They have that, to some degree. The standard library is mostly optional. Also, a lot of things are 'implementation defined', so you could just not implement those. That leaves quite a small language core.
No, I don't think it is loaded, or at least not unnecessarily. The communist background of the glass is an important element in the video. Especially when they discuss the fact they couldn't sell it in the west, due to (tendencies of) capitalism.
That they made it in east germany and made up an excuse for being bad at sales?
corning the guys they bring up at the very end is also the company that did pyrex. they spun that business off in the 90s. They don't mention that because you'd recognize it and go "wait my cabinet's been full of that my whole life"
You dont understand communism then, and didnt grow up under such regime.
Most people involved in such projects were far from what you can call communists, not involved with regine, not members of the party (or if they were it was just to be allowed certain positions in the system, literal ticking checkbox on the requirements list), some even secretly hating it and conspiring against it. This reductionism is unnecessary and outright incorrect.
One can claim it was invented in communist East Germany (although the official name was literally German democratic republic), and thats about it.
You also slap 'invented by american capitalists' onto every single invention coming out of US of past 250 years?
It isn't that wild, really, that people who have even the most basic awareness of history are concerned about the spread of the single most destructive ideology in all of history.
Communism problem is that it goes together with authoritarianism and corruption.
Yes, you can get both of those things with capitalism, just look at Russia, but looks like they are more likely to happen with communism.
Authoritarianism is responsible for many people's deaths, while corruption is why things were so bad that it pushed for invention of this.
The reason why the glass is not popular right now is because we as consumers are perfectly fine with this. We let companies get away with it instead of voting with our wallets. Nearly all of us are guilty purchasing smart phones that won't last longer than 2 years, pre-paying for games when companies frequently stiffed us that way. Almost no one puts time to research which companies produce quality product so such manufacturers frequently go out of business.
> is evidenced by their using the term as a synonym for authoritarianism.
You can't deny the fact though that all socialist (or what people from beyond the pond like to call "communist") countries turned towards authoritarianism on their "journey" of eventually achieving communism (even if some of those countries might have started off with the best intentions to actually improve things). And it happened with such regularity that it cannot be explained away with "no true scotsman (pardon: communist)" arguments.
Oh if anything I think you're being too timid with your critique here so let's say the quiet parts out loud. The movement was coopted by sociopaths and used as cover to promote naked authoritarianism. This doesn't excuse failure to grasp the original stated goals or (worse) trying to utilize red scare propaganda to handwave past capitalism's obvious flaws.
> You also slap 'invented by american capitalists' onto every single invention coming out of US of past 250 years
Try criticising capitalism and you'll soon encounter exactly that rhetoric, even for things that exist only thanks to government direct action (the most socialist org in USA, the Department of Defense, is directly and indirectly responsible for huge part of innovation that people assign to "capitalism" despite it having little to do with it)
> The communist background of the glass is an important element in the video. Especially when they discuss the fact they couldn't sell it in the west, due to (tendencies of) capitalism.
And that's nonsense. The real problem was the reunification and the collapse of the East German economy. The East Germans got rid of their government, peacefully and the result was the unification of a protected plan economy to an open social market system (West Germany did not and still does not have US style capitalism -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy ). The East German market was not having access to current technologies and raw materials (for example due to the lack of money to buy on the world market). The companies in the east were not competitive and they lost their protecting system.
There were LOTS of glass manufacturers, both in West Germany and in the surrounding countries. Those were eager to take the market and a small and expensive glass production was an easy victim. There are lots of examples where GDR products were replaced by Western products, which were much more efficient in production and distribution.
It has very little to do with "capitalism", just that there was a much larger and more efficient market around, eager to take over. The "communist" economy wasn't communist and it was behind a self-built "protective" wall. When the wall collapsed and the system which protected the wall collapsed (-> the whole eastern Europe incl. the former Soviet Union largely collapsed), then during reunification of East and West Germany, the East German economy also collapsed (products were no longer competitive, lost their markets, etc.). The West German companies did not have the time to protect small scale producers, their problem was to deliver on the expectations of the East Germans: create same living standards, provide access to the larger market without scarce products.
For the East German population it was mostly clear, they wanted to buy western products, which for a long time were either not available or far too expensive or both. East German brands were out of fashion.
The attraction of the West German economy and political system, together with the failure of the East German system (and its soviet-influenced model), caused the collapse of the political and economic system of the GDR.
Later the "Ostalgie" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostalgie ) made people aware that there was also a loss: familiar brands were gone, familiar products were gone, jobs were gone, people were gone, (-> many went to West Germany to work there) western products were not always better, ...
TLDR; -> the company was a victim of the turmoil of the reunification and introduction of a larger&open economy.
Side note: that East Germans needed to take care of scarce products (see the cars which had long waiting lists) did not mean that the East German production was environmentally friendly. Just the opposite, East German production was as environmentally unfriendly or even more, as in the West. An environmental movement (like the Greens in West Germany) was not possible in the one-party-rules system of the GDR dictatorship. Later, a lot of production got closed(& sometimes replaced) because of old and dirty factories and production processes.
Side note 2: Germany now has a large scale "Mehrweg- und Pfandsystem" for bottles. This means that in any super market one can buy bottles of, say, beer and one pays a higher price. The markets are required to take back the empty bottles and pay the consumer the "Flaschenpfand" (bottle deposit). Bottles get reused a lot (50 times) and this system has 43% market share. One can imagine that lighter/more durable glass bottles might have an advantage in such a system. Currently we see either heavy glass bottles or lighter plastic bottles (reused 25 times).
> Side note 2: Germany now has a large scale "Mehrweg- und Pfandsystem" for bottles.
