If you grow up in that environment (restricted by government in some areas and liberated in others) you’ll start seeing systems very differently. The game plays differently with different rules.
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.
>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.
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.
I wrote from personal experience. In 1992 in a fisherman town we had a robotic arm and Pravetz 8 and 16 computers with the 5 inch floppy disks. We had to use Basic to program the arm and it was only doing basic movements. The teacher had a 16 year old who was assisting with the lab and you did have to ask for permission to do stuff.
I'm glad you were that lucky! I was lucky too, my father had computer at work. Maybe that's why we met here. I guess it would be better if written with 'me' and not 'they'
The fun fact was that the 16 year old that passionately administered the lab was also hitting on any female students who went in there, essentially chasing them away. I suspect the number of techies would double if it wasn’t for all the bad behavior.
I was fortunate in that Internet cafes started happening and I could volunteer to administer networks and troubleshooting for them while getting PC time for free. I also maintained PCs for friends with businesses who could afford one. So the Pravetz sparked my curiosity but the real growth happened on begged and borrowed time from other peoples computers.
>ROBKO 01 is an anthropoid robot manufactured in Bulgaria by BAS (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) and produced by the Medical Equipment Factories. It is an analog based on the manufactured in the USA Armdroid 1000. The two robot arms are completely the same, except some minor differences in the mechanics and drive circuitry.
> 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
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.
I didn't mention Paris, or even West in general though. Made zero comparisons. The whole text is about the place where I lived. So I'm not sure how did I manage to glamorize something
When you say “Not every school had computers” as a rebuttal without realizing that pretty much no school in a bunch other countries elsewhere in Europe had computers at the time.
This was a fascinating article, because I've seen so many results of the Eastern Bloc reverse-engineering efforts basically founder into obscurity. Many of these re-created (sometimes with minor variations, or quite novel and ingenious implementation choices) computers were made in small series, but could not compete against illegal imports, and in any case would only be briefly popular in their local university town.
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.
Well... The rusian Spectrum clones had some sucesfull career. And they did a lot of improvements over the original Sinclair and Amstrad designs. The Pentagon and the Scorpion with extra RAM, or the ATM come from pure rusian ingenuity .
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.
Illegal for whom? The manufacturers? It's the same as it's now illegal for Boeing and Airbus to sell parts to Russia, yet Russia developed a network of intermediaries in several countries that buy the parts on their behalf so they can maintain their planes. PEWEX stores used to sell of kinds of goods from the west, including computers and even cars, if you had the dollars it was far easier to buy a western car or a computer than wait for a domestically made one. Maintaining it afterwards was a different question of course, but PEWEX stores were created specifically by the government to obtain dollars, they bought goods in the west usually by barter, and then sold them domestically for dollars, which then they used to buy the goods they really wanted since no one would take Polish Zloty in the west, but dollars opened many doors.
Yes, but, wasn't the prices fixed for stuff? I imagine there must have been things which were either cheap to buy, or which could easily "disappear" from a production line and sold in the West for more than it was worth on the other side of the curtain.
You couldn't just go and sell stuff in the west. The USSR had exit visas. You had to prove you had a genuine need to leave, would be searched and treated very carefully. And proving a need to leave was difficult. Merely wanting to go on holiday or see relatives wasn't close to enough. There were very few exit visas available, which is why stories about defectors are often about elite athletes or sports champions.
>>Also the Soviets manufactured very little of anything valuable to the west. Their primary exports were commodities.
Time to mention the story of how Pepsi Co briefly had one of the largest navies in the world, because CCCP couldn't settle its debt to Pepsi with cash, so they accepted several warships instead.
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 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.
You know, I never thought about it that way. But you're making a lot of sense here. And in older sci-fi literature, after a very early period of distrust of the concept, cybernetics as a component / enabler of perfect collectivist society did show up, before - as you said - the West advanced too far away from the local state of the art.
