So it's cool to see that Bulgaria managed to muster enough government interest to force a cohesive strategy for the whole country. It sounds like it paid off.
Also, after googling for Правец, I have found out that I can in fact read Bulgarian, which was quite surprising to me.
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.
Lots of stuff under communism was cheaper on paper. It was also extremely crappy and/or unavailable.
So black markets were thriving, even though, as you rightly point out, used hard to get, expensive currency.
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 mix. There could've been even more, but a combination of distrust towards the new capitalist science and later unwillingness for those pesky machines to show the real state of the USSR economy meant that this was not developed with the full backing of the eastern block.
Also, as a broader view of your point, perhaps technocratic communism degenerates by giving way to bureaucratic communism.
Francis Spufford explores this idea in Red Plenty, which I highly recommend. More broadly, I think the book would appeal to many HN readers.
WEKTOR system was killed because it would made deputy minister of innovation at that time (Jan Mitręga) the best informed person in the Communist Party.
INFOSTRADA/KSI (Krajowy System Informatyczny - National IT System) systems were killed because they would disrupt the falsified and controlled information flow within the Communist Party.
The author asks why did the communists always clone things despite having engineers who could have designed their own? You don't need an LLM to answer this. The book "Chip Wars" is a really good history of Silicon Valley and has a section on the Soviet chip industry, how it was structured and why it cloned chips instead of designing their own.
The Soviets didn't just clone computers but most of their advanced tech. Partly it was just mandated top-down. You had dictators at the top who were there, as the author observes, because they were just more aggressive and swivel-eyed than anyone else. They mandated cloning, so cloning is what happened because everyone was afraid of them.
But that doesn't really answer the question. Cloning things isn't just an attribute of one specific set of leaders in the Soviet era. All communist countries are like this. Western AI labs keep claiming the Chinese labs are distilling them like crazy, and we know Anthropic has anti-distillation measures hidden inside Claude Code so it's not just a PR thing, they do believe it's happening for real.
It always happens because leftism rejects the role of the capitalist in society. Capitalists are workers whose output is voluntary coordination across complex projects. If you kill them all then you have a society that's unable to create voluntary coordination across complex projects. The immediate consequence is that the economy goes haywire because without capitalists nobody knows how much or what to produce; the USSR solved this by having spies steal price lists. But you also can't run a novel chip design programme. That would require finding the right people with the right skills, encouraging innovation by giving them a cut of the rewards, and other things you aren't allowed to do in leftist regimes. So ... they just couldn't produce voluntary coordination. And thus to get anything done outside the military they had to steal the output of western capitalists by just copying whatever their teams were doing, down to the last detail.
It's been a couple years since I've seen a 'the Chinese can't innovate' post here and I can't say that I've missed it.
For those unfamiliar (not Mike based on his observations about Star Trek’s economy), absent a working price system, no rational method for economizing, i.e., choosing between alternatives, exists. When building a railroad, do you go around the mountain or tunnel through it? Who knows? Take away the profit-loss test, and the loudest, most aggressive thug in the room wins out, which Mike noted the history of communist countries as confirming.
Understanding the economic calculation problem reveals why communists had to copy or steal not just the technology but even its prices. Granting the extreme of an entire country full of perfectly obedient “new Soviet men” — which emphatically did not exist, as shown by the common saying “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us” — Maximum Leader is in the dark without prices; he doesn’t know what to command them to build! So he does the next best thing: crib off someone else’s paper.
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.
It is the difference between "safety" and "liveness" (the two kinds of correctness guarantees in computer programming). Communist societies are, at their extreme, "safety" societies: they try to guarantee that nothing bad ever happens. Capitalist/market societies are, at their extreme, "liveness" societies: they try to guarantee that something good/interesting _eventually_ happens (even if bad things have to keep happening).
A "safety" mindset is sympathetic to cloning, because it does not have to deal with much uncertainty. A "liveness" mindset is not sympathetic to cloning, because it has already been done, and profit/monopoly opportunity is minimal.
Well, because they didn't always clone things, you know. But when they decided to, it was almost always pitched as "okay, we're 10/20/30 years behind in this industry, if we try to repeat that path from the zero, we'll never catch up — let's start at near of their cutting edge, and go from there".
> the USSR solved this by having spies steal price lists.
Oh, that's a story I'd like to hear.
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, depending to whom you speak. Certainly makes discussions between ex-ussr people and americans hard. I remember how my school teacher got irritated when we asked her "how was the life under communism". "We never lived under it, we lived under socialism" she said
To sum up, this is not a "no true Scotsman" situation, since the observing part of the world decided to extend the meaning
this website and free discussion as a whole would not exist if communist governments had their way, something to keep in mind
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 mechanisms that are cheap but allow an interested individual to iterate infinitely to reach advanced levels. 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. In the US, schools enable that with sports, which monetize as entertainment venues. In the Eastern Block they had that with brains. As soon as the stupid restrictions on travel were lifted, the brains knew to leave the other restrictions and immigrate to places that reward cognitive surplus.
