Because it's easy when you don't let facts block you. Spread lie number 1 on Monday morning, lie number 2 in the afternoon, lie number 3 the next day, and do that for years and decades.
Whenever someone spends the time, and it takes a long time, to correct you, laugh, mock them, spew a few more lies.
And it's easy to do when the rich, the owner class side with you, because they buy newspapers, websites, ads, which you can't do if you lean left because acquiring money at all cost is not a priority of left wing people.
> Meanwhile a US citizen was jailed for a meme quoting Trump after Kirk death.
And that was wrong, too. Also newsworthy because it is so unusual.
> First link
I think it's probably legal under US jurisprudence, but fine, you can have that one. How about the guy who got raided for calling Robert Habeck a "professional moron"? Or the 170 other people raided in Germany for their online speech?
In conclusion from the `What you realistically can't avoid` section is that running entirely on non american services will never happen.
Unless some entity pours hundreds of billions (trillions?) of euros into solving this over multiple decades there will be no way to replace google ads and sign in with google/apple. The AI part seems to be the easiest thing to solve in the list, that says something.
Seems to me like it's mainly regulation. The thing that makes people in China, or Russia, for example, not use Google - isn't that Yandex / Baidu got tons of investments. It is that people can't easily access Google. If the EU decides to pull the switch (or if the US decides to do so), we have enough competence people here to build a search engine.
That's where democratic governments at a disadvantage. Europe is also more integrated into US market. For example, killing access to Google ads ecosystem will make 100s of thousands or even millions of people unemployed. Apple and Google have multiple offices in Europe. A divorce with US will again make a huge amount of people lose their very high paying jobs. Unlike China and Russia those people can vote.
Moreover, in democracies companies from other countries usually get more say and have more lobbying power. Open market system gives more decision powers to global players. Whereas in China or Russia, if you are not serving the goals of the dictatorial rule, you get ousted permanently without a fear of elections.
I think those things are very hard to predict. Yes, many Europeans will stop working for American companies and lose their very high paying jobs. On the other hand, the EU as a whole will stop sending billions of euros to the American economy, and at least some of this money will be invested in creating local alternatives; Those who worked for American companies will probably find their place in these alternatives.
Everything you wrote about the open market system is true, except it seems like that system have died over the past year. Europeans understand now that the US isn't a friend.
My worry there isn't (just) Europeans who directly work for American companies but Europeans who work in the _markets_ that US companies created.
For example almost all digital marketing agencies are almost pure resellers of big tech products: ads on Facebook, Google or Microsoft networks. Similarly majority backend solutions are delivered over 3 big cloud providers' specialized products like AWS Lambda or GCP BigQuery. The definition of Mobile Software developer is someone who writes software for Google or Apple platforms. The entire fields will disappear overnight.
Google was freely available in Russia up until 2022 and Yandex still had a larger market share. It really was a solid competitor to Google, much better than anything the EU ever had.
While it's true Europe might not be producing the next Apple or Google, there are lots of alternatives, like national academic login systems, logging into third parties with bank credentials or government IDs... Solutions that depend less on one commercial company capturing the market, that are in place on a national level and work well. It's a different landscape. Factors like current day political turmoil make people much less trusting of "American" solutions. It remains to be seen if this goes beyond sentiment into some actual pan-European solutions that (claim to) safeguard privacy and data.
What about non EU users? Americans don't second guess themselves when they slap google/apple/meta sign in only. They know everyone in the world will never pause when they see their logo on the buttons. To reach this scale of worldwide adoption for a European service requires a massive amount of investment.
What's even the entry point? Google and Apple make the devices that everyone uses. Even if you build a service like you suggested, how do you ensure that everyone is using it?
> They know everyone in the world will never pause when they see their logo on the buttons.
As in, that they won't run away when they see them or that they will all happily use them? If you mean the latter, then it's just false.
Also, why do you assume that such product would need to be used worldwide all of a sudden? Having something for the local market would be sufficient to call it a success in this instance. There's an ICC judge who could tell you a thing or two about having a whole digital life on the hook of services from one country, so reducing this dependency is a clear benefit.
> Also, why do you assume that such product would need to be used worldwide all of a sudden
Because I'm talking about not running on any American services. Which Americans can do and do all the time. I don't see how we can reach a point where we can one day not include google/apple sign in and not lose a massive number of potential users. Sure it's possible that one day we'll see a "Sign in with EU login" but below it they're always be sign in with google/apple, for a very long time.
That post mostly concerned infrastructure, you won't likely run the same managed DB with 2 different providers, for example, but you can well offer sign-in with EU/non-EU options, and as long as the first one is viable, I'd say that would already be a win in terms of OP's goals.
Yeah, they sell you that with the devices. You would need to crack iOS/Android dominance first before you could realistically consider NOT assuming someone has at least one or the other account.
Agreed mate, it took absolute trillions of Euros for "Sign in with VK" to become a common option in Russia. No clue how they did it while also waging wars.
"Sign in with LINE" in Japan? Quintillions of Yen were spent.
It's possible that will get ""solved"" overnight when some critical service gets cut off or banned in one direction or the other for political reasons.
I could say that you cannot run entirely on US technology, because electronics comes from China. Does that mean that we should just strive to move everything to China, so that we only depend on them?
This question cannot be asked in good faith on a user board. It requires an 800 pages book on politics, history, philosophy, economics to be properly answerered and it would barely scratch the surface.
