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Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)

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Re: Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)

#31

Post by surfingdino »

sieszpak wrote: post #13

Many Poles have distinguished themselves in various fields of science and life. I recognize Madame Curie, Copernicus, Ulam, Pope John Paul II, Chopin, Polanski, and perhaps Wozniak. I had a Polish professor at Mellon University who talked a bit about it, and there was a lot.

Others include Marek Holynski https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek_Ho%C5%82y%C5%84ski (co-inventor of OpenGL, told by the visiting Russian commie inspector to focus his 3d research on "serious" things like CNC machining), Stefan Kudelski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Kudelski (Nagra audio and video recorders), Staniskaw Ulam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Ulam (Manhattan Project, Monte Carlo methods), Casimir Pulaski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_Pulaski, Tadeusz Kosciuszko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadeusz_Ko%C5%9Bciuszko and many more...

Re: Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)

#32

Post by Ancapistani »

TMWNN wrote: post #22
sieszpak wrote: post #13

Many Poles have distinguished themselves in various fields of science and life. I recognize Madame Curie, Copernicus, Ulam, Pope John Paul II, Chopin, Polanski, and perhaps Wozniak. I had a Polish professor at Mellon University who talked a bit about it, and there was a lot.

[flagged]

This actually really bothers me.

The Poles have a long history of being a leading European nation in many areas. These "jokes" arose in the wake of Polish immigration to the US and the conquering of Poland by Nazi Germany and then the Soviets.

Re: Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)

#33

Post by NiteOwl066 »

sieszpak wrote: post #13

Many Poles have distinguished themselves in various fields of science and life. I recognize Madame Curie, Copernicus, Ulam, Pope John Paul II, Chopin, Polanski, and perhaps Wozniak. I had a Polish professor at Mellon University who talked a bit about it, and there was a lot.

Yeah you could add many more major names like Banach or my favourite (and imo most underappreciated) Jan Czochralski.

Re: Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)

#34

Post by mepian »

The tired cliche of comparing the subject to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (celebrities from the later microcomputer era, one of which is not even a hardware guy) made me cringe, why not compare him instead to Ken Olsen and Wesley Clark, the men who actually built first minicomputers in the West, or to someone like Andy Bechtolsheim? I guess the target audience of the article doesn't know anyone but Gates and Jobs.

Re: Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)

#35

Post by initramfs »

the article mentions one other Perceptron of its kind in the U.S., and that has another really interesting story (this one got downplayed by Marvin Minsky but the inventor died young in an accident): https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/09/professors-perceptr...

Re: Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)

#36

Post by Muromec »

legitster wrote: post #20

Really good story. I recommend reading the whole thing. A couple things that I think add some useful context, having spent some of my life in other post-soviet countries: - In Communist theory (at least as Marx and Lenin saw it) business competition was a destructive force and one of the "inherent contradictions" of capitalism. So if another project was deemed to be better, that was justification enough for shutting…

To be fair, competition was very much allowed where soviet government needed it — in design bureaus and sometimes architecture. There was more than one firm that designed planes and helicopters for the military.

Re: Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)

#37

Post by throaway12346 »

sieszpak wrote: post #13

Many Poles have distinguished themselves in various fields of science and life. I recognize Madame Curie, Copernicus, Ulam, Pope John Paul II, Chopin, Polanski, and perhaps Wozniak. I had a Polish professor at Mellon University who talked a bit about it, and there was a lot.

[dead]

Re: Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)

#38

Post by throaway12346 »

mepian wrote: post #34

The tired cliche of comparing the subject to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (celebrities from the later microcomputer era, one of which is not even a hardware guy) made me cringe, why not compare him instead to Ken Olsen and Wesley Clark, the men who actually built first minicomputers in the West, or to someone like Andy Bechtolsheim? I guess the target audience of the article doesn't know anyone but Gates and Jobs.

[dead]

Re: Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)

#39

Post by TMWNN »

Ancapistani wrote: post #32
TMWNN wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This actually really bothers me. The Poles have a long history of being a leading European nation in many areas. These "jokes" arose in the wake of Polish immigration to the US and the conquering of Poland by Nazi Germany and then the Soviets.

I am well aware of Polish genius in things like their early work on Enigma (as mentioned elsewhere). In the US (I don't know about other countries), 100% of Polish jokes are told without any inclination, on the part of the teller or the recipient, of actually believing that Poles are intellectually backward.

I have no idea how/why Poles became the subject matter of such jokes, but doubt that the history you outlined was the cause; after all, there are no such Czech jokes or Romanian jokes. I suspect that just as the jokes themselves are memes, at some point in the past Poles mysteriously ended up as the putative subject in some random fashion, akin to the arbitrariness of the ethnic group in this famous Austin Powers scene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgp-0UxeBK0>, then spread as a meme.

PS - Steve Wozniak (also mentioned elsewhere) ran a Dial-a-Joke line featuring Polish jokes in the early 1970s.

Re: Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)

#40

Post by robertlagrant »

darby_nine wrote: post #18
RIMR wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man you really should have read the article to understand that the main competitor to the K-202 had ties to the Communist government and was able to get production shut down. There was also some concern over the number of western parts inside of the K-202, so a modern equivalent would be closer to the U.S. banning of Huawei hardware in U.S. cell networks, where the hardware is cheaper and superior, but we ban it beca…

> Man you really should have read the article to understand that the main competitor to the K-202 had ties to the Communist government and was able to get production shut down. What do you think regulatory capture is? The exact same behavior, and we have it all over our society. The parallels to OpenAI are obvious. And if you look... sure enough, the board has multiple people connected directly to the bowels of feder…

> What do you think regulatory capture is?

Not this.

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