briandw

China isn't communist. It stopped being communist under Deng Xiaoping. The market reforms are what lifted people out of poverty.

You said "living standards have plummeted since the collapse of communism in many countries" objectively not true. After communism collapsed (collapsing because it failed as an economic model) life in those countries was pretty bad. Living in the ruins of a failed system is going to be a bad time. Even so, of the 12 Soviet states, 10 are much better off. Turkmenistan is 582% bigger GDP. Moldova is about the same Ukraine is worse off, but being invaded by Russia will do that. Other states like Poland at 3.5x the GDP and Estonia are at 8x the GDP.

Do you trust the Soviets GDP numbers? Even if you do, the Soviets were spending upwards of 40% of their GDP on the military, not exactly a quality of life enhancement. Even discounting that, the only states that I could find that might qualify are Moldova (about the same level) and Ukraine about 72%). Ukraine is pretty clearly the Russians are to blame there. Other post Soviet countries, like Turkmenistan are > 580% bigger real GDP. Uzbekistan, Armenia and Kazakhstan are around 3x bigger GDP. Belarus, Tajikistan and Azerbaijan are around 2x bigger GDP. Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Georgia are about 1.3x bigger GDP.

Have you ever looked at the living standards in communist countries? Do you really expect that communism will improve anything for anyone other than the party bosses?

Fantastic project BTW! How much AI help did you have with this project? I'm assuming some. If so is it something that you would have taken on before AI help?

Mostly it's a QA issue. For new features it's just much easier to ignore older OSs

I some very real way this has been true for a very long time. Does anyone know how a AMD Ryzen processor works? I mean does anyone understand in any detail how it works from machine code down to the transistors?

Does anyone single person understand what’s happening when compiling a large C++ code base? Meaning, can anyone track the basket cast C++ language constructs down to the Clang IR to the optimized machine instructions? From there can any one person follow those machine instructions all the way through to the actual registers etc to actually running the code?

> Before approving construction, I would want communities of humans to understand why the design works and what justifies confidence in its safety. I would hope that we all would.

Why would mathematicians be the best at this or even able to contribute? Engineers and physicist seem like a much better choice. Mathematicians tend to not bother with messy things like whats physically possible, or human consequences etc.

Yes I should have been more precise about the virtual memory. There was something like it that could swap to disk (in os 8 i think). Anyone remember RAMDoubler? It wasn't anything like the UNIX VM that came with MacOSX.

It looked further along than I expected. I remember hearing that they were having a hell of a time making it a modern os with proper multitasking etc.

I am so grateful that I can play with Copland. I was the ultimate fan boy back it the day. My first computer was an Apple ][ and we had the first Macintosh at home. All the mac fans were desperate to get a reentrant multithreaded system that didn’t let a rogue application take down the system. That and virtual memory were desperately needed. The UI is what made it all worth it, so clean and comprehensible. You always knew what was where and what felt like complete mastery of the system. MacOSX was a welcome change but it was never as comfortable or friendly or even as responsive as the original. The original mac mouse latency is still better and any system in common use today.

The secret to extreme long life is bad record keeping.

Really? How? Show me a country that taxes wealth and is prosperous. Taxing unrealized gains results in owing tax on money you don’t have and makes starting a funded company impossible.

Unfortunately this does not work at nation scale. We are not insects. Tribes fail at levels over a few hundred and that scale only works because of blood ties. Communism has failed to produce good outcomes every time it's been tried. Even coops aren't competitive with traditional corporations.