Collapse or no collapse I just hope that somebody sets up a HN equivalent in Europe. Discussing technology in a meaningful and fun way becomes impossible when moral values diverge beyond recognition and this is now becoming our reality.
It can't be the UK or France because of their laws around platforms and while Wikimedia has picked Germany the EU as a whole is pretty vulnerable to anticompetitive lobbying for more regulations from the giants that can afford any regulatory barriers.
> Relative number of technology unicorns headquartered in Europe would be a good start.
You seem a bit confused. "Unicorns" are characterized not by technology but by coming up with novel business plans that can disrupt incumbents. The likes of Google and Apple are tech companies, but Uber, NetFlix, AirBnB, etc have tech as a secondary support role to what actually drives the unicorn status.
More nuanced, what characterizes a unicorn isn't even a successful business plan. Being able to fool a fat wallets investor to dump cash on your idea is the key aspect that makes and breaks a unicorn, and tech is an afterthought.
> Or number of bleeding edge tech industries you'd say "Europe" is leading (e.g. space, military, nuclear, AI, etc)
France is the world's second largest arms exporter in the world, ahead of Russia.
In the top 10 list of world's arms exporters, 5 countries are EU members.
Not bad, for a region that has offloaded it's arms industry to the US.
Also, does the US have anything that comes close to ASML? Perhaps a TikTok clone or an app to rent apartments counts more as tech than it, perhaps?
Conflating bureaucratic red tape with regulations that actually protect citizens is the deceitful, immoral strategy, by people who are basically... evil.
Simplifying bureaucratic rules can be beneficial and can take countless forms (digitizing trivial manual work, removing duplication, applying materiality thresholds etc. etc.) The result is clearly a win-win for all.
Removing protective regulations is instead a zero sum game. Each fradulent bank behavior not persecuted is siphoning wealth from their clients. Each further exploitation of personal data collection is enriching the surveillance capitalists at the expense of the user-product (and ultimately our very democracies).
Society and politics has a lot of gray areas. This is not one of them.
Libreoffice features prominently in the "eurostack" initiative/proposal that was launched today. If there will be ever mainstream self-sovereign compute, it will almost certainly include this incredible project.
The nag I will always repeat: libreoffice should have made much bigger, much sooner, strides to integrate the Python ecosystem in deep ways (striking on its own and ignoring Microsoft's path).
Had it done so, it would now undisputably own the desktop productivity future, with local LLM integration just the trendy example.
Visualization seems to have stagnated in the AI craze era. Lots of androids touching holographic screens and what not, as metaphors for the almighty "AGI" coming any day now, but cant recall a major new development in the last five years?
One area that might be "pregnant" for some new approaches is the visualization of large datasets, eg large graphs. Extracting useful (and objective) information instead of ovewhelming with the sheer number of data points. That is indeed the art of visualisation.
You are probably right. I would not discount the importance of many open source tools for making viz more widely available (and far more powerful than excel graphs) but its indeed tooling, not conceptual and in any case already available for more than a decade. Stagnation indeed.
Hard to know how significant this is because its impossible to know what the political class (and many others) mean by "AI" (and thus its potential risks). This is not new, similar charades a few years ago around "blockchain" etc.
But ignoring the signaling going on on various sides would be a mistake. "AI" is for all practical purposes a synonym for algorithmic decision making, with potential direct implication on peoples lifes. Without accountability, transparency, recourse etc the unchecked expansion of "AI" in various use cases represents a significant regression for historically established rights. In this respect the direction of travel is clear: The US is dismantling the CFPB, even more deregulation (if that is at all possible) is coming, big tech will be trusted to continue "self-regulating" etc.
The interesting part is the UK stance. Somewhere in between the US and the EU in terms of citizen / consumer protections, but despite brexit probably closer to the latter, this siding with dog-eats-dog deregulation might signal an anxiety not to be left behind.
Remarkable story and a glimpse at how nasty vested interests can become as the world starts to second guess the sustainability of an entire century's worth of "growth" at all costs.
Its not black and white, without pesticides we'll probably all perish from malnutrition within a year or two, but the pressure to contain the collateral damage to environment and people will not go away.
> without pesticides we'll probably all perish from malnutrition within a year or two
I'm unsure if that is true or not. Certainly it would reduce yields initially but some high yield farming in the US has already moved away from pesticides. It seems that we could probably engineer out of pesticide use if we wanted to by combination of more gmo crops and changing the crops grown somewhat.
Robotics might hold promise for ditching pesticides too. There's already laser weed killing machines. Could we target specific insects with smaller robots that can move under and between plants?
There's also just trying to use nature to help use. Beneficial fungus can be fostered to out compete harmful ones. Chickens can be unleashed in the fields at the right times to reduce the insect load. Maybe we could genetically modify sterile predator insects to hunt down the pests and then die off since they can't reproduce themselves.
Honestly this is being tried but we can't even classify emerging new pests (for lack of science funding and staffing). Many engineers have a keyboard view of how the agriculture industry works and only when they are boots on ground do they realize the actual problems faced by farmers. This is not an attack on engineers, but for every person with a weed laser idea, there's very few willing to implement it.
In the longer term various alternatives are conceivable if people put their minds to it. Politically, economically, technically this is very much like the energy transition: There is immense current dependency that cant be just switched off (and vested interests will resist for as long as possible, using every possible means), but there is sequence of low hanging fruit which in time can be expanded. The trick imho is to always apply the highest amount of pressure that wont burst the kettle.
On mastodon I noticed an interesting approach: to warn in a visible manner that a topic is "sensitive". Not sure if that triggers less aggressive behavior, maybe its even the opposite? But just as there are instinctive red dots that grab our attention there might be digital blue dots to calm us down.
Most science papers are only read by a tiny circle of experts, maybe a dozen or so. The process still works out. The critical challenge is to have some quality human readership (instead of the AI bot brigade and random zero second clicks).
Theoretically the internet would have enabled the long tail, making tiny domain focused niches viable. In practice discovery is the most gamed algorithm in existence. Unless you have the resources and inclination to spend quality time towards useless "SEO" nobody knows you are alive.
Software is a cultural artifact. It reflects the society and economy that produces it, just as much as music, literature, urban design, or cuisine.
So you cannot "destroy" software. But you can have fast food versus slow food, you can have walkable cities or cars-only cities, you can have literate or illiterate society etc. Different cultures imply and create different lifestyles, initially subjective choices, but ultimately objectively different quality of life.
The author argues for a different software culture. For this to happen you need to create a viable "sub-culture" first, one that thrives because it acrues advantage to its practitioners. Accretion of further followers is then rapid.
Agreed with most part about cultural artifact, but some food is scientifically proven unhealthy, and there are unsafe way to create software. So maybe there are statically measurable way to create better software instead of just cave in to the trend.
There is a certain amount of "convergence" of good practices thats happening despite the exhausting trend following. E.g. people happily(?) wrote c++ code for decades but today there is strong pressure from the success of ecosystems like rust and python. Open source accelerates that competitive evolution as it improves transparency and lowers the threshold for adoption.
