1. Mass starvation at a few points due to central planning errors

2. Horrifying purges and paranoia that cannot be excused as "errors"

3. Achieving mass literacy and a partially industrial economy in a single generation, from a medeival starting point.

Most good Americans who paid attention in civics class learned 1 and 2 very well without truly appreciating 3.

You have to understand that they were coming from a peasant economy where nobody could even read. It's an accomplishment despite Mao's shortcomings and awful deeds. And look at the scoreboard today. Highest GDP by purchasing power parity in the world. Xiaomi cars are nicer than Teslas, only non-American tech industry, high speed rail, etc etc.

Obviously most people are sensible most of the time but sometimes they are not.

Building data centers in Antarctica with nuclear power would be easier. And still way harder than necessary.

Of course, if you're optimizing, you'll reuse buffers and objects in either language.

Forging is machine assisted now with tons of tools but its still somewhat of a craft, you can't just send a CAD file to a machine.

I think we're still figuring out where on that spectrum LLM coding will settle.

The point is, the person wasn't trying to hedge against looking bad, they literally had to do and document this.

I once knew someone who had to solicit 3 bids and document them to buy a $500 camera for local government. They weren't thinking "I am useless and craven", they were thinking "this is silly but I have to do it".