nforgerit

Sounds like a dream. They didn't have that at my time (2007) at Karlsruhe. Programming was negligible and could be overall circumvented by picking the according courses.

That is the theoretical construct in the German system. However the differences are fading and to me it does not seem to be like German universities, as actors of (self-proclaimed) highest art in their topics, are doing very well.

Btw: Though I enjoyed Maths much more than CS, I wouldn't have understood Linear Algebra without watching the MIT Open Courseware thingy by Gilbert Strang. I think that's saying a lot about the German art of teaching (at least at that time).

They do, but at least 15ys ago at university of Karlsruhe (which they laughably renamed to KIT at that time) people could circumvent most of the programming tasks. I looked up the current curriculum a couple of months ago, and they at least seem to have expanded from "3 weeks Java embedded into another course" to a full-blown one semester long programming course.

If you ask me, they should make programming the fabric of almost all exercises/tasks, be it in math, cs or sth else along the lines. This would, however, require professors who are in to that kind of stuff and most preferred singing powerpoint-karaoke.

German here. Austerity? Over-regulation? An oligopoly of tech-incompetent local enterprises? Just guessing here.

As a student in 2007, I started being an avid follower of what Big Tech was doing and was flabbergasted that local tech enterprises didn't seem to notice or change anything. In CS at university they didn't teach programming (only as an aside) but all the funny theoretical OOP fluff that the community rightfully started ditching and frowning upon.

Given software is slowly eating everything, I am not surprised in the result. Probably 7/10 of my fellow CS students will not be remotely able to explain how a given software works under the hood.

I think in the future I'm gonna open my sources as science fiction literature with "hypothetical" installation notes. Prose is not yet prohibited, is it?

German here, trying not to sound too polemic:

Is it known if this initiative (and other "acts" like AI Act) is lobbied for by SAP, MS and the likes? To me, this looks so much like an attack by enterprises against startup competition who cannot afford legal insecurities/legal departments/security certifications, that I can barely understand such a governmental interference without thinking about bad actors.

Thing is no EU startup cares about gatekeepers as long as scaling up in the local market is as bureaucratic as it is. And the fact that EU politicians are proud about the results of their proactive regulations is just.. wrong.

> “The fact that Threads is still not available for EU citizens shows that EU regulation works,” said Christel Schaldemose, a Danish lawmaker, according to Politico last week.

I like the EU, I really do. But this logic is helplessly flawed and fucked up beyond all repair.

Given their own struggle to set up a working environment for Tech Startups, Germany and France are gonna lose a lot of talent to, eg UK.

Somehow I knew that this question would come up, questioning the "progress" makes me a heretic.

So last 2-3 months I subscribed to ChatGPT4 (and much longer to Copilot), worked through most of the HN threads on tips and reviews, posts I could find on "prompt engineering" and have hundreds of sessions with ChatGPT4. So, I still might have missed something, but I think I have a rather good idea of what's going on.

1. It's rather good with understanding what I want. I can dump pretty much anything into it and give it certain rules (things we described years ago as "Google fu" until Google SERP became useless) and it will make something out of it.

2. It's a nice rubberduck to discuss things and get a broad overview on certain topics.

3. It's amazingly stupid, even if I ask it for its confidence, on the validity of its answers. It's like talking to a 8-year-old know-it-all: You have to fact check everything. If I confront it with the error, it even reacts like a 8-year old.

4. Initial responses for intentionally broad topics (summed up with "give me ansible yaml to deploy wireguard to N servers") are often times not working at all and after an hour of query-response you're better off reading ansible docs.

5. Initial responses for intentionally special topics (summed up with "what's the fastest algorithm to sort this given x, y, z and bla will never be A") it frequently comes up with good, sometimes surprisingly creative solutions.

