I actually think Germany would be really good at digital infrastructure if they stopped being afraid of friend computer. Germany is immensely proud of its history of creating standards - there's literally a place in berlin called DIN Platz. Germany is also very proud, and rightly so, in its history of mathematical innovation.
Everything that isn't dross in the computer world is either a well designed standard, or a well designed algorithm. If the German government adopted a sensible standard for government documents, for example, and mandated that all documents must be saved in it, that would already make a huge difference.
Germany has tons of potential, but Germany is one of the most risk averse countries on the planet (see Uncertainty Avoidance Cultures)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_avoidance]. This makes it amazing at building high quality industrial products, taking innovation done elsewhere and refining and polishing it, slowly over many years - building standards as you say. However, it doesn't help much in the innovation department. Also as probably the world leader in data privacy and protection that's another vector working against innovation. And then there is the robust legislation and bureaucracy (in a controlling sense) around all financial products (not to mention in general), which gives Germany advantages in certain industries but is also a distinct disadvantage for innovation in many sectors. There is also a massive union culture, which provides Germans with a great quality of life, but again, that's something probably negatively correlated to innovation.
I'd like to see more innovation in general and if this leads to that its good. But I don't personally think that innovation needs to happen in Germany, so long as it happens somewhere and Germans can do what they do best with it.
How do you explain all of the groundbreaking technologies and processes that have come from Japan and Korea? Both are at the extreme end of uncertainty avoidance.
How does the Germany of today reconcile itself with the iconoclasts of its past from mathematicians, physicists, chemists, explorers, filmmakers, and industrialists who set the stage for modern life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries?
In my experience it generally generally doesn't, and instead revels in the prestige of past successes. Titles and self mythology seem to be more valued than achievement and performance.
It's a sad frustration, as there is so much potential here.
> the robust legislation and bureaucracy (in a controlling sense) around all financial products
Germany has the world's largest, most liberal, and most liquid listed (<-- read that term twice before you rebut with an unlisted market!) equity structured products market. These products are essentially leveraged equity/FX options packaged as a bond. I'm confused. Can you be more specific about which particular "financial products" you think are excessively regulated in Germany?
> There is also a massive union culture, which provides Germans with a great quality of life, but again, that's something probably negatively correlated to innovation.
Hmm... So if people struggle in life and have live from hand to mouth in multiple jobs to support their family and loved ones, they are more innovative?
It engrains the idea into people early on, that they should work to upskill themselves or build their own jobs, instead of coasting on the idea the government will always be there for them to provide jobs and security.
Also, plenty of people in Germany live hand to mouth now. Poverty has been on the increase due to CoL.
So, your hypothesis is that greed fuels innovation? Those innovating are rarely the ones benefiting financially. I think it rather fuels hustling. The end game of hustling are monopolies, which have little to no interest in innovation.
From what examples I can think of right now, innovation actually appears to require a certain level of coziness. I'd say great ideas come from curiosity, and if you're struggling to eat, that's usually limited. The trick is, perhaps, to be cozy, but not so cozy that lifting a finger seems pointless.
> I actually think Germany would be really good at digital infrastructure if they stopped being afraid of friend computer.
They still have the automotive / electrical engineering mindset on computers and software. Software in Germany is built to achieve a means to an end. It is never the end goal itself.
>Software in Germany is built to achieve a means to an end. It is never the end goal itself.
Well, that's how it should be, I don't write software to worship any software deities, I use it to get a job done. If you don't you end up with that 700 dollar useless gadget that was basically a python API wrapper in a box that everyone rightfully made fun of.
We can do a lot of things better in software in Germany but treating it as an engineering discipline is a good thing, I think even the US is probably past the peak of the zero interest free money toy product phase and people are focusing more on real industry again.
What he means is that Germans are less susceptible to the SV bullshit artists that are hyping up their bubble unicorns for VC money, inflating companies with workers just to sell them at peak of the hype before cutting all those “positions” and then en-shittifying the product.
Technology coasted for a few decades gaining public’s trust as an unquestionable improvement over the past. That reputation is wearing out faster than I’d like to admit.
I hear from friends and family that SV big tech are increasingly equated with surveilence, credit card leaks, and destructive games of billionaires detached from reality. I had a long potluck talk with a stranger that was convinced ChatGPT is analogous to another crypto scam. It blew my mind and opened my eyes that could be a popular opinion.
I agree Germans are less susceptible to SV bullshit artists, but they also miss out on the upside for game changing ideas. Whether this is a net negative or net positive is yet to be determined. Up to this point, it has been Germany’s financial loss to over index on the engineeriness. Maybe it is America’s loss to over index on the financial outcomes and the truly world changing ideas and those very same ideas can be a net negative. I would have said 2 months ago that you would be hard pressed to find people on this message board who would agree with the latter, but I think that may have changed significantly recently.
As a German coming from Mannheim, and now living on the Canadian West coast, I have to say that this is exactly the mindset that makes it so difficult to innovate in Germany. While people have a top education and know everything they need to, they don't have a "digital mindset". I think of myself now as computing process, and see myself as a cyberneticist in the German philosophical tradition of Hegel, Marx, Hilbert, Gödel and Bloch, but even I more often than necessary mistrust innovations.
Almost all the science fiction and cybernetic work of the last 75 years came either out of the Eastern block, or out of the US. There is basically no German sci fi vision, and there is extreme reluctance to speculative, big picture thinking as it is pursued in Silicon Valley. Software companies grow quickly and need a very different approach. Silicon Valley mostly understands this scaling aspect and winner take all markets really well. German investors are cheap and extremely risk averse, I tried to build a software company in Germany and it is hard.
While a lot of the current AI work was also done in Germany, e.g. by Schmidhuber, Germans are stuck in their business model. I recommend Münchau's book "Kaput" (or one of his podcast interviews) on how poorly Germans have adapted to the non-industrial aspects of a modern economy (read: "services"). I really hope that more tech founder thinking like Benz, Bosch or Siemens returns to Germany in a modern form. But I don't see it yet, and Germans are still super reactive and conservative to larger changes. The Greens tried to think a bit out of the box, and were heavily punished for it. In general there is basically no political representation for building a new successful economy. At best there is this nice little narrative about the long established "Mittelstand", which has produce almost zero software companies. The first step right now would be to own the idea of the EU, and wanting to win instead of complaining.
I'm not German and have only made a couple of short visits to Germany, so I have no basis on which to judge your statement that Germans don't have a digital mindset.
But if that is indeed true, I find it equally interesting the Germany has been an important center for the development of electronic music. Berlin in particular is "arguably the world capital of underground electronic music" (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/arts/music/women-djs-berl...)
No, he lives in Switzerland now (Lugano as far as I know). Switzerland is a big magnet for European talent, as is Germany to a lesser degree. My point though was that Germany was not lacking the thinkers to drive a technological revolution, it is rather the society that does not really have the mindset for radical changes and forward thinking.
> Software in Germany is built to achieve a means to an end. It is never the end goal itself.
How do explain the explosion of non-embedded software companies in Berlin in the last 20 years? On the continent, it is hard to beat the Berlin tech scene for start-ups.
> Everything that isn't dross in the computer world is either a well designed standard, or a well designed algorithm
You must be hanging out in a different part of the computer world.
What I see is that most standards reflect evolved systems, and those standards usually have many amendments. Most algorithms are generation descendants of broken predecessors. I love hearing about a singular talent coming up with something new and getting the world to listen, but the story is usually way messier than that.
So, I agree that good standards and (to a lesser extent) algorithms come out of practice.
However, the basic point about a standard is not that it's perfect: it's a coordination mechanism. Companies go bust all the time, technology changes all the time, but if you have standard components, large parts of complex systems can be maintained indefinitely. Like, I have a rolling press that was made in 1840, and I can still replace the bolts for it, because the standard thread gauge has not changed.
I guess the nice thing about both algorithms and standards are they are the two places where the software world is not just burning people's lives on relentlessly reinventing the wheel. If you contribute even a fraction to the study of an algorithm, your work will be part of software in a thousand years. If you contribute to a standard, you are producing the conditions for a thousand other programs. Both of these things are basically common goods, and they help everyone. I think a culture of programming where it's less about founding the next over-capitalized unicorn, and more about creating a mutually supportive ecosystem, would produce very good software.
We actually have a rather recent government agency called "DigitalHub" for that, too, which has been quite successful at pushing open standards and open source. Then there's https://zendis.de/#produkte whose sole purpose is to replace non-EU closed-source software, for example by replacing Windows + Office with Linux and the custom desktop software suite https://opendesk.eu/
Most of German standardization boils down to creating artificial competitive moats to their existing companies, while propping up an incredible lucrative 'standardization industry'.
This allows most Germans to sleep soundly at night knowing some company won't show up at the door selling the same product they do, but better and cheaper.
This is a well know playbook, and is appealing to bureaucrats who conflate a stack paperwork with actual quality, and is not exclusive to Germans (why does FDA approved medicine cost 100x of chemically indentical stuff sold in other countries etc.)/
The point of PDF is document representation. It looks the same. This allows the government to assume an act of forgery when a non-governmental org attempts presenting documents looking like government documents. You can't do that with HTML. PDF with text source sounds perfect.
Seriously though, that's a horrible bowdlerization of the argument in the Phaedrus. It's actually very subtle and interesting, not just reactionary griping.
I'm not sure I can do it justice in an adhoc way, but it's important to keep in mind there are a few layers of irony that the piece is working on. First, Socrates, who does not write, is being presented as a character, in written form, by his disciple. So obviously Plato does not share Socrates' views on writing, even if he finds them interesting and valuable.
Second, in the dialogue, there are a bunch of examples of texts that are presented by the characters: the speech from Lysias, which Phaedrus has hidden in his cloak, then the speech from Socrates, that he disavows, then another speech, taking the opposite position. There's also the (fascinating) recounting of a legend about Thoth, and the invention of writing, which plays on the fact that the greek word for 'medicine' is the same as that for 'poison'.
It's a really rich text - as, I guess, you might expect from a really brilliant writer who was also a disciple of a philosopher who never wrote a word. I tend to think of it as a serious attempt to describe the conceptual differences between speech and writing - something people tend to collapse ('writing is recorded speech', etc).
I mean, it's not a very interesting research topic? People who are poor and young commit certain categories of crime more often. That has nothing to do with immigration or race or whatever.
It has everything to do with illegal immigration because illegal immigration is a constant influx of people that are within the "right" demographics for crime (young, male, less educated, less wealthy etc). If you change the demographics of a country to add poor young people every year, you get a higher incidence of crime by definition.
I mean, it is? It's the most divisive political topic at the moment and the reason why populisms are on the rise? If anything, I'd expect more and more detailed studies on that?
Trying to prove correlations between race and crime is literally the historical basis of criminology as a discipline. They failed, it's stupid, and now people know better.
You can commission as many studies as you like on astrology, and they'll all be meaningless.
If you read the thread, you will find that this is not about the correlation between race and crime, but about the correlation between illegal immigration and crime.
I've read that big pharma are primarily patent companies: most of the actual research is done by universities, then most of the production is outsourced.
Pharma companies spend 10x what universities and the NIH do.
The only grain of truth in it is if you compare a tiny subset of what pharma companies do, and look only are extremely early drug exploration, and ignore all of the subsequent development like drug screening, testing, formulation, and clinical trials.
I think even Russia and the US still do intelligence sharing on a lot of stuff - and that's before you consider that the US seems to be in everybody's networks anyhow, so non-sharing is probably just sharing with a bit more skullduggery.
I don't think they share on the bulk data. I would highly doubt they routinely cooperate on cyber crimes given Russia's stance on the matter (basically encouraging it).
The expectations for hostage-takers are pretty low, whereas the expectations for police are, if not sky-high, at least that they won't kill or injure you.
Disappointment is often proportionate to anger.
There's a second point which is, from a political perspective, police behaviour can be easily changed. Desperate criminal behaviour cannot.
These are all valid explanations or potentiators for what can cause the phenomena or syndrome, but it doesn't mean that the behavior is accurate to the truth.
She chose to spoke in a way that condemned the police who tried to help you and she chose to spoke kindly to the hostage takers - you can frame everything in anyway you want.
But reality is that police tried to do good for society while hostage takers were actively putting her in risk and trying to take from the society.
To be empathetic to the police, they were also under tremendous stress, and had never seen a situation like that, Sweden had never seen this, and like the article said they hadn't trained for that. They tried to make the best of the bad situation they could, and after managing to have everyone lives intact, they were still condemned by someone who they tried to save, and that someone was speaking kindly of the people who caused the situation in the first place.
I think I'm pretty good for a layperson at statistics + public health stuff, and a lot of the precautions we ended up taking in the pandemic were news to me: for instance, the effect of masks on protecting others, the relationship of infection surges to mass casualty events, and so on.
I figure a lot of people are just not used to following rules (they're office workers who don't wear PPE at work, etc) so when they had to follow rules, they freak out.
When the situation is "there is an epidemic of a disease transmitted from human to humans" that people do not go breathing in each other's face is not a matter of «follow[ing] rules» but following good common sense. If people freak out realizing and following good common sense, there is a massive societal problem.
And going to the matter of «freedoms ... curtailed», the instantiation of "treat them like retards" had been to forbid people in deserts to leave the house*. If the administrations arrive to absurd satanic ruling, there is again a massive societal problem.
The problem remains not with freedom per se but with (the absence of) intellectual light.
This post does not seem to have much relation to what I wrote.
The article writer wrote that during the epidemic freedoms where curtailed; I noted that more importantly, the citizens of democratic societies, that constitutionally see their members as empowered, in regulations became de facto elements regarded as fools. It is a paradox and reveals a bigger problem: liabilities should not be free to start with and the role of the state is to diminish their number in favour of the mature (reliable etc). So, the problem of freedom that the article author mentions so swiftly is shallowly treated.
There is no need to have any «requisite training», in this occasional context, to know that you cannot go around and sneeze on people, that you cannot risk people's health lightly, that "do not meet people" does not equate to "do not leave the house". It is just a matter of basic wits. When basics are supposed as missing a massive societal problem is revealed. Pointing the focus over freedom when the ground approach is regarding people as fools is missing a bigger point. In some territories people have been forbidden to live the house - not in New York or Singapore or Valletta, but in the remote countryside and mountainside; in some territories people have been forbidden to take a walk in the night. Beyond the limitation of freedom there is a labelling of the population as mentally underage. Technical-scientific-medical competence over e.g. the effectiveness of masks has nothing to do with it.
And for what «expertise» and «advice» are concerned - which were not at all part of my argument -, many administrations have made it very apparent that they had no credibility or substantial authority. This again, underlines a massive societal problem. Citizens are required to have basic wits and much more - and administrations with even more reason.
Democracy is not supposed to settle technical questions. It is supposed to settle questions about societal goals and moires.
As such, there's no need for anybody to know about anything technical. And they don't: the president of the US suggested injecting bleach. The prime minister of the UK bragged loudly about shaking hands with absolutely everyone.
The various interventions vis-a-vis night-time strolls were basically technical measures in the end of a widely-agreed upon goal: avoiding mass casualties. You can say you are fine with the casualties. You can become an expert and identify a mistake in the argumentation. You can't vote on what the facts are, and whether or not 'do not leave the house' moves case rates up or down is a fact.
> You can say you are fine with the casualties. You can become an expert and identify a mistake in the argumentation. You can't vote on what the facts are, and whether or not 'do not leave the house' moves case rates up or down is a fact
No, I have been trying to say since the original post that we cannot be fine with a system in which it is either practiced or plausible or both that people are or are deemed incapable of understanding proper behaviour, such as "virus spreading: stay far from people" - which cannot be considered technical, because it is not a matter of higher expertise but a very trivial idea. In light of people not understanding "collective risk: stay far" and of the de-dignification that embraced the former ("the population is imbecile and accident prone: do not touch any tool in the shed"), the point of "freedom" that the article writer proposed as first comes later.
Unless you mean: are you fine with car crashes casualties which could be prevented by forbidding transportation - in which case I would say that yes, such casualties in the general framework are overwhelmed by the benefit given by the opportunity that enables them as a possible side effect. So yes, if a citizen acted responsibly and all precautions seriosly taken the remote ugly case happened, then yes, "too bad". Forbidding cars to avoid accidents would be insane.
Only yesterday, by coincidence, I was told by an acquaintance of somebody fined 500e for having gone running in the woods - a guy exercising in mountain paths.
There is no need to gather any expertise beyond "primary school" level to highlight the expected behaviour I mentioned.
And sure "not leaving the house" avoids a class of accidents, just like "not using cars" avoids car accidents: but it is psychotic to reduce numbers that way. And it is absurd to confuse "do not meet people", direct, with "do not leave the house", indirect - and the absurd is satanic. So in front of psychopathology (taking goals as absolute), of satanistic absurd, of the prospect of a "citizenship of the mindless" etc., the goal about "mass casualties" goes in the background in importance and similarly for the mistaken issue of freedom.
No need to presume: you can read the article. "dissemination of defamatory fake news and another probe over possible obstruction, incitement and criminal organization."
Anyone who accuses X of hosting disinformation and fake news will 100% win in court. It’s at least 75%of the content I see when I dare to go to the “for you” algo feed.
Obviously there's a lot more detail in all the prosecutions and investigations. Most, or all of it, should be publicly available if you really care to understand the problem.
Laws have been broken, and this is the justice system's reaction to that. This is not censorship. Brazil (and most of the world) don't subscribe to the idea that freedom of expression and freedom of press are unbound.
This is censorship. Just because it's being done within a legal framework doesn't mean it's not censorship. The Brazilian people will have to decide whether they want their judiciary to have such excessive control over freedom of expression.
The rest of the world should subscribe to the idea that freedom of expression and freedom of expression are (nearly) unbound. The USA is the only major country which gets this right.
> The Brazilian people will have to decide whether they want their judiciary to have such excessive control over freedom of expression.
This is a very loaded comment, full of personal opinions. Which is fine, but let's not pretend it's factual truth.
In any case, we have. At least within the limits of our USA-inspired representative democracy. Federal law goes through 3 houses of elected representatives: the National Congress, the Senate and the Union Executive.
The Constitution goes through even more scrutiny.
> The rest of the world should
More personal opinions. Which, again, is fine. But it's not factual truth.
> The USA is the only major country which gets this right
I think this says it all. We have very little common basis for discussion. I would say the USA is the main major country that gets the _most_ things wrong.
When any party, either government or private, blocks free expression then that is literally censorship. It might be legally or morally justified in some circumstances, but it is still censorship.
Words mean things. You don't get to redefine words to support your argument.
Sure but you'd also have to define free expression.
Article 10 of the Human Rights Act [0] says:
> 2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
I will charitably assume that you aren't a native English speaker and are honestly confused about the nuances of the language rather than trying to derail the discussion with incorrect and irrelevant semantic arguments. Just because a particular act of censorship might be legal within a certain framework doesn't mean it isn't censorship.
Although I can't imagine why you would cite a UK law in a discussion about censorship in Brazil. It's sad how the UK has been growing ever more authoritarian and totalitarian, but that's an entirely separate discussion.
> Just because a particular act of censorship might be legal within a certain framework doesn't mean it isn't censorship.
For the record, I would like to note that this sort of censorship is utterly unconstitutional here in Brazil too.
Every single time this gets discussed, I cite the literal words from the constitution:
> Any and all censorship of political, ideological and artistic nature is prohibited
These are very simple words that any citizen can understand. There is no room for misinterpretation here. Yet every single time people respond with impressive mental gynmnastics to justify the judge-king's actions. I've had people argue with me by citing laws lower than the constitution, by getting into asinine arguments over the definition of free speech and censorship, by arguing about "isonomy" as if it somehow invalidated the very simple words written above, and also by calling me a moron for presuming to do the judge-king's job as if the contradictions weren't there in plain sight for all to see. The guy you're replying to once called me a sterotypical reactionary WhatsApp uncle right here on HN.
In the eve of the 2022 elections I witnessed this judge censor a documentary a priori. Without even watching it, before it was even released, he judged it was "fake news" and ordered its censorship. This is the sort of thing that used to happen in last century's military dictatorship. There is no justification for this whatsoever.
If a brazilian is harmed by someone's speech, they get to answer. They get to be made whole by legal means. They don't get to straight up censor the other guy or in any way prevent them from speaking. I see this all the time, even in politics. Some guy insults another, gets sued and is made to pay damages or whatever. That's all there is to it. The original insult is not censored. This is fine.
With these judges it's different. Some magazine ran some damning article on them back in 2019 and they granted themselves virtually limitless power to investigate, prosecute, judge and punish "fake news" of all kinds, with themselves as the victims. They determine what's fake of course. Their powers just kept expanding until they essentially usurped all power in this country. It got to the point the judge started proposing changes to laws directly to our representatives. The changes were rejected but he just rammed the "fake news" nonsense down our throats anyway via his "resolutions".
This is not a democracy, it's a dictatorship of the judiciary. Unelected judge-kings with lifetime mandates whose pens directly make the people with guns do their bidding. It's kind of ridiculous to even discuss "laws" at this point. These guys could write whatever they want on a piece of paper and it becomes law.
Everything that isn't dross in the computer world is either a well designed standard, or a well designed algorithm. If the German government adopted a sensible standard for government documents, for example, and mandated that all documents must be saved in it, that would already make a huge difference.