It looks like Joscha Bach [0] is continuing his "From Computation to Consciousness" series. I've enjoyed some of his older talks so I'll probably check out this new entry as well.
A few of the science talks related to biology also seem really interesting, although it reminds me of how much I'm lacking in understanding and knowledge of the topic. It looks like there's a big focus on mixing generative AI with biology research, and I don't know enough to disambiguate whether there truly innovative work happening or if this is an attempt to ride the AI hype cycle. Does anyone here have experience and knowledge on the topic to suggest whether the talks are worth checking out?
This is actually one of the few conferences where I really like pretty much every talk. These are not mainstream, yet all of them convey so much knowledge and information. End of the year is always reserved for watching CCC talks...
If you are part of a hacker space you could always get tickets through that quite easily. I think it’s great that they are supporting their original core audience like that.
The only way accommodate more attendees and grow would have been to move permanently to a fairground like Leipzig. Unfortunately, there seems to be no willingness to do so. I found the Leipzig events phenomenal and would like to understand the reasons behind this decision, but can only find speculation.. maybe fairgrounds are simply too expensive?
Leipzig’s hotel situation is worse due to having to connect to the fairground outside town. However, due to Leipzigs location at the intersection of two major historic European trade routes (fyi: via imperii and via regia, still has the largest head railway station in Europe), it has much better connections than Hamburg to the rest of Germany and Europe, including Berlin. Also Leipzig (and the fairground itself) have train connections to three airports including BER..
This is way better than usual, but still a step down from what could be: just load the NoJS schedule with the initial page load and then replace it with your React app or whatever it is if JS is enabled. You can have the same banner at the top letting people know there's more functionality with JS. The only downside is more info over the wire, but it's not that much more, especially as a fraction of the already-slow load times for the JavaScript version.
ain't that the damn truth! I was at 37C3 and they had these knucklehead presenters advocating to essentially pass legislation to have people take more public transport like buses and they were proposing this as a worldwide solution while also criticizing companies like Tesla that they are just "green washing".
I had to be the first to line up to a mic to give them a piece of my mind. I asked them have they even been to the US(many Europeans just cannot internalize the true scale of the country)
Also asked what are they going to do when the populations starts to lash out against these forced proposals and turn to the far side of the other aisle in response. They didn't seem convinced and got applause for their response.
Well given that a year has passed and the political shockwaves we have seen all around the world, I had the last laugh (unfortunately).
I also realized how much of a bubble these 'enlightened hackers' are in. They are so convinced of their intelligence that they just totally reject what the populations of the world are really thinking. It was really an eye opening moment for me as I have been a fan of CCC for decades since I was a little kid.
Your snark is a bit unfair. But I also noted how far-left and anti-capitalistic many talks/speaker are. I guess it shows the power differential between US vs Europe/Germany and also the difference between disrupting American and risk-averse European culture? Super smart people in the Bay Area found startups to get rich (and invent the future). Super smart people in Germany can only go into academia and research how to decolonize digital activism.
I love watching CCC every years though I rarely catch it live. Since we have a couple of days to wait for this year's talk, I'll ask. Does it bother anyone else that some talks are in German, or does it bother anyone else that they find themselves bothered that the talks are in German?
I love all languages great and small, natural and formal and so I'm conflicted on subjects like this. I find young German speakers to be generally both good at English and pragmatic about choice of language and I'm glad to see that they haven't ceded the ground entirely.
On the other hand you might consider a language as a network whose utility grows with number of nodes. Or you believe in the inevitability of Gresham's Law driving out good currency with bad. I have sympathy for this point, and in an emergency in a mixed nationality group would certainly shout "fire" in English first.
As an example I'll be interested to watch this one about data protection for age verification: https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2024/fahrplan/talk/S... but feel it would be a shame if the reach was limited by the choice of language. AFAIR they don't do multilingual restreams (automated or otherwise) like some other online events.
(Übrigens kann ich doch Deutsch, trotzdem mein Standpunkt bleibt.)