You might as well ask similar questions about most basic laws and concepts behind how western societies work.
We should each ask ourselves such questions and review our view on them from time to time during our life because they're important, but mostly by doing our own research and self study. But asking point-blank strangers such a vague question is putting an unfair burden on them.
There's maybe a few hundred people worldwide who could casually drop a proper answer to your question while casually browsing hn.
I believe it'd be more fair to start answering your own question to show how far you are in your intellectual journey on that topic.
My own answer is this. We have created a system of exploitation where we extract value from people's labor and transfer it to an oligarchicy that is slowly increasing in power. Governments are captured by that ruling class and are unwilling to do anything that threatens them. In addition, they are slowly reducing the rights and social mobility of the middle and lower class in order to expand the power and capital of the oligarchy.
Any money that is possessed by the working classes is then taxed in the form of increased living expenses or directly by the government until they can barely afford the necessities that allow them to continue working. Once they are no longer able to do so, they are discarded and allowed to die of preventable illness, starvation, drug use or exposure.
It's also trivially true that an AI has at least once been able to write a working hello world.
When someone claims that AI can't generate working code I assume that it means consistently generating working code. We're talking about a tool. It has to work more often than not and on codebases that we tend to work with, i.e legacy code.
Personally I don't claim that because I'm using everyday to generate working code.
I spend between 1 and 2h a day on hn and I barely know what openclaw is. I've seen it mentioned once or twice and checked their website but that's all.
If one lets AI FOMO since the release of chatgpt drive them they'd be glued to their screen 24/7.
OAI wants to keep the hype train going. That is all. OpenClaw is just a project that attracted the interests of people messing about with LLMs. Which as a proportion of economically active people is.... tiny.
They brought him (Pete) over as he seems to have some way of thinking about LLMs in the form of a product. Will he have repeatable success on a large scale? Who knows. I doubt it personally.
Copilot is notoriously bad. Have you tried (paid plans) codex, Claude or even Gemini on your legacy project? That's the bare minimum before debating the usefulness of AI tools.
"notoriously bad" is news to me. I find no indication from online sources that would warrant the label "notoriously bad".
https://arxiv.org/html/2409.19922v1#S6 from 2024 concludes it has the highest success rate in easy and medium coding problems (with no clear winner for hard) and that it produces "slightly better runtime performance overall".
> Have you tried (paid plans) codex, Claude or even Gemini on your legacy project?
This is usually the part of the pitch where you tell me why I should even bother especially as one would require me to fork up cash upfront. Why will they succeed where Copilot has failed? I'm not asking anyone to do my homework for me on a legacy codebase that, in this conversation, only I can access---that's outright unfair. I'm just asking for a heuristic, a sign, that the grass might indeed be greener on that side. How could they (probably) improve my life? And no, "so that you pass the bare minimum to debate the usefulness of AI tools" is not the reason because, frankly, the less of these discussions I have, the better.
I'm saying this to help you. Whether you give it a shot makes no difference to me. This topic is being discussed endlessly everyday on all major platforms and for the past year or so the consensus is strongly against using copilot.
If you want to see if your project and your work can benefit from AI you must use codex, Claude code or Gemini (which wasn't a contender until recently).
> This topic is being discussed endlessly everyday on all major platforms and for the past year or so the consensus is strongly against using copilot.
So it would be easy to link me to something that shows this consensus, right? It would help me see what the "consensus" has to say about the known limitations of Copilot too. It would help me see the "why" that you seem allergic to even hint at.
Look, I'm trying to not be close-minded about LLMs hence why I'm taking time out of my Sunday to see what I might be missing. Hence my comment that I don't want to invest time/money in yet-another-LLM just for the "privilege" of debating the merits of LLMs in software engineering. If I'm to invest time/money in another coding LLM, I need a signal, a reason, to why it might be better than Copilot for helping me do my job. Either tell me where Copilot is lacking or where your "contenders" have the upper-hand. Why is it a "must" to use Codex/Claude/Gemini other than trustmebro?
Allowing politics on HN doesn't mean discussing politics in every thread. If it's a story about someone who improved performance of their system by using Rust then sure there's no need to bring anything political. But threads about Nvidia, Tesla, encryption, internet blackouts, social media, startups investments, etc, all warrants political discourse.
I wish that were true, but in my experience so far, it isn’t.
Not only does politics and general stories crowd out everything else over time on other sites, there are HN submitters who seem to be trying to accelerate this.
During the war, when HN was getting Israel-Palestine stories constantly, I started looking at the submission history of some of the submitters, and some of them were just pushing these types of stories every day for months and months.
So yes, I think allowing politics will eventually mean being dominated by politics and general interest.
Globalizing the intifada means pushing an agenda everywhere, including on HN, on posts where it is relevant and on posts where some obscure or conspiratorial connection can be made.
If HN is going to allow accusations to be slung against groups of people it has to allow others to respond, and that sets off endless debate amongst people who will not be changing their minds on the matter but will repeat the same argument on the next post.
Every Israel Palestine story was like that. Just hundreds of back & forth exchanges of fire that could be copy pasted from the last story, along with copious complaints that HN was censoring them even though the story was on the front page. Just a complete waste of time, and very dishonest & unserious people.
Whenever someone spends the time, and it takes a long time, to correct you, laugh, mock them, spew a few more lies.
And it's easy to do when the rich, the owner class side with you, because they buy newspapers, websites, ads, which you can't do if you lean left because acquiring money at all cost is not a priority of left wing people.
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