-2 points

I’m genuine curious if it’s any good.

Russians are kinda EE experts. If anyone’s gonna resolder their GPU…

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101 points

Ah yes, the Blyatbox. I guess we’re going back to cold war era Russia where all their stuff is just worse blatantly reverse engineered copies of stuff from other countries. Makes sense, Putin for some reason has really had a hard-on for recreating cold war era Russia.

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27 points

stuff is just worse blatantly reverse engineered copies

The reason they only had reverse-engineered copies is because the bigwigs at the CPSU decided that the workers didn’t need personal computers, despite the fact that all the computer research facilities in the USSR (of which there were plenty) recommended that they do.

If the USSR had thrown it’s weight behind personal computing we could have had some interesting shit.

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17 points

People don’t realize that the USSR was actually ahead of the USA and Europe in certain fields they decided to put effort in…

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10 points

Sure, when you can force the workforce to do a thing, that thing tends to get done. But they’ll probably do it slower than if they chose to do it. So other things will suffer if they force a certain initiative.

And that’s what we saw in the USSR. Certain initiatives progressed well (space program, nuclear program, etc), while others suffered (food production, basic manufacturing, etc).

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-5 points

It’s not just that… thanks to the USSR we have technologies that wouldn’t have even existed if it was left up to the capitalists. Such as synthetic diamonds and… you know - anything and everything to do with space.

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1 point

Ternary computing is some serious alt-history fodder.

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3 points

It’s interesting, but the electronics are more complicated. There’s a reason that everything standardized on base 2, including in Russia after the 1950s.

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6 points
*

You underestimate how affordable or accessible a computer was in the eastern block. For reference, a color tv that is “mass produced” and didn’t need much expensive high tech parts would cost as much as you would earn in one year - if you manage to find one in a shop.

For a computer you needed to find keyboard, drive, monitor, software and the computer itself which would be at least equally expensive to a color tv.

All the chips had to be manufactured locally in the eastern block, because there was an embargo on western computer tech. RAM alone was 10x more expensive because the manufacturing process was very inefficient.

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10 points

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10 points

Going back to the cold-war era where the USSR had to manufacture and provide mostly every single consumer good for its own citizens due to economic sanctions and isolation. You can’t compare luxury goods made all over the entire world for a wealthy minority, designed by experts from all other industrialized countries, against soviet-made mass-produced items which were meant to be able to be produced in as many units as possible using the least amount of resources possible. It’s just different manufacturing paradigms.

The USSR was what is called a “shortage economy” as opposed to western capitalism’s “surplus economy”. In capitalism, an abundance of competing companies in the same field leads to overproduction of most goods in a way that some products from some brands end up on the shelves of stores and storage houses collecting dust, and companies who manufacture a lot of these non-desired products, disappear. This leads to an inefficient waste of resources and labour, since it leads to unused goods and services.

The USSR, on the other hand, had a state-planned economy in which, using predictions of the planned output of raw materials, decided what to produce with these materials. Producing 10 more drills, meant that you had to produce 10 fewer units of something else. Hence, the economy was optimized so that only as many as strictly necessary of most goods would be manufactured. Additionally, the products were design to require the least amount of labour and resources necessary to be manufactured, taking into account mostly long-life and easy repairability to prevent inefficiencies. It was the only way that the USSR could, as a less industrialized state than for example Germany or the US or Britain (which had started industrialising around one century before the USSR did), could provide goods for everyone, and for the most part it did. The quality of products may not have been as high as high-quality consumer goods in the west, but that’s simply a combination of design choice to be available to cover more goods with similar amounts of raw materials and labour, of fewer experts in design and manufacturing than worldwide due to the size of the soviet block and their economical embargos.

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0 points

They couldn’t have been that isolated when they were directly buying and copying western designs. The first version of Tetris was programmed on what is more or less the Soviet clone of the DEC PDP-11.

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3 points

Being able to purchase some models of some products here and there doesn’t mean you can sustain a segment of the industry through imports

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8 points

On non-complex stuff, I wish some of our shit was still built to last like shortage economy stuff was. It seems like planned obsolescence creeped from a handful of products to basically everything.

A lot of it is market forces and globalization — people just get the cheapest version off Amazon if they don’t know the brands — but even relatively expensive clothes, tools, charging cables, etc. break all the fucking time.

This isn’t a communist vs. capitalist rant so much as an old man one. Simple products were generally better quality in the past. The cars broke down more but the tools you needed to fix them lasted fucking generations. Jeans didn’t just rip like they do now. Even things like pocket knives lasted forever if you took basic care of them. You can still find quality products but it’s increasingly impossible in some product categories.

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4 points

Planned obsolescence is a direct consequence of capitalism, and it gets worse the more capitalism develops. Capitalism, through competition and markets, makes some companies triumph and some companies to be outcompeted by the ones that triumph. This, coupled with ever-increasing capital investment by the companies that get the most profits, leads unequivocally and necessarily to increasing concentration of capital in the hands of a few companies in a given sector: oligopoly and monopoly. And when a sector is dominated by oligopoly and monopoly, it means competition between companies, the whole premise of capitalism, disappears. And it is at that point when malpractice such as planned obsolescence becomes a thing, because consumers literally don’t have a choice.

You’re absolutely right that it would be great to go back to times before planned obsolescence, but the only possible way to do so is politically, by eliminating the very system that leads to planned obsolescence.

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2 points

good look to them trying to revelse engineer a modern CPU lmao

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3 points

I would probably call it something like Нахуящик. I think it would resonate better with local audiences.

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-2 points
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1 point

And they’ll only use it to steal all of your data!

Wait, Russia doesn’t have a big reputation for hacking and espionage, right?

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0 points

In orbanistan (hungary) occuppied by soviets for 40 years (but even today orban is in the pocket of putin), we have a joke: “the problem with soviet/russian microelectronics: the product does not fit through the factory gate”

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30 points

This is certainly a choice.

I feel bad for the devs they’re going to hold at gunpoint.

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2 points

I wonder if they’re going to do digital or physical releases. It would probably save more money if they didn’t have physical media.

Would be funny if Western games companies start getting in on it. Although I suspect that everything on it’ll be mobile game quality garbage.

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