[pasabagi]

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.

[DataDaoDe]

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]. 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.

[throwaway2037]

    > Uncertainty Avoidance Cultures

How do you explain all of the groundbreaking technologies and processes that have come from Japan and Korea? Both are at the extreme end of uncertainty avoidance.

[andrepd]

> Also as probably the world leader in data privacy and protection that's another vector working against innovation

Extremely thick irony here

[Dracophoenix]

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]

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]

It has something to do with an episode of German history that took place between 1933 and 1945.

[rkachowski]

In my experience it generally generally doesn't, and instead revels in the prestige of past successes. Titles and self mythology seem to be more valued than achievement and performance.

It's a sad frustration, as there is so much potential here.

[throwaway2037]

    > the robust legislation and bureaucracy (in a controlling sense) around all financial products

Germany has the world's largest, most liberal, and most liquid listed (<-- read that term twice before you rebut with an unlisted market!) equity structured products market. These products are essentially leveraged equity/FX options packaged as a bond. I'm confused. Can you be more specific about which particular "financial products" you think are excessively regulated in Germany?

[chme]

> 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.

Hmm... So if people struggle in life and have live from hand to mouth in multiple jobs to support their family and loved ones, they are more innovative?

[xenospn]

A quick trip to sub-Saharan Africa will prove this is both true and untrue.

[FirmwareBurner]

It engrains the idea into people early on, that they should work to upskill themselves or build their own jobs, instead of coasting on the idea the government will always be there for them to provide jobs and security.

Also, plenty of people in Germany live hand to mouth now. Poverty has been on the increase due to CoL.

[fhd2]

So, your hypothesis is that greed fuels innovation? Those innovating are rarely the ones benefiting financially. I think it rather fuels hustling. The end game of hustling are monopolies, which have little to no interest in innovation.

From what examples I can think of right now, innovation actually appears to require a certain level of coziness. I'd say great ideas come from curiosity, and if you're struggling to eat, that's usually limited. The trick is, perhaps, to be cozy, but not so cozy that lifting a finger seems pointless.

[selfmodruntime]

> 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]

>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.

[flipgimble]

What he means is that Germans are less susceptible to the SV bullshit artists that are hyping up their bubble unicorns for VC money, inflating companies with workers just to sell them at peak of the hype before cutting all those “positions” and then en-shittifying the product.

Technology coasted for a few decades gaining public’s trust as an unquestionable improvement over the past. That reputation is wearing out faster than I’d like to admit.

I hear from friends and family that SV big tech are increasingly equated with surveilence, credit card leaks, and destructive games of billionaires detached from reality. I had a long potluck talk with a stranger that was convinced ChatGPT is analogous to another crypto scam. It blew my mind and opened my eyes that could be a popular opinion.

[janderson215]

Popular opinion and fact can be very different.

I agree Germans are less susceptible to SV bullshit artists, but they also miss out on the upside for game changing ideas. Whether this is a net negative or net positive is yet to be determined. Up to this point, it has been Germany’s financial loss to over index on the engineeriness. Maybe it is America’s loss to over index on the financial outcomes and the truly world changing ideas and those very same ideas can be a net negative. I would have said 2 months ago that you would be hard pressed to find people on this message board who would agree with the latter, but I think that may have changed significantly recently.

[whilo]

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.

[pmags]

I'm not German and have only made a couple of short visits to Germany, so I have no basis on which to judge your statement that Germans don't have a digital mindset.

But if that is indeed true, I find it equally interesting the Germany has been an important center for the development of electronic music. Berlin in particular is "arguably the world capital of underground electronic music" (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/arts/music/women-djs-berl...)

[331c8c71]

Hmmm, does Jurgen Schmidhuber live in Germany? I'd think primarily Ticino where he spent the majority of his career if I understand correctly.

[whilo]

No, he lives in Switzerland now (Lugano as far as I know). Switzerland is a big magnet for European talent, as is Germany to a lesser degree. My point though was that Germany was not lacking the thinkers to drive a technological revolution, it is rather the society that does not really have the mindset for radical changes and forward thinking.

[throwaway2037]

    > Software in Germany is built to achieve a means to an end. It is never the end goal itself.

How do explain the explosion of non-embedded software companies in Berlin in the last 20 years? On the continent, it is hard to beat the Berlin tech scene for start-ups.

[FirmwareBurner]

zero interest money and consumer demand of knock-off products that SV made a decade before and proved the market is successful

[shermantanktop]

> 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]

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.

[fxtentacle]

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 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/

[fabianholzer]

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...

[ZeWaka]

openSUSE!

[torginus]

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.)/

[amadeuspagel]

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

[rad_gruchalski]

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.