The real kicker here, is the that it is not the case in China (which FWIW, has a roughly equivalent GDP to the EU).
Does China struggle if the US cuts off lots of these things? Sure. But they have a local ecosystem that has been forcibly, and which much complaint from big-tech, separated from the US ecosystem.
Are they reliant on Android? Sure, but only the open source bits. Google isn't allowed the same strangle hold over the rest as it is in the west.
I'm not necessarily sure that this is to China's credit, but if this is the discussion that Europe wants to have, then it is a good contrast.
It will only get worse with LLMs being at the core of ever more activity.
I'm not sure why only the USA is capable of creating state-of-the-art LLMs. As for Europe, I can say that it has a simple but effective strategy to keep falling behind:
1: Prevent innovation via regulation
2: Problem: Being dependent on foreign technology
3: Fight the problem with more regulation
4: Goto 1
Maybe people from China, Japan, India, or the UK can shed some light on why no state-of-the-art LLMs come out of these countries?
I've spent quite a few years doing software dev for various governments, including the EU. Every time this was brought up, the engineers (including myself) who brought it up were pretty much laughed out of the room. Apparently the question of where stuff is hosted was answered by people who are several paygrades above mine, and they're obviously very well informed (/s).
Ultimately it always came down to money. And AWS/Azure/GCP are apparently so much cheaper that nothing else matters.
I'm really glad people are starting to wake up to this.
It's been the case for a while, but we've been sliding more and more into the hands of the US.
Microsoft used to ship software that was local first, and removing the activation servers wouldn't have affected deployed software, now though? A removal of a subscription is an immediate revocation.
It's worse with Google Docs.
And of course, nobody knows how to run servers anymore unless they're in US tech company owned and operated datacenters, this is absolutely terrifying, but truthfully it's the office products that have the most capability to cause harm.
The real problem is average mentality: many here for instance still want paper mail, the office, some also on call from home dress with suit and tie, complete with tie clip and shoes, in their own home! Efficiency is an oxymoron for them, being disorganized and pretend the contrary sticking to mere apparent organization is normal thing. Learning organizations? Most are still at Taylor-Weber-Fayol models...
There is a deep social fracture between "the old dying cohort" and a new cohort still struggling to emerge and still without a clear shape. The result is full-quite-quitting mode and sub-par performances on anything with entrepreneurs playing the old https://i.ibb.co/gdTBXT0/Corp-Whining-Hist.jpg deepening the fracture.
> virtually all user devices run American-controlled OS on American-designed chips.
True, but the US don't control the entire supply chain, which is spread all around the world. It's a much desired stalemate that will hopefully persist.
The "Trump hits the kill switch" solution at least has an old fashion "solution" : as soon as the first person is killed because of the disruption, this would probably count as an act of war. Now, I don't know how much our armed forces dépend on AWS / azure at this point.
Oh, and we would probably stop paying our bills, so, who pays for American pensions ?
However, I'm terrified at "Bezos / Musk / Zuck / whoever decides to shut down EU". And I'm terrified at "AWS just gets hacked and stops working for a few days."
But, hey, we can't really fund efforts to switch, we have pensioners to pay.
The current state of affairs is concerning. But what really concerns me is how much of the innovation in the infrastructure layer is American. I can browse innovative infra layer startups all day and not come across a single European company. Why is that?
I would like to hope the non us branches of these companies could be forced to mitigate a total cutoff.
Giga corps like MS and Amazon are not entirely monolithic and one could in a doomsday situation like this try to take control of either the European branches or the people working there to mitigate the worst of the outcomes.
I don´t know who you are, but god bless you. I speak in my name and of every other European that understands how vital this is, for us and for our children. We need to make some noise, and show to our ELECTED LEADERS how democracy and prosperity looks like.
You said it in a proper statement: The EU can be shut down instantly.
I mean is it possible that a leader don´t know how to collect taxes, come on, the AI will generate trillions for decades to come, so grab that concept and close the black hole.
I think EU politicians have either not grasped the seriousness of this situation, or they think that there's nothing that can be done so they don't talk about it. I'm not sure what's worse.
The solution is obvious but titanic: develop our own hardware. The software side in infrastructure terms is not so dramatic because we already have excellent open source options: OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Linux.
The article is missing one big and critical sector as well: defense.
I think is pretty obvious that buying military tech from the other side of the world is an extremely poor choice. China and Russia (in terms of development) are the examples to follow.
On the other hand it can take many decades and ridiculous amounts of money to develop the defense industry to be neck to neck with the west (if such thing is achievable).
When I see countries praising jet fighters like the F-35 and acquiring or wanting acquire them, do they really understand that is not their fighters at all? If total control over mundane CPUs and hardware is already a reality imagine what level of control the might have over those machines.
An alternative to securing or recreating the entire technology stack top to bottom would be to own one critical piece of the stack. If European interests owned a vital slice of the technology stack that was difficult to recreate and too cheap/convenient to not be used by international government/business/consumer interests, that could be a powerful deterrent. I.e., it sets up a "mutual assured destruction"-style defense.
US based computer services for the EU could be shut down with a few keystrokes as could US based services anywhere in the world including in the US, but life would go on, if with a fair bit of inconvenience. We got through WW1 and 2, we could survive without google for a bit.
20 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 40.0 ms ] thread*I have an immense admiration for Fabrice Bellard*, but he is an exception among these school populations.
Does China struggle if the US cuts off lots of these things? Sure. But they have a local ecosystem that has been forcibly, and which much complaint from big-tech, separated from the US ecosystem.
Are they reliant on Android? Sure, but only the open source bits. Google isn't allowed the same strangle hold over the rest as it is in the west.
I'm not necessarily sure that this is to China's credit, but if this is the discussion that Europe wants to have, then it is a good contrast.
I'm not sure why only the USA is capable of creating state-of-the-art LLMs. As for Europe, I can say that it has a simple but effective strategy to keep falling behind:
Maybe people from China, Japan, India, or the UK can shed some light on why no state-of-the-art LLMs come out of these countries?Ultimately it always came down to money. And AWS/Azure/GCP are apparently so much cheaper that nothing else matters.
It's a sad state of affairs.
It's been the case for a while, but we've been sliding more and more into the hands of the US.
Microsoft used to ship software that was local first, and removing the activation servers wouldn't have affected deployed software, now though? A removal of a subscription is an immediate revocation.
It's worse with Google Docs.
And of course, nobody knows how to run servers anymore unless they're in US tech company owned and operated datacenters, this is absolutely terrifying, but truthfully it's the office products that have the most capability to cause harm.
There is a deep social fracture between "the old dying cohort" and a new cohort still struggling to emerge and still without a clear shape. The result is full-quite-quitting mode and sub-par performances on anything with entrepreneurs playing the old https://i.ibb.co/gdTBXT0/Corp-Whining-Hist.jpg deepening the fracture.
True, but the US don't control the entire supply chain, which is spread all around the world. It's a much desired stalemate that will hopefully persist.
Oh, and we would probably stop paying our bills, so, who pays for American pensions ?
However, I'm terrified at "Bezos / Musk / Zuck / whoever decides to shut down EU". And I'm terrified at "AWS just gets hacked and stops working for a few days."
But, hey, we can't really fund efforts to switch, we have pensioners to pay.
No. Nope. It was. Then after 20 years it got bought. It has been terrible since 2023. Domain prices increased by 100, 400 percent.
Pure enshittification. Run.
oh right, no longer Europe ...
EU Eyes Ditching Microsoft Azure for France's OVHcloud
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44331045
SUSE launches new European digital sovereignty service to meet surging demand
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44507166
'Europe must ban American Big Tech and create a European Silicon Valley'
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44552389
SourceHut moves business operations from US to Europe
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44365246
The article is missing one big and critical sector as well: defense.
I think is pretty obvious that buying military tech from the other side of the world is an extremely poor choice. China and Russia (in terms of development) are the examples to follow.
On the other hand it can take many decades and ridiculous amounts of money to develop the defense industry to be neck to neck with the west (if such thing is achievable).
When I see countries praising jet fighters like the F-35 and acquiring or wanting acquire them, do they really understand that is not their fighters at all? If total control over mundane CPUs and hardware is already a reality imagine what level of control the might have over those machines.