This was already standard procedure in East Germany though, pretty much everything from glass bottles (via a "Pfandsystem" much the same as today's minus the deposit machines) to paper to scrap metal was recycled. We even had regular 'waste paper collections' at school which were organized like a competition. This had little to do with environmentalism but instead to get more independent from resource imports.
(as you mentioned, the environment was much worse off in East Germany than it is today, especially around industrial locations)
They provide the Coke and you provide a glass. Sounds efficient for me. That's how I usually handle it, when buying beverages.
You can get old used Superfest glasses on ebay for 10$ per piece. That's sustainable capitalism: they don't get thrown away and the seller makes a great price.
Plus: you can get the original DDR/GDR design from 30 years ago and fill it with any beverage you want.
Sorry Eastern Germany was a communist place. Lefties are just angry that it failed so they do the usual excuse ("it was better than Capitalism" to "Usa is the reason why it wasn't working" to "It wasnt real communism." To "we should try communism." )
The most productive areas of Eastern Germany were private but Commies didn't like it so they shut it down in 70s. Hence Eastern Germany became poor.
It was called "real socialism" (or "Real existierender Sozialismus" in German), because the party elite was fully aware that the promises of a socialist utopia collided hard with reality in East Germany (and the rest of the Eastern Europe socialist countries). So the propanda idea was basically to hold the carrot dangling in front of the people of achieving "actual socialism" as a first step, and then at some later point (maybe a few hundred years in the future) "communism" (as envisioned by Marx/Engels) - "just work harder and then it will get better, you'll see Genosse!".
Of course nobody in their right mind believed such bullshit (not even most party members).
Private companies were shut down a lot earlier than the 70's, more like the 50s and early 60s. Later this was relaxed again. It was actually possible again in the 80s to run a small privately owned business (my parents were both self-employed). A privately owned company in East Germany still doesn't mean that there's any competition though, or ability to be better off than a worker in a state-owned company. The entire economic enviornment just wasn't compatibly with the idea of running a business that's not controlled by the state.
Still, compared to some of the poorer Eastern European countries, East German people were somewhat well off. Maybe on a level like Portugal or Greece, but of course piss-poor when compared to West Germany. And in any case much worse when it comes to personal freedom of course (which was a much more critical problem than the economic problems).
Also, all those things don't change the fact that East German engineers sometimes came up with brilliant solutions despite the less than ideal conditions.
One hardly needs to be either a leftist or angry about anything to accept the rather obvious critique of capitalism that the general lack of durable products on the market provokes. It is fairly uncontroversial that designed obsolescence is ubiquitous.
> accept the rather obvious critique of capitalism that the general lack of durable products on the market provokes
This doesn't have anything to do with capitalism, but apathy of consumers.
The lack of durable products is because consumers don't value durable products enough to seek them out and pay more for them. In a communist or command economy, the exact same thing would happen if the leader decreed that goods needed to be cheaply made. There's nothing intrinsic to capitalism here.
You should read and think about the HN guidelines, and whether your comments are motivated by curiousity and intellect, or base emotions and religious dogma.
The deception and malice that you've shown in this thread is incredible.
> I'm not the one that defaulted to pointing at the guidelines when my views were challenged.
I pointed at the guidelines because you're blatantly and flagrantly violating them, and refusing to read them.
I also successfully defended my views using logic and reason. You resorted to redirection ("Lowering production costs and increasing sales volume are both achieved by producing lower quality merchandise" is irrelevant and betrays a total lack of understanding as to how capitalism works) and base emotional manipulation (such as "Are we now so desperate to defend capitalism that we're going to pretend shareholder value isn't the primary goal" and "accept the rather obvious critique of capitalism" and "ironically accurate" and "Have a nice day" as a way to terminate an argument in a belligerent manner).
Your attitude is utterly unsuitable for Hacker News. We do not want comments like this here, that intentionally lie and spread false information and dodge questions and emotionally manipulate.
If you refuse to read the guidelines, you should not post. Reddit is a better place for comments such as the ones you've been making.
No, I don't think you can trust AI to answer correctly, ever. I've seen it confidently hallucinate, so I would always check what it says against other, more static, sources. The same if I'm reading from an author who includes a lot of mistakes in his books: I might still find them interesting and usefull, but I will want to double-check the key facts before I quote them to others.
Saying this is no different than saying you can't trust computers, ever, because they were (very) unreliable in the 50s and early 60s. We've been doing "good" generative AI for around 5 years, there is still much to improve until it reaches the reliability of other information sources like Wikipedia and Britannica.
He did not say he wanted to ban images, that is an exaggeration. I see the danger as polluting the historical record with fake images (even as memes/jokes), and spreading wrong preconceptions now backed by real-looking images. This is all under the assumptions there are no bad actors, which makes it even worse. I would say; don't ban it, but you morally just shouldn't do it.
The real danger is that this anti-racism starts a justified round of new racism.
By lowering standards for black doctors do you think anyone in their right mind would pick black doctors? No I want the fat old jew. I know no one put him in the hospital to fill out a quota.
While the 168mb is ridiculous, I'm more facinated by the choice to depend on an unimplemented feature from a group/company they had no control over or contracts with. I would hesitate to depend on things which haven't been released for a few months/years.
I realize the web moves fast and some might prefer working with new technology, but this sounds so weird to me.
It isn't necessarily, especially if your chip involves some analog or RF design, or must be robust. It is only for increased compute power where the smalles nodes shine
Smaller nodes also do not inherently have better performance for all tasks. They bring performance penalties in some regards, extra costs, and more complexity, which might make something older like 65mm a far better choice
