the "spirit" of the law is to restrict access to china to advanced type of chips

so if the law is permissive enough it allows easily getting around it, they can just rewrite the laws or go after nvidia directly for breaking the "spirit" of the law

> or go after nvidia directly for breaking the "spirit" of the law

The legal obligation is to comply with what the law actually says, not what the legislator possibly had in mind when they wrote the law...

You should read the law before making such outrageous statements.

Judges absolutely do look at the intent of lawmakers and rule on that intent.

The "intent of lawmakers" is based on what the law actually says, and when that is not clear because of ambiguous drafting (crucial point) then it is interpreted based on what the legislator must have meant in context.

Here if the law says "don't sell A to China" then you don't sell A to China but obviously you're free to sell B or C if you want to, you can't claim that the "spirit" and what was actually meant was not to sell anything at all...

That's true until judges start to determine ambiguity using weak logic. It won't be the first time.

Can't reply to mytailorisrich so I will write it here..

I am binge watching Last Week Tonight, and around s2e20(?) there is a Supreme Court ruling that interpreted something about medical care that if read literally (it has the word "state") would mean "each State individually" which would allow each state to slap it down, OR by the wider meaning of the word 'state' aka the central Government. So there are authorities in the US that very much interpret laws to capture the meaning.

That's a different type of ambiguity. That's ambiguity in the wording. The bureaucrat in question is saying they'll make the next thing illegal straight away, not that they need to go fix their poor wording.

The sole job of people who get other people's money to do a job can't define what they want, and are being praised for bypassing the written rules they're meant to write. I think this isn't really acceptable.

> The new products comply with the rules. Why are you changing the rules?

This should be obvious. They're changing the rules because the intention of the rule was being violated via a loophole that wasn't obvious when the rule was first made.

Then why celebrate the people who can't write rules? Their incompetence is at best causing a lot of wasted effort.

I'm not celebrating anyone. Although I do have an appreciation for policymakers who can adjust quickly, and I recognize that making rules that aren't exploitable is difficult given you're fighting an uphill battle against incentives and the opponent will therefore attempt to find any small and unpredictable loophole in order to maximize profits.

> Their incompetence is at best causing a lot of wasted effort.

It's unclear if you're saying the intention of the rule is bad, or merely the way the rule was implemented is bad. If you're talking about the former, you haven't justified that position. If you're talking about the latter, then you are fixating on an irrelevant detail that will be corrected and should step back and look at the bigger picture.

> If you're talking about the latter, then you are fixating on an irrelevant detail that will be corrected and should step back and look at the bigger picture.

I don't think triumphalistic declarations of war from legislators who have just written a badly worded law should be celebrated. If that's not big picture enough, either justify why that is, or please refrain from telling me what I should be talking about.