@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Hahaha, I don’t recall when I first stumbled across it, but I’m sure it must have been the same experience you had.

Ignoring the consistent fuck-up of the decimal point (German reverses comma and dot, we use a comma as the decimal separator and the dot as the thousands separator), they managed to print the amount correctly in most e-mails. But the “shipping is underway” e-mail is broken. For ages.

How ‘Situational Awareness’ Hedge Fund Dropped 67% in AI Stock Rout
CNN tells the unfortunate tale of hedge fund Situational Awareness, “founded in 2024 by German-born Leopold Aschenbrenner when he was in his early 20s.”

Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI employee, founded the hedge fund on the premise that “AI will be the dominant driver of global market returns over the next decade,” according to the firm’s site… … ⌘ Read more

Hamburg Is Replacing a Bridge In One Huge Piece
Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: The northern German City of Hamburg is currently in the process of replacing one of its bridges in one single gigantic piece. The new replacement weighs 3700 metric tons and was carefully moved into place over a stretch of 500 meters, requiring extreme patience and precision maneuvering. Some places leave only 40 cm of room to neighbouri … ⌘ Read more

Germans love consonants – and it’s the opposite with Scandinavian languages, isn’t it? 😅 This is so crazy for me to listen to:

https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=no&text=good%20morning%2C%20how%20are%20you%20today%3F%20my%20name%20is%20katharina%20and%20I%20am%20eating%20a%20banana%20and%20hopefully%20also%20an%20apple.%20everything%20I%20say%20is%20a%20blur.&op=translate

Love me some Finnish:

https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=fi&text=good%20morning%2C%20how%20are%20you%20today%3F%20my%20name%20is%20katharina%20and%20I%20am%20eating%20a%20banana%20and%20hopefully%20also%20an%20apple.%20everything%20I%20say%20is%20crystal%20clear.&op=translate

‘Inside the Dystopian World of Germany’s Free Speech Crackdown’
Thousands of Germans have been threatened with fines or prison sentences for social media posts, reports The Telegraph, calling the country’s political speech laws “unusually stringent for an EU member state.”
One German had his home raided for calling a minister a “Schwachkopf [dummy]” while another was fined €2,000 (£1,700) for calling Friedrich Me … ⌘ Read more

World’s First Wave Power Generator Receives Certification For Regular Use
“The Norwegian certification agency DNV has certified the commercial wave-driven power generator Corpower C4 for regular use,” writes Longtime Slashdot reader Qbertino. “German news site heise.de has a detailed write-up. See a CGI video of the power station and its internals, as well as the company’s website [at their respec … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Well, 15 shows the site. On the left, I had a roll mat on a tarp. I borrowed some “NVA tarps” from the scouts for this trip. The scouts got them from the National People’s Army, the German Democratic Republic’s armed forces after Germany was reunited. They’re 1.75m x 1.75m in size and weigh 1.3kg, quite heavy, but super awesome. One tarp on the bottom, another one to cover up the clothes, shoes and sleeping bag in order to protect against the thaw. Finally, a mosquito net over all that, hung from a rope between two trees.

My mate just used a hammock with a mozzie net on the right hand side. The third tarp served as the luxurious bedside carpet. :-)

We sat on my second tarp to chill and enjoy the sunset and surroundings. It was nice to notice birds etc. die down. It took a really long time for the last light to fade away. Since we have a very high risk of forest fires, we of course couldn’t have a camp fire. But after all the exhaustion, I didn’t even miss it for one second.

Since we had dinner at home before leaving, all we brought were two lye rolls, two grain rolls, two brezels, some sausage and chocolate biscuits for breakfast. From the 2.5l of water, I ended up using 2l. It’s always good to have a little extra, despite the unnecessary weight. We had brekkie a few kilometers further on a bench in the shade. The first bench was already in direct sun.

Our camp site was maybe 30m to the side and a few meters down of a summit path hidden behind some trees and bushes. We were quite lucky, the other side of the hill got quite a bit of a breeze at night. We could hear the leaved treetops making much more noise behind us.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yes, these kind of dogs should really be strictly forbidden!

It’s not illegal if you own the forest or ask the owner. :-)

@david@daiwei.me Yeah, no clue. But my mate said the dog is disqualified from such adventures in the future. :-)

The temps were supposed to hit 14°C just before sunrise. Since we didn’t bring a thermometer, I can’t tell for sure. I was rather hot in my sleeping bag, so I had to pull out my arms every now and then. My mate’s sleeping bag was a little lighter and, unfortunately, the zipper jammed up. Since it didn’t close all the way, it felt quite a bit cold I was told in the morning. When we got up at 6ish (we said, we don’t care about time at all), it was probably already 16°C if not more. I brought a jumper, but a t-shirt was already nice enough to wear. The jumper just served as my pillow. The mercury raised by the minute then.

