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

summa_tech•about 1 hour ago

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.

gostsamo•27 minutes ago

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.

summa_tech•8 minutes ago

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.

somat•about 2 hours ago

"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?

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

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion (6 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews