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lasagna_coder

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interestingly, i find that many of the things that also make money aren't even really useful, they just exist and people want them for some obscure reason. so you're right, and also it might actually lead to making money anyway because what might seem useless doesn't exclude valuable.

clutter the ecosystem what ecosystem? diverts community to spent time on "useless" projects what community? addressing real-world challenges. what challenges?

i'm curious to know what the criteria or thresholds are for releasing vs not releasing.

Well yes, a certain number of the public service or political parties will believe things that are simply false (whether legitimately or as a means to serve their goals), in fact, many political parties in Germany and other developed countries are based entirely on false premises to the extent of being named after them. But this is actually the point of democracy, so as much as the observation is humorous it also highlights a certain level of naivety.

Digging even a little into German history reveals why the whole digitalisation and bureaucracy situation is the way it is. In fact, it also shows a side that if one doesn't believe that our tech-centric disruption culture is a corruption of society and people, then one might actually be the one who is delusional. Remember, there's a whole class of people out there who depend heavily on things working the way they do - no so much for gain, but for the benefit that any 'digital' alternative may cripple them (e.g. many elderly, disabled, and poor members of society). To some, providing a secondary tool isn't simply an alternative, it's the first step towards a complete replacement of the thing they find more useful (a good example of this is 'cashless societies').

I think this is uniform across Germany, and I think the legal requirement might be either be registered or have an appointment to be registered, similar to other legally required appointments, which (from my understanding) causes issues regarding endless-reschedule loopholes.

to be fair, many countries' governments have this same issue, and even when they do something the UX feels like something from 2002. The thing is, its complex, often the job pays way below market rate and government jobs often have rigid salary tiers, hiring might not be done like a normal tech co. as you might also have specific public servants to do it, and then you have culture, which might rule out certain people or cultivate attitudes towards work. Beyond that, in developed democracies like Germany, what gets funded long enough to be pushed to production can depend on election cycles and public opinion. Additionally, the big 4 have a big presence in developed countries and they often get these 100 million <currency> contracts to do stuff like that and... enough said.

This is highly useful. You could take the idea, generalize it to be reusable for any German form, and make a plan to develop such a thing as open source with funding from: prototypefund.de as their applications close end of the month.

There are many cars and many car owners and many car drivers in Germany, I think the stat is something like >3/4s Germans own cars. There happens to be public transport and bicycle infrastructure proportionate to the density of a region (ie more in cities), but lots of Germany is still rural, sparsely populated, and dominated by cars for getting around. If you aren't from/in Germany and visit it, you'll see how popular cars are here and that is unlikely to change soon.

Faster code writing still requires people who know what the code should do, what it should look like, etc, like you if it's true what you say you're capable of. It sounds like you sharpened the right skills: how the code should work, and didn't waste time, ie. practicing being faster with a keyboard. Now you're more a developer, and less a typist, that's all. We still use engineers to design bridges, despite much of the actual building being done by machinery, process, and unskilled labor, because we don't trust a cement mixer to tell us how the bridge should function.

What are these projects are you referring to? AFAIK Tesseract is sponsored by Google, from what I understand it is state of the art, ie it is Google OCR. Searching for OCR with OpenCV only reveals using OpenCV with Tesseract, not rolling its own OCR, OpenCV being used to preprocess images to optimise them for Tesseract. Maybe I'm missing something, so I'm interested if you can point me in the right direction.