you use and which year you look at but the trend is pretty much the same - the QS rankings place Tsingshua at 25th which is admitedly high, yet there is only one other in the top 50.

On the subject of Tsingshua, I'm not sure that its graduates securing jobs with the Chinese government is a particularly strong indicator of its success on the world stage. Over here, it's nowhere near as well respected as elite universities from the US or Europe and has produced only two Nobel Laureates, both back in the 50s, compared to about 70 from the UK since then. If you can think of a fairer way to compare universities globally then I'd love to hear it.
>> No. 20822 Anonymous
15th June 2016
Wednesday 9:20 am
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>>20821

>On the other hand, nobody's going to travel halfway across the world to read Media Studies at an ex-poly.

No, they take Business Studies instead.

I don't really have a dog in this fight, but it's important to remember that as well as genius Chinese students coming to our best universities, there are plenty who will happily come to any of them.
>> No. 20823 Anonymous
15th June 2016
Wednesday 10:03 am
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>>20811
In but I think out is likely. More fool me for thinking Dave could run a campaign. What a shambles In has been.
>> No. 20824 Anonymous
15th June 2016
Wednesday 3:50 pm
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>>20822
OK. From my personal experience it seems that there are greater numbers of Chinese students coming to the top UK universities compared to others, but it's hard to find data on this. The best I found was percentages of total international students by university, in which there is a trend towards higher ranking universities having higher proportions of international students. The correlation is relatively weak because of course there are many other factors involved, however the p-value of the data is about 7E-7 so the trend is very unlikely to be down to chance.

While it's still possible that there are a number of rich Chinese students coming here because they have a better chance of getting into a university, it doesn't appear to be the broad trend. Furthermore, even if it was it doesn't change the fact that at the very top end UK universities are still ahead of those in China both in terms of teaching and research quality, and the associated impact on UK industry from these world-leading universities and institutes is what gives us an edge.
>> No. 20825 Anonymous
15th June 2016
Wednesday 5:25 pm
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I think there's a cultural aspect to it as well - British degrees are perceived as prestigious in China, even if it's a degree from a grotty ex-polytechnic. British universities are quite happy to take Chinese (or other foreign non-EU students) as they can multiply their tuition fees and still be guaranteed plenty of applicants.

Or at least, that was how it was explained to me by a Chinese student I used to live with.
>> No. 20826 Anonymous
15th June 2016
Wednesday 6:30 pm
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>>20824

what uni is the huge outlier up top?
>> No. 20827 Anonymous
15th June 2016
Wednesday 6:51 pm
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>>20826
It's the University of Buckingham - one of the UK's few private universities. They don't receive UK government funding and their course fees are higher than the £9k standard at many other UK unis. Whilst international students pay more than home and EU students, the difference is less than at most other unis, which is presumably why their proportion of international students is so high.
>> No. 20828 Anonymous
15th June 2016
Wednesday 7:26 pm
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>>20824

It's worth noting that Chinese students underperform compared to other international students or UK residents. 52% of non-EU students got a 2:1 or better, compared to 42% of Chinese students. While that isn't conclusive, it does support the hypothesis that Chinese applicants to British universities aren't being entirely honest about their academic ability.

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/apr/15/chinese-students-in-uk-poor-results
>> No. 20829 Anonymous
15th June 2016
Wednesday 8:01 pm
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>>20828

I studied in China at a prestigious university of theirs. Half of their students had n fucking clue what was going on.

Rotten to the core.
>> No. 20830 Anonymous
16th June 2016
Thursday 9:32 am
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>>20814 As mentioned in the video, what takes a month in the UK takes a few days in Shenzhen.

This confuses me a bit - there are plenty of quick-turn prototyping shops in the UK. Prices are higher (because of labour, property and materials costs, I'd guess) but the services all exist. There are also hackerspaces and the like where you can do your own prototyping using shared machines.
Shenzhen is nicely set up, and has this mystical (from a distance) aura, but it's not somehow fundamentally different. Maybe local companies need to make their presence and availability known a bit more? (Thinking- the scale offered by Shenzhen may be the real advantage. You _know_ that you can get <thing> made fast, because even if your favoured shop is too busy, there are a hundred more available, wanting your business. Maybe that's the fundamental difference?)
Hax looks like a good plan - but I wonder how much of their advantage is from being away from distractions - you've flown out and have a clock ticking, as well as the resources.
>> No. 20831 Anonymous
16th June 2016
Thursday 10:56 am
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>>20830

>The scale offered by Shenzhen may be the real advantage.

More or less. The local economy is entirely geared towards manufacturing, so there's plenty of capacity for everything. It's the people as much as the product. If you need ten design engineers or 200 trained assembly workers, you can hire them in a couple of days. It's not just PCB manufacture but injection molding, CNC machining, connectors, production fixtures and test equipment. There are hundreds of suppliers of everything, all vying for your business.

Component availability is also a big factor. In the west, a lot of stuff is unobtanium unless you're a large company and can jump through a lot of hoops. In Shenzhen, you can get the latest ARM SoC, a high-res AMOLED or a Sony CMOS biked to your office in a couple of hours.

If you haven't been to Shenzhen, it's hard to get your head around how big it really is. It has more than twice the population of London; the broader metropolitan area has a population of ~50m and Hong Kong is within commuting distance. There are millions of people employed in the electronics industry.

The electronics markets are a geeky fever dream, like something you'd see in a cyberpunk film. Endless labyrinths of trade, thousands of tiny booths selling everything and everything. There's constant hustling everywhere you look. Guys on motorbikes piled high with boxes of components, scything through traffic to sort out an urgent shortage. Kids playing on the floor while their mother counts out huge trays of DRAM chips or MicroSD cards.

It's something you feel in your gut. The frenetic pace, the overwhelming scale. A vast sea of humanity who eat, sleep and breathe the electronics business.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBtRJc-z05k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc1mSApO2jM
>> No. 20832 Anonymous
16th June 2016
Thursday 12:41 pm
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I'm in Shanghai at the moment fellow Britlads. Come to China before the UK decides to leave stay in the EU. Its the fabled promised lands of Hong Bao, Guanxi, Riminibi and La Du Zi.
>> No. 20833 Anonymous
16th June 2016
Thursday 1:21 pm
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>>20832
How's the pollution? I was considering China for my holiday this summer but you have visa bullshit (costs 200 and something) to contend with. So I'm going Taiwan instead.
>> No. 20834 Anonymous
16th June 2016
Thursday 3:30 pm
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>>20833

>How's the pollution?

Absolutely disgusting. It's tolerable if you spend most of your time in air conditioned buildings and cars, but if you spend any amount of time outside you develop a smoker's cough and your snot turns black.

http://aqicn.org/city/shanghai/

>>20832

>La Du Zi

Hello darkness my old friend...

Forgetting to bring toilet paper is a mistake you only make once. The horror. The horror.
>> No. 20835 Anonymous
16th June 2016
Thursday 11:26 pm
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>>20834
I've yet to use one of those, they look monstrous.
>> No. 20836 Anonymous
16th June 2016
Thursday 11:26 pm
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>>20832
What do you do there?
>> No. 20837 Anonymous
17th June 2016
Friday 3:26 am
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>>20836
Mostly just take advantage of young women who don't understand that the only reason I'm there is that I'm totally unattractive to women in my own country, with good reason.
>> No. 20838 Anonymous
17th June 2016
Friday 3:33 am
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>>20837
I thought this would happen for me when I moved to the US, but I'm still not that great looking and my accent is filth.
>> No. 20839 Anonymous
17th June 2016
Friday 6:19 am
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>>20837

So the charisma man phenomenon is legit?
>> No. 20840 Anonymous
17th June 2016
Friday 9:37 am
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>>20837
Word I've heard from roosh.v et al is that Shanghai women only care about what's in your pocket, and that if you're not over 6 foot you won't stand out in a big city.

How good are you finding it?
>> No. 20841 Anonymous
17th June 2016
Friday 11:32 am
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>>20840
I'm sure Roosh V. et al are reliable, non-biased sources of information on women.
>> No. 20842 Anonymous
17th June 2016
Friday 1:52 pm
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>>20841

I don't know who this Roosh fellow is, but the Chinese are very materialistic.

