I've joined some large EU efforts in the past, and it's always like this. Lots of different parties involved focused on producing tons of absurd documents, and nothing else. Some have good intentions, but it doesn't matter. There's a great thread on X now discussing the same topic:
"25 years ago each major US company had a German and/or French equivalent. Today equivalents of US tech giants are in China and Europe is on its way to become an open-air museum. What happened?"https://x.com/MichaelAArouet/status/1827588190342979934
Some of the top replies:
"Bureaucracy, Regulation, Aversion to Innovation, Green myth of degrowth etc happened"
[...] Europe’s challenges are significant, but not insurmountable. To regain its edge, Europe will need to foster a more dynamic business environment, streamline regulations, and encourage risk-taking in its startup culture. Without these changes, Europe may continue to fall behind, watching as the U.S. and China shape the future of technology.
The EU has a lot of talent, but it lacks good leadership and good priorities.
In a finite resources world, with unsustainable levels of pollution and soon of climate change, I don’t understand why much more of EU regulation and enforcement resources are not spent towards mandatory hardware re-use. All computer vendors know 90% of IT users never even scratch the surface of computational power and functionalities.
As for Gaia-X itself, governments are always on the hunt for programs to justify their spending of tax and debt money. Favorable outcome is the spending itself as a mean to subsidize this and that group.
> I don’t understand why much more of EU regulation and enforcement resources are not spent towards mandatory hardware re-use
Beliefs like these are common in Europe and I absolutely despise them. Inefficiencies in IT exist for boring reasons like requirements that are way too complex or that keep changing, internal politics, and inexperience. If you add more regulations that don't move the needle you just get more politics, more middle men that seek to profit from the regulatory capture (advisors, consultants, resellers), and you distract industry from focusing on those things that matter most.
Complexity is the enemy of progress. IT systems fail when they attempt to codify contradictory bureaucratic processes that make no sense. The solution is to simplify. Businesses that refuse to simplify get eaten by hungry startups, and deservedly so. What do you think will happen to a continent that refuses to simplify?
You are confounding the environment we are part of and the so called “free market”. Also interests of titans of the industry, the “free market”, and general interest of the population. Mixups like these are common in developing countries.
> In a finite resources world, with unsustainable levels of pollution and soon of climate change, I don’t understand why much more of EU regulation and enforcement resources are not spent towards mandatory hardware re-use. All computer vendors know 90% of IT users never even scratch the surface of computational power and functionalities.
well, newer hardware is more efficient than older hardware, but the cost and e-waste resulting from replacing working but older hardware with new stuff is also non-zero.
desktop usage sure, it makes sense to keep it a good long time. in datacenter, for many situations the cost is not worthwhile because DDR5 is substantially more expensive for a given tier of memory, pcie5 is way more expensive to implement, etc. the newer platforms are really also higher-cost ones, due to the complete collapse of moore's law and hitting the limits of physics in link rates etc. On the other hand power does matter and datacenters are highly power-constrained etc.
it's completely application-specific, maybe if you do something that benefits from AVX-512 it's super worth it to upgrade, but for a lot of people it isn't, so it isn't something you can make a blanket regulation on when is the Right Time to upgrade.
MLID has good guests on sometimes and this is an interesting one. Just before this he's talking about the power issues ("they just can't get power into the datacenters quickly enough to keep up with needs"), and he balances this concern against the massive price factor confounding the newer DDR5 stuff.
This engineer is a good reality check on a number of sacred cows with the AMD fanbase too - for example he is excruciatingly negative on AMD's Platform Vendor Lock. He was asked if the AI market dumped if they could scoop up any cheap gear and the answer is no - they don't use GPUs currently, and they wouldn't even be able to benefit from (eg) epyc cpus being dumped because of the platform lock. They are basically e-waste (by design) once they hit the market unless the provenance is known, and even then it destroys the market efficiency (by design) since now you have separate market for Dell Epyc, Lenovo Epyc, HPE Epyc, etc. Once the value drops, surplus places won't even bother parting them out and basically the channel for that stuff dries up and they become actual e-waste.
And remember, this affects Ryzen processors now too, and platform lock is becoming much more common now as AMD makes the deals with OEM providers to get them into work desktops etc. In 5-10 years there probably won't be too much of a secondhand market left, largely because of AMD... and there's really not much that can be done since this is all hardware-locked/physically fused, short of just pushing a firmware which disables the whole thing.
He also is not mincing any words about the Sinkclose/Ryzenfall exploits where an attacker can escalate from a VM guest to jailbreak/control of the PSP and BIOS persistence. Obviously that's a huge, huge issue for datacenter operators and it's bullshit that AMD just basically decided not to patch it for older chips. The amount of handwaving and corporate defense the AMD fan club runs is silly, of course those are major issues and need to be patched ASAP.
I remember the "root password lets you do root things, where's the exploit" and other insane cope/handwaving from HUB and GN and other tech media and social media. Shockingly, the people who actually own the servers aren't as keen on a VM guest being allowed to `sudo jailbreak psp`. And AMD just wanted to leave that unpatched on a huge number of chips, even though they had a working fix for that uarch they were already deploying!
It's unfortunately the same level of security focus that AMD has given to other exploits like the cache ways vulnerability or the PREFETCH+cache eviction vulnerability ("worse than meltdown", discovered by one of the researchers who discovered meltdown), which AMD simply left unpatched and insecure, and (very) quietly told people to enable KPTI if they cared. "Insecure by default" corporate mindset.
OP is EU has become an open air museum and all the good companies are now either American or Chinese.
> Boeing makes the comparison easy for Airbus.
What else to compare against this claim ?
Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale industry. It is not just aerospace, even auto is still über competitive, European manufactures are on par or perhaps better than anything Ford and GM have to offer. I am sure Europeans can come with good examples for every bad one.
The point it is easy to paint a narrative however reality is lot more complex and doesn't match with sweeping generalization .
Tech companies are getting insanely large valuations (I work in tech, and I think they're absurd). Europe doesn't have many large public tech companies, therefore Europe looks bad in terms of the "industries of the future"
Plus a bunch of angry USians really irritated by the anti-trust stuff the EU has been doing (DMA etc).
It's not even all tech either. Europe has some big players in silicon or biotech for example. It does however lack giants that introduced major disruptions in the way things are done, like cloud services, social networks, gig economy etc.
> Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale industry
First of all this is an empty statement that reeks of rhetoric. You don’t have the full grasp of the picture to quantify if a company is miles ahead of the competition. Nobody does. Ahead in terms of what? Even if we want to compare companies in more specific aspects (for the sake of comparison) — be it revenue, vision, innovation, supply chain, or efficiency — Airbus is not ahead of the pack (which includes the likes of Lockheed Martin, GE Aerospace, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Rolls Royce).
Airbus is half of the commercial airline market duopoly with Boeing. Customers really have no other choices. Airbus benefits when Boeing drops the ball. Simple as that.
Passenger safety for starters, passing safety audits, units shipped or sold, not having a 60 year old airframe to iterate its product with [1].
> Airbus benefits when Boeing drops the ball.
It also has to build airplanes of quality, price and on time that can fly economically for its customers. Duopoly doesn’t mean it has to do nothing.
[1] MCAS was needed after all because Boeing decided to stick a big new engine on a low sitting 1960s 737 airframe, instead of developing a new airframe.
> Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale industry
So now you don’t claim Airbus is “miles ahead” of the best that US and China can offer, moving the goal post from that very generic statement to just comparing A32X with B737MAX?
So why not comparