> Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
edit: formatting
Cyberspace depends on physical reality and everything that comes from that. Resource constraints, economics, politics, arms races, warfare, etc.
The surplus binges of the 90s do not make for an accurate sample of human and politics nature.
That is to say the Declaration is pure cringe. The idea that cyberspace could become sovereign unto itself is patently absurd: The user's ass belongs to whichever country they inhabit.
In fact international waters if you're not flagged and registered to a specific country, then it's open season for anyone to board and seize you.
Problems: Solar flare & radiation resistance. Heat dissipation. Energy (more effective solar panels, for things as close to sun as we).
Partially solved - getting to orbit. And as much as we hate musk, SpaceX might solve it once Starships start flying commercially.
If we would separate energy part out and beam it somehow, we could sit in a body's shadow in some Lagrange point equivalent for a given body system and greatly reduce heat dissipation requirements and suspectibility to solar flares.
Come on, pull the other one, surely it can’t be that something so useful can be used as a tool for Mafia style politics.
I figured Mistral was a nice idea and liked because it was a European competitor more than because it competes. I'll be happy to be wrong if it has improved
I think this post is useful if you are, say, a European that wants to find a nearby tech company to work for or are curious where the tech "scene" is at in Europe
Show me a European iPhone, European Microsoft, European Nvidia, etc. Hell, I’ll take a European one man company that can reach all 27 markets.
Europe needs a single market for capital and the removal of legal barriers to extend across the continent, foremost for the little guy. Von der Failen can only add _more_ regulation. Someone wake me when they actually make something easier.
Legally speaking, a one person company can address the whole EEA market. From a marketing/sales standpoint yeah, sure, it's probably hard to address culturally different markets like Portugal, Poland and Sweden.
But it does not have much to do with regulations, especially not ones decided at the EU level.
I'm all for better integration but diverse cultures are here to stay....
Sample size of one, but done business in Italy, Spain, Belgium, France, Switzerland and Germany: main issues were not regulation related...
It was a travesty that the UK government let it be sold, admittedly.
You also seem to somehow justify spending 25k on an endeavor you don’t know will succeed upfront, when every other country on the planet allows you to open one with orders of magnitude smaller amounts of capital.
You can open a UK LTD in a few days with 12GBP. Similar in DK/NL/CZ… the list goes on.
I’ve learned firsthand that germans will bend over backwards to justify this insanity.
As for leaders, von der Leyen might not be the best but still lightyears better than the orange pedo in the wh.
> Europe needs a single market for capital and the removal of legal barriers to extend across the continent, foremost for the little guy.
?!?
You can trivially sell your software inside the EU. As for software that I use almost daily: OsmAnd. LanguageTool, which is spell-checking this message, is made in Germany. IntelliJ products are made in Czechia, and I'm using them right now.
We just lack the regulatory freedom and deep financial markets, access to credit, etc.
The "avoid dependence on the US" movement only really started picking up steam with Trump's accelerating dementia in his second term.
The iPhone, Microsoft, and nVidia all took multiple decades to develop into the behemoths they are today. Famously, the first iPhone was actually expensive trash: no apps, no 3G, couldn't even cut and paste text. It wasn't until the 3G model and the App Store that it became a true success.
Also famously, while the tech elitists complained about all of its shortcomings, the broader consumer market fully embraced it and it single-handedly drove an entirely new generation of consumer electronics.
My point, which you seem to have overlooked, is that parent poster complaining that a "european iphone" doesn't exist is not realistic, considering how it went for Apple.
Unfortunately, most Eastern Bloc countries are led into the false belief that the EU is encroaching on their ways of life and "making them eat ze bugs", and the Brussels elite is more concerned with using their slim remaining political capital to push restrictions on internet freedoms rather than federalisation.
In Europe, valuation is still largely tied to tangible assets and steady EBITDA. This creates a massive 'Patient Capital' gap. While US investors have evolved to price the long-term unit economics of digital scaling, where high initial burn is the cost of building a global moat, European private equity remains culturally risk-averse. They prefer the predictable, incremental returns of a specialized factory over the 'winner-takes-most' volatility of digital platforms. By prioritizing collateral over code, our domestic capital is effectively subsidizing the past rather than financing the future. That's our problem.
Meanwhile, tech companies are continuing to bail into the US the moment they reach significant revenue due to crushing tax and labour costs (see e.g. Oura announcing their departure from Finland yesterday)
Unfortunately the EU and many local governments have chosen to double down on crippling socialism (presumedly to "own Trump") so this continue at an accelerating pace.
Where in the EU is a software engineer paid SV FAANG rates?
