nforgerit

Congrats, this is the stupidest thing I’ve been reading all day. And that includes the orange man’s post.

This is a very superficial perspective. Disclaimer: I disdain both BSW and Afd.

You're basically falling into "the populist trap" in which they take a fact or something true and wrap it with a lot of BS and conspiracy theories. If you disregard the true core "just because it's from the wrong party" you give them political lever. We've seen that playbook working out for 10+ years.

De Masi did a great job as a financial expert in a parliamentary group, highly regarded by people over the whole political spectrum. I don't understand why he joined BSW but that doesn't weaken his point here.

And since we're already publicly discussing Trump blackmailing us with decommissioning US IT-Services without further notice, it is exactly right to talk about assets like gold being stored on US soil.

Oh McKinsey had a name for that program ("Leap"). I once worked at a "Telco Enterprise Startup" in Berlin founded by them.

They essentially lied about any anticipated KPI potentials and let their "tech" people put together a 15k EUR/month (before public release) platform on AWS which was such a pile of mess, it made the second year's CTO start from scratch. After some heavy arguments because of their poor performance, McKinsey agreed to let some "non-technical" people work there for a couple of months for free. All arguments you'd had with the McKinsey "Engineers" felt like talking to AWS Sales, they had barely any technical insights but a catalog of "pre-made solutions" to choose from.

Not an expert either, esp. because I'm too young and socialized in West Germany with family ties to Thuringia, though.

What always struck me was Eastern Germans' tendency to practical things (and an enormous creativity in fixing broken stuff!). In addition, this is 1949 Eastern Germany, the country was devastated and this part under Soviet rule. It might sound a bit weird as a gift from today's wealthy point of view but historically "a good pair of shoes" was always something people appreciated throughout all times and cultures.

I'd suggest browsing through ourworldindata.org's energy section. It is an absolutely astonishing accomplishment what China has built with slashing PV and battery prices as well as production capacities in recent years. Dynamics are such that there's hope they'll reach peak CO2 emissions in the upcoming few years, way ahead of their own plans. I'm saying that as a German whose 20y old idea (be a global supplier for renewable tech) they copied and executed like 10x better.

Whilst I agree with most of the points, author is making here I cannot help but make a small snarky remark that we, as a dev community, have been talking and dreaming about those talking points since the advent of html5 which is roughly 15ys.

Marketing and availability, i.e. is it within reach when a customer thinks about it, are core problems needing to be solved.

Not at all. E.g. Germany requires housing projects to build "enough parking lots" for newly built flats[0]. The result is that flats either don't get built at all or "green surfaces" (or playgrounds) get transformed into parking lots.

So the _real world_ result is, as a society, we favor parking lots over homelessness or green surfaces which is contradictory to pretty much everything else we're discussing. These laws are from times in which the legislator thought of them to be a good idea. Times have changed, the regulation hasn't and nobody is talking about exactly those issues. There's plenty more of those examples which can only lead you to the conclusion that most finely granular regulation is rather harmful than helpful.

[0] https://dejure.org/gesetze/LBO/37.html (German, it might be different from federal state to state)

Parent was discussing systematic issues and I was answering to that. In fact, what I'm getting downvoted for (the problem of outsourced over-engineered regulations that frequently contradict each other) is openly discussed, at least in Germany.

Maybe you should check yourself in "seeing anti Europeans everywhere".

The problem is that those regulatory committees always put some kind of idealistic nonplus ultra standards into the regulations without respecting the real world.

"Sorry kids, no kindergarden here for you because the regulator requires us to build parking space for SUVs and obeying this means we can't build enough parking space for all your parents which would break another rule. So we'll do nothing."

Think of it as people who feel more frustrated than other by being interrupted in their thinking process. From my anecdotal evidence I think one can map different psychological spectrums like ADHD or autism to them liking or disliking such tools that "pop up".

Also energy efficiency significantly improved, no?

Our governments are a swamp of incompetence concerning anything "Information age". But still my fav story is from the private sector:

In order to "merry" digital and paper form data, they set up a system to send paper forms to Swiss post ("digitization-as-a-service") who routed them to (afair) Bangladesh where cheap workers (used to a wholly different alphabet) manually transcribed stuff as XML and uploaded it to some ftp directory. We SWEs then were supposed to build automated systems based on that handwritten XML data. Obviously, the cost they reduced with cheap labor they had to pay multiple times to have us building a resilient data ingestion system. Why again are we okay with having lawyers and MBAs making decisions?

German government will print out all messages on paper and hire thousands of civil servants to read each message. It's gonna be a Beschäftigungswunder.

I once had the opportunity to watch two crows attacking a swarm of sparrows.

I've never seen birds hunting birds before so it made me watch the whole scene for 3-5min and I was baffled how the crows systematically 1) induced chaos trying to isolate a sparrow from the swarm then 2) killed it and 3) while one crow was busy eating it the other crow kept the infuriated swarm at distance. After a while 4) the crows changed jobs.

You hit the nail. It's been almost tragically funny how people frantically tried to juggle 5 bars of wet soap in recent 2 years solving problems that (from what I've seen so far) have been already solved in a (boring) deterministic way consuming much less resources.

Going further, our predecessors put so much work into getting non-deterministic electronics together providing us with a stable and _correct_ platform, it looks ridiculous how people were trying to squeeze another layer of non-determinism in between to solve the same classes of problems.

I'll call it the Volkswagen Trap, or more general the ICE one-way street

The main problem is not even the ice wasteland which northern Europe would be but the dramatic temperature gradient to the Mediterranean which means storms and weather extremes we've never seen before.

