As much as I am for freedom and hate that DMCI or whatever it is called the guy is delusional. Not because he propoese to repeal the act (I am all for it) but his ideas that one can have some profitable business doing circumvention and selling software / hardware that unlocks whatever one is trying to unlock. As soon as you try to sell one it will be hacked and released for free.
“You told me these were the best engineers in the world!!”
“I said they were the best engineers in Canada”
(Great quote from the BlackBerry movie).
Rings true here. You can’t fight market forces. To push out the US tech you need to build something that’s better than the US tech. Anything else is just wishful thinking.
It's only a small contribution, but last week we have ended our Dropbox subscription (12 * 20 Euro = 240 Euro) and moved our data to Proton Drive. We are also moving out photos out of Apple Photos (12 * 10 = 120 Euro per year for storage). And I have also moved my mail out of Fastmail (to Proton Mail), which is a nice Aussie company, but their main servers are hosted in the US, so too risky. We also just moved all our backups from Backblaze B2 to Hetzner + local (between me and my wife 12 * $15 = $180 per year). Besides moving to Proton and Hetzner, we are increasing donations to non-profits like Mastodon.
I encourage everyone outside the US and in particular Canada and Europe to move your data out of the US and away from US cloud companies now. Putting your data there is not safe anymore and can and will be used for blackmail (see Microsoft cutting access of the International Criminal Court's (ICC) chief prosecutor's email). Trump is now blackmailing countries with tariffs to get them to back off support for Greenland (not going to happen), so things are going to get ugly.
If you are heavily into tech or an activist, etc. it's also a good time to pick up an extra phone like a second hand Pixel to run GrapheneOS as a backup. Or (less secure) a phone that can be unlocked and run something like /e/OS.
I know that it might take years to get all companies, governments, etc. off American big tech products. But that's not a good reason for not safeguarding your own data. Besides that, the more funding non-US alternatives get through enthusiasts, the better they are positioned to improve their alternatives.
True. European countries will never violate privacy, prosecute citizens for their beliefs, or use blackmail operations against its citizens. Problem solved!
The easiest was of escaping the trap of US tech dependence, is to buy your tech from China. Everything they have is very advanced, and cheap to boot. Huawei instead of Apple, WeChat instead of WhatsApp, etc. Everyone wins except Trump.
This is written from a Canadian perspective, but even within America, there are good reasons to stop giving money to American tech companies and find alternatives. The founders and executives and investors of all of these companies have become wealthy and powerful. Now they are dismantling the country by funding a certain political group and looking the other way as that same group seeks to deport 100 million Americans (basically all non whites), invade allied nations, and terrorize people in the streets. There’s no escape from the reality that dollars given to American tech companies is dollars given to that same machine.
Geopolitics aside, tech dependence in general has tipped from net helping us to hurting us. AI dependence is going to make social media dependence look like nothing.
The EU has a plan to replace all of that in the pipeline already. That isn’t new, they are already like 5 years into it and I think looking to launch it next year. That one I actually don’t think is going to be a problem at all as a lot of it is already built and basically ready to go.
Made a Ask HN, but screwed it up by editing the text.
Anyway, good ideas/tools for evaluating LLMs ?
Naturally, as a Dane, I am moving away from Claude, but I’d like more than a gut feel about how much I may have given up to do so.
Also, my next car will be a BYD. The current one is a Ford.
Replacing one non-ally by another. We have a VW ID.3 and it's great. Some people will argue that the on-board system is better on a Tesla or BYD, but a small loss of convenience, but a huge win for independence and the internal market. (Most of the criticisms are also outdated, the platform improved a lot since earlier generations.)
Please, just leave already. Stop talking about it and just do it. It’s like people talking about how awful social media is. Just don’t fucking use it.
Nothing would make Americans happier than an alternative. Europeans, go build your own big tech that can compete and win against Microsoft/Copilot. It’s not a big lift.
If we want to meaningfully reduce our dependency we "just" need more capital. All founders in Canada will tell you that Canadian VC suck: they are risk averse, their due diligence is painful and their terms are made so they can't lose. It is not rare in Canada for ex-founders of failed startups to be hundred of thousands of dollars in debt. That's why we are always advised to go seek funding in the US.
In Canada we like to give money to big established monopolies, that's our thing. The SR&ED program is a prime example of that, as a bootstrap business it took us 3 years before we could apply since we didn't have enough money to front full salaries for 1.5y before receiving a grant.
It is not really a complex problem to solve, the entrepreneurs know the solutions but our politicians and wealthy people are so small c conservative it's pathetic.
I mean it’s their money, not yours. Stands to reason that if you have a silly amount of money you can afford to spend it in silly ways (and if you don’t, you don’t). Sometimes you even hit it big then you get to tell everyone how much of a genius you are!
I really wish the EU leaned heavily into the cloud basic building blocks.
There's a lot of stuff in big cloud that is genuinely hard to duplicate especially with network effects, but I don't see why they can't throw a billion or 3 at ensuring you've got a homegrown stack that can do VMs, S3, function, container registry, database, block storage, firewall etc - with guaranteed funding, clear licenses, handful of local options perhaps with some sort of local guaranteed certification etc.
Baby steps are better than no steps & a lot of things can be made to run on those building blocks
Baby steps are better than no steps & a lot of things can be made to run on those building blocks
Yes. EU citizens should not let others (or themselves) talk them down. Yes, it will be an enormous job, but it's how you tackle any job - step by step. And there are a lot of things that can already be moved, like e-mail, code forges, databases, etc.
You think those are building blocks? I think that those are the very tippy-top of the tech stack!
Because, okay, lets say you have already got those things I quoted.
What are you going to run them on (CPU, RAM, storage, etc)? How are they going to talk to each other (Routers, switches, etc)?
It makes no sense, IMO, to have all your software but nowhere to run them. Better to throw that money at ARM/RISC-V development, and you'll literally get startups starting up to build the software for that hardware.
All you're proposing now is (re)building software for a US stack.
I think there are different forms of dependence that result in more or less severe carrying costs. Hardware is only a problem when you need to replace it or create new installations, so its carrying cost is rather low. The Microsoft 365 Copilot app is subscription-based, induces vendor lock-in with a whole software/hardware ecosystem, and is updated on a whim from the vendor with next to no customer control; its carrying cost is enormous.
The thing is that we had been allies for many decades. So the US and the EU are very entwined. You only mention one side, those chips are made using ASML machines from The Netherlands (with lenses from Germany), the latter two use an architecture licensed from a UK company (owned by a Japanese conglomerate). It was a very successful cooperation between two continents, but since the US wants to throw that under the bus, we have to become self-sufficient.
It will take time to untangle the mutual dependencies and become more independent. That said, ARM also designs full ARM64 cores (until recently Qualcomm cores were based on ARM cores, until the new cores based on the NUVIA acquisition) and they can be fabbed in Taiwan (TSMC) and South Korea (Samsung), and hopefully Europe in some years.
Besides that, it's true that if you are running Linux, you rely on US firmware and Intel/AMD chips, but assuming that Intel ME doesn't have a bad remote kill switch, you can continue to run on existing hardware.
China is getting closer to tech independence by the day, I imagine they are happy to sell their tech to anyone who is willing. Not saying this is good or desirable from a European perspective, but quite likely.
All the countries now going local. I hope there is lots of redundant jobs b/w countries and increase employment. We don't need any more efficiency, all we need is to work sane hours without stress and die in peace.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 52.2 ms ] threadhttps://youtu.be/3C1Gnxhfok0?si=uKDlYn33IIYevj8p
“I said they were the best engineers in Canada”
(Great quote from the BlackBerry movie).
Rings true here. You can’t fight market forces. To push out the US tech you need to build something that’s better than the US tech. Anything else is just wishful thinking.
I encourage everyone outside the US and in particular Canada and Europe to move your data out of the US and away from US cloud companies now. Putting your data there is not safe anymore and can and will be used for blackmail (see Microsoft cutting access of the International Criminal Court's (ICC) chief prosecutor's email). Trump is now blackmailing countries with tariffs to get them to back off support for Greenland (not going to happen), so things are going to get ugly.
If you are heavily into tech or an activist, etc. it's also a good time to pick up an extra phone like a second hand Pixel to run GrapheneOS as a backup. Or (less secure) a phone that can be unlocked and run something like /e/OS.
I know that it might take years to get all companies, governments, etc. off American big tech products. But that's not a good reason for not safeguarding your own data. Besides that, the more funding non-US alternatives get through enthusiasts, the better they are positioned to improve their alternatives.
Anyway, good ideas/tools for evaluating LLMs ? Naturally, as a Dane, I am moving away from Claude, but I’d like more than a gut feel about how much I may have given up to do so.
- Gmail -> ProtonMail
- Whatsapp -> Telegram
- I installed Linux to my parents laptops. They like it.
- YouTube App -> Newpipe and Smarttube
Also, my next car will be a BYD. The current one is a Ford.
Replacing one non-ally by another. We have a VW ID.3 and it's great. Some people will argue that the on-board system is better on a Tesla or BYD, but a small loss of convenience, but a huge win for independence and the internal market. (Most of the criticisms are also outdated, the platform improved a lot since earlier generations.)
Nothing would make Americans happier than an alternative. Europeans, go build your own big tech that can compete and win against Microsoft/Copilot. It’s not a big lift.
In Canada we like to give money to big established monopolies, that's our thing. The SR&ED program is a prime example of that, as a bootstrap business it took us 3 years before we could apply since we didn't have enough money to front full salaries for 1.5y before receiving a grant.
It is not really a complex problem to solve, the entrepreneurs know the solutions but our politicians and wealthy people are so small c conservative it's pathetic.
There's a lot of stuff in big cloud that is genuinely hard to duplicate especially with network effects, but I don't see why they can't throw a billion or 3 at ensuring you've got a homegrown stack that can do VMs, S3, function, container registry, database, block storage, firewall etc - with guaranteed funding, clear licenses, handful of local options perhaps with some sort of local guaranteed certification etc.
Baby steps are better than no steps & a lot of things can be made to run on those building blocks
Yes. EU citizens should not let others (or themselves) talk them down. Yes, it will be an enormous job, but it's how you tackle any job - step by step. And there are a lot of things that can already be moved, like e-mail, code forges, databases, etc.
...
> VMs, S3, function, container registry, database, block storage, firewall etc
You think those are building blocks? I think that those are the very tippy-top of the tech stack!
Because, okay, lets say you have already got those things I quoted.
What are you going to run them on (CPU, RAM, storage, etc)? How are they going to talk to each other (Routers, switches, etc)?
It makes no sense, IMO, to have all your software but nowhere to run them. Better to throw that money at ARM/RISC-V development, and you'll literally get startups starting up to build the software for that hardware.
All you're proposing now is (re)building software for a US stack.
You're running Linux? Oh fine... on which hard- and firmware? Intel? AMD? Apple Silicon? Qualcomm? All US.
You're using the Internet? Via Cisco routers?
Europe and other regions would have to put in huge efforts to really gain independence.
It will take time to untangle the mutual dependencies and become more independent. That said, ARM also designs full ARM64 cores (until recently Qualcomm cores were based on ARM cores, until the new cores based on the NUVIA acquisition) and they can be fabbed in Taiwan (TSMC) and South Korea (Samsung), and hopefully Europe in some years.
Besides that, it's true that if you are running Linux, you rely on US firmware and Intel/AMD chips, but assuming that Intel ME doesn't have a bad remote kill switch, you can continue to run on existing hardware.