[mike_hearn]

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.

[unmole]

You're eliding the more prosaic and direct explanation for why the Soviets were forced to clone chips instead of designing systems from scratch: cost. The American semiconductor industry had a vast civilian customer base that let it recoup R&D expenses. The Soviets didn’t. Chip Wars covers this in detail with numbers.

[mike_hearn]

It wasn't that, not at the start. Soviets were cloning US semiconductors right from the very first days of the industries existence when they were mostly selling chips to the US military. There wasn't a huge consumer base back then keeping them afloat, and the Soviet chip industry was highly prioritized by the Kremlin. They even built an entire city called Zelenograd just to house the semiconductor workforce.

[unmole]

The Soviets did try to design their own chips in the beginning. But it was a lost cause because they simply couldn't keep up with the advances of the West.

[codeflo]

Cost can't be the true reason. In a planned economy, the customer base doesn't matter. If the state wants to allocate X number of engineers to do Y, it simply does, at the expense of whatever other project is considered politically less important.

The fact that the customers' demands have no influence on resource allocation, except to the extent that bureaucrats decide it's politically convenient to address them, is in fact precisely why life under communism is so shitty.

[unmole]

It may not have been the only reason, but cost was absolutely a major real reason. In a planned economy, cost does not disappear. Skilled engineers, specialized materials and equipment are all still scarce. Semiconductors are literally the most sophisticated manufactured products and require the most complex supply chains. The Soviet Union was notoriously bad at coordination between ministries, state agencies, design bureaus, and factories. Semiconductors are probably the single worst industry for the Soviet model.

Maybe in theory, they could have lobbed enough bodies at the problem to make it go away. But they simply did not have the resources.

[codeflo]

Of course in any economy, there are scarce resources, and skilled labor is certainly one of them. What I'm specifically arguing against is the assertion that in a planned economy, the existence or lack of a customer base would in any real way impact the allocation of those resources. That's not a helpful way to analyze the decisions of the communist planning committee.

[IAmBroom]

That is a simplistic and naive POV.

Yes, the state can allocate X engineers to do Y.

But a complex system requires Z engineers to design subsystem 1, and repeat 100x.

And engineers for sub-subsystems.

And specialists for allocating resources reliably.

And mass shipping systems for transporting those resources efficiently (remember, this is a country that STILL doesn't have palletized supply chains!).

Unlike defeating the Third Reich, it is not a problem that can be solved by merely throwing more bodies at it.

[codeflo]

I don't disagree with that, but that's not what was discussed. The person I was replying to was asserting that the Soviet union couldn't have developed semiconductors because unlike the US, it didn't have "a vast civilian customer base that let it recoup R&D expenses". My argument is that "recouping" anything doesn't matter in a planned economy.

[BigTTYGothGF]

> Western AI labs keep claiming the Chinese labs are distilling them like crazy

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.

[gbacon]

That’s a nice driving tour of the effects of the economic calculation problem.

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.

[imtringued]

I think you are overselling the killing aspect although its true.

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.

[nz]

I think it is even simpler than you suggest. Cloning an established product is more efficient in terms of both effort (even if costs are subsidized turnaround time is still a measurable physical quantity) and politics (nobody ever got fired for cloning -- if the clone becomes popular, you win, if the clone does not become popular, the West loses).

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.

[bigfishrunning]

> if the clone does not become popular, the West loses

How? if the original product being cloned is popular, isn't the west still winning?

[pwg]

I think the OP meant "if the cloned item becomes popular 'in the west'".

[Joker_vD]

> why did the communists always clone things despite having engineers who could have designed their own?

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.

[bigfishrunning]

A few years ago i went to the International Spy Museum in Washington DC[0]. It was really interesting and had a lot of cold war espionage stories, although it is one of the few museums in Washington DC that charges admission. Worth it in my opinion if you're interested in this stuff and have the opportunity to go

[0] https://www.spymuseum.org