Yeah, I circled the spot with a biro to keep an eye on it. Until now, there’s absolutely nothing to see. Looks like I got lucky.

@bender@twtxt.net Immediately reminded me of the German children’s song “Laurentia, liebe Laurentia mein”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Q0aky9FvLc

Have a nice weekend!

Remembering When Alan Turing Developed a Portable Voice Encryption Device
Long-time Slashdot reader smooth wombat writes: Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley papers for his assistant Donald Bayley who held onto the papers until his death in 2020 … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yes, this screenshot. However, not the Dutch but rather the German version, no wonder it looks so crazy!!1!11

It’s been a hot minute or two since I last used KDE, so I don’t remember exactly. I just vaguely recall that I found myself thinking multiple times that the KDE application categories were better matching or there were more or something like that. Most of my classmates were on Windows and had one giant long list of all sort of stuff in there. You even had to scroll in the menu. Sure, they installed all kind of garbage, which didn’t exactly help. Where in KDE, they were actually grouped by Office, Internet, Graphics, Multimedia, Games, etc. In Windows, applications usually hid themselves in a sub folder named after the software vendor. At least in the later (?) days.

I only used Win 95, 98 and XP at home. For maths class with computer algebra system (Maple), we had a Cassiopeia with Win CE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_Cassiopeia At school, there was probably also Win 2000, but I don’t know anymore for sure.

A German Court Has Ruled That Google Is Liable for False Statements Generated by AI Overviews
The ruling holds that a company that designs, trains, operates, and manages an AI system must assume legal liability for any damages caused by the responses it generates. ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Those damn foreigners shall not enjoy our German music, how dare they! Something like that.

Infineon to Open German Chip Fab as Part of EU Sovereignty Push
Infineon is set to open a $5.8 billion power-chip fab in Dresden on July 2, backed by about $1.1 billion in EU Chips Act subsidies. The plant will make power semiconductors for AI data centers and could eventually add up to $5.8 billion in annual revenue as demand for AI infrastructure strains global electricity systems. Bloomberg reports: Infineon, tra … ⌘ Read more

German Court Holds Google Liable For False AI Overview Answers
A Munich regional court has ruled (PDF) that Google can be held directly liable for false claims in AI Overviews. The case involved AI Overviews falsely linking two publishers to scams and shady business practices, with the court rejecting Google’s argument that users could simply check the sources themselves. The Decoder reports: Google’s AI overview … ⌘ Read more

German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews
Article URL: https://the-decoder.com/landmark-german-ruling-declares-googles-ai-overviews-are-googles-own-words-and-makes-it-liable-for-false-answers/

Comments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48470248](https://n … ⌘ Read more

‘Finally, a happy end’: Germany’s Alexander Zverev rejoices after winning first grand slam title
Alexander Zverev has ended a three-decade German drought, beating Flavio Cobolli in an epic five-set match to win the 2026 French Open. ⌘ Read more

Seth Rogen Rebooting 80s TV Show That Dog Lovers Adore
Seth Rogen is reviving an iconic ’80s TV show popular among dog lovers. The reboot will come from Rogen and his friend Evan Goldberg’s production house. What 1980s TV show is Seth Rogen rebooting? Seth Rogen will reboot The Littlest Hobo, a TV show from the ’80s about an ownerless German shepherd dog that helps […]

The post [Seth Rogen Rebooting 80s TV Show That Dog Lovers Adore](https://www.comingsoon.net/tv/news … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net … boom, 5500+ hits on that blog post. 🤣 Should I start monetizing this shit?! 🤪 (Don’t worry, I won’t. German law gets super annoying if you do that kind of thing.)

Fed Up With Vibe Coders, Dev Sneaks Data-Nuking Prompt Injection Into Testing App
It all started when the German developer behind an open-source app for Java testing “added hidden instructions to sabotage projects performed by AI coding agents,” reports Ars Technica:

The instructions were added to jqwik, a test engine for JUnit 5… The salient change in the update was a line that read: … ⌘ Read more

Journalist Spots Fugitive Terrorist Using Facial Recognition Software
Slashdot reader Bruce66423 writes: A German court this week sentenced a member of the Red Army Faction — a far-left terrorist organisation that operated in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s — to jail. [67-year-old Daniela Klettewas was sentenced to 13 years for armed robberies, according to the Guardian, and “she also faces trial for … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Ahh, I see. Okay, I’m with you there. On this high level, I can understand how the thing works.

Maybe my wording isn’t good. 🤔 Let’s take a real life example from what we do at work.

