Ack. I wrote an ASN.1 compiler in Java in the 90s. Mostly just to make sure I understood how it and BER/DER were used in X.509. I think the BER interpretation bits are still being used somewhere
I'm sorry you had to waste a year of your life.
There are few things I dislike more in the computing world than ASN.1/BER. It seems to encourage over-specification and is suboptimal for loosely coupled systems.
Looking at the comments, it seem that many people hate ASN.1 and many people like ASN.1 (I am the latter). (I consider BER to be messy and overly complicated, but DER is much better.) (I wrote a implementation of DER (decoding and encoding), although not the schema format (which I have never needed).)
Strangely, a previous version of this post was silently deleted. I suspect "Civil Resistance" or "worldcat.org" are triggering some sort of moderation hold.
With tech execs trying to walk a difficult road of doing business in what some are suggesting is an increasingly authoritarian political environment, and trying to avoid Disney or Target like boycotts, seems it's relevant to this community.
Like I said, I'm not trying to advance any agenda other than "maybe it's a good idea to know what people are talking about."
It would be great if we could discuss it without name-calling or invective. Maybe that's too much for parts of this community at this time. Things do seem to be heating up a bit politically.
I know this isn't the place to chime in with a conversation
about economics, but when has that stopped me before?
I read Mokyr's book, A Culture of Growth
[[ https://search.worldcat.org/title/964805224 ]] a couple years
ago and enjoyed it. I had a few nits about the content, but
then again, I'm not a Nobel Prize winning economist, so maybe I
should keep my mouth shut about that. If you're interested in
either history or economics, you should put it on the list of
books to consider reading. If you're interested in both, you
probably should read it.
But... I can also recommend von Hipple's Innovation series:
[[ https://evhippel.mit.edu/books/ ]].
And for the beginnings of a contrasting view to the "yeehaa!
growth!" mindset from the timeframe covered by Mokyr's book, I
would recommend Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful."
[[ https://search.worldcat.org/title/1239792692 ]] To be honest,
except for two chapters, I found the writing a little
uninspired. But it's worth a read as it introduces concepts you
hear from "post industrial" types (thinking of the Slow Food and
Slow Money movements.) I have a to-do item to write a book
about the "Slow Code" movement, but the industry probably
doesn't need help with that.
I haven't read Aghion's Endogenous Growth Theory
[[ https://search.worldcat.org/title/1027693933 ]], but worldcat
tells me it's at my local academic library, so I may have to
give it a go.
Aha. This works. It defaults to German for German language videos and even gives you the option to flip over to English if you want to. That's much more sensible.
I was talking to a friend in Germany who said the German language interface doesn't give creators those options yet. And that's the thing that really gets me. I click on a video by a German, in the German language, expecting to hear German. But instead a high pitched synthetic English voice comes out. Don't get me wrong, I loved all the obviously dubbed B-movies from the 70s and 80s, but it's jarring to hear ARD commentators not speaking German.
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