I live in Hamburg/Germany, where the CCC is hosted. It would feel strange to go to a German hacker congress in a German city and people would expect that everything is in English, first. It's organized by volunteers from various CCC groups from all over Germany and not by a commercial congress provider. The result may look like a "professional" congress, but that's the result by countless hours of volunteers enabling it. Generally there is much more to the congress, then the talks you can see online. It's a large gathering (> 14k participants with >2500k volunteer organizers) of people from all kinds of German grassroots hacker domains... with a lot of groups meeting there and presenting themselves. The Hamburg congress center, where it takes place, is not the largest location possible, but it currently seems to be the best mix of a congress center in the middle of a large German city with lots of rooms and space for all the groups.
Having CCC talks translated to and from English/... is fine, as it's actually done.
> We interpret ALL talks in the three main halls and the two community stages live and in real-time. German talks are interpreted into English, and vice versa. Our work is transmitted live in the lecture halls, streamed to the Internet, and recordings are published on CCC sites and YouTube. We have another channel where we interpret into more languages, this is transmitted and published in the same way.
> AFAIR they don't do multilingual restreams (automated or otherwise) like some other online events.
They do. There's a team of interpreters at CCC who translate most talks between English and German, and to some other languages. As with most things CCC, it's all volunteer-driven and done on a best-effort basis, but it's there.
When interpretation is available, I prefer talks that are given in whichever language the presenter is most comfortable in. Presenting in front of a large audience is stressful enough as it is, so IMO it makes a ton of sense _not_ to worry about doing that in a second/third language, and delegating that part of the presentation to someone else instead.
I think it's great. I've good passable German, not enough to really follow the details of a fast-paced, complicated talk, so I'm practically shut off from German media (at this level, anyway). But still, diversity is good, and the American-Anglification of all things cultural and linguistical is not necessarily a net positive.
As in, I'm aware there's good points to it, but it's not an entirely clear picture, and some alternative things existing is probably good. How many 12-year old Germans who dislike English for one reason or another found CCC and had major positive changes occur in their lives, ya know.
As a native German speaker living in the US, I have mixed feelings:
- Talks in German feel slightly less, hmm, professional? Maybe it's the field I grow up in (physics). Like, ok, in your studies you speak German, but when you grow up and go to big-boy conferences, it's English. The Congress should be big-boy league.
- Also, realistically, many technical terms are English, so the a German talk might have to make hard choices. CPU, not "zentrale Recheneinheit"
- At the same time, I like that it lowers the barriers for entry. Speakers and visitors who are not fluent in English can participate.
- Personally, though, I prefer a good fluent German presentation from a cringy English one. As a German native speaker, typical German mistakes in English irritate me more than others, I think, so I found some talks given in English hard to follow. Pet peeve: Technology. I think that's a better Shibboleth than Flash-Thunder-Welcome.
- Realistically though, the congress is a worldwide phenomenon, and important, and as English is the current lingua franca (hah), I think they should encourage English presentations, or at least English slides. (Because they provide translated audio in the recordings!)
- Lastly, I can only encourage everyone to learn more languages, at a young age. I kick myself I didn't. But even in languages which are relatively close, like English and German (compared to, say, Japanese), I found that one language has concepts the other one doesn't, and that changes how you think about things. For example, English has accuracy and precision, with, at least in physics, different meanings. In German, it's both "Genauigkeit".
Just because people are good at English doesn't mean their English skills are up to giving a permanently-archived talk to tens of thousands of people at the 1st or 2nd most important hacker con on the planet.
I'm all for giving a presentation in the language you're best at. Let machine translation (or manual translation) pick up the slack, not one person's possibly-mediocre ESL skills.
I also can speak German but I avoid doing so when technical accuracy is paramount, because sometimes, small details really matter.
On the one hand, communication is easiest if everybody uses the same language. On the other, the dominance of English is one thing that gives US too much cultural power.
I think I'm happy that there is still content in other languages out there.
> Does it bother anyone else that some talks are in German, or does it bother anyone else that they find themselves bothered that the talks are in German?
There’s generally live translation (into English, German, and sometimes French). The translations are also available for download (eg https://media.ccc.de/c/37c3/).
They usually do Translation live, so I'd be very surprised if they didn't offer them in the stream as well. They always offer English and I think some talks have been live-transcribed, too, for people with hearing disabilities, but that might be automated by now.
Personally I think it's good you are not forced to present in English. I know enough people who are not comfortable enough with English to present in it. There are also some niche topics that have a focus on Germany. For these sometimes German brings a bit of nuance/local flair that you can't really translate. For these I'm happy that German is available as the original and then the translators will do their best to provide an English second best.
To some degree I find it inevitable that conferences situated in countries that are not native English speaking will have some program points in the local language. As long as they offer help with understanding the content, I don't see an issue with this, regardless of how big/influential they are.
There is a realtime translation team that's available as an audio track in the life streams as. The translation is done be volunteers. The last ~5 years they managed to translate all the German and English slots on the official stages. Some less common language options may be provided later e.g. Spanish, French, Chinese, funni dialects like Plattdeutsch, etc.
When I was there where was always a group of people sitting in the first row live-translating the talks. That was many years ago so this is probably even better now.
I've been to CCC (and hope to continue doing so again when life ceases to get in the way), and it's never bothered me in the slightest. The Congress is organized by the Chaos Computer Club, founded in Germany and consists primarily of decentralized clubs/associations that themselves are German-speaking. The talks (often) live-dubbed English, and post-talk the talks are translated as well (both the live translation and the post-recording subtitling are done by volunteers, BTW). The majority of congress-goers speak German as a first language, and frankly many of those who don't speak German still attend German talks - thanks to the translators (you can even get a sense of this by watching the talks on the website; there are many instances of English being used for questions and even answers in the Q&A sections of German talks). P
ersonally, I believe the world would be less interesting if everything of interest was in the same language - I think all (major, at least - those with a budget for translators/enough volunteers to translate) conferences should allow the speakers to give their talks in the language they are comfortable in.
Anecdotally, I've never had passable German conversationally, but have studied the language a fair bit, and watching so many German talks with translation (both remotely and in-person) actually passively brought up my understanding of the language that I could understand most of what was being said; to the point that I felt comfortable over the years passively understanding the German language outside of the congress in most situations. Sure, being able to to speak in another language comfortably is ideal, but being able to listen, even just passively, in another language really feels like a superpower.
I have commented about this in the past and got downvoted for it. There is a reason why virtually all international conferences require presentations and talks to be held in English. If this was a German-only event it would be understandable, however as it is written on their website the CCC congress is "the biggest European hacker gathering and has grown into one of the most important conferences on digital transformation."
Another argument put forward is the existence of English dubs for every video. I have found the quality of these dubs varies a lot, since they are run by volunteers and not people experienced in live translation. In some talks there can be segments without any translation, and in one case the translator even "gave up" because the speaker was talking too fast.
Hi, I'm a long standing CCC interpreter (volunteer of course).
We aim to interpret live 100% of the talks in German (* we do not always interpret things that aren't strictly speaking talks, like poetry readings or performance art, although we try to make these as accessible as we can). We also interpret various talks into other languages - we have a sizeable team working on French and Spanish interpretation, and depending on volunteer availability, we are keen to be target any spoken language. For this talk you are interested in, I'm very confident it will be interpreted into English.
You can find our work on media.ccc.de both on the streams and recorded talks. If you're attending live we have lower latency audio streams available on-site, check out c3lingo.org.
There are a lot of "Red" (Ethics, Society & Politics) talks. And a lot of "Yellow" (Art & Beauty) too.
I don't say it is bad thing, as all "our" tries to be "be out-of-politic" and "don't bring politic to our beloved technology" is why we are where we are now (in rather sad world, IMHO).
You have a narrow view of "proper hacker talks" and the purpose of the Chaos Computer Club. The congress is representative for what is of interest for CCC members.
You went into women only spaces with the obvious intent to troll.