There’s this AI chatbot. It gets support requests from users, so the user says something like “I need access to a particular system”. This triggers the bot to “run” the instructions stored in a large Markdown file, like “check if the user is authorized to do this, then issue the following API requests”, and so on. This is essentially like running a little script, except it’s written in natural language (German) and there’s no “script interpreter” but just the AI.

Now, suppose that the AI doesn’t quite do what was intended. There’s some subtle bug. How do you debug this? How do you find out how the AI came to the “conclusion” to run step A instead of step B? And how do you find out how exactly you have to change your prompt so this doesn’t happen again next time?

If this was an actual script/program instead of AI, you could repeat the request and attach a debugger or throw in some printf() or whatever. How do you do that kind of thing with AI? How do you pinpoint exactly what the problem was?

(Or is this just a stupid idea? Do we have to give up that way of thinking when using AI? Is the era of debuggability over?)

I should have changed the key binding from Print to Shift+Print a long time ago to launch import and upload the screenshot to my server. I was constantly hitting that stupid key on accident when I actually wanted to press [AltGr].

If I only could map a key binding to slap these damn ThinkPad T15 keyboard layout designers at Lenovo remotely in the face. Seriously, who in their right mind puts Print (in German Druck) between AltGr and Ctrl at the bottom row to begin with?! Exactly. Nobody. What a horrible location.

Image

@arne@uplegger.eu (Mixing lovely fruit with bitter things like olives or cheese is something that only Germans do, right? 😅)

KDE Receives $1.4 Million Investment From Sovereign Tech Fund
The German Sovereign Tech Fund has invested 1.2 million euros ($1.4 million USD) in KDE Plasma technologies to help strengthen the structural reliability and security of the desktop environment’s core infrastructure, including Plasma, KDE Linux, and the frameworks underlying its communication services. Longtime Slashdot reader jrepin shares an excerpt fro … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de LOL. Once you truly know Germans (if such thing is possible, hahahaha!), you realise the stereotype is totally uncalled for.

Germans don’t have humour? Oh, yes we do! Get this:

I was pushing my bike slowly up a hill, coming across an elderly lady.

She goes: “Go slowly!!! 😡”

“???”

“Haha! Just kidding! 😊“

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de @bender@twtxt.net Thank you very much! <3

I only filtered out the noise floor of the camera itself. I selected one second of “silence” in Audacity and used the “Effect” → “Noise reduction” (Rausch-Verminderung in German) dialog with its default settings. I repeated that two or three times in total with different sections of “silence”. It’s very hard to find something where there is really no other bird singing in the background. But in contrast to the original audio, the edited version is noticeably more squeaky I find.

Oh, and I increased the volume. Especially after the noise reduction, everything is a bit quieter.

I got rather lucky, only a few cars went by and my microphone is too shitty, to really pick it up. :-D It’s kinda drowned out by the background noise. 45 seconds into the video, a car passes. Also at 1:10 without a doubt. I’m sure there were actually many were. Most of them passed behind me, the mic is facing away from that sound source. Of course, the densely built-up area still reflects a lot.

It also helped that Azabache is a loud singer himself. Fortunately, no idiots screaming either.

If you want to compare yourself or play around to see what other improvements you are able to achieve, I uploaded the original from the camera in the same directory under the lovely name DSCN5687.MOV. It’s 236.1 MiB in size.

LinkedIn Faces Spying Allegations Over Browser Extension Scanning
LinkedIn is facing allegations that it quietly scans users’ browsers for installed Chrome extensions. The German group Fairlinked e.V. goes so far as to claim that the site is “running one of the largest corporate espionage operations in modern history.”

“The program runs silently, without any visible indicator to the user,” the group says. “It … ⌘ Read more

Court Rules TCL’s ‘QLED’ TVs Aren’t Truly QLED
A German court ruled that TCL misled consumers by marketing certain TVs as “QLED” when they “do not deliver the color reproduction expected from QLED TVs.” It has ordered the company to stop advertising or selling those models in Germany. TechRadar reports: The case was filed by Samsung, which claimed that TCL was running deceptive advertising, and more court cases on the same topic are … ⌘ Read more

German Publishers Push Regulators To Fine Apple Over App Tracking Transparency
German publishers and advertising groups are urging regulators to fine Apple over its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) system, arguing it unfairly restricts access to advertising data while allowing Apple to remain the central gatekeeper – without subjecting its own apps to the same restrictions. If Germany’s antitrust … ⌘ Read more

European Consortium Wants Open-Source Alternative To Google Play Integrity
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Heise: Pay securely with an Android smartphone, completely without Google services: This is the plan being developed by the newly founded industry consortium led by the German Volla Systeme GmbH. It is an open-source alternative to Google Play Integrity. This proprietary interface decid … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net he didn’t. The embedded video show the speaker he was referencing to, on the German video.

