Not sure what you mean, Brave blows Firefox out of the water in terms of privacy protections. Firefox has milquetoast fingerprint protection and it doesn't even block ads. uBlock is worse than Brave's blocking by virtue of not being natively integrated.
We're still talking about "zero-shot prompt" when the saying "X-shotted" ["One-shotted the difficult maze"] was already a well-established thing in daily vernacular. So now you constantly have to readjust your brain because whenever you read "zero-shot prompt" your mind goes "uh.. a zero-try attempt is a paradox and cannot exist".
Zero-shot, one-shot, few-shot etc. refers to how many examples you have to give.
It comes about from machine learning algorithms that could pick up on patterns from a small number of examples. Few shot means only a handful of examples to recognize something. One shot means only a single example. And zero shot means no examples. Of course, you have to indicate what you want somehow, but in the case of an LLM that's the prompt. Once LLMs were trained for instruction following, you didn't have to give any examples, you could just give a prompt describing what you want, and that was a zero-shot.
You're explaining something to me I already know. Hence the "readjust my brain".
I'm complaining about the LLM field co-opting a term that was already used in daily vernacular. Imagine if people in the LLM field made it so that saying the LLM made a "final answer" means that it got stuck in a loop. Now, whenever someone says an LLM gave a "final answer" we have to divine if they meant it is in a loop or gave the right answer after working through a few intermittent ones by itself.
Choosing to call it "X-shot" was a dumb move. And now we're stuck with it. No two ways about it.
What is really interesting about Linux users is that they cost an enormous amount in support.
I think it was a dev of the reboot of Planetary Annihilation that said their Linux users / build made up a few percent of the sales but over 90 percent of all support tickets (!). Mind you that this was before Valve's Proton.
If those bugs are only present in the Linux port, then yeah, Linux users cost more to support. But if a significant amount of these bugs affect all platforms, then you could argue that a Linux user is much more valuable to them than a non-Linux user because they provide better feedback. Assuming they actually care about fixing their product.
yes, this. i don't know if it was the same game another another where the devs said that while linux users send the most bug reports they are also the most grateful about having a game that runs on linux, and all their reports genuinely helped make the game better for everyone. (wildly paraphrased from faint memory)
in other words, if you want your game tested and get good feedback for it, do release on linux. maybe even release on linux first. linux users will love you for it, and you get to release a more polished game for a wider audience on windows.
Personally, I think it's probably best to test with Proton as part of a game development cycle to reduce the overall complexity in terms of development (not that games aren't already exceedingly complex). That's just my take... especially if you want to take advantage of that extra 5% or so potential extra market share.
Part of the problem is that Linux isn't really one platform, it's 10 different ones of varying popularity (e.g. supporting Gnome on Debian with Wayland doesn't mean that KDE on Nix with X will work). And it costs somewhere in that 1-10x range to support it because of that.
Steam fixed this years ago. Many native games will default to the Steam Linux Runtime to ensure long-term compatibility and generally consolidated runtime expectations: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime
Compared to the dylib nightmare that Microsoft keeps shipping in Windows, native Steam/Linux is actually pretty consolidated.
When I worked at a Linux distro I worked with one device maker who told me in confidence that 90% of their revenue came from Linux-based shops and they only needed a one-person support team. They had a 20 person support team for the remaining 10% of revenue coming from Windows-based shops.
Where I work now the top 10 customers are Linux shops. They probably account for 80% of our revenue. The remaining hundreds of customers are more evenly split between Linux and Windows.
So I guess it depends very much on what industry you're in. For consumer games it might be Windows, but outside of financials and administrative realms and into the world of embedded it's a heckuva lot of Linux. Support costs tend to be lower, and you really only have to target Red Hat and Ubuntu.
Yes, and I think a free-version user might produce more support requests than a commercial user for two reasons:
1) commercial/professional users might feel more entitled to support, but typically have a better understanding of linux and more versed in fixing stuff themselves.
-- and more importantly --
2) They probably have a dedicated setup where they can run the AMD-blessed distro
You can certainly see the modern Apple influence: 4 different instrument panels, 7 different corner radii.
The control panel is the odd one out at the moment, but perhaps in the next version they'll "upgrade" it to a lop-sided rhomircle instead. Maybe even find a way to make the seatbelt foul the accelerator pedal when in use, in homage to the Magic Mouse.
I like tactile knobs and switches. I can see my self enjoying using them, similar to a fidget toy. Or an earbuds case that you can close with a satisfying SNAP.
Look at the infotainment, you have the handle bar thing that you can feel and thus rest your hand vertically. But instead of just a row of flip switches, in the middle you have the depressed button and a wheel. All of this helps using it without taking your eyes of the road.
I don't have a way with words, but there is also something about the instruments cluster. Looks cool I guess. Reminds me of 80s / 90s Mercedes maybe? Shows everything without being too much.
What does something looking ugly have to do with it having buttons?
The interior looks like the car version of those "Xbox 720", "Gameboy Omega" meme renders from the late 2000s. It's just plain ugly.
Compare that to some of the beautiful devices Braun and Sony created in the past. Buttons don't prevent something from looking beautifully crafted. But ugly design does.
Thinking of it, you know who could design a beautiful Ferrari interior? Teenage Engineering. Look up the OB4 radio in red.
You're not the only one. Users have been screaming for tactile buttons for about a decade or more now. Mercedes recently switched to tactile buttons and more expected to follow.
But regarding this car, did you check where it says "CONTROL PANEL" in your link? It is still a flat screen ...
Anyway, none of this looks revolutionary to me. Whether you think it is aesthetically pleasing or not (I do not).
> "CONTROL PANEL" in your link? It is still a flat screen ...
Yes, it has 9 or so physical buttons. Those are the ones I talked about in the post you are replaying to. As long as you can most needed tasks by buttons I'm fine also having a touchscreen.
Just judging my the images it seems the climate On/Off is touchscreen only. Even though you can control temperature by buttons. Could be that you can enable / disable it via other means. (Double click climate or whatever)
> none of this looks revolutionary to me.
Yeah same. But then again I have no idea what was revolutionary in car dashboards. Maybe GPS navigation?
Logius is the company that actually owns and manages the DigiD stack, it's just that they hired Solvinity for their expertise. AFAIK Solvinity can't access the data.
I can't find it right now, but on Tweakers there was a long comment by someone on the inside that explained Logius basically had almost no know-how of how the current stack works, and there's lots of bespoke stuff. Basically classic vendor lock-in. The government (rather, Logius) now really wants to transition away from Solvinity, but that will likely be a 5+ year process.
I also feel like this is another thing that the "fast ring" of the EU should do together. Take Estonia's stack as a base, and then countries like Sweden, Denmark, Finland, The Netherlands adopt it and co- develop it. Make it extensible for the bespoke things the countries need, and every few years check which bespoke extensions can actually be generalized and modularized. Would lead to a much better product. A man can dream :)
> I also feel like this is another thing that the "fast ring" of the EU should do together. Take Estonia's stack as a base, and then countries like Sweden, Denmark, Finland, The Netherlands adopt it and co- develop it. Make it extensible for the bespoke things the countries need, and every few years check which bespoke extensions can actually be generalized and modularized.
Argentina's ministry of education did something like this with university software. The one used by students to sign up and by teachers to track grades, etc. There's a single open source modularised, customisable system made country-wide, and public universities customise it to their needs.
Before this initiative, every university was implementing their own software from scratch. In many cases, different faculties (e.g.: Engineering, Natural Sciences, Humanities, etc) each had their own software development teams developing their own independent software stack.
> Argentina's ministry of education did something like this with university software. The one used by students to sign up and by teachers to track grades, etc.
For what it's worth, this seems roughly equivalent to Moodle, which is open-source (GPL) and used globally, apparently especially popular in some of western Europe, the US, etc. [1] School systems can and do of course customise it as needed.
The problem with Moodle is that it's terrible. Yes you can customise it, but the core must be 20+ years old now, and it really shows. Universities don't have the talent in house to do anything more than bodge solutions for local bureaucratic knots. That doesn't generalise into an improving system over time.
It's even more complicated: the datacenter and the servers are owned and operated by the government, and the DigiD app itself is owned and operated by government-owned Logius.
From what I have been able to deduce, Solvinity is contracted for some kind of sysadmin services - so basically Kubernetes babysitting?
Honestly they have good separation of concerns in the Dutch government. And running the stack doesn't automatically mean hosting the services, there's enough local expertise in the Netherlands to run that.
A few years ago I had the mispleasure of working for the island government of Bonaire, and they kinda run the same systems as they do in the mainland, being a sort of municipality.
