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.
What about Wojciech Zaremba of OpenAI? MAybe not at the level of the above yet, but crucial person in one of the hottest companies in the world.
Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)
61–70 of 153 posts
Re: Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)
#62> After World War II, the communist regime in Poland considered members of the resistance a threat to its existence, convinced that people who had risked their lives to free Poland of its Nazi oppressors could also act to undermine the new Soviet regime Interesting fact from the article...
> Interesting fact from the article... That was the case in many countries. In France for example a huge part of the resistance was way too sympathetic with Stalin's ideas (and btw didn't join the resistance up until 1941 and Hitler's operation Barbarossa, when Hitler betrayed Stalin) so one of the very first thing the government did in France right after WWII was to disarm the resistance as much as they could. Most…
> In France for example a huge part of the resistance was way too sympathetic with Stalin's ideas (and btw didn't join the resistance up until 1941 and Hitler's operation Barbarossa, when Hitler betrayed Stalin)
It's more subtle than that. Communist resistance certainly existed before 1941. Many of the veterans from the Spanish civil war for example engaged quite early, without waiting for Stalin's instructions. Repression against communists increased overnight when Hitler invaded the USSR, which led to more active resistance. But it's not like they just had been sitting quietly enjoying life under Pétain up to then.
After the war communist resistants, particularly those who came back from deportation, were seen with suspicion by the party's leadership, and the party ended up at the hands of people who hadn't been as active in the resistance, but were considered to be more loyal to Stalin. Which suited the Gaullists just fine and gave them the opportunity to push the narrative that only they had been the true resistants from the first hour.
Re: Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)
#63Many 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.
What about Wojciech Zaremba of OpenAI? MAybe not at the level of the above yet, but crucial person in one of the hottest companies in the world.
Jakub Pachocki from OpenAI is polish too.
Re: Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)
#64Earlier 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. 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.
Per Wikipedia:
In politics, regulatory capture (also called agency capture) is a form of corruption of authority that occurs when a political entity, policymaker, or regulator is co-opted to serve the commercial, ideological, or political interests of a minor constituency, such as a particular geographic area, industry, profession, or ideological group.
When regulatory capture occurs, a special interest is prioritized over the general interests of the public, leading to a net loss for society.
Sounds like what happened with the K202 would have qualified as regulatory capture to me.
But the guy you're talking to is putting way too much, (idk, Anger, Righteous Indignation, Outrage, whatever) into the tone of his text given the overall content of the conversation. It's very off-putting.
Re: Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)
#65[flagged]
Re: Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)
#66Officials weren't keen on these bespoke machines because there was a Comecon push to standardize on unified system based on IBM 360, with compatible peripherals manufactured in many Eastern bloc countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ES_EVM
K-202 was later developed into MERA 400, which was somewhat more successful. https://mera400-pl.translate.goog/Strona_g%C5%82%C3%B3wna?_x... One of interesting things from modern perspective is that these machines didn't have synchronous clocks, but cycles were timed by RC delay circuits which were tuned differently for various groups of instructions. One notable operating system developed for it was CROOK, which was significantly more unixy compared to other contemporary mainframe based systems. There's modern emulator for it https://github.com/jakubfi/em400, and they have excellent YouTube channel (in Polish though): https://www.youtube.com/@MERA400/videos
Re: Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)
#67[flagged]
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Re: Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)
#68Many 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.
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Re: Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)
#69Many 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.
Jan Łukasiewicz and his (Reverse) Polish Notation.
Re: Jacek Karpińśki, the computer genius the communists couldn't stand (2017)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> strange believe that if not the communists Poland would be a global superpower I think it's fair to consider Poland the birthplace of the modern computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography) Maybe not a global superpower, but it is very easy to me to imagine a Poland not destroyed by Nazi then communist rule being an innovation center of the world.
Prewar Poland was a military dictatorship(mild but was) in the permanent state of crisis, on a brink of a civil war with all of its minorities. And it is a wild take to blame communists for the nazi atrocities. But communist solved most of the problems that prewar Poland would have problem of solving. Yeah Polish tech was amazing especially if you consider the resources
Communists also happen to be the sole reason why Polish people still exist, because a certain Austrian painter was going to eradicate them all after he was done with the Jews.