@prologic@twtxt.net Sorry if I raised the wrong hope. Only the German talk is about the “why good people don’t want to work at your company” subject. Among the key points are the absolutely terrible job adverts, team leads not themselves looking for people to hire but letting other dudes do that, company cultures and communication.

A mate just recommended this German talk why people don’t wanna work at your company: https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2025-3321-es_es_ka_em_warum_gute_leute_nicht_bei_euch_arbeiten_wollen It’s really good. I fully agree with most parts.

The speaker referenced https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xmEgtRhw7o (Mårten Mickos: Believe in Something Bigger Than Yourself) which is also very interesting, if you make it through the first bit. He talks about his CEO role at MySQL AB.

The Bizarre Enhancement Claims Rocking Ski Jumping
German newspaper Bild reported in January that some ski jumpers have been injecting their penises with hyaluronic acid ahead of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics – the theory being that temporarily enlarged genitalia would yield looser-fitting suits when measured by 3D scanners, and those looser suits could act like sails to produce longer jumps.

A study published last … ⌘ Read more

The European Commission Is Testing an Open Source Alternative To Microsoft Teams
The European Commission is preparing to trial a communications platform built on Matrix, the open source messaging protocol already used by the French government, German healthcare providers and European armed forces, as a sovereign backup to Microsoft Teams.

Signal currently serves as the backup tool but has proven to … ⌘ Read more

BMW Commits To Subscriptions Even After Heated Seat Debacle
BMW may have retreated from its controversial plan to charge monthly fees for heated seats, but the German automaker is pressing ahead with subscription-based vehicle features through its ConnectedDrive platform.

A company spokesperson told The Drive that BMW “remains fully committed” to ConnectedDrive as part of its global aftersales strategy. Features r … ⌘ Read more

Leica Camera’s Owners Weigh $1.2 Billion Sale of Controlling Stake
The owners of Leica Camera AG – Austrian billionaire Andreas Kaufmann and private equity giant Blackstone – are considering a sale of a controlling stake in the German camera maker in a deal that could value the company at about $1.2 billion, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

HSG, formerly known as Sequoia Capital China, … ⌘ Read more

Fell into a bit of a rabbit hole and learned that it took German law until 2008 to actually allow unisex/gender-neutral first names: https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/entscheidungen/rk20081205_1bvr057607.html 🤦

I wonder if my elderly German neighbors have learned enough English by now to understand what I’m swearing about all day long. 🤔

Mercedes Temporarily Scraps Its Level 3 ‘Eyes-off’ Driving Feature
Mercedes-Benz is pausing the roll-out of Drive Pilot, an “eyes off” conditionally automated driving feature that was available in Europe and the US. From a report: As first reported by German publication Handelsblatt, the revised S-Class will not have the Level 3 system when it arrives at the end of this month. Mercedes was one of the first auto … ⌘ Read more

Volkswagen To End Production At German Plant, a First In Company History
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The last vehicle will roll off the assembly line at Volkswagen’s plant in Dresden, Germany, on Tuesday, marking the first time in the automaker’s 88-year history that it has closed a plant in its home country. Volkswagen warned of potential production cuts last year, as i … ⌘ Read more

Russia hits Ukraine as US reports progress in talks with Kyiv
France’s president condemns the attack and announces talks in London on Monday with Ukrainian, British and German leaders. ⌘ Read more

German president compares UK ties post-Brexit to Oasis
Frank-Walter Steinmeier says both sides had decided to not look back in anger while referencing band’s reunion. ⌘ Read more

German president compares UK ties post-Brexit to Oasis
Frank-Walter Steinmeier says both sides had decided to not look back in anger while referencing band’s reunion. ⌘ Read more

German president compares UK ties post-Brexit to Oasis
Frank-Walter Steinmeier says both sides had decided to not look back in anger while referencing band’s reunion. ⌘ Read more

The Papers: ‘Face ID in every town’ and ‘Kate’s great herr do’
Many of Thursday’s front pages carrying photos of the state banquet for the German President at Windsor, alongside a range of other stories. ⌘ Read more

The Papers: ‘Face ID in every town’ and ‘Kate’s great herr do’
Many of Thursday’s front pages carrying photos of the state banquet for the German President at Windsor, alongside a range of other stories. ⌘ Read more

King Charles welcomes German president on first state visit in 27 years
Germany’s president has received a ceremonial welcome from the King and will get a state banquet in Windsor Castle. ⌘ Read more

King Charles welcomes German president on first state visit in 27 years
Germany’s president has received a ceremonial welcome from the King and will get a state banquet in Windsor Castle. ⌘ Read more