Quote: „Deshalb ist der Chaos Computer Club nach seiner Satzung und nach dem Willen der Mitglieder eine galaktische Gemeinschaft für alle Lebensformen. Als solche wollen wir allen Teilnehmenden eine sichere und schöne Erfahrung auf unseren Veranstaltungen bieten, unabhängig von Alter, geschlechtlicher und sexueller Identität, körperlichen und geistigen Voraussetzungen, ethnischer, regionaler und/oder religiöser Zugehörigkeit bzw. Herkunft, äußerlicher Erscheinung oder sozioökonomischer Stellung.
Wer sich dieser Offenheit nicht verpflichtet fühlt, hat bei uns nichts zu suchen.“
Translation: “That is why the Chaos Computer Club, according to its constitution and the will of its members, is a galactic community for all life forms. As such, we want to offer all participants a safe and enjoyable experience at our events, regardless of age, gender and sexual identity, physical and mental abilities, ethnic, regional and/or religious affiliation or origin, physical appearance or socio-economic status.
Anyone who does not feel committed to this openness has no place with us.”
Anyone who goes into protected spaces with the intent to troll and score political points is an obvious (metaphorical) bomb thrower who should have no place in any events that want to provide all participants a “safe and enjoyable experience”.
“Open to all creatures” does obviously not mean anyone can come. Anyone who themselves cannot be open to all creatures has to be aggressively excluded from such events. That is the only way to defend openness.
TheAceOfHearts|1 year ago
It looks like Joscha Bach [0] is continuing his "From Computation to Consciousness" series. I've enjoyed some of his older talks so I'll probably check out this new entry as well.
A few of the science talks related to biology also seem really interesting, although it reminds me of how much I'm lacking in understanding and knowledge of the topic. It looks like there's a big focus on mixing generative AI with biology research, and I don't know enough to disambiguate whether there truly innovative work happening or if this is an attempt to ride the AI hype cycle. Does anyone here have experience and knowledge on the topic to suggest whether the talks are worth checking out?
[0] https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2024/fahrplan/talk/3...
Mathnerd314|1 year ago
n_plus_1_acc|1 year ago
ElectRabbit|1 year ago
dlmotol|1 year ago
[deleted]
FlorianRappl|1 year ago
rurban|1 year ago
joeig|1 year ago
Many talks are usually available in the live stream and on demand.
Zolomon|1 year ago
sevg|1 year ago
dewey|1 year ago
DanielleMolloy|1 year ago
The only way accommodate more attendees and grow would have been to move permanently to a fairground like Leipzig. Unfortunately, there seems to be no willingness to do so. I found the Leipzig events phenomenal and would like to understand the reasons behind this decision, but can only find speculation.. maybe fairgrounds are simply too expensive?
Leipzig’s hotel situation is worse due to having to connect to the fairground outside town. However, due to Leipzigs location at the intersection of two major historic European trade routes (fyi: via imperii and via regia, still has the largest head railway station in Europe), it has much better connections than Hamburg to the rest of Germany and Europe, including Berlin. Also Leipzig (and the fairground itself) have train connections to three airports including BER..
towawy|1 year ago
gsich|1 year ago
jdndene|1 year ago
But getting a ticket this year was very easy, I got three on two separate occasions.
firefax|1 year ago
Great design. Too often sites force me to temporarily whitelist their JS to get basic info.
lolinder|1 year ago
sourcepluck|1 year ago
namibj|1 year ago
wunderwuzzi23|1 year ago
dtquad|1 year ago
usr1106|1 year ago
saturn8601|1 year ago
I had to be the first to line up to a mic to give them a piece of my mind. I asked them have they even been to the US(many Europeans just cannot internalize the true scale of the country)
Also asked what are they going to do when the populations starts to lash out against these forced proposals and turn to the far side of the other aisle in response. They didn't seem convinced and got applause for their response.
Well given that a year has passed and the political shockwaves we have seen all around the world, I had the last laugh (unfortunately).
