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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

#71

Post by vidarh »

unmole wrote: post #59
vidarh wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you believe "real communism" can not be achieved by marxism-leninism, then that would be a conclusion. I intentionally did not make any claim like that, because that is wildly subjective and contentious. You're entirely free to think these regimes are "real communism" - I have no interest in that argument.

What, however, is not subjective, is that the stated ideology of all of these regimes is derived from ML, and that there is a vast number of communist ideologies outside of ML. You're free to consider those equally bad if you please. I've not made any argument about that either.

It is a fascinating picture of exactly what keybored argued that the immediate reaction of people is to drag out strawmen like this.

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

#72

Post by unmole »

codeflo wrote: post #62
unmole wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're eliding the more prosaic and direct explanation for why the Soviets were forced to clone chips instead of designing systems from scratch: cost. The American semiconductor industry had a vast civilian customer base that let it recoup R&D expenses. The Soviets didn’t. Chip Wars covers this in detail with numbers.

Cost can't be the true reason. In a planned economy, the customer base doesn't matter. If the state wants to allocate X number of engineers to do Y, it simply does, at the expense of whatever other project is considered politically less important. The fact that the customers' demands have no influence on resource allocation, except to the extent that bureaucrats decide it's politically convenient to address them, is…

It may not have been the only reason, but cost was absolutely a major real reason. In a planned economy, cost does not disappear. Skilled engineers, specialized materials and equipment are all still scarce. Semiconductors are literally the most sophisticated manufactured products and require the most complex supply chains. The Soviet Union was notoriously bad at coordination between ministries, state agencies, design bureaus, and factories. Semiconductors are probably the single worst industry for the Soviet model.

Maybe in theory, they could have lobbed enough bodies at the problem to make it go away. But they simply did not have the resources.

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

#74

Post by unmole »

vidarh wrote: post #69
unmole wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet you're the one here bringing that up, not me. It is irrelevant if it is "real communism" or not - it remains an objective fact that all of these regimes have derived their ideology from one very specific branch. In fact, all of them make a big fuzz over exactly that, and all of them had a history of brutally persecuting supporters of other communist ideologies. You don't need to support any of them to recogni…

You argument is just No true Scotsman with extra steps.

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

#75

Post by PunchyHamster »

> 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!

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

#76

Post by vidarh »

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…

One of the most interesting little nuggets on this is Reagans notes on Able Archer 83, where he for the first time seems to have realised that the Soviet leaders weren't cartoon villains, but actually were just as scared of the US as the US was of them.

That doesn't make the authoritarian nature of the regime any better, nor does it excuse any of the brutality, but it demonstrated how reductive it had been to try to interpret how they were thinking based on an outsider view that generalised all of them into some archetype without understanding individual motivations.

The irony is that so much of Western thinking of this assumes a ridiculous level of collectivism that never existed because it's fundamentally at odds with human nature.

If anything a lot of people have adopted what they deem a "communist mind" in their own analysis of these regimes - and ideologies - and treat large groups of people as if they are carbon copies.

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

#77

Post by vidarh »

unmole wrote: post #74
vidarh wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet you're the one here bringing that up, not me. It is irrelevant if it is "real communism" or not - it remains an objective fact that all of these regimes have derived their ideology from one very specific branch. In fact, all of them make a big fuzz over exactly that, and all of them had a history of brutally persecuting supporters of other communist ideologies. You don't need to support any of them to recogni…

You argument is just No true Scotsman with extra steps.

It seems you know what I'm thinking better than me. I have categorically not argued it's invalid for you to consider these regimes communist.

How, exactly, is it you imagine this is a "No true Scotsman"?

What I have argued is, if anything, that there are lots of Scotsmen, and trying to reduce them all to one is meaninglessly reductive.

In other words, I've indirectly explicitly argued against No true Scotsman.

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

#78

Post by flohofwoe »

vidarh wrote: post #34
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.

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…

...or as the post-'68 West-German joke goes: "When two leftists meet, 3 splinter groups are formed", doesn't quite roll off the tounge like the German version "Treffen sich zwei Linke: bilden sich 3 Splittergruppen."

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

#79

Post by unmole »

anovikov wrote: post #25
gostsamo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bulgarian is phonetic to a large degree so if you know the sound associated to a letter, you can understandably pronounce it as well. Regarding communism and computing, deterministic systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible have certain appeal for the communist mind. If you search in the HN archives, you might find even more stories about the bulgarian computer industry with a MIT publication in the…

Was there "communist mind" in Bulgaria? Which is same as asking - did you guys perceive Communism as something homegrown, something of your own - "your take on how it is best to develop a country", or something forcibly imposed on you by the Soviets? Bulgaria was seen with disdain in the Soviet Union as seen as a country where little but tomatoes were made (even if we knew it wasn't really the case), so in our Soviet…

> We knew Serbs liked it

I wouldn't have thought that was the perception given Yugoslavia was explicitly non-aligned and the economy was more market oriented.

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

#80

Post by unmole »

keybored wrote: post #27
unmole wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regarding communism and computing, deterministic systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible have certain appeal for the communist mind. Francis Spufford explores this idea in Red Plenty , which I highly recommend. More broadly, I think the book would appeal to many HN readers.

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.

I just want to point out how absurd this is. A Bulgarian says communist mind. People from the former Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and other planned economies immediately understand what he means. But we have an American and a Brit complaining about how the good name of communism is being sullied.
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