> Oura announcing their departure from Finland yesterday
The article I read said they were moving their HQ domicile to Delaware in preparation for a US stock market listing. A bit like US companies do. It said firmly that roughly half of its staff were already in the US, half in Finland, and that wasn't going to change.
Maybe Europe shouldn’t copy the nationalism, but governments should copy some of the reasons the breeding grounds in the US and China exist. Think about how they got that far, and especially how China caught up so fast.
1. I'm not sure China caught up so quickly due to any lack of nationalism.
2. There's an allure to working with an EU business because it's in the EU because they're less likely to jerk you around. You have no idea how many times I get told their in nothing they can do, then have to drop the 'I live in the EU and this is illegal' card, and magically the problem is resolved by the next email.
That depends who you are, and what you are doing. If you have information stored such that having it in US infrastructure is a national security risk, then you might think differently.
>but governments should copy some of the reasons the breeding grounds in the US and China exist.
Which reasons should they copy? Massive government subsidies? Large grants masquerading as defence contracts? Threatening foreign governments to force market access with taxation lower than the native businesses? Are you saying European governments should favour European companies just because they are European?
The US and China pulling all this shit is exactly why the whole European alternatives thing is trending. Before Trump started threatening everyone, we had no problem using US tech.
The traction which is proverbial "wind in the sails" for further development must come from somewhere. A new promotional channel might help with it.
Also I don't think it's any kind on nationalism. Just pragmatism for the very unstable times.
And the whole point here is a more diverse alternative to the extreme dependency on the US tech companies
However, it is going to require public funds to achieve. A public/private partnership scenario is very likely at least the near to mid term future for European tech development. And the world can only stand to benefit.
Politically, nationalism is absolutely very bad and it's a shame the world is headed in this direction. This global distrust only serves chaos agents and accelerates us into another World War (if we aren't already in the early stages of one). I had hope that people would prefer to come together but it's unfortunately too risky with US politics.
Isn't that largely nationalism and pressuring companies to use (initially) mediocre local tech solutions though? Once the market is there, quality catches up rapidly.
Nationalism, but armed with actual law enforcement and economical support instead of good intentions and lip service.
And what are these other reasons?
China is an example, countries that had become technology independent through sanctions is another
You can’t foster excellence if you don’t reward it monetarily (enough).
No unified capital markets, no high reward as an investor.
As an employer/employee takes a year to fire people even when they don’t show up, ergo the incentive is to coast.
As a founder you’re buried in bureaucracy and taxes, so the incentive is to stay an employee.
It’s a trifecta of shit.
In what country? I just checked, in France it's 15 days. The employer can ask to be paid the notice period, and the employee won't get unemployment benefits.
That is not true in the UK. In the first two years of service you can fire someone without a reason so long as you were not being deliberately discriminatory. Burden of proof on the employee for this
After that you just have to go through a fair process. Your decision is not in question, just whether you followed a fair process. I have worked in a place that routinely fired people for being 1 minute late on three occasions. Late once, verbal warning, late twice, written warning, late three times fired.
> As a founder you’re buried in bureaucracy and taxes, so the incentive is to stay an employee.
As a sole trader in the UK you can set up instantly. You have 3 months to let the tax authority know what you did, but no real threat if you leave it a bit longer. Setting up a corporate entity takes 10 minutes online. You can have that done by your accountant and the annual accounts done for maybe £300. No need for an audit until you have cross 2 out of three of these thresholds
Annual turnover of no more than £15 million
Gross assets of no more than £7.5 million
Average number of employees of no more than 50
Immediately you get a significant tax advantage over employees.
Easy access to capital is harder, unless you went to high-end private school that is. Development capital is not that hard to get, but seed funding is harder.
There is not a single European LLM on the same level as US or Chinese models. France's Mistral reached 400M in revenue, but I believe it could have been more relevant if the EU had not slowed everything down with overregulation.
China's LLM development relative to resources spent is impressive, but it also happened to be predicated on Chinese miners buying into the previous pyramid scheme and having a lot of GPUs on hand already. I don't think the lack of European commitment to the previous pyramid scheme putting it a bit behind in that regard indicates any kind of grand regional failure, so much as an event of pure circumstance that probably has little lasting meaning 5 or 10 years from now.
Your comment is also blind to the absurd amount of research and projects which are born here but later move to look for funding.
So the EU is not irrelevant, on the contrary, we’re just mourning the fall of the US and transitioning to an independent future. Who would’ve though, we’d end up needing to build a copy of everything…
These two things are not alike. At all.
Listen to Rubio's speech again.
The EU is in a managed decline, and no number of migrants will change that.
But the lack of risk capital and investor brainpower has been a huge problem.