I also realized how much of a bubble these 'enlightened hackers' are in. They are so convinced of their intelligence that they just totally reject what the populations of the world are really thinking. It was really an eye opening moment for me as I have been a fan of CCC for decades since I was a little kid.
andrepd|1 year ago
ralfd|1 year ago
xnacly|1 year ago
Y_Y|1 year ago
I love all languages great and small, natural and formal and so I'm conflicted on subjects like this. I find young German speakers to be generally both good at English and pragmatic about choice of language and I'm glad to see that they haven't ceded the ground entirely.
On the other hand you might consider a language as a network whose utility grows with number of nodes. Or you believe in the inevitability of Gresham's Law driving out good currency with bad. I have sympathy for this point, and in an emergency in a mixed nationality group would certainly shout "fire" in English first.
As an example I'll be interested to watch this one about data protection for age verification: https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2024/fahrplan/talk/S... but feel it would be a shame if the reach was limited by the choice of language. AFAIR they don't do multilingual restreams (automated or otherwise) like some other online events.
(Übrigens kann ich doch Deutsch, trotzdem mein Standpunkt bleibt.)
lispm|1 year ago
Having CCC talks translated to and from English/... is fine, as it's actually done.
https://events.ccc.de/en/2024/11/26/call-for-interpreters-tr...
says:
> We interpret ALL talks in the three main halls and the two community stages live and in real-time. German talks are interpreted into English, and vice versa. Our work is transmitted live in the lecture halls, streamed to the Internet, and recordings are published on CCC sites and YouTube. We have another channel where we interpret into more languages, this is transmitted and published in the same way.
phlo|1 year ago
They do. There's a team of interpreters at CCC who translate most talks between English and German, and to some other languages. As with most things CCC, it's all volunteer-driven and done on a best-effort basis, but it's there.
When interpretation is available, I prefer talks that are given in whichever language the presenter is most comfortable in. Presenting in front of a large audience is stressful enough as it is, so IMO it makes a ton of sense _not_ to worry about doing that in a second/third language, and delegating that part of the presentation to someone else instead.
sourcepluck|1 year ago
As in, I'm aware there's good points to it, but it's not an entirely clear picture, and some alternative things existing is probably good. How many 12-year old Germans who dislike English for one reason or another found CCC and had major positive changes occur in their lives, ya know.
davrosthedalek|1 year ago
- Talks in German feel slightly less, hmm, professional? Maybe it's the field I grow up in (physics). Like, ok, in your studies you speak German, but when you grow up and go to big-boy conferences, it's English. The Congress should be big-boy league.
- Also, realistically, many technical terms are English, so the a German talk might have to make hard choices. CPU, not "zentrale Recheneinheit"
- At the same time, I like that it lowers the barriers for entry. Speakers and visitors who are not fluent in English can participate.
- Personally, though, I prefer a good fluent German presentation from a cringy English one. As a German native speaker, typical German mistakes in English irritate me more than others, I think, so I found some talks given in English hard to follow. Pet peeve: Technology. I think that's a better Shibboleth than Flash-Thunder-Welcome.
- Realistically though, the congress is a worldwide phenomenon, and important, and as English is the current lingua franca (hah), I think they should encourage English presentations, or at least English slides. (Because they provide translated audio in the recordings!)
- Lastly, I can only encourage everyone to learn more languages, at a young age. I kick myself I didn't. But even in languages which are relatively close, like English and German (compared to, say, Japanese), I found that one language has concepts the other one doesn't, and that changes how you think about things. For example, English has accuracy and precision, with, at least in physics, different meanings. In German, it's both "Genauigkeit".
(Edited: Formatting)
sneak|1 year ago
I'm all for giving a presentation in the language you're best at. Let machine translation (or manual translation) pick up the slack, not one person's possibly-mediocre ESL skills.
I also can speak German but I avoid doing so when technical accuracy is paramount, because sometimes, small details really matter.
jyounker|1 year ago
I find it arrogant to think that presenters should speak a language other than German.
