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A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing

llama.gs

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Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing

#111

Post by littlestymaar »

broken-kebab wrote: post #98
dzink wrote: post #93

If you grow up in that environment (restricted by government in some areas and liberated in others) you’ll start seeing systems very differently. The game plays differently with different rules. They had Pravets computers and robotic arms in rural classrooms in places that didn’t have traffic lights, or English teachers. Chess and Math competitions as well, were accessible everywhere. Those were all self-feedback mec…

>Even if only a tiny subset of any population has the cognitive surplus to meddle with programming and math, they had easy access to fulfill that and be found. This is exactly 100% not true. Source: I grew up behind the Iron Curtain. Why some people are so ready to glamorize poverty and restrictions, I don't even understand. Not every school had computers, and those which do, often had the fear of something being bro…

> Why some people are so ready to glamorize poverty and restrictions, I don't even understand.

> Not every school had computers, and those which do, often had the fear of something being broken as the main guiding principle

People glamorize exotic places they don't know, and you're doing exactly this here: I grew up in the 90s in the suburb of Paris (not in a poor neighborhood) and we didn't have a single computer in school until. And even later in high school in the early 2000, we had few computers in dedicated rooms the teacher had to book in advance and often not all computer worked.

The West was much better that the eastern block in many aspects, but it wasn't the land of unlimited abundance some people from the East believed it was.

Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing

#112

Post by broken-kebab »

littlestymaar wrote: post #111
broken-kebab wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Even if only a tiny subset of any population has the cognitive surplus to meddle with programming and math, they had easy access to fulfill that and be found. This is exactly 100% not true. Source: I grew up behind the Iron Curtain. Why some people are so ready to glamorize poverty and restrictions, I don't even understand. Not every school had computers, and those which do, often had the fear of something being bro…

> Why some people are so ready to glamorize poverty and restrictions, I don't even understand. > Not every school had computers, and those which do, often had the fear of something being broken as the main guiding principle People glamorize exotic places they don't know, and you're doing exactly this here: I grew up in the 90s in the suburb of Paris (not in a poor neighborhood) and we didn't have a single computer in…

I didn't mention Paris, or even West in general though. Made zero comparisons. The whole text is about the place where I lived. So I'm not sure how did I manage to glamorize something

Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing

#113

Post by broken-kebab »

dzink wrote: post #107
broken-kebab wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Even if only a tiny subset of any population has the cognitive surplus to meddle with programming and math, they had easy access to fulfill that and be found. This is exactly 100% not true. Source: I grew up behind the Iron Curtain. Why some people are so ready to glamorize poverty and restrictions, I don't even understand. Not every school had computers, and those which do, often had the fear of something being bro…

I wrote from personal experience. In 1992 in a fisherman town we had a robotic arm and Pravetz 8 and 16 computers with the 5 inch floppy disks. We had to use Basic to program the arm and it was only doing basic movements. The teacher had a 16 year old who was assisting with the lab and you did have to ask for permission to do stuff.

I'm glad you were that lucky! I was lucky too, my father had computer at work. Maybe that's why we met here. I guess it would be better if written with 'me' and not 'they'

Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing

#114

Post by svilen_dobrev »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #75

> The methodology was elegantly practical: Hayes assigned each circuit to a PhD student. Cheap labour, and almost certainly cheaper per insight than an LLM. We need API for that, grad students are paying to be there so can't get cheaper than that!

That's how my group got through "Computer Memories" subject. The guy handed us xerox-copy of some Motorola book, and assigned each one a chapter to translate from english to bulgarian, and then type the result into, text file (edi? Forgot the text editor name, had pretty good machinery for macroses). This was 1988. The result was the "official" textbook on that subject for next ~10 years..

Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing

#115

Post by littlestymaar »

broken-kebab wrote: post #112
littlestymaar wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why some people are so ready to glamorize poverty and restrictions, I don't even understand. > Not every school had computers, and those which do, often had the fear of something being broken as the main guiding principle People glamorize exotic places they don't know, and you're doing exactly this here: I grew up in the 90s in the suburb of Paris (not in a poor neighborhood) and we didn't have a single computer in…

I didn't mention Paris, or even West in general though. Made zero comparisons. The whole text is about the place where I lived. So I'm not sure how did I manage to glamorize something

When you say “Not every school had computers” as a rebuttal without realizing that pretty much no school in a bunch other countries elsewhere in Europe had computers at the time.

Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing

#116

Post by dzink »

broken-kebab wrote: post #113
dzink wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote from personal experience. In 1992 in a fisherman town we had a robotic arm and Pravetz 8 and 16 computers with the 5 inch floppy disks. We had to use Basic to program the arm and it was only doing basic movements. The teacher had a 16 year old who was assisting with the lab and you did have to ask for permission to do stuff.

