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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 histo

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.

fxtentacle 1y ago
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 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/ https://opendesk.eu/
- ZeWaka 1y ago
  openSUSE!
- fabianholzer 1y ago
  Yes, and zendis in its very German ways only hires folks who commute to Bochum at least three times a week. Home office? Da könnte ja jeder kommen...
selfmodruntime 1y ago
> 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.
- Barrin92 1y ago
  >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.
  - whilo 1y ago
    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.
shermantanktop 1y ago
> 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.
- pasabagi 1y ago
  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.
DataDaoDe 1y ago
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 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.
- andrepd 1y ago
  > Also as probably the world leader in data privacy and protection that's another vector working against innovation Extremely thick irony here
- Dracophoenix 1y ago
  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?
  - svara 1y ago
    There were way more young people back then. Germany as a country has the mentality of a retiree, because that's who lives there. I say that as a German doing a startup in Germany. There's upsides as well but it's true.
  - Tainnor 1y ago
amadeuspagel 1y ago
There are two common standards for documents: PDF and HTML. The german government mostly uses PDFs and should move to HTML.
- rad_gruchalski 1y ago
  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.
torginus 1y ago
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.)/

fxtentacle 1y ago

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 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/ https://opendesk.eu/

ZeWaka 1y ago
openSUSE!
fabianholzer 1y ago
Yes, and zendis in its very German ways only hires folks who commute to Bochum at least three times a week. Home office? Da könnte ja jeder kommen...

selfmodruntime 1y ago

> 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.

Barrin92 1y ago
>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.
- whilo 1y ago
  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.

shermantanktop 1y ago

> 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.

pasabagi 1y ago
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.

DataDaoDe 1y ago

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 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.

andrepd 1y ago
> Also as probably the world leader in data privacy and protection that's another vector working against innovation Extremely thick irony here
Dracophoenix 1y ago
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?
- svara 1y ago
  There were way more young people back then. Germany as a country has the mentality of a retiree, because that's who lives there. I say that as a German doing a startup in Germany. There's upsides as well but it's true.
- Tainnor 1y ago

amadeuspagel 1y ago

There are two common standards for documents: PDF and HTML. The german government mostly uses PDFs and should move to HTML.

rad_gruchalski 1y ago
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.

torginus 1y ago

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.)/