Scarblac|1 year ago
I think I'm happy that there is still content in other languages out there.
rsynnott|1 year ago
There’s generally live translation (into English, German, and sometimes French). The translations are also available for download (eg https://media.ccc.de/c/37c3/).
bleakenthusiasm|1 year ago
Personally I think it's good you are not forced to present in English. I know enough people who are not comfortable enough with English to present in it. There are also some niche topics that have a focus on Germany. For these sometimes German brings a bit of nuance/local flair that you can't really translate. For these I'm happy that German is available as the original and then the translators will do their best to provide an English second best.
To some degree I find it inevitable that conferences situated in countries that are not native English speaking will have some program points in the local language. As long as they offer help with understanding the content, I don't see an issue with this, regardless of how big/influential they are.
crest|1 year ago
dewey|1 year ago
zxexz|1 year ago
Anecdotally, I've never had passable German conversationally, but have studied the language a fair bit, and watching so many German talks with translation (both remotely and in-person) actually passively brought up my understanding of the language that I could understand most of what was being said; to the point that I felt comfortable over the years passively understanding the German language outside of the congress in most situations. Sure, being able to to speak in another language comfortably is ideal, but being able to listen, even just passively, in another language really feels like a superpower.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
ulnarkressty|1 year ago
Another argument put forward is the existence of English dubs for every video. I have found the quality of these dubs varies a lot, since they are run by volunteers and not people experienced in live translation. In some talks there can be segments without any translation, and in one case the translator even "gave up" because the speaker was talking too fast.
namibj|1 year ago
korfuri|1 year ago
We aim to interpret live 100% of the talks in German (* we do not always interpret things that aren't strictly speaking talks, like poetry readings or performance art, although we try to make these as accessible as we can). We also interpret various talks into other languages - we have a sizeable team working on French and Spanish interpretation, and depending on volunteer availability, we are keen to be target any spoken language. For this talk you are interested in, I'm very confident it will be interpreted into English.
You can find our work on media.ccc.de both on the streams and recorded talks. If you're attending live we have lower latency audio streams available on-site, check out c3lingo.org.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
flawn|1 year ago
lakomen|1 year ago
I have quite a few recordings I'd like to watch
a9ex|1 year ago
sylware|1 year ago
amai|1 year ago
Interesting talks e.g.
"Breaking NATO Radio Encryption"
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
Simon_O_Rourke|1 year ago
[deleted]
blacklion|1 year ago
I don't say it is bad thing, as all "our" tries to be "be out-of-politic" and "don't bring politic to our beloved technology" is why we are where we are now (in rather sad world, IMHO).
lispm|1 year ago
mauricioc|1 year ago
bijant|1 year ago
[deleted]
arrrg|1 year ago
Quote: „Deshalb ist der Chaos Computer Club nach seiner Satzung und nach dem Willen der Mitglieder eine galaktische Gemeinschaft für alle Lebensformen. Als solche wollen wir allen Teilnehmenden eine sichere und schöne Erfahrung auf unseren Veranstaltungen bieten, unabhängig von Alter, geschlechtlicher und sexueller Identität, körperlichen und geistigen Voraussetzungen, ethnischer, regionaler und/oder religiöser Zugehörigkeit bzw. Herkunft, äußerlicher Erscheinung oder sozioökonomischer Stellung.
Wer sich dieser Offenheit nicht verpflichtet fühlt, hat bei uns nichts zu suchen.“
Translation: “That is why the Chaos Computer Club, according to its constitution and the will of its members, is a galactic community for all life forms. As such, we want to offer all participants a safe and enjoyable experience at our events, regardless of age, gender and sexual identity, physical and mental abilities, ethnic, regional and/or religious affiliation or origin, physical appearance or socio-economic status.
Anyone who does not feel committed to this openness has no place with us.”
Anyone who goes into protected spaces with the intent to troll and score political points is an obvious (metaphorical) bomb thrower who should have no place in any events that want to provide all participants a “safe and enjoyable experience”.
“Open to all creatures” does obviously not mean anyone can come. Anyone who themselves cannot be open to all creatures has to be aggressively excluded from such events. That is the only way to defend openness.
diggan|1 year ago
Is there any 3rd party articles/posts about the events you're describing?
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]