Also, as a broader view of your point, perhaps technocratic communism degenerates by giving way to bureaucratic communism.
One thing to understand about communism is that lots of people believed in it, but for the most part the communist elites considered it a feudal system where one's access to resources made them valuable and gave them power. Anything that would provide the higher ups transparency and accountability would be ruinous for the balance of power and therefore met significant pushback. There was never a technocratic communism because idealists would be either defanged to act as specialist executor clas or outright removed as unreliable players.
Regarding computer usage, it was increasing to the very end, but the desolution of the USSR stopped it and the industry was destroyed in the following crises. The elites tried to modernize the economies, but it was too little too late.
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 mental map of the world there was no particular image of what a Bulgarian thought about Communism. We knew Serbs liked it and we knew Czechs and Poles didn't, for instance. What about Bulgarians?
I think the latter was the main reason why. Serbs were not Soviet puppets, USSR could not control them, they didn't feel occupied by foreign power. So even if Communism kinda sucked, it was more like "dumbass politician we elected who keeps mismanaging things" rather than "foreign enemy who's yoke we must get off our butts".
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 ascribe to it.
Regarding your question, I cannot talk on behalf of everyone. Many who didn't like communism were killed or crushed otherwise in the early years, many who accepted communism did it because of the association with Russia and the historical connection there, many who had their best years in the booming years of the regime until 1970 approx remember it fondly, many who had their worst years in the nineties have a nostalgia avoiding to talk about the bad aspects of it, many didn't give a damn and lived in the system while undermining it, and many of those who would formulate intellectual criticism of it were actually well incorporated in the system to give a damn about what is good or bad. Overall, there were lots of people who disliked both the party and its dependence on the USSR, but there was not a mass movement until the very last years when things started to break down.
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.
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.
> 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.
Hard to talk about favorites in books, but there was a solid decade of my life where I'd have probably said this was my favorite sci fi book. Highly recommend to anyone reading this.
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 ascribe to it.
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.
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 idea of a singular "communist mind" as ridiculous as you.
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.
"systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible " was exactly what got computer systems killed in Communist Poland.
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.
Quite a few words in Bulgarian are similar to words in other European languages, just written in a different alphabet. I briefly dated a girl in Bulgaria years ago and was surprised at how quickly I could find my way around by reading street signs, applying knowledge of French and German, etc.
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.
There was also a Soviet Apple II clone, called Агат (Agat). But iirc, for whatever reason, they couldn't clone the 6502, so they built one out of logic ICs, and the thing was too slow to run Apple II software unmodified. Later there was an expansion card with a real imported 6502 that added full compatibility.
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.
I think my reaction is mostly puzzlement. I can see a sensible point or several in the article, but I was not always sure how big a point the author was trying to make.
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.
Thank you for this. Very enjoyable read. It reminds me of a post I saw discussing how code review is similar to reviewing mathematical proofs -- you have to know it like you wrote it, and now with AI, this is less and less the case. I definitely miss the days when I knew something was bulletproof because I wrote it and tested it thoroughly.
> 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!
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.
Interesting point about the grassroots origin. When I read the accounts in early 1990s it was alleged that a whole factory of a minor computer manufacturer in the USA was bought and relocated to Pravets. Including the furniture, broom closets and trashcans. Though am not sure if computer designs were also allegedly in the deal.
Also that Bulgaria invested into some semiconductor manufacturer in Singapore to maintain uninterrupted access to the components.
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 for "communist" thinking. And that's natural, because people's thinking is not same in the West as in the East, and even more in far-East.
Ok, enough on that, everyone's right to call it whatever they want, just pitching some clues that can help avoiding the cliché.
My journey also started when first seeing IMKO-2 in 1984, then there was a popular magazine for the young "engineers" called "МЛАД КОНСТРУКТОР" (full archive here https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0Bw941VGG9Tjc... )that started publishing a course of BASIC. So I learned virtually and even wrote programs on paper before the first actual contact with the computer, which happened 1 year later on the newly acquired by my school couple of PRAVETZ-82.