Since all gemeentes in the Netherlands are basically independently run but have to communicate with each other for DigiD but also the GBA (ID system) and loads of other stuff, they invented a standard. It's a SOAP based monstrosity called StUF, and you better spell it like that.
I can't find much about StUF in English, but there is this about the succesor where they lament on how engrained StUF still is.
It wouldn't surprise me that migration to common ground is what they are refering too. StUF knowledge is not widespread due to the level of vendor lock in. There's not many vendors and outside GovIT nobody cares about StUF.
Estonia's tech was cool maybe 20 years ago. From what I understand it's a bit too hard on fetishization of PKI and Ukraine goes too hard on apps. Netherlands actually gets it really well with DigId that is doing bare minimum needed to actually perform eidas stuff without getting into the woods with legally blessed asn1 schemas and oid [0].
I'm not sure what bespoke stuff they invented to get their sweet vendor lock in eurobucks, but the whole thing is nothing more than an OAuth provider for 19 million people. I guess NFC integration in the app that reads physical ids is on a fancier side, but I suspect on that side it's vendor locked by card vendor and their SDK.
Disclaimer: I have more exposure to Ukrainian variation of this setup (see jkurwa) than to actual Estonian and extrapolate a bit from what I heard from people. Half of this may be outdated or wrong, but I believe that the general vibe is correct.
From what I know about Estonian eID stack, they use traditional PKI to the full extent -- LDAP, PKI, OCSP, all the standard designs from the 90ies and then internally (for use by the government itself) they have a sort of a document exchange system on top of that where everything is done through CMS (PKCS). I believe this is why eIDAS and trust services directive talk about trust lists, qualified certificate authorities and all that.
So you get a physical id card that is a smart card for X509 certificate and then sign, encrypt and do all the stuff you do with keys once you figured out key management. Since the key can't leave the card you need to deal either with a special Estonian keyboard that doubles as a keyreader (in Ukrainian flavor we get a mobile app that can generate a key and get x509 issued remotely, maybe Estonia has that too nowdays or we get a file-based key from a trusted provider, like a bank) or get an actual keyreader or a phone. On the provider side you also have to deal with trust lists, because Estonia and Lithuania don't use the same root of course.
The first gotcha is -- if you have LDAP, CSP and OCSP and can query those, that's a bit of a privacy risk (AFAIK, primary key is based on the date of birth, because reasons). Second gotcha -- key rotation is not practical, so certificates are long lived. Certificates that I saw had demographic identifier of the person as a serial, which is not great for privacy, but convenient for deployment I guess (for comparison, Ukrainian flavor only allows CSP through subject key and has the number deep in the directory lookup extension)
I don't think the stack is bad, but I think it's an overkill for the basic feature of logging into the government website and blessing some bytes with your legal persona. It does help when the user signs a legal document and then tries to walk it back (for example because the document is now an exhibit A in a VAT fraud case, yes real story). I think this particular problem can be solved by non-technical means. More specifically, PKI solves the problem of verifying the identity of the user and then allowing to prove to a third party that it happened.
What is actually needed from the ID stack is allowing a first party in a closed system to match the token presented by a second party to their legal identity. I don't believe cryptographic signing or key derivation is really necessary, as the system that produces the key and the system that verifies the signed artifact are the same entity in most threat models.
I think DigID does the right thing by being a glorified OTP generator with more or less nice UX that solves just that. The actual problem is key provisioning anyways, but once you have done that, it isn't necessary to go full PKI.
To make my point even more ahm pointy, we don't use client X509 to log into github or google. We use passwords, HOTP and fidokeys, because x509 has bad UX and bad security too (in practice)
Add: downvotes for explaining why PKI is an overkill? okay, I will not survive that
I appreciate your comment, but don't bother complaining about moderation. It isn't an interesting read.
Why not use the cert on the ID to sign your own private key in the chain? That way, you can revoke the keypair should the need arise. The private key on the ID card would be valid for as long as the ID card is valid (here in NL: 18+, 10 years; 18- 5 years). And you can use each keypair for whatever. The benefit (and possible disadvantage) is the government knows you are you.
It's a wall of text prefaced by your disclaiming that you don't really know what you're talking about. So then why would I want to read that? Just say "yeah I'm not really sure about the details what I wrote above was word of mouth" and move on.
Maybe better, but less useful. I don't carry my Identity Card at all, unless I cross the border within EU where it is used. All other functions I have in our country app. To which I can log in using physical card, but I have other options that are online.
Not true. You have to be able identify yourself on the street in case the police wants to talk to you. A driver’s license is also valid identification.
What are the penalties for not doing so? I'm always amazed at the willingness of Europeans to follow rules like these, regardless of their impact on personal sovereignty. People in Finland were the most extreme example of this behavior that I've ever encountered. People would look like you murdered a child for jaywalking in Helsinki.
It's a nothing burger really. I have a card wallet for bank passes, transport cards and the id thingy. Not a single cop ever stopped me (I'm not in the usual suspect demographics, so that helps), so I didn't have to show it ever in 7 years. I imagine I would have a different attitude if cops did actually ask for it for no reason.
I however heard about things like riding a bicycle without lights and being fined 50 bucks for that, which triggers asking for an id, which in it's turn triggers a 100 euro fine on top. In the story I heard the second fine wasn't actually given.
Why carrying it is practical? What is it used for?
The only time I need my ID is during elections, but I can also show the one I have in our government produced app.
Older people in Poland do carry those, mostly out of some kind of habit and some kind of fear that police might need it. I can drive a car and get a speeding ticket, and all I need police to know is my ID number (it is not the identifier of my identity card), which I know by hard, it consists of my birth date plus 5 semi-random numbers). I don't need my ID, my driving license nor my insurance data - everything is located in police database based on my ID number (or my license plate).
Bad sides of carrying it is that you might loose it, and that is a PITA, because you need to block it right away (someone might take a loan with it, happens I kid you not) by calling your bank or similar service.
So I take it out from my wallet (which I don't carry also) only when I go to the airport.
Not exactly. The Netherlands has an identificatieplicht (an obligation to identify yourself), not a formal draagplicht (an obligation to physically carry ID at all times).
Police may require identification only in specific situations connected to their duties, not arbitrarily. If you cannot show valid ID when requested, you can still be fined or taken to a police station to establish your identity, so in practice most people do carry ID anyway.
The distinction is historically sensitive in the Netherlands because compulsory identification documents were heavily associated with Nazi occupation policies during World War II.
It's a state owned enterprise as far as I remember. So technically they don't wear civil service uniforms in the office, but still get the usual government office hours.
I once interviewed for a job at what I think was a civil service branch that developed software for the military. But they were out of budget for this, while the military did have budget, so if I was hired, I'd have to wear a military uniform to the office. A very stylish one, they claimed.
this was true a year ago but not so much anymore. You still have to supervise the agents, but they can write maintainable code if you keep an eye on it.
> However what has happened is that the EU's soft power is crumbling
Uh, no. The US soft power is turning to dust whilst the EU is out there building the new free [trade] world, with itself as the biggest lynchpin.
What has happened the past ±30 years is that most EU countries cut spending on their militaries to the bone, because big brother USA would take care of it anyway. Now that we are returning to a multi-polar world, suddenly the EU is left scrambling for hard power that it doesn't have. That's why they can't play hardball when the US does a new ridiculous thing, because they simply lack the hard power to back up Ukraine.
The US is sorely going to regret their antics though. Long term, the EU is going to switch to their own stacks, both for military but also things like cloud and other tech. It's trillions of $ the US economy will be missing out on. And voting in a Democratic president, senate and house is not gonna change a thing about it, because the US has proven itself to be a fundamentally unreliable, if not outright hostile partner.
The US alone spends 1.5x as much on consumer goods (yes, adjusted for PPP) and nearly 2x as much on R&D as the entire EU. It’s very sweet that the EU is trying to decouple itself from the US economy, but I highly doubt its ability to become “leader of the free trade world” when it has so little money to throw around.
Yeah, we'll just up our EU debt to about 40 trillion USD, make up some money and continue. Sounds a lot like US right? Living in perpetual debt as a nation.
"the EU is out there building the new free [trade] world, with itself as the biggest lynchpin"
At its usual pace ... do you know when the negotiations with Mercosur started? Year 2000. Only now we have an agreement. Still, better than not doing anything at all. But I wonder how many of the original negotiators are still alive.
It also yet remains to be seen what happens if China puts a real pressure on us. Our list of allies is now somewhat thin and we have to cozy up to India, which indirectly funds the Russian war against Ukraine by importing Russian weapons and Russian oil/gas, the latter in huge quantities. Still, better than cozying up to China, because the possibility that Beijing teaches Brussels some cool tricks to keep the population under perfect surveillance scares me.