Stefan Rahmstorf[0] has been talking quite a lot about this in the recent 3-5 years, with a rising urge over time. This paper perfectly fits what he was telling about AMOC in a Keynote a month ago[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Rahmstorf

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHNNW8c_FaA "One of the most ominous risks for Europe is that of a major change in Atlantic ocean currents. Recent science suggests it has been greatly underestimated in the past -including by me, having worked on it for over 30 years. Here Prof. Rahmstorf presents his keynote in Vilnius in May 2024."

I'll be getting downvoted for it but imho Ms never really cared about creating good software products and has been shoveling (at best) mediocrity through their wildly successful sales channels and through developing a stranglehold on public institutions (vendor lock-in). Azure is just another angle.

Why care if you got monopoly-alike power?

We jokers are tired as well

Why do you think not being willing to put resources to comply to rules equals to intentionally "spying on their users"? How come you think the rules assert that businesses are not able to spy on their users without their consent? You should better look what's inside the law's box instead of just looking at the packaging.

German here.

+ I like the right to be able download my personal data dump on platforms

- cookie banners are a total pointless waste of everyone's time

- institutions and organizations use "data protection" and "privacy" as generic gaslighting argument for things they can't do and/or lack competence in and as an excuse for keeping their 20y+ old processes

- consumer data is no way safer than before, just the means of collection have changed

- the law is so interpretable (e.g. "what is exactly PII data? IP addresses? the evercookie? what is an evercookie?") that, without blindly copying implementations from other sites, you'll probably end up in a grey area

- they started using GDPR for politically motivated unrelated prosecution. e.g. the first thing Italy did when ChatGPT went hype was using GDPR to quickly block the service. the case is only somewhat related because of scraped data for learning, however GDPR in my interpretation is about personal data.

So all in all is it worth it? I guess no. But YMMV.

The best thing I can say about evaluating LLMs for code is that they reminded me of the infinite monkey theorem.

Don't fret. What people call AI these days is just a gigantic economically unsound bullshit generator (some underlying ideas might be valuable though) that passed very stupid tests. It is brutally marketed like blockchain & crypto by some sociopaths from Silicon Valley, their mini-mes and middle management hell which needs to double down on bad investments.

The bigger problem I see is the economical situation.

German here. It's actually true that you see a lot of "public intellectuals" that publicly tell how bad they were at math.

I only realized that when Merkel as chancellor back in Covid times, after numerous meetings with other politicians and non-scientists, found herself explaining exponential growth on a press conference with her fingers.

Not sure about the 1970s hypothesis, though.

When I learned programming as a teenager, I was using one of the C++ classics which, of course, taught OOP and Inheritance as a magic silver bullet.

When I then finished the book and its examples, I wanted to do my own exercises and went through about 1-2 very painful years trying to model my things using Inheritance and totally blamed myself for being too stupid to do software development.

Only then I started searching and finding essays and blog posts of people criticizing OOP and esp. Inheritance for exactly the things I was struggling with. This felt like a relief!

My question: Why is Inheritance still taught as a silver bullet? I'm seeing university courses using Inheritance both for Domain and infrastructural code reuse at the same time. Esp. in Germany I see a lot of stupid 90s alike "programming" courses and, no shit, according code bases. It's as if they were living in a gigantic bubble.

I absolutely agree. I learned the hard way that they cannot be trysted and will use the different communication channels to their own advantage. Still kind of shocks me as a German who usually went with “they do weird things but you can generally trust the state”.

It opened up plenty of loopholes to avoid taxes and quit social systems, starting from healthcare, pensions etc. to all those little extras that allow you a tax avoiding setup which is impossible for regular employees. It also incentivizes ridiculous consumption, like the company car tax you mentioned but also to “just buy anything for 100k just to maximize cost”. It also doesn’t really incentivize RND but to wait for the next “RND tax program” any future government might be setting up. No shit that German companies are so bad with innovation (plus they’re usually lead by MBAs and lawyers who frequently have no clue).

German solo-founder here who just gave up this shitshow and moved to Estonia:

Estimate your revenue at 0€ for now unless you have real reason to believe otherwise (do you have paying customers lined up already? probably not). That way, you only have to pay corporate tax at the end of the year based on your actual profit (vs. having to prepay tax every quarter).

This is funny. I tried to set my revenue to 0 in the beginning and the tax authority simply set it to 60k (they couldn't even tell me where this number came from). After a couple of harsh phone calls (from their end, they were yelling) they simply kept it and told me I could file a "Verwaltungsklage". Of course, they (and IHK) derive the quarterly pre-taxes from that and didn't give a rats ass if I actually made any revenue. I got my money back a year later (which got worse and worse over time). Simply kills you, If you have to pay the bills and try to route your little boat through the stormy seas. Several times I spontaneously had to credit 2-3k EUR to get my customers to shorten the term of payment.

IHK: Domains are not allowed.

This is funny as well because my company name was a domain name. IHK noticed that and I told them (on phone w/o any proof) that it's mine and they were okay.

The rest, I'd say is batshit crazy bureaucratic but somehow manageable. Germany is just not a good spot for "some SaaS idea" or maybe not even for bigger ideas as well anymore. At least not until they radically streamline their bureaucracy (which depends on radically professionalized politics which is not realistic at this time).

PS: Founding a company made me stop believing in "Social Market Economy" (German self-label) since the taxation system and social systems allow for amazing things once you're out of the employee system.

Edit: Typos and grammatical mistakes.