ed: @er2d, can't reply to your comment for some reason, so doing it here: I don't agree. In theory a monopoly decreases the necessity for R&D. Of course this becomes more complex if the R&D is funded or steered by the state. But look at the current state of LLMs. There is fierce competition between 3 US companies. But geopolitically it's the same as if there would be one monopoly. The US being the clear technological leader in an industry is not dependent on that industry being a domestic monopoly.

And for the Europe comment: Also don't agree. Look at Boeing & Airbus. Both are companies where the US & EU have decided that they need to ensure the existence of a domestic airplane manufacturer. So in these cases they support these companies (often in violation of international trade laws). But it has nothing to do with monopolies. If a state decides to support a company to ensure its existence, a monopoly is the logical consequence and not the aim. Because if that industry would be profitable it wouldn't need to be supported in the first place.

But all these tech companies are not in industries that would move off-shore or stop existing because they're not profitable enough, so it's an entirely different setting.

Gameplay feedback: I'm a pretty decent player at the original games and I couldn't make it over a single obstacle, the controls seem extremely sensitive/abrupt currently.

https://bewelge.github.io/escherTower/

I love this myself, but..

> have great debug information

How do you debug WebGL stuff? I find that to be one of the least debuggable things I've ever done with computers. If there's multiple shaders feeding into one another, the best I can usually come up with is drawing the intermediate results to screen and debugging visually. Haven't been paying too much attention to the space the past 2-3 years though, so I'm wondering if some new tools emerged that make this easier.

I just checked and REWE only lets you sort by absolute price. But honestly, you can compare prices so much better on their website than in a physical supermarket already [0].

[0] https://www.rewe.de/shop/c/frisches-obst/?sorting=PRICE_DESC You have to enter a random zip code eg 20249

The issue is that each market sets their own prices and I believe REWE is the only large one where you can fairly easily scrape the product catalogue. I thought about it in a shopping list context, so you'd need to make it location dependent to be useful. But you could do a lot of cool things with it. Like choose a basket of goods and it creates a route for you: "Go to supermarket A and buy goods XYZ, then to supermarket B and buy ABC"

What you describe as B2B2C is exactly what chefkoch does. And it's exactly what I initially said, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. But anyway. Doesn't feel like we're getting anywhere. Have a great day ;)

What I suspect though: They mainly show current discounts. The REWE API exposes those as a separate list for each market. There's around 3.5k markets and each can set their own discounts and has their own product catalogue with their own pricing.

So it would be 3.5k API calls to fetch all offers for all markets. Which is doable.

But fetching all products takes like 100 calls per market. It's quite a bit of data. And I think most supermarket don't publish their catalogue at all since they don't have delivery options.

First up: Read and follow the rules. No need to insult me. Especially considering what you said shows that you both misunderstood AND misrepresented what I've said.

And frankly, my reasoning was simply saying "Company won't publicize internal info if they don't get an advantage from doing so". It's literally the same reason Google doesn't publish all of their source code. I'm struggling to see what part you are misunderstanding but it has to be something extremely basic to conclude I'm a conspiracy nut for basically stating "Company acts in their interest".

Opening an API to the public allows third parties to develop apps that can then be consumed by end-consumers. Not trying to be offensive here, but do you know what an API is? To conclude I meant every single end-consumers building their own app is at best disingenuously twisting my words.

Opening the API would allow new players like you and me to enter the market and take a piece of the pie. Why would a market, dominated and controlled by a few big players, opt for that? You don't even need to know that the German grocery market is incredibly price competitive, to understand that.

> If you think about it, imagine if REWE officially exposed an API B2C. This would mean they are obligated to provide support. Can you provide a source for that requirement? I'm pretty sure you just made that up.

> Businesses and services differentiating between B2C and B2B is nothing new, that is why the two different terminologies exist ! At this point I'm entirely lost what you read in my comment. Yes I know. I specifically made that distinction.

> What next, you don't want to fill up your car at the petrol station (B2C) but you want to be permitted to buy a barrel crude oil direct from the drill and refine it yourself (B2B) ? Yeah you definitely misunderstood something... What I said/meant:

The question: Why isn't the API open?

My answer: For B2B I gave an example where the API is used by another German firm, providing an example that the API is indeed consumed B2B.

For B2C: They have no reason to do so. They have a well functioning app where you can order stuff. They have one of the bigger recipe pages (at least it does very well SEO-wise) in Germany where you can immediately order ingredients from a recipe. The biggest recipe page in Germany (chefkoch) offers a direct link from recipes to their order page. Maybe you're missing this info? Thinking it's an internal API to data that isn't exposed anywhere at all would somehow explain whatever you tried to say here. But again, if you're that uninformed, don't insult people.

The owners of German supermarket and car companies are really the richest of the rich in Germany (okay and maybe the SAP guy on top). It would definitely be a net positive if someone manages to scrape and compare their prices.

In the restaurant market it's one player abusing many small players.

And honestly, I think the reason everyone cries when "Amazon launches an API" is because Amazon would not dare to piss off the German supermarket oligopoly.

What do you mean? The official REWE app and website provide just that.

> I'm sure this is a [regulation-]solved problem in Germany though

Not sure what you mean by that.

B2C: Is it really surprising that a busines has no interest in providing more price transparency to their customers?

Also there already exists this reverse engineered project: https://github.com/ByteSizedMarius/rewerse-engineering/

I do have a suggestion for your app though: Have it compare your basket of goods across different markets in your region to show you the cheapest option. I'm pretty sure this possibility is actually one of the reasons they locked down the API.

I've used Data from REWE in the past and made a comparison between a couple of cities in Germany (I believe it was Frankfurt, cologne, Berlin, Munich and Hamburg). Hamburg was by far the most expensive, often as much as 10-20% more expensive.

Ed: Nevermind, I missed the "BOE (Spain's official gazette) consolidated legislation API" part. Sending jealous greetings from Germany. We just have a bunch of PDFs in Germany. And the private entity that has been publishing them for decades even claims copyright on them!

I was not actually quoting any specific American case law but referring to the general legal concept. But even if I had referred to it specifically, it would not be meaningless. If I understand correctly, the US has overturned that specific case, but to my understanding the legal concept behind it remains in effect. But I see how my use of quotes and the choice of words "most famous example" was confusing here. I was not aware that there is this specific US case where the "Fire in a theater" phrase originates from and was talking about the general concept of purposefully causing a panic in a crowded space.

>Freedom of speech is not absolute

> Nobody ever claims it is? That's literally never in dispute, fraud (for example) is illegal everywhere.

I never claimed that anyone claimed that.

I thought that the preceding statement was too simplistic for a complex topic and tried to offer a more differentiated explanation. Why are you upset that I started that explanation with a statement that you agree is true?

Freedom of speech is not absolute. Neither in Europe nor in the US. Both effectively have rules restricting certain speech. For example, speech that may harm others, such as inciting violence or maybe the most famous example: "Shouting FIRE in a full venue".

European countries tend to spell out these restrictions more explicitly. It's completely reasonable to disagree with these restrictions. But the simple existence of them shouldn't lead you to the conclusion that one is "more freedom of speech" than the other.

And at last I want to add, that that is how it's been historically. Sadly, the recent developments in US show pretty well how freedom of speech cannot be measured by "How many specific laws are there about things I cannot say?".

But frankly if they meant that, the statement doesn't really say anything at all. Because what in this world is hard if you stop taking shortcuts and spend time doing it correctly?