All in all: Why oh why would I trade in correctness with a significant error rate ("hallucination" is a word from SV marketing hell) and debugging bullshit answers. Since debugging things is already a big drag in programming, I need things I can trust to build more things on top of them. If I can't trust 100% the "command" an LLM is generating, I'll never directly let it execute its code.

> It's like relying on a calculator. You still need mental math skills to know that 91 * 10 can't equal 2511. Similarly, when GPT starts hallucinating, it helps if you have a high sensitivity to smelling it out.

Well, at least my calculators don't have this error rate GPT4 still does. Especially for seemingly simple things like a command flag, I have zero trust if GPT doesn't give me something that will eventually erase all my data.

Can't find it anymore but I've watched a documentary claiming that Henry Ford and other car makers, oil companies and tire manufacturers in US and Europe lobbied city mayors over 100ys ago to get rid of perfectly fine public transport in favor of private cars. It felt ridiculous that we're still falling for that propaganda.

IMO lots of accidental complexity with no real value (in most use cases). I saw myself disagreeing frequently with pre-defined charts and creating an own chart just for one use case is better done with kustomize. It might make sense though for a bigger org with at least several dozens of engineers to ensure certain internal standards (in which platform engineering might make sense as well).

Not exactly sure what they're thinking and certainly don't want to produce conspiracy theories but with their track record of the past 2 decades of "promising moonshots, not achieving much" and their recent ideas (weakening e2ee, chat control) and actions (e.g. against climate activists), to me it's pointing towards a more repressive state because they already know that they've lost the race against climate change.

Never heard that "Deutschlandtakt 2070" (lol) depends on electrification of all railway tracks, to be honest. Would be interesting to read up on that, so if you have a source, I'd be glad to read it!

Yes but make no mistake: German car manufacturers will make the German governments lobby for whatever they find value in when time goes by.

They've recently invented the funny term "Technologieoffenheit" as an abstract concept to allow for "whatever the market decides" which sounds good but completely ignores, e.g. that they won't have enough renewable energy to produce zero-emission e-fuels/hydrogen at a scale big enough to achieve reasonable consumer prices for usage in cars. AFAIK anything that is based on organic matter can only be net-zero and potentially drives out potentially more important food. Not sure yet what this "strategy" leads to if not more populist politics.

Well climate scientists have collected more proof than ever in the last 2 decades to back the models and predictions. What we see is _measured_, not just opinion.

And if you happen to read a bit about how biological systems, the weather systems, our economical systems, food supply et al. work together while keeping in mind that IPCC reports are _conservative_ about their predictions (meaning they rather underestimate than overestimate), you should really deeply be worried about the near-future outcome of the ongoings.

Just because we successfully hacked our nutrition system a 100ys ago does not mean that we'll be able to cope with how consumerism and agricultural intensification afterwards affects us with dozens of new problems. At some point it just gets too expensive and/or too complex for humans to solve.

Hm, I do get why people trying to be optimistic always bring up examples from the past to extrapolate that "humanity will always find solutions". What I don't get is that the same people simply overlook that we're not talking about single symptoms with a simple cause but about a root cause (emitting co2) which is deeply integrated into all our actions and economies and humanity is struggling dealing with that for at least a couple of decades.

We're talking about bringing half a dozen to multiple dozens of networks out of balance that we only halfway understand.

How is that more than a superficial label if western democracies behave like big hypocrites?

- Starting dubious wars against foreign nations? We've had Afghanistan and Iraq.

- Spying on and criminalizing citizens? We're having Five Eyes and possibly much more than we don't know about.

- Treating whistleblowers against our standards of human rights? We're having Manning, Snowden and Assange. And probably many more we haven't heard about.

I'm not repeating some whataboutisms trying to relativize, e.g., the horrible attack of Russia against Ukraine or the Chinese Social Scoring system. I'm just asking about the meaning of "democracy" in the Western world is, if our gov'ts are sh*tting on our values any time they need.

Can't help but think that our governments are prepping for very harsh times coming up. Sorry for the pessimistic view, but this is what it looks like to me.

