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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

#51

Post by keybored »

unmole wrote: post #40
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.

Ponting out that communist regimes tried to implement planned economies with the help of computation is a statement of fact, not psycho-mysticism . Red Plenty features Leonid Kantorovich trying to build a computer powerful enough to model the entire Soviet economy. It absolutely is something HN readers would find interesting, your uninformed, middle-brow dismissal notwithstanding.

This focus on the X Mind has a certain legitimacy in literature and biographies, where there is a focus on characters and persons/personas. Because they can certainly have an X Mind. I’ll grant it that. But in the context of discussing the Eastern Bloc it does become psycho-mysticism, and this is the context where I was commenting on it.

This and that type having such and such mindset always needs to, in a serious treatment about real things and across more than a handful of people, play a very secondary role. Because it can only ever be speculative narrative that does not enter into any real argumentation. Seeing Like a State does it well. It discusses state projects and their outcomes. What people did given their positions and limitations (the limitations of what they could see). Any narrative about how The State Seer Mind works is just speculative narrative; the real meat is in the discussions on the grand projects like the pitfalls of monocultural forestry.

But this infantile treatment of Communism is treated as okay/normal, even celebrated. On that subject you can start with the supposed ideology and work backwards from that.

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

#52

Post by keybored »

unmole wrote: post #41
vidarh wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fascinating exercise in antrhopology to see otherwise smart people confidently discuss the mind of people most of them have had no exposure to in person. Having spoken to a variety of people across the very broad spectrum of left-wing thought, ranging from libertarian marxists opposing the very existence of a state, to hardline marxism-leninists who thought the former group belonged in labour camps, I find the…

Yeah, real communism has never been tried. /s

Here we see the standard intellectual repertoire on Communism.

- Communist Totalitarian Thinking

- “Never been tried” quips as a retort to, um, no one even claiming that here

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

#53

Post by gostsamo »

anovikov wrote: post #43
gostsamo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whatever some people seem to ascr…

My question wasn't about liking the 'socialism' or not as much, more about seeing it as something of your own - no matter if good or bad, or something that your enemies imposed on you by force?

Again, depends whom you are asking. When the party includes Moscow in the national anthem, you realise that the party sees itself coupled with the USSR. The official line is that the brotherly russian nation helped the forces of good win against the faschists and it would work due to the associations with the liberation war. Many would strongly disagree. The scandals are ongoing even today.

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

#54

Post by unmole »

vidarh wrote: post #47
unmole wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, real communism has never been tried. /s

Strawman - at no point did I make that claim. It has no relevance to my comment.

It's a variation of the same tired argument that's proffered up when communist praxis is criticised: That communist regimes they don't represent real communism unlike the all the other hippy versions.

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

#55

Post by whizzter »

gambiting wrote: post #44
anovikov wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>could not compete against illegal imports How could that be possible? Imports had to be made in hard currency which was incredibly scarce in the Soviet Bloc (a VCR cost couple years of engineer's income on a black market), and was hard to obtain both for official/communist enterprises, and private individuals. Locally made stuff was bound to be a lot cheaper.

At least in Poland it was semi-common that if you had any family abroad they could send you dollars. So yeah a soviet computer was in theory cheaper but it was impossible to buy, or you could just walk into PEWEX and walk out with an actual commodore 64 bought with dollars that you "happened" to have. Of course, PEWEX stores were fully state-sanctioned enterprises, not illegal imports.

I think the point was that the illegality was that manufacturers in the west was not supposed to sell computers to the east?

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

#56

Post by adrian_b »

anovikov wrote: post #43
gostsamo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 whatever some people seem to ascr…

My question wasn't about liking the 'socialism' or not as much, more about seeing it as something of your own - no matter if good or bad, or something that your enemies imposed on you by force?

Bulgaria was somewhat shielded from the direct force of the Soviet Union, unlike the Baltic countries, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and East Germany, which were invaded and conquered by the Soviet army.

Moreover, the Baltic countries were then incorporated into the Soviet Union, together with big parts from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania, while the remaining parts of those countries became vassal states, from which Russia continued to steal vast amounts of resources during the fifties, under the cover of some mixed companies established with the locals. In some of these countries armed resistance in the mountains has continued to fight against the Russians for a few years, until eventually all opponents were defeated. In Hungary and Czechoslovakia the Russians made large-scale military interventions in 1956 and 1968.

East Germany has also been occupied by the direct invasion of the Soviet Army, which have also plundered everything that they could, like they also did in the other directly invaded countries. From East Germany, the Russians have stolen entire factories, piece by piece and tool by tool, transporting them in Russia and reassembling them there.

So in such Eastern European countries, the Russians were much more clearly identified as the invading enemies, since WWII until 1990.

Bulgaria had been too far away from the Soviet Union, so unlike most East European countries it has not lost territory after WWII. If you compare pre-WWII and post-WWII maps, you can see that the Soviet Union has moved tremendously towards the West. While other countries have lost much territory, Poland has not lost much area, but the country has moved to the West as a whole, because the Eastern Polish territory occupied by the Soviet Union has been somewhat compensated with territory taken from East Germany.

In Bulgaria, like everywhere else, most of those who had been rich before WWII have been robbed or killed by the communists, but overall Bulgaria has suffered much less during the transition to communism, so I expect that much fewer of them were seeing the communists as external enemies imposed by force.

In all Eastern European countries only falsified histories were taught about the Soviet Union, Russians, WWII and communism, but nevertheless in the countries that had been directly invaded by the Soviet Union there was a large fraction of the population which were aware of the histories of their own families, which typically included the loss of property stolen by communists and relatives detained, deported and/or murdered either by the Russians or by the authorities installed by the Russians. So despite the public brainwashing, it was hard to completely erase the memories of these facts.

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

#57

Post by unmole »

keybored wrote: post #51
unmole wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ponting out that communist regimes tried to implement planned economies with the help of computation is a statement of fact, not psycho-mysticism . Red Plenty features Leonid Kantorovich trying to build a computer powerful enough to model the entire Soviet economy. It absolutely is something HN readers would find interesting, your uninformed, middle-brow dismissal notwithstanding.

This focus on the X Mind has a certain legitimacy in literature and biographies, where there is a focus on characters and persons/personas. Because they can certainly have an X Mind. I’ll grant it that. But in the context of discussing the Eastern Bloc it does become psycho-mysticism, and this is the context where I was commenting on it. This and that type having such and such mindset always needs to, in a serious tr…

> But in the context of discussing the Eastern Bloc it does become psycho-mysticism

The comment was made by a Bulgarian who actually lived under the regime and explained what he meant. The psycho-mysticism is entirely in your head.

> the real meat is in the discussions on the grand projects like the pitfalls of monocultural forestry.

You mean like, I dunno, Gosplan? Which was the point of the comment that you so strenuously objected to?

Communism deservedly lies on the ash heap of history. Attempts to rehabilitate it by feigning nuance should be met with derision and contempt.

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

#58

Post by dirasieb »

flohofwoe wrote: post #23
yehat wrote: post #16

I know there's predominant thinking that "communism" existed somewhere, but in fact it doesn't. It was the ideology developed in the West and brutally imported into the East. Why I say that and why it matters to understand the difference? Because there was no "communist" thinking behind the motivation to do whatever by the ordinary people. There was something deeper that manifested in a way that many people mistake f…

It's quite simple really: "communism" was the carrot which the governments of socialist countries dangled in front of their people to distract from all the problems and hardships caused by the top-down planning economy and to move the blame from the elites to the lazy workers who just don't work hard enough to enable the communist utopia (which was like fusion power, always only a generation away).

voted down for speaking the truth

this website and free discussion as a whole would not exist if communist governments had their way, something to keep in mind

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

#59

Post by unmole »

vidarh wrote: post #45
mike_hearn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All actual communist societies work the same way, so it's clearly possible to generalize.

All "actual communist societies", have been run by marxist-leninists or regimes supporting derivations of it, which is a couple from dozens of ideologies within the umbrella. So, sure, you can generalize about those regimes. That still does not speak to any unified "communist mind". Those regimes have collectively murdered vast numbers of proponents of other communist ideologies.

> All "actual communist societies", have been run marxist-leninists or regimes supporting derivations of it,

In other words, real communism has never been tried.

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

#60

Post by Schlagbohrer »

Ok I read this article but I don't see how it connects to LLMs as he puts forth at the start. Is he saying we have not yet reached the phase where someone will reverse engineer LLMs to figure out what is actually going on with these strange new beasts?
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