Super wealthy people in developing countries will still buy high-end Porsches and Mercedes G-wagons instead of Xiaomi EVs. For now.
But the EU makers likes of VW are fucked since they sell Chinese quality cars at premium prices and German union workers expect six figure salaries for a hard 35h week of bolting bumpers to cars.
It is difficult to think of an economic region that is more opposed to free trade than Europe (that isn't a comedy country). Possibly some countries in South America?
Trade within Europe has massive restrictions. I have no idea why, given the stated aims of Europe...we are posting this on a post about the Netherlands trying to protect office software ffs, people think this isn't the case. One of the reasons why the EU created a trade bloc, and the same reasons why you see the same attempts in areas of the world like South America, was to limit the impact of free trade. This should be completely obvious given that the EU is not competitive in areas where they lack the ability to limit competition.
Also, I will point out: US policy is for the EU to do exactly the thing that you are suggesting. This has been the consistent position of Trump since 2016. The main blockers for this have been politicians in the EU. I am not sure how you equate being unreliable with subsidising EU defence spending to the tune of multiple trillions so that EU countries can spend on welfare either.
The EU self-image is totally bizarre, it is so out of touch with reality. Hostile to all forms of change and innovation: actually one of the greatest free traders there has ever been. Xenophobic and hostile to certain countries: possibly one of the greatest allies to these countries ever. Never gets any support on Ukraine, would be a leader if the US weren't such bastards: spent multiple decades fuelling Putin's state.
There are still some protectionist issues on the single market itself.
For example, Poland defends its rail operator, PKP Intercity, against foreign competition by a series of dirty tricks, including "just never registering a sale of a depot to a competing corporation in the land registry".
Almost every major EU country, has implanted some domestic protectionist rules to protect some of its politically well connected lobbyist industries or jobs from cheaper or more efficient intra-EU competition buying them out. The restrictions almost never are in reverse.
I don’t understand how you can believe that about the EU. The union has been evolving so much since its creation. It is itself one of the greatest innovation in governance ever created. GDPR is an innovative framework making the EU leader in privacy protection. European open banking initiatives/frameworks are unique and have been leading the way forward for the past 20 years, and we are now reaping all the benefits with the latest payment system developments (PSD2 and others were already awesome but the payment standard is what makes the day to day citizens actually see the results). The 28th regime[0] in development is innovative. Schengen/TFEU Art. 45 is such an innovative policy. Where else can you move freely between so many countries?
That’s only from the top of my head and the few examples I’m familiar with
I assume you don't live in the EU either...yes, there is an absolutely huge industry behind it, that is why it passed. Companies have to employ data protection officers, effectively a no-show job, and there is a whole industry of people connected to governments that facilitates this. And that also protects existing companies from competing because it is so expensive to handle customer data...as you need to employ an EU bureaucrat who is the equivalent of a CCP party official...that you have to pay for.
The weirdest thing is that the EU is maximally corrupt, and people are unable to see it because they are so enured to the corruption. It is all corruption. GDPR does not increase productivity, it is tax on consumers to produce something that is required by government with the surplus being passed to insiders (civil servants, unions, and billionaires).
Also, the per capita rate of billionaires in countries like Germany is higher than the US...this is whilst they have a population that has the same net financial wealth as Greece. In Sweden, 60% of total GDP was produced by companies controlled by one family until the 70s. The whole system is based upon large government in concert with large businesses and large unions. If you are in the club, you get a lifetime of free money. If you are out of the club...well, good luck competing with the migrants they are flooding into the country.
Of course it doesn't, because the whole point of having GDPR is preventing companies from doing some productive stuff that would involve collection of personal data.
> Companies have to employ data protection officers, effectively a no-show job
No… an employee of the company can be designed as the data protection officer. Do you have literally no experience working in the EU? If yes you have really strong positions for someone that misinformed. Where are you getting your information from?
I can tell you that if you work in a large company with sensitive data it’s definitely not a no-show job, that can for sure be a full time position
> .as you need to employ an EU bureaucrat who is the equivalent of a CCP party official
Either complete lie or you are delusional. Wtf are you talking about
> GDPR does not increase productivity, it is tax on consumers to produce something that is required by government with the surplus being passed to insiders (civil servants, unions, and billionaires)
Ok, I think you’re completely out of your mind. The thought process makes absolutely no sense. Now I feel bad I have wasted my time engaging.
The only people that think global free trade is a good thing are the top .001% net worth individuals which use it to wield power.
Trading blocks (like the European single market) are specifically designed to protect their members from shit that global corporations or other nations attempt to get away with.
I'm not sure what "Trade within Europe has massive restrictions." means without context. Compared to some Randian capitalist utopia where there are no rules and no governments? Or compared to before the creation of the European single market?
“The International Monetary Fund estimates that the persistent barriers to the EU single market still represented the equivalent of a 110 % tariff on services.”
There is a good amount of work to be done to complete the single market, what we currently have is way too fragmented
That is politically impossible. Everyone knows it is impossible because if you open up some countries to free services trade then the political basis for the EU and the traditional governing countries would collapse.
The limitations on trade within Europe are intentional design. The attempts to stop the economy from collapsing with these massive government spending packages are the death throes.
I mean, it is extremely difficult, but the whole union was seen as impossible the last century. With strategic developments over decades I don’t think it’s impossible
The European Coal and Steel Community was established over 74 years ago.
The idea of Europe as a nation goes back to the early to mid 20th century, at least. One example i can find a citation for (but it was far from the first): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe_a_Nation
What you said comprises the exact error in logic that people make. Because we did this, this other thing is possible.
The EU was a certainty in a region that is hostile to change, wants big government, wants centralization, is suspicious of democracy, etc. Free trade would be a massive change, that is why it hasn't happened. The EU is basically the logical conclusion of European forms of governing.
I have no idea how you can be aware of the history of Europe or the people involved with the EU and think this. It is incomprehensible. One of the most bizarre aspects of the EU is that has become a religion for people who have no idea that the basic principles of the EU are everything they oppose.
But the EU started out as an industry group, the ECSC, to limit competition in coal and steel (with the helpful side effect of making German industrialists who did very well under Hitler even more rich).
If there is any founding principle of the EU, it is that competition should be limited because the view of people who founded the EU was that economic competition caused WW1/2 (a very generous interpretation of Germany's role in events but one that was used because there were a lot of wealthy Germans who wanted to use the EU to limit trade...btw, the situation today is beyond their wildest dreams, it is has made a small handful of German billionaires very wealthy for no effort).
The ECSC was about creating a common market. So we are talking about free trade within the community. Which is the literal opposite of what you’re describing? We are talking about a trade community that is literally about blocking countries from introducing discriminatory policies. I assume you see the EU as anti-democratic somehow? You seem to have pretty much everything backward. The ECSC is something covered in school as a teenager, it’s not a secret or hidden history you’re somehow finding out. Yes after the world war there was a huge push to get neighboring countries to compete in a local free market instead of via military expansion. And yes that eventually served as a framework to develop EU institutions. And yes some people in Germany and other countries made quite a lot of money from the trade. How do you arrive to the conclusion that the region is hostile to change, wants big governments (we are talking about a region split in multiple countries, each with their own political systems, multiple of which are federations split in states that have their own autonomy and political systems. Somehow this huge community of small political entities becomes a huge government?), want centralization, and are suspicious of democracy?
Somehow whenever European powers collaborate together it is framed as anti democratic, anti innovation, anti trad. Complete nonsense
I wish European countries would love big government and centralization just as much as EU detractors say. We have way too much fragmentation, the overhead of coordinating so many small entities is just so high and a waste
My hope is that eventually the "fast ring, slow ring, adjacent ring" system of the EU becomes a thing. I then imagine BeNeLux, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, maybe Czechia entering that fast ring. And as they synchronize their business and tax laws and capital markets, it'll show such an acceleration of growth that almost immediately more EU countries will want to go in on it. The nice thing is that because the "fast ring" would be more of a gentleman's agreement than a true EU institution, it wouldn't be bogged down.
The only hair in the soup I see for the start is that Denmark and Sweden would have to join the Euro, but their currencies are already effectively pegged to it anyway.
Services trade within Europe is often less free than services trade outside of Europe. The reason why is because there is a strong political constituency within Europe to ensure that certain kinds of sinecure jobs are not impacted by competition (and yes, as you helpfully point out, to blame that on "global corporations"...and people wonder why Europe had such a long period of dictatorships in the 20th century, "globalism", right? wink, wink).
> Trading blocks (like the European single market) are specifically designed to protect their members from shit that global corporations or other nations attempt to get away with.
Most of those global corporations are in favour of these trading blocks - they are the best placed to take advantage of them.
The EU is far more than just a trading block. The trading block is the countries they have free trade agreements with - the EEA,, plus the UK, plus Turkey. The EU is a political union.
