Mhhh although this is a bit OT it is also very interesting:
Germany has unions and works council.
It is required by law that companies allow works council to exist and if they exist they get certain rights.
> In Germany, they serve two functions. The first is called co-determination, through which works councils elect members of the board of directors of German companies. The second is called participation, and means that works councils must be consulted about specific issues and have the right to make proposals to management.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council#Germany )
Also Germany has good amounts of regulations for certain issues (sometimes too much regulation but oh well).
And Germany has many options to participate in local and regional politics that prevent the worst offenders.
But in the end a company is still a company that is forced to act in a way that maximizes it's profits. I think from my perspective we do not have such wild predator companies like you see them in the US but there are certainly a few very dubious things going on.
Except maybe the gGmbH and Vereine (clubs) which are companies and semi company structures that must act for the common good and without profit interest.
And one funny thing is that in Germany stock companies are required to act to the "best interests of the company" and not the "best interests of the stock holder" - in German law the company includes the worker, the future of the company and social aspects.
I think it is because of the Chinese new year.
The Chinese labs like to publish their models arround the Chinese new year, and the US labs do not want to let a DeepSeek R1 (20 January 2025) impact event happen again, so i guess they publish models that are more capable then what they imagine Chinese labs are yet capable of producing.
And made almost zero impact, it was just a bigger version of Deepseek V2 and when mostly unnoticed because its performances weren't particularly notable especially for its size.
It was R1 with its RL-training that made the news and crashed the srock market.
In fact, many Asian countries use lunisolar calendars, which basically follow the moon for the months but add an extra month every few years so the seasons don't drift.
As these calendars also rely on time zones for date calculation, there are rare occasions where the New Year start date differs by an entire month between 2 countries.
If that's a sole problem, it should be called "Chinese-Japanese-Korean-whateverelse new year" instead. Maybe "East Asian new year" for short. (Not that there are absolutely no discrepancies within them, but they are so similar enough that new year's day almost always coincide.)
This non-problem sounds like it's on the same scale as "The British Isles", a term which is mildly annoying to Irish people but in common use everywhere else.
For another example, Singapore, one of the "many Asian countries" you mentioned, list "Chinese New Year" as the official name on government websites. [0] Also note that both California and New York is not located in Asia.
And don't get me started with "Lunar New Year? What Lunar New Year? Islamic Lunar New Year? Jewish Lunar New Year? CHINESE Lunar New Year?".
“Lunar New Year” is vague when referring to the holiday as observed by Chinese labs in China. Chinese people don’t call it Lunar New Year or Chinese New Year anyways. They call it Spring Festival (春节).
As it turns out, people in China don’t name their holidays based off of what the laws of New York or California say.
Please don't because "Lunar New Year" is ambiguous. Many other Asian cultures also have traditional lunar calendars but a different new years day. It's a bit presumptuous to claim that this is the sole "Lunar New Year" celebration.
I didn't expect language policing has reached such level. This is specifically related to China and DeepSeek who celebrates Chinese new year. Do you demand all Chinese to say happy luner new year to each other?
It is so absurd to think that an investment in even the most uncompetitive fab while one has currently none is uneconomical.
Even if this fab is 3 times more expensive then other ones, the result of not having one will tank the entire economy and GDP of a nation if things go bad.
We speak here about trillions of damage while a fab costs only a few billions.
> Even if this fab is 3 times more expensive then other ones, the result of not having one will tank the entire economy and GDP of a nation if things go bad.
That's hogwash. Sorry. Human society won't simply stop working just due to the lack of 2nm chips.
There are plenty of chip manufacturers around the world, including EU ones. Taiwan only has the quasi-monopoly over the cutting edge process.
What are you talking about? There's a lot of fabs in Europe, just on much older nodes than Taiwan, US and Japan or even China have.
>We speak here about trillions of damage
Where did you get the trillions from?
>a fab costs only a few billions
Billions just to build, but then who's gonna foot the bill for running it, if the fab is not economically competitive to those from Taiwan and Japan, at EU domestic wages, EU environmental regulations and lacking knowhow supply chains that needs to be built up in the EU? The taxpayers again?
The German government (meaning the taxpayers) are still subsidizing energy costs to keep manufacturing from collapsing or leaving the country altogether because it's not internationally competitive anymore.
So how much more of the private sector should the taxpayers subsidize before we take a look at ourselves in the mirror that everything is FUBAR and that endless taxpayer funded subsidies(aka corporate welfare) are just disguising the endemic rot while not actually fixing the problem?
i have written this text by myself except like 2 or 3 sentences which i iterated with an LLM to nail down flow and readability. I would interpret that as completely written by me.
> The suggestions you make are all sensible but maybe a little bit generic and obvious. Asking ChatGPT to generate advice on effectively writing quality code with AI generates a lot of similar suggestions (albeit less well written).
Before i wrote this text, i also asked Gemini Deep Research but for me the results where too technical and not structural or high level as i describe them here. Hence the blogpost to share what i have found works best.
> If not, I'd suggest to augment the post with practical examples or anecdotal experience. At the moment, the target group seems to be novice programmers rather than the typical HN reader.
I have pondered the idea and also wrote a few anecdotal experiences but i deleted them again because i think it is hard to nail the right balance down and it is also highly depended on the project, what renders examples a bit useless.
And i also kind of like the short and lean nature of it the last few days when i worked on the blogpost.
I might will make a few more blogposts about that, that will expand a few points.
They're really cool, I just wish they weren't an iPhone accessory. If I could do everything from my Mac I'd consider them, but Apple likes to assume every Apple customer also has an iPhone.
I truly don't understand how people can make such comparisons, and in general defend social media. Is this some sort of Stockholm syndrome?
Social media has ruined my mental health, when I fell into a deep hole of propaganda. It took me a year to recover, and I'm still not fully recovered, and I'm still trying to separate between what I truly think, and what social media "made" me think. People underestimate the power of echo chambers created by the algorithm.
I saw how friends and family got radicalized thanks to social media. Social media is currently fueling at least one war and multiple regional conflicts, where people who know nothing about the events, get "educated" by social media. Social media is fueling hatred and bigotry, further diving already fragile societies. Social media disinformation campaigns were behind Brexit. And social media is used as a tool by government to spread misinformation or influence social opinions. All these in addition to everyone being an influencer and showing their phone into the faces of people in public places, while selling crap from AliExpress for 500% markup, as if you drink electrolytes, put a nose tape, and clean your face every day -- your life will become ten folds better.
I can't name one good thing that came out of social media. None. And even if there are things, and I'm sure someone will name them out, they are minor comparing to the negative sides, or could be achieved in a more sustainable way.
I appreciate your comment though! Thanks :)
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