Berlin is very different from the rest of Germany.
4,920 karma · joined February 14, 2023
This is a balancing of legally protected interests [Güterabwägung] between privacy and censhorship. Independently of what the law may say, many Germans are strongly biased towards privacy here. Be also aware that in Germany the strong US-American concept of "free speech" does not exist; the laws that do exist are weaker.
> Given that, however, if someone asks me not to take their picture, I first give them the option of receiving a copy for their own purposes, and if they decline, I respectfully delete.
Why not ask for permission instead of objection? (even if, as you claim, the formal written law may be on your side)
Which kind of clothing are you talking about?
> Nobody I personally know wants a faster CPU; they want competent, faster, native feeling software and more power efficient hardware.
I think you miss the point: what you claim that users want is not something that hardware designers have a lot of influence on (except for the aspect that the IC should be (more) power-efficient): these are rather problems that software developers are there to solve. So, hardware designers are simply the wrong persons to ask if you have such wishes.
It is rather consensus that by now,
- too many potential weaknesses for RSA are known (in particular in how it is used in standardized cryptosystems [1]),
- it is a bad idea if too many "free parameters" of the cryptosystem are decided by the practical implementation (in RSA: the decision which primes to use to generate the key pair) instead of these parameters being part of the standard
Thus the advice to drop RSA is in my opinion sound.
But otherwise: many people indeed have the suspicion that the panic that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer might get developed in the next year is indeed used to push novel "post quantum algorithms" which
- have not been analyzed as thoroughly as older algorithms, and thus might contain weaknesses,
- were covertly developed by some three letter agency, and contain backdoors.
In other words: your suspicion might not be unfounded - this just does not imply that RSA does not have its risks and should thus arguably indeed be abandoned.
---
[1] Just to give one example: in the past, RSA was often used together with the padding scheme PKCS#1 v1.5, see [2]
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=PKCS_1&oldid=1342...
In the second book of the book series, "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", the question gets revealed: "What do you get if you multiply six by nine?"
People did attempt this:
https://github.com/katobungen/LANA_report_202607/blob/pdf/LA...
See also https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=15770
Here are Kirti Joshi's comments about the LANA project report: https://bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/sites.arizona.edu/dist/4/404/f...
I do understand the argument that it can be considered as a benefit for society if companies that have a very incompetent management that falls for this kind of trap of getting locked in by some vendor without having an emergency escape plan available get milked or even get bust. :-)
Because most code is a stinking pile of shit.
But at least I can easily imagine a world where people indeed do this. :-)
Indeed yesterday I drew some pictures (on my computer) that visualize what actually happens in some rather mathematical algorithms.
Nearly every designer and artist knows that artisan stuff does not bring in the money, but rather commissions for "everyday stuff"; in German there exists the term "Eisdielen-Jobs" [1] ("ice cream parlor jobs") for commissioned, boring, "everyday" design jobs like, as the term implies, creating the design and illustrations for a menu map of an ice cream parlor.
--
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/karriere/illustrator-als-beruf-kreati...
Relevant (NSFW):
> Guns don't kill people, I kill people - with guns
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC03hmS1Brk
:-D
1. Take some CC0/public domain source code.
2. Build a binary out of it and sell licenses for your software.
Case study: SQLite's source code is public domain. On the other hand, it is embedded in many commercial software products that are sold - and you are not allowed to reverse-engineer the software or redistribute binaries of it. This would be possible/allowed in a no-copyright world.
Public domain is something different from an emulation of "there is no copyright":
You can take public domain material to build some program binary:
- In the current legal system, you can enforce restrictions on the usage of this binary, and can forbid redistribution, reverse-engineering, ...
- In a "no copyright world", you cannot enforce such restrictions.
I am not aware of any open-source license which tries to approximate the "there is no copyright" situation:
- Such a license would not compulse you to publish the source code of any modification you make for it.
- Such a license would allow you to distribute compiled programs only.
- On the other hand, such a license must not restrict you to de-compile, modify or re-destribute any binaries built from the source code.
- But any such derivate of such a binary or source code would have to stay under the same license (this is a different kind of virality than "normal" viral licenses).
The trenches between the different factions are far too deep for any middle ground to have any chance.
It should be obvious that the US military has good reasons why this would be the death for many military strategies. So, why doesn't the military than treat every soldier who has a mobile phone near to him where the above could cause military problems to be a saboteur (perhaps even with the accusation of being a spy of a hostile nation) who should be charged by a military tribunal?
It is only an investment if it (likely) gains yield. Otherwise it is just a means of preservation of value.
That's why the human operator needs a gun. :-)
In Germany, the grocery discounter Aldi (both Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd) explicitly created advertising campaigns that they offer the same prices even if you don't use an app. The economic background is that Aldi's competitor Lidl nudges customers to use their app for discounts.
An article: https://www.mobiflip.de/aldi-ohne-app-so-verpasst-der-discou...
Pictures of the billboards: https://i0.wp.com/www.mobiflip.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/07... https://i0.wp.com/www.mobiflip.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/07...
