Question for the Deutsch HN-ers: Is this readable to your modern eye? Letter for letter I can see the relation to the handwriting I was taught in Dutch in the 80s, but as a text it looks like sanskrit to me. Obviously learnable, like learning greek or other foreign ciphers. But I would not imagine a neighbouring language written down less than a century ago to seem so foreign.
AFAIK this hasn't been taught since the 40s. Now (since the late 60s) there are 3 different cursive scripts available, and it's up to the school to decide which one to teach (if any).
This can't be fully correct, though, at least for my (as-remote-as-it-gets) area. My father was born in '52 and had to learn it in school here. He still writes the small 'z' in Sütterlin, and it looks really nice.
Hmm, I believe you. The article also says "Sütterlin continued to be taught in some German schools until the 1970s but no longer as the primary script.[citation needed]"
Looks similar to the cursive z I learned - I guess in the late 70's/early 80's - in Scotland. It's still in my signature, although that's a right scrawl.
> Question for the Deutsch HN-ers: Is this readable to your modern eye?
Generally, no. It is too confusing, since not only are many letters simply obtuse, some are mixed up with modern cursive writing. For instance, capital 'B' is pretty much exactly capital 'L', small 'h' is exactly 'f', small 'o' is 'v', and so on.
Fraktur for instance is much, much easier to read, since there is basically just one mix-up ('s'/'f'), it just takes some getting used to.
Sütterlin is very ancient. I knew someone how used it for handwriting, but there are only a few people that really learned to read and write it.
In Algebraic Number Theory it's quite common to use some kind of Fraktur-Alphabet for Symbols (Rings, Ideals, Groups,...). It's natural there to use some kind of Sütterlin for hand-writing and exercises. But I think to become really fluent, you have to dive very deep into Algebra... There are some letters you'll use a lot like p(rime), M(odule), G(roup), R(ing), A(lternating Group), S(ymmetric Group).
I don't think I've read/written all available letters yet...
If you carefully look at each word instead of mistaking the capital B for an L, failing to recognize the first word, and giving up in frustration, you can pick out common words like die or der and then slowly expand from there. It helps that one of the longest words in the text is Sütterlinschrift itself, which gives you quite a few letters. Once you have most of the alphabet deciphered, your internal language model takes over and it's smooth sailing from there. It definitely takes quite a bit of getting used to, but less so than e.g. Yiddish written in Hebrew script.
I second this. As someone who still learned "Schreibschrift" in school, I have a tiny bit of a head start but a lot of letters changed or at least changed in style drastically but I can reverse-engineer as you described.
I can read it by treating it like a cipher and going letter-by-letter with help of the table in the article. The text is straightforward German, so once I memorized some basic shapes, it wasn't that hard.
Could I make any useful guesses on the letters based on modern handwriting? Not at all. Many shapes are completely different, e.g. I knew about the long s, but never saw an e that looks like n or a B that looks like L before.
A friend got into it around 8th year of school and strung me along so I can still read it pretty comfortably, but without that, the answer would be no - some of the most common letters, like 'e', are just too different.
I get the sense, though, that especially in Bavaria it held on for a while even after WWII - very rarely you still see storefront signs written in it for flair, and somewhat more often you encounter subtle "Sütterlinisms" like having a lower half-arc above the cursive letter 'u' in the handwriting of older people and signage meant to evoke it.
I was never officially taught Sütterlin, but through family and other circumstances I can read it fairly well after a bit of a "warm-up" period.
What's interesting is that it's pretty much impossible for me to read if used for a non-German language. Sütterlin for English text? My brain cannot parse this at all - the script automatically flips my brain to German!
That makes a lot of sense, given that in the Kurrent era it was actually considered proper to use a "Romance" (and hence "modern-looking") script even for non-Germanic loanwords in German text, mirroring the Fraktur/Antiqua distinction in print typesetting!
In a way, this could also be compared to the present-day use of katakana for loanwords and hiragana for native text in Japanese (which ironically only crystallised as a universal convention after WWII).
My (German) grandmother used to write me letters in English using this script. I didn't find it too difficult to read, probably because I understood the context (names of other family members, questions about my day-to-day activities, updates on her life in Germany).
I still learned "standard Latin cursive" in school, which was more or less the direct successor to Sütterlin.
They are remarkably different. Especially the lower-case letters, where around half are completely unrecognizable. Cursive Latin is arguably closer to cursive Greek than to Sütterlin.
Some lower-case letters straight changed meaning during the Sütterlin->Latin transition. d->v, e->n, ect.
I learned this still in the 90s, readable without issues and i can still write it if i concentrate. But i just realised that i haven't even used a pen in years and just the act to write on paper feels truly weird now.
Eg, people often say any amount of radiation is bad, but there’s evidence that isn’t true. If you’re going to make a similar claim about alcohol, you should justify it.
“Persistent consumption above some threshold” is a radically different claim than “any amount”; and you should quantify that in both respects.
Sure, I indeed think they mean that. So, which amount actually does start to show negative effects? 1 drink per 10 years? Per year? Per month? Per week?
> Alcohol is a toxic, psychoactive, and dependence-producing substance and has been classified as a Group 1 carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer decades ago – this is the highest risk group, which also includes asbestos, radiation and tobacco. Alcohol causes at least seven types of cancer, including the most common cancer types, such as bowel cancer and female breast cancer. Ethanol (alcohol) causes cancer through biological mechanisms as the compound breaks down in the body, which means that any beverage containing alcohol, regardless of its price and quality, poses a risk of developing cancer.
The risk of developing cancer increases substantially the more alcohol is consumed. However, latest available data indicate that half of all alcohol-attributable cancers in the WHO European Region are caused by “light” and “moderate” alcohol consumption – less than 1.5 litres of wine or less than 3.5 litres of beer or less than 450 millilitres of spirits per week. This drinking pattern is responsible for the majority of alcohol-attributable breast cancers in women, with the highest burden observed in countries of the European Union (EU). In the EU, cancer is the leading cause of death – with a steadily increasing incidence rate – and the majority of all alcohol-attributable deaths are due to different types of cancers.
I am very skeptical of this report, not because I think the numbers are wrong, but because their presentation seems as skewed as it can be.
4% of cancers are attributable to alcohol [1]. That's borderline negligible in the grand scheme of things. How do they manage to attribute half of that to light alcohol consumption? No clue. No quantification of the risk either, which is nowadays nearly always a reason to summarily discard the information, as alarmism reigns. Tidbits like "steadily increasing incidence rate", technically true but deliberately misleading in context as it's entirely expected since Europe keeps getting older, Eastern countries' life expectancies match the West's, road safety improves, people are more aware of nutrition, etc.
Taken together, this screams more of the "never do anything that might potentially maybe harm your health" approach to medicine than an actual solid case.
I even think there are a lot more geeks 'out of the closet' now. Gaming, board games, reading scifi/fantasy, programming and general tech interest - I think they've all massively increased in popularity when compared to the 90s? I for one have found that I can find 'regular people' sharing with me what used to be pretty much solo and online hobbies. Might also have been that life has forced me to develop new friendships and so I had to open up on my hidden hobbies.
This is a great question. Have been in insurance for 20 yrs now. Cannot phantom why f.e. insurers don’t hold manufacturers responsible for losses due to cloned car keys with inadequate protection. I do know that insurers are generally very hesitant to start legal procedures, especially those that end up in the news. Say, Volkswagen and Stellantis are formidable adversaries as well as national champions, so there is some presumption that getting your right might be difficult. And the bar as I understand it is not technical SOTA, but more something like acceptable practice, so the manufacturer could argue “hey everyone has shitty protection, so suck up the loss”. Perhaps the newest European legislation will help raise the bar / even the playing field.
People are average on average. OP is measuring LLM succes based on a super human test which most of us would likely fail. Creativity is just longer context and opinionated prompting. (For discussion purposes. I’m on 70% true.) Average Joe LLM and me are having a great time.
(I am not an AI bull.) I'd say current AI is already there. It's just that the personality of LLM is not what we would have expected from scifi. It's like an average IQ person with pleasing problems, problems being fair, trouble listening, problems in estimating what it can and cannot reasonably accomplish (overconfidence bias, very human indeed) and a very large, if somewhat shallow knowledge base. I'd argue it's human right now. The superhuman part, that will be akward. The Turing test isn't a good metric, now that we're close. Humans are bad at judging humans - we think too small from our personal beliefs.
A thought experiment. With an energy budget of about 20 euro a day, could a current level AI/LLM without the moral boundaries make money _anywhere_? Would it start robbing, stealing, spamming, phishing, lying? Hey, that's what a subset of humans is doing right now! Would it start an AI porn site? Would it find niches for fully vibe coded SAAS-applications? If AI isn't there yet currenly, it should fail on every dimension (not just some!). For the sake of discussion (too instrumental for my moral taste), about 5-10%? of humans in my country are actively and solely supported by other people. I think current AI could beat that hurdle.
Over the holidays I built a plan for an app that would be worthwhile to my children, oldest son first. That plan developed to several thousand words of planning documents (MVP, technical stack, layout). That was just me lying in the sun with Claude on mobile.
Today I (not a programmer, although programming for 20+ years, but mostly statistics) started building with Claude Code via Pro. Burned through my credits in about 3 hours. Got to MVP (happy tear in my eye). Actually one of the best looks I've ever gotten from my son. A look like, wow, dad, that's more than I'd ever think you could manage.
Tips:
- Plan ahead! I've had Claude tell me that a request would fit better way back on the roadmap. My roadmap manages me.
- Force Claude to build a test suite and give debugging info everywhere (backend, frontend).
- Claude and me work together on a clear TODO. He needs guidance as well as I do. It forgot a very central feature of my MVP. Do not yet know why. Asked kindly and it was built.
Questions (not specifically to you kind HN-folks, although tips are welcome):
- Why did I burn through my credits in 3 hours?
- How can I force Claude to keep committed to my plans, my CLAUDE.md, etc.
- Is there a way to ask Claude to check the entire project for consistency? And/Or should I accept that vibing will leave crusts spread around?
I'm on a pro plan, also run into limits within 2 hours, then have to wait until the limits of the 5 hour window reset (next reset is in 1 hour 40 minutes at 2am)...
You can just ask claude to review your code, write down standard, verify that code is produced according to standards and guidelines. And if it finds that project is not consistent, ask it to make a plan and execute on the plan.
Yeah, not going to lie, working at Google and having unlimited access to Gemini sure is nice (even if it has performance issues vs Claude Code… I can’t say as I can’t use it at work)
Why? I see no arguments, only propositions. (I will bring little arguments myself below. Not flaming.)
Technological advancement is in my opinion unrelated to the way current “social” technologies impact “social relations”. Things are not going well, I’d agree. But I can imagine one hundred beautiful features (or historical technological advances) that have improved social relations, trust and general well-being.
Current big tech is dystopian and extraction based, but that’s not the general trend of the last two centuries. In the late ‘90s, early ‘00s I was actually very optimistic about technology and the state of the world (poverty, global village, war, climate).
Antisocial tech has put us back a long way. But that’s not technology general, ‘just’ Google, Apple, Meta and the app-0-sphere being or doing evil by extracting attention in finite time via small machines. The big machines have brought us much. And even then both ways; for good and for bad.
1. Even early computers of the 90s and 00s tended to reduce face-to-face contact. At least a lot of children started to spend more time on the computer than hanging out in real life. (The latter wasn't obliterated, but reduced.)
2. Airline and rapid travel encourages people to move away from friends and family because they can be visited or reuinted on occasion more often.
3. Not sure how you were enthusiastic about the climate – it's been going steadily worse since the use of fossil fuel technology, which in addition makes it harder for people to engage in sustenance farming in many places due to unpredcitability. People have to rely more on industrial farming
4. Industrial farming and large-scale farming puts many family farms out of business, meaing less human dependence on individuals and more on technology.
5. YouTube, etc. brings more knowledge to the world but many tutorials mean people can be more independent and rely on individuals less for their knowledge.
6. Personal cars mean people do not have to rely on each other for a lot of manual labor like hauling stuff, and they now drive instead of walk to the grocery store, which means a lower likelihood of encountering others you know.
7. All communications technologies in general mean less in-person communication, or a greater ability to move away from communities. The internet means less going to the library, etc.
1. time spent in front of screen means you aren't in a face to face interaction with someone, but the same can be said of books. When many people still connected to a local BBS it was another way to get to know people around you and meetups were common.
2 & 6 & 7. access to airlines (and travel in general) was a net positive for meeting new people. Suddenly people could meet and get to know far more people than the handful of folks in the town they grew up in. Travel is probably on the best ways to meet new people and gain relationships and being able to pack up and move to where your new friends/love interests are is a good thing while communication tech lets you keep in touch with people who are in different cities/states/countries and maintain those relationships
3 & 4. People have to depend more on others to do their farming for them, but if you're working the fields you can't be out meeting real people face to face either. You're much more likely to have a social encounter at a grocery store than a grain silo. the hours you aren't spending growing your own food means you have more time to be with the people you love
5. independence is good and learning new skills means going out to new places to practice them or for supplies and equipment where you can meet other people with similar interests. It's the parasocial aspect of youtube that's most harmful.
> 2 & 6 & 7. access to airlines (and travel in general) was a net positive for meeting new people. Suddenly people could meet and get to know far more people than the handful of folks in the town they grew up in.
Debatable because social relationships also become more frivilous.
> 3 & 4. People have to depend more on others to do their farming for them, but if you're working the fields you can't be out meeting real people face to face either.
But at least you can develop closer relationships with fewer people. Again, it's a matter of what place on the spectrum is ideal.
> 5. independence is good and learning new skills means going out to new places to practice them or for supplies and equipment where you can meet other people with similar interests
Independence is good only up to a point. Too much independence is a natural consequence of advancing technology and becomes pathological.
>1. time spent in front of screen means you aren't in a face to face interaction with someone
Even if you are video chatting? I video chat with family and friends all the time to keep in touch over longer distances. I feel technology is helping there a lot.
If there were no video chatting, people would have more incentive to meet in person or not move away as much. Although a small proportion of people will have video chatting over nothing, the GENERAL trend will be more distance between people, even if in SOME cases it means less distance and more meaningful communication.
That's the key also: a small subset of people who benefit in the short-term does not mean that the technology doesn't move things in a worse direction in the long term. After all, the introduction of new technologies like video chatting sometimes just solves problems created by older technologies, possibly leading to a situation of decreasing LOCAL maxima, each of which seems like it is an improvement because it is, after all, a local maximum.
Hmm so it seems technology is empowering the individual to the level of killing society? I mean it in the sense that we came to this development over millennia of social fueled evolution, and now technology allows us to get rid of all this "legacy". I'm only thinking loud here, but it seems conservatism should have a better target with this, or at least more close to reality, instead of only attacking the consequences with magical thinking.
That is true. But the downside is that technology is also at the same time pushing biological life aside, because its development is fundamentally unsustainable. So it also means eventual complete subservience to it without any true freedom.
Thanks for your replies. I understand the worldview. We differ on a few points of view.
Large scale farming releases hands for more specialization. Specialization leads to interdependence and (in my naïveté) peace. ‘We’ did get a very large part of the world out of poverty. That was part of my optimism. And I thought we would reach peak oil faster and go for sustainable faster (batteries are still the major future potential upside for me).
Perhaps in a ‘might have been’-scenario 9/11 and the end of the end of history (Fukuyama), plus the antisocial tech are the turning points. Haven’t thought that shift from techno optimism to political, social and cultural negativity (in me, but it seems a trend as well) through enough. The whole bitcoin shebang, the return of the 80s American Psycho capitalism and consumerism, the wars just rub me the wrong way. I might be turning hippie in my second half of life.