I'm glad you were that lucky! I was lucky too, my father had computer at work. Maybe that's why we met here. I guess it would be better if written with 'me' and not 'they'

The fun fact was that the 16 year old that passionately administered the lab was also hitting on any female students who went in there, essentially chasing them away. I suspect the number of techies would double if it wasn’t for all the bad behavior.

I was fortunate in that Internet cafes started happening and I could volunteer to administer networks and troubleshooting for them while getting PC time for free. I also maintained PCs for friends with businesses who could afford one. So the Pravetz sparked my curiosity but the real growth happened on begged and borrowed time from other peoples computers.

Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing

#117

Post by keybored »

gostsamo wrote: post #39
keybored wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The incredible things I read on this site. The communist mind? Oh right, there’s a book for that, and it’s probably agreeable to people on this site. What the heck is this psycho-mysticism.

As I commented elsewhere: I used "communist mind" as a collective term for the ideological framework in which computers were discussed. The state had a party and the party had an ideology and the ideology legitimized the other two, hence all actions of the state and the party had to be justified through it. It does not mean some other kind of consciousness that allowed one to be closer to the ghost of Marx or whateve…

I know where you’re coming from.

Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing

#118

Post by imtringued »

dzink wrote: post #107
broken-kebab wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Even if only a tiny subset of any population has the cognitive surplus to meddle with programming and math, they had easy access to fulfill that and be found. This is exactly 100% not true. Source: I grew up behind the Iron Curtain. Why some people are so ready to glamorize poverty and restrictions, I don't even understand. Not every school had computers, and those which do, often had the fear of something being bro…

I wrote from personal experience. In 1992 in a fisherman town we had a robotic arm and Pravetz 8 and 16 computers with the 5 inch floppy disks. We had to use Basic to program the arm and it was only doing basic movements. The teacher had a 16 year old who was assisting with the lab and you did have to ask for permission to do stuff.

>ROBKO 01 is an anthropoid robot manufactured in Bulgaria by BAS (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) and produced by the Medical Equipment Factories. It is an analog based on the manufactured in the USA Armdroid 1000. The two robot arms are completely the same, except some minor differences in the mechanics and drive circuitry.

https://8bitclub.com/general-information/

Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing

#119

Post by imtringued »

mike_hearn wrote: post #29
summa_tech wrote: post #8

This was a fascinating article, because I've seen so many results of the Eastern Bloc reverse-engineering efforts basically founder into obscurity. Many of these re-created (sometimes with minor variations, or quite novel and ingenious implementation choices) computers were made in small series, but could not compete against illegal imports, and in any case would only be briefly popular in their local university town…

Quite a few words in Bulgarian are similar to words in other European languages, just written in a different alphabet. I briefly dated a girl in Bulgaria years ago and was surprised at how quickly I could find my way around by reading street signs, applying knowledge of French and German, etc. The author asks why did the communists always clone things despite having engineers who could have designed their own? You do…

I think you are overselling the killing aspect although its true.

The reason is that strict Marxist don't believe that entrepreneurs are producing any value. If anything, they are believed to produce negative value i.e. surplus value is an appropriation of value from workers. If you get rid of them, the negative value disappears and society is better off.

Since only workers produce value (labor theory of value aka LTV), they can only produce what is already confirmed to be valuable. Reproducing the work of other workers doesn't violate the labor theory of value, but producing something that has the potential to be worthless does. [0]

You can see that a disdain for intellectual property law and an obsession to only produce what others have already produced makes cloning a natural strategy for communism.

[0] The mudpie criticism against the LTV is usually rebutted by communists saying they would never produce something worthless. It is implied that they have efficient central planners tell them what to produce.

Re: A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing

#120

Post by imtringued »

tryauuum wrote: post #87
varjag wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit of No True Scotsman. USSR (and other places) did an earnest attempt to build communist societies based on Marxist tenets. They went full in: class war, expropriation, even the attempts to abolish money and family. That it failed after decades of attempts was not for the lack of trying, so maybe at this point it's worth reconsidering viability of the idea.

Is not a "no true Scotsman" situation. USSR itself did acknowledge that whatever they have is not communism. Because they knew the definition, they knew that it's a utopian society which, as you mentioned, doesn't use money The rest of the world had to name this regime somehow. Since there was only one party, the communist party, the west named the regime "communism". Now we have a word with different meanings, depen…

Ok, so you're telling me Marxist socialists propagate an idea that they have no idea how to accomplish?

I mean, I knew that, but the idea that someone would tell me this in defense of Marxist socialism by being pedantic over linguistics is kind of wild.

Your school teacher got irritated and deflected immediately rather than using this as an educational opportunity. This type of behavior clearly doesn't radiate fondness of that time. Those kids know nothing, which is why their question was "wrong". They have to pull the right levers to get answers from the teacher, as if this was some kind of unpleasant interrogation.

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