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?
> A limitation, but also an engineering decision that had a certain brutal elegance: you get one alphabet at a time, comrade, and you will type in capitals.
Same decision with the capitalist American Apple II, only upper case letters unless you added some additional board.
Eastern bloc computers are so fascinating to me. The soviets were pretty bad at it, but the germans were doing pretty well all things considered. It's also fascinating how much they liked DEC, at least architecturally
Very interesting article. It's always fascinating for me as someone from Gen Z, to see how the computers worked in the beginning, and the stories behind them.
nobody — knew what these circuits were actually supposed to compute.
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.
> More interesting is what happened next: an institute in Sofia was reportedly tasked with decapping the ICs, lifting the netlists under a microscope, and reproducing them with socialist lithography
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?
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.
>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.
>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
>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.
"AMD’s AI director reports that Claude Code has become “dumber and lazier” since February, based on analysis of 6,852 sessions and 234,760 tool calls, which is the most thorough performance review any AI has received and rather more than most human employees get."
Are there any good ways to measure agent ability? Or do we just have to go by vibes?
117 comments
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.
>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.
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.
I was fortunate in that Internet cafes started happening and I could volunteer to administer networks and troubleshooting for them while getting PC time for free. I also maintained PCs for friends with businesses who could afford one. So the Pravetz sparked my curiosity but the real growth happened on begged and borrowed time from other peoples computers.
>ROBKO 01 is an anthropoid robot manufactured in Bulgaria by BAS (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) and produced by the Medical Equipment Factories. It is an analog based on the manufactured in the USA Armdroid 1000. The two robot arms are completely the same, except some minor differences in the mechanics and drive circuitry.
https://8bitclub.com/general-information/
> 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
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.
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.
>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.
https://www.rbth.com/history/334094-athletes-fled-ussr-how
Also the Soviets manufactured very little of anything valuable to the west. Their primary exports were commodities.
>>Also the Soviets manufactured very little of anything valuable to the west. Their primary exports were commodities.
Time to mention the story of how Pepsi Co briefly had one of the largest navies in the world, because CCCP couldn't settle its debt to Pepsi with cash, so they accepted several warships instead.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-shi...
> 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.
Regarding computer usage, it was increasing to the very end, but the desolution of the USSR stopped it and the industry was destroyed in the following crises. The elites tried to modernize the economies, but it was too little too late.
For example, my father was able to buy a Beta VCR in the late 80s on his engineer's salary, it took him three months of intense saving.
Regarding your question, I cannot talk on behalf of everyone. Many who didn't like communism were killed or crushed otherwise in the early years, many who accepted communism did it because of the association with Russia and the historical connection there, many who had their best years in the booming years of the regime until 1970 approx remember it fondly, many who had their worst years in the nineties have a nostalgia avoiding to talk about the bad aspects of it, many didn't give a damn and lived in the system while undermining it, and many of those who would formulate intellectual criticism of it were actually well incorporated in the system to give a damn about what is good or bad. Overall, there were lots of people who disliked both the party and its dependence on the USSR, but there was not a mass movement until the very last years when things started to break down.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
What the heck is this psycho-mysticism.
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 ascribe to it.
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 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.
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.
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 asjson_loads,python_startup, ornbodyalready 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.
> 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.
> 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!
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.
> A limitation, but also an engineering decision that had a certain brutal elegance: you get one alphabet at a time, comrade, and you will type in capitals.
Same decision with the capitalist American Apple II, only upper case letters unless you added some additional board.
> For fourteen years... nobody —
nobody — knew what these circuits were actually supposed to compute.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.
> More interesting is what happened next: an institute in Sofia was reportedly tasked with decapping the ICs, lifting the netlists under a microscope, and reproducing them with socialist lithography
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.
Are there any good ways to measure agent ability? Or do we just have to go by vibes?