Texts:
German:
GÜNSTIG
OHNE
BONUS-APP.
EINFACH EINKAUFEN.
ZUM ALDI PREIS.
CHEAP
WITHOUT
BONUS APP.
SIMPLY SHOP.
AT ALDI PRICE.
WARUM
EWIG PUNKTE
SAMMELN?
GÜNSTIG
OHNE
BONUS-APP.
EINFACH EINKAUFEN.
ZUM ALDI PREIS.
WHY
COLLECT POINTS FOREVER
?
CHEAP
WITHOUT
BONUS APP.
SIMPLY SHOP.
AT ALDI PRICE.
Lidl was furious that this campaign was so well received by the population (for this keep in mind that the Schwarz Gruppe (Schwarz Group), the corporate group behind Lidl, has big plans for cloud business (Schwarz Digits [1])), and created its own rather ridiculed counter-campaign:
https://www.mobiflip.de/aldi-greift-an-lidl-kontert-jetzt-ge...
Image: https://i0.wp.com/www.mobiflip.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/07...
German text:
Hey, liebe
Aldi Kollegen,
erst Deutschland in Nord und Süd aufteilen und dann stolz von einem Preis für alle ohne App sprechen.
Ihr habt Humor.
Liebe
Aldi Kunden,
ihr seid natürlich ALLE herzlich eingeladen, von Hamburg bis München zu einheitlichen Preisen zu sparen – mit oder ohne Lidl Plus.
Hey, dear
Aldi colleagues,
first divide Germany into North and South and then proudly talk about one price for everyone without an app.
You have a sense of humor.
Dear
Aldi customers,
you are of course ALL cordially invited to save at uniform prices from Hamburg to Munich – with or without Lidl Plus [the name of Lidl's app].
For me, HN ist rather some kind of counterweight/counterbubble where not everybody is insanely critical and cynical about Elon Musk and Sam Altman. :-)
You seem to live in a bubble where these people are worshipped ... :-(
You are free to ignore mathematics that is not completely trivial. I prefer (and would rather recommend) to understand it, and use this understanding to build a >1-billion-USD/EUR application out of it. :-)
But this is not what mathematics is centrally about. The central point is the kind of thinking about the respective topics (and understanding it) which these more abstract definitions encode.
Understanding the topic just enough to do some elementary computations does not give you the kind of thinking that is often near a transcendental experience.
Just to give one example: the reason why the localization of a commutative ring (a generalization of the field of fractions) is introduced is that many properties of ring hold if and only if they hold for all of its local rings; see for example [1]. This means to understand some property of a commutative ring R, we "just" have to understand its (simpler) local rings.
This is an example why one wants to study such ideas; on the other hand, I can imagine sooo many more exciting things to do with my life than dividing numbers by each others to form fractions. :-)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Localization_(com...
Sabine Hossenfelder, for obvious reasons, knows quite a bit about physics, though on some physics topics she has opinions that are outside the mainstream. For other areas, I am rather certain that she has a talent to learn about them up to some shallow level quite fast, which suffices to create some video about the respective topic, and then move on.
Yes: this is about building the quotient field (field of fractions) [1] for some integral domain, or more generally, building the localization ([2], [3]) of a commutative ring with respect to some given set that is closed under multiplication (the special case of the quotient field for a ring R is obtained when one chooses R\{0} as such a set).
--
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Field_of_fraction...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Field_of_fraction...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Localization_(com...
Two considerations on this:
1. In the USA, it is common to switch jobs often (in opposite to, for example, Germany). So, in the US-American system it is not often worth the effort to invest a lot of mentoring ressources into some employee if he will leave soon anyway.
2. I personally observe that I often do try to give less experienced programmers good hints on how to improve, but my kind of thinking about programming is often so different that my advice is often of no use for them. Or I often get the arrogant reaction by less experienced programmers that I care far too much about obscure details. I thus seriously do believe that the only way to help junior programmers to become better is to completely crush their ego and arrogance (just like a doctoral study programme in, say, mathematics does to the doctoral students), which is of course not allowed at work. :-(
... for people who are native speakers of English.
The problem is writing such an essay takes magnitudes more of an effort for people who are not native English (or whatever the language is in which discussions are done about the project) speakers.
Also, relatedly, essays written by non-native English speakers often get considered to be AI-written by common AI detection systems, even though no AI was involved when writing them; see for example
> I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.
> https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...
I would claim (both by living in Germany and the posted diagram) that for each of these values, most share this value, but not everybody. The problem is that for each value, the stakeholders who do/don't share it can be different. So, a lot of agreements are very complicated.
This is also in my opinion a central reason for the rising anti-EU sentiments in many countries: the more is dicated from above in Brussels/Strasbourg, the more often it happens that in some group who has a really strong opinion on this topic strong anti-EU sentiments will become socially very accepted in this group.
The solution that I would thus propose to keep these anti-EU sentiments not to escalate would be to keep the areas where the EU has any influence to those areas
- where there is an insanely strong consensus over what is "right" vs "wrong" over the whole EU, and
- which are politically rather uncontroversial (i.e. the opposite of being a political minefield).