Global corporation can lobby far more effectively than anyone else at the EU level.
FWIW our local car industry had decades to prepare to compete in the EV sector and decided to do pretty much nothing + train China how to take over their market. We’ve been way too protective of that industry, I’m personally happy they finally have to face some real competition. Protectionism has its place in global trade but it should be with a very specific goal in mind, such as giving the companies some room to breath while transitioning to new technologies and avoid a complete disruption of your economy. You cannot do it just to keep a dying industry alive. But you’re supposed to replace the external economic pressure with internal political pressure (or similar), otherwise corporation just go with the status quo
It is amusing what he inflicts on USA and I thoroughly enjoy it ... But the idea that EU is taking leadership in this chaos is somewhere between laughable and delusional.
Actually EU is getting fucked on every possible turn. We are the ones that pay trough the nose for all his follies. We are weaker than ever and we have delusional commission in charge.
Compared to Ursula Trump is the reincarnation of Richelieu and Bismarck with a pinch of Disraeli
> whilst the EU is out there building the new free [trade] world, with itself as the biggest lynchpin
In the same way America is stuck in its military heyday past, the EU is stuck pretending its brand of multilateralism is still a thing outside its own borders.
That assessment highly depends on your region I assume. They are far from 7 day shipping for me. In fact, it's the same 2-3 days as Amazon for non-Prime customers here. Speaking of non-Prime, free shipping is also at 50€.
The limited selection is certainly true but mainly it misses drop shipping stuff and what's essentially a mirror of aliexpress with a huge markup. I don't really miss those. In fact, it requires a considerable amount of time to navigate through those offers on Amazon, so not having them is a plus in my book.
> I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom.
Steve Jobs really cared about his users, and putting out great products for those users.
I imagine he would have loved all the machine learning stuff that Apple has being doing the past few years (stuff like voice noise separation, instant text OCR and photo object isolation).
Based on the story about the first iPod being too big, dropping a prototype in a fish tank, lots of air bubbling up and him going "there's your space", or the disdain he displayed about how crappy Mobile.me was, I imagine he would have recognized LLMs for the flakey product they are and would have been very wary of introducing them into users their workflow.
> .. and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better ..
Siri is still crap, but so is Gemini. Both still do incredibly stupid stuff like when you try to request some music on Spotify "cannot find the artist or song 'My Playlist Hard Techno'" / play some unknown vaguely matching artist. Or it'll do an internet search for "goose oven cooking timer ten minutes". Or ask "for how long should I set your timer?" and name the timer "goose oven cooking timer ten minutes" which in a way is even more stupid.
You'll get some naysayers here saying stuff works perfectly, but its that inconsistency that sucks. Sometimes it'll one-shot a really difficult voice command or obscure song search. And then other times (many times..) I have to yell at it three times to set a timer, at which point I sigh, realize doing it manually would've been faster, and set the timer manually.
In a way its made me realize LLMs and voice assistants aren't that good, it's just that even tech people have incredibly low standards. Especially the people working in AI.
The problem is natural language is a horrendously bad human-computer interface. Even if they're running nondeterministic software, computers are very precise machines. You wouldn't talk to your lathe or milling machine and expect good things to happen. So why would you have that expectation of a computer? It's ridiculous sci-fi fantasy nonsense.
It's hilarious, when you boil away all the froth and hype, that we've collectively decided that "talk to computer" is somehow worth an entire generation of venture capital and maybe even the whole stock market. It's a dumb idea to begin with. A mouse and keyboard are better.
Vivaldi is the only Chromium browser that actually breaks sites that work on Chromium(based) browsers itself. Mostly stuff like government ID login. A few European logins don't work, and haven't for years (!) with Vivaldi not giving a crap despite ample reports. Extra ironic since Vivaldi is touted as an EU alternative to US tech.
I really doubt that's as general of an occurrence as you make it up to be. There's a particular government process I can only do on Edge (no other browser works, chromium or not). For a certain login process in a different branch of government I can use Vivaldi or Firefox, but not Edge. I don't think you can single out a browser for this kind of thing.
I have issues with sites on Vivaldi but it's never due to Vivaldi itself. It always ends up being that case that either uBlock Origin or Vivaldi's own built-in ad/privacy blocker ended up blocking some javascript library that the site needs.
ProTip: Try to do your thing in Guest Mode. It will almost certainly work there.
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