Comment by dzink | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dzink | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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