"Marriage markets" are a normal thing in Chinese cities. Parents congregate in parks to match-make their children. They post fliers with height, weight, age, education and salary. Nobody is shy about asking how much you earn, or rejecting you because you don't earn enough. In rural areas, arranged marriages are still common.

Wealth is so significant that there's a term for getting married without a house, a car or a lavish ceremony - 裸婚 or "naked marriage". The idea of marriage for love rather than for pragmatic material reasons is still highly contentious. Many older people think that it is immature and self-centred.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U21i-FLuUiI
>> No. 20843 Anonymous
17th June 2016
Friday 2:10 pm
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>>20842
Marrying for a reason other than material gain is self-centered? How strange.

Roosh is one of those PUA MRA types who people occasionally try to ban from entering their countries for being misogyny.
>> No. 20844 Anonymous
17th June 2016
Friday 2:23 pm
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>>20836

After being forsaken by a career in academia following the completion of my PhD, I'm a maths teacher.

>>20837
Eh, I'm actually not that into asian women. And the talent pool of laowailadies leaves something to be desired.

>>20840
China is v. materialistic. This one lad told me he met up with a girl on a tinder date and was going to take her out to dinner, but she wanted him to drop a grand on clothes for her before they went. WTF.

I'm about to embark on two months of vacation. I haven't had a vacation in about 4 years and the thought of two months off is positively terrifying.
>> No. 20846 Anonymous
17th June 2016
Friday 2:55 pm
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>>20843
I guess it depends on your point of view. Material gain for yourself, of course that is self-centered. But I'm guessing they see it more as material gain for your family and future children, versus love/lust for yourself only.
>> No. 20847 Anonymous
17th June 2016
Friday 2:56 pm
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>>20844
>forsaken by a career in academia

Could you tell us more? Did you choose to leave academia or could you not find any decent postdoc positions?
>> No. 20848 Anonymous
17th June 2016
Friday 3:19 pm
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>>20847
Sorry about the 4chan and the formatting but it's highly relevant. Don't fall for the China trick.
>> No. 20850 Anonymous
17th June 2016
Friday 3:43 pm
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>>20848

It's the wild west. Don't even try doing business there if you don't have a trusted local fixer with plenty of 關係, preferably a Party member. The Chinese are very us-and-them - if you're not in the inner circle, you'll get fucked with impunity.
>> No. 20851 Anonymous
17th June 2016
Friday 4:36 pm
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>>20842>>20843
I meant the forum rooshvforum, aside from the pua stuff it has a surprising amount of useful travel information.

Roosh himself never goes for asians, he's a slav fetishest as far as I can tell.

>>20844
True, but the materialism is much worse in the cities, real gold diggers there, I think you probably mean Tantan though, tinder much like other western online services isn't available.

>>20848
I hear lots of good stories from /trv/ and the like, but yeah, you'll always be a laowai, immigration in the way westerners think of it isn't a two way street.
>> No. 20852 Anonymous
17th June 2016
Friday 7:27 pm
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>>20851
It's actually from /his/ but you're right on Chinese xenophobia. Concepts such as Tianxa led to a very insular and racist society. All the way up to the collapse of the Manchu dynasty, they did not want to accept that something was wrong with their society. The Taiping rebellion, the Opium wars, the Boxer Rebellion and the century of humiliation that followed did not change their cultural arrogance.

It's irrelevant anyway because they'd soon rule the world.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0C4_88ub_M
>> No. 20853 Anonymous
18th June 2016
Saturday 5:28 am
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>>20847

I could actually write a novel on this. I became pretty disillusioned by all the 'academic misconduct' I witnessed, and how those who were the most dishonest scientists seemed to have the greatest success, whilst all those who practiced rigour were left working 60 hours pw on 40 hour contracts with grim future prospects.

I was offered a post-doc stateside, but I didn't much fancy the experimental work which would have been inducing strokes surgically in primates.

I get paid less now, but I work way less and the work is more pleasant.

>>20848
>>20850
Yeah, China isn't for everyone.

>>20851
It was tantan.
>> No. 20854 Anonymous
18th June 2016
Saturday 7:31 am
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>>20831

Indeed. I fucking love Shenzen, and am off there next wpc I can afford. I love the energy you get there, it really is a place like no other...eek for three days of trawling round electronics markets to build the hardest

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