C'mon it wasn't that bad. npm was a fun experiment on what could possibly go wrong with putting leftpad into a single package.

For me it's still by far the best runtime to do anything event-alike/http/json/web. It's quick to develop small things and quick to deploy (if you omit the whole transpilation shenanigans which of course help if you have dozens of engineers working together).

Finally I got a clue to how the next Ted Lasso season is going to look like: He's going to coach remotely having everyone happily wearing a VP.

Joke aside: It's mind-boggling how Apple uses product placement to hammer pictures in our heads and get us to consider not looking like a jerk anymore when wearing AirPods just because some "icons" are wearing them.

My mom's watching and soap is just not my kind of taste

There's a difference between me deciding which payment method I use for service X and having service X decide into which tracking networks they put me in.

Additionally, Mullvad showed how to use cash via regular post to pay 100% anonymously for service X.

So are we all now officially complaining about that it stinks where we've SEO-sh*tted for two decades?

Good, then let's get rid of this ad network dystopia which never worked as advertised (they show me special offers for a frying pan, 2 weeks after I ordered one. Laughable ya folks). Replace it with great authentic inspirational content and people will throw their 2 bucks at it.

My 2 cents on AI-assisted code authoring:

First time I got my hands on Github Copilot some time ago, I intentionally chose something "odd" (so no CRUD API in X, Kafka stuff, sorting algorithm) so I chose to re-create some Excel sheet alike UI in React & Canvas.

First everything proposed was misleading but after the first couple of lines, it astonished me by really proposing things like nested loops for iterating over a grid (surely, I used an according function name). I came quite far (for a quick test) with marking single and multiple cells and being able to drag the marked area and double-click for text input. Then I realized it was about time to invent a proper data model and stopped it there.

All in all, I'm using it for like 50% of daily coding, but it's frequently misleading in subtle tricky ways that I expect to be quite dangerous especially if using it for tests as well (need to double-check if it's not BSing me twice). Debugging code is already a big drag in our work and I'm somehow not happy with debugging AI-generated code.

Does it run Doom?

Only decisions got significantly less erratic and somehow weekly newsletters are suddenly written in form of a haiku.

Chaotic maybe pre-covid. But with the pandemic, the skyrocketing energy prices, the housing problems and the numerous Ukrainian refugees things got really bad for the local government. The latest low was that they weren’t able to held democratic elections by western standards. Some bright minds of the public authorities thought it would be wise to held a combination of local and national elections, 1-2 plebiscites together with having Berlin Marathon at the same day while they didn’t print out enough paper ballots and estimated every voter to only take (afair) 2min in the voting cabin. Court ruling decided to repeat that election for Berlin.

I'd say 20th century Berlin always was an island of craziness. In the roaring twenties, it became both a poorhouse (hyperinflation) and the city with the wildest parties and openly queer communities. After WW2 the story is that the Allies made sure that Berlin would be barely governable. In times of the iron curtain many many left-wing Germans who didn't want to serve in the military escaped to West-Berlin which was known as a safe harbor. And in the 90s from what I can see, it looked like a big techno party.

So all in all, I think Berliners old and young are pretty fine with craziness and some kind of "governed anarchy". Only recently (to me at least and from what I heard for other people as well), it became really annoying because the government seems completely overwhelmed by pretty much everything. Berlin is btw still said to be the "capital of unemployment" and recently the housing problems and gentrification reached another absurd level.

There's this story the ex-mayor of Berlin once told that there was a streetlamp directly in front of Rotes Rathaus (townhall) which was enlightened day and night and he couldn't figure out for a year or so who was responsible for that.

Due to its history the responsibilities in Berlin about simple things like that are separated in such arcane ways that no one really knows who is in charge for what. Even reforming that seems almost impossible and makes Berlin what it is: A likable but highly dysfunctional city state (I think I may say that as a German and ex-Berliner).