Wasn't up for a while, but its there now.

Cockshott is a terf, and I hate that he is one of the best in the field of economic planning, but this book was interesting. Now you can read it without paying him lol

  • invalidusernamelol [he/him]M
    ·
    11 months ago

    ML tech is basically just gaussian elimination. It's dealing with tensors and matrices and could easily be adapted to do exactly what he lays out in TANS. Which is why I think China is spending a lot of money funding research into building ML systems.

    The hardest part as always is getting those input weights.

    That being said, using a ML model for this would allow you to scale it to run at different speeds. So you could simplify the input models and get a faster result then use that to more efficiently allocate computing resources in the more detailed planning models.

    • FunkyStuff [he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      I saw you mentioned Towards a New Socialism elsewhere in the thread, do you remember the section where he talks about using an iterative algorithm to approximate gaussian elimination?

      It's also interesting to think of ML as a way of circumventing Gaussian elimination, I guess it makes some sense but I've always thought of it as a minimization algorithm for some loss function and nothing else.

      • invalidusernamelol [he/him]M
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        He's mentioned tensor flows and machine learning in his work before.

        He also has an implementation called New Harmony written in Julia you can mess with.

        Oh yeah, and the ML stuff would never replace raw gaussian elimination. It's just more time efficient if you know what end state you're looking for. It would just be a tool for planners, not a planning system. Kinda like when you have render previews in 3D modeling software to get a general idea of what you need to add to make a scene lol right.