As a child of the 80s I’ve never felt technology reducing social interaction. But that might have been a temporal sweet spot. Massive amounts of screen time, massive amounts of outside time (friends, sports).
I suppose I mistakenly assume that the tropes of my youth still applies, though.
Young people don't need to study for the baccalaureate - it's officially a giveaway now.
The real "rite of passage" is surviving the stress of the lottery that is Parcoursup. (The impressively scaling web system that replaced any illusion of meritocracy with an opaque selection that makes night-clubs bouncers looks fair. And I can't even use this allegory on young people, since they've never been to a night club anyway.)
And I guess, with TV dwindling, the Tour is going to be uneconomical to cast, soon. But, unexpectedly, people are still spending their afternoon on the road sides to be "part of the show", to get close to the podiums, the camera, the TV crews, etc... to watch the substance users drive past them (And sometimes the bikers too.)
What's the problem with Parcoursup? Im not French and had never heard about it. I just read the Wikipedia entry but it isn't clear why it causes so much stress to students.
Because there is no way to understand why you're accepted or not in a given training program.
The system looks like it mimics what exists (or at least, what existed 25 years ago) in "Grande Ecoles" (Elite Engineering schools like Polytechnique, Centrales, Normale Sup), etc... - you make "wishes" to enter that or this program, and you're offered a spot in some of them and denied the spot in others.
However, the huge difference is that the algo in Grande Ecoles is pretty clear: there is an entrance exam that serves as a competition. The exam is precise enough that you're going to be graded relatively evenly no matter where you live, and the examinators don't know you. In the end, you get a ranking.
Then, depending on how selective they are, each training program is basically going to offer a spot to the first N people who wanted to join, ranked by the score at the exam. Very harsh if you miss the training of your dreams for half a points, but pretty simple to understand.
Parcoursup, on the other hand, gives zero information about why you're accepted or not. It's very different from receiving a letter from Yale telling you "sorry, your grades are not good enough, your applying essay did not mention diversity / freedom / whatever, etc...")
People fill the blanks with rumors ("they don't take people from this city", "they don't take people with that last name", etc...), heuristics ("it's better to be the first of a bad class in a countryside high school than being the fourth in a very good class in the cities"), conspiracy theory ("someone hacked the system to remove my kids names", etc...)
Kids don't have a point of comparison, parents usually only face the kafkaesque system once, so it's hard to build a reformer base, and the system changes every two years anyway. (Which is the glimmer of hope: it might converge to something halfway decent in the long run.)
It's entirely possible the initial plan was completely different from the current implementation - or maybe there is a missing piece that never came to exists (replace the baccalaureate with a ranking exam ?)
Political opponents would tell you that it's on purpose to limit people entering university to lower the costs (I mean, we have pensionners to pay at home and abroad.) ; or that life is simpler if you're rich enough to enter private training program (where the algo for entry is "cash or check ?")
The one good things is, that, as far as I know, once you've gone through the hurdles, most universities, engineering schools, etc... are still very cheap in France (to the level that USA would call it "free" in comparison). Even the most elite ones.
The former system had drawbacks: you would basically register wherever your want to study whatever your want ; the first few classes of the university would be crowded beyond reason, and then half the student left when they discovered they did not really want to study psychology or history of art for a living, but, hey, that's youth ;)
Thank you - the old system is very much like what I faced in the 90s in Latin America. You do the test, get blindly ranked and are chosen based on the number of openings and your ranking. You could have been the least diverse human in the world - your test scores did the talking.
But the new system is actually not too different from many universities in the US. I never got a rejection letter from Yale but I don't think they are that specific in why you got rejected. As the parent of an American high schooler, I have to deal with this subjectivity myself. We hear things like "School X loves people who volunteer at nursing homes".
There are companies specialized in guiding your kid towards the subjective requirements of each school, including training your kid to say the things that certain schools like to hear
The absolute classic would be Hal Varian, afaik still chief economist at Google. Still proud of working through Microeconomic Analysis. He has an introduction into micro as well. His books are so full of worthwhile thoughts. Micro introduced me to platform economics before the internet was a big thing.