Intelligence builds with reinforcement learning on context that gives you feedback - which makes it easy to iterate on. If you’re not making those types of games/tools/systems available to kids, you are going to lose that generation to more attention grabbing stuff like Youtube or sports.
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 broken as the main guiding principle. Sure, some teachers were understanding and gaining their trust you could get some time for experiments. But it was rare. In a school "where there was no traffic lights" you would definitely find no "robotic arms" really (I can't even guess where this sci-fi bs came from). And you would rather only allowed to press spacebar when told so under close supervision.
Getting a computer at home wasn't easy either. That DIY culture appeared from the need more than from fun, but it wasn't available for all anyway. Knowing how-to is a barrier in itself for a kid, but try getting all necessary parts at first. Those were societies of constant "defitsit", and one needed connections and/or good money to obtain even simple things. On my block there were exactly 1 kid with self-built computer and you would need to fight for his favors. And anyway those machines were often more like primitive gaming consoles with very limited programming possible.
So in fact majority of late-socialism programming enthusiats grew in families where parents could bring their children to the work and let them play with computers there. Which is minority of minority.
> 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.
The USSR did make their own Z80 and 8080 clones later though. There existed an IBM PC compatible built completely out of Soviet-made parts. A lot of fully localized ZX Spectrum clones as well, of varying degree of homebrewness. Those were very popular in the late 80s and early 90s from what I gather, but I'm too young to have used one myself.
At the narrower level, it seems to be saying that benchmarks are easier to interpret when you know what they really are. That makes sense. If a circuit is known to be a multiplier, that tells you more than if it is just called `c6288`.
That is also why I thought of Python benchmarks. In something like `pyperformance`, names such as `json_loads`, `python_startup`, or `nbody` already tell you something about the workload. So when you compare results, you have a better sense of what kind of task a system is doing well on. But so what? It is just benchmarks. They don't guarantee anything about anything anyway.
What made it harder for me to follow was that this fairly modest point is wrapped in a lot of jokes and swipes about AI and corporate AI language. Some of that is funny, but it also made me less sure what the main point was supposed to be. Was the article really about benchmark interpretation, or was that mostly a vehicle for making a broader point about AI hype and technical understanding?
So I do think there is a real point in there. I just found it slightly hard to separate that point from the style and the jokes.
We need API for that, grad students are paying to be there so can't get cheaper than that!
Are there any good ways to measure agent ability? Or do we just have to go by vibes?
> to build something enormous, declare it transformative, and hope nobody asks what it actually computes.
And the corollary:
> [such] approach requires billions of dollars and produces systems that cannot explain themselves.
First home “Apple //e” was in Africa, using a Korean improvement on the Apple ][+ adding lowercase and memory and more. It was lugged in by Korean ambassador's son and remained a better performer than the Apple //e once that came out.
Once I started looking for the history, I've never found what that Korean machine was.
Next came Apple IIc which ran circles around it. Then Fat Mac, SE, SE/30… but that's a different story.
Also that Bulgaria invested into some semiconductor manufacturer in Singapore to maintain uninterrupted access to the components.
Same decision with the capitalist American Apple II, only upper case letters unless you added some additional board.
This is utterly, utterly mind-boggling to me. Seriously no one had any curiosity to look in to these things for 14 years? I mean, I guess someone was bored somewhere along the way, but usually that sort of thing becomes an open secret... not here, I guess.
Given that (afaik) the Apple II logic would have all been jelly bean logic or otherwise off the shelf parts did they really reverse engineer ICs?
Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update):
https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22062590
DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Reverse engineering course
Will Wright defined the "Simulator Effect" as how game players imagine a simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination. "Reverse Over-Engineering" is a desirable outcome of the Simulator Effect: what game players (and game developers trying to clone the game) do when they use their imagination to extrapolate how a game works, and totally overestimate how much work and modeling the simulator is actually doing, because they filled in the gaps with their imagination and preconceptions and assumptions, instead of realizing how many simplifications and shortcuts and illusions it actually used.
https://www.masterclass.com/classes/will-wright-teaches-game...
>There's a name for what Wright calls "the simulator effect" in the video: apophenia. There's a good GDC video on YouTube where Tynan Sylvester (the creator of RimWorld) talks about using this effect in game design.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
>Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things. The term (German: Apophänie) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness". He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential, over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations.
RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdqhHKjepiE
5 game design tips from Sims creator Will Wright
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scS3f_YSYO0
>Tip 5: On world building. As you know by now, Will's approach to creating games is all about building a coherent and compelling player experience. His games are comprised of layered systems that engage players creatively, and lead to personalized, some times unexpected outcomes. In these types of games, players will often assume that the underlying system is smarter than it actually is. This happens because there's a strong mental model in place, guiding the game design, and enhancing the player's ability to imagine a coherent context that explains all the myriad details and dynamics happening within that game experience.
>Now let's apply this to your project: What mental model are you building, and what story are you causing to unfold between your player's ears? And how does the feature set in your game or product support that story? Once you start approaching your product design that way, you'll be set up to get your customers to buy into the microworld that you're building, and start to imagine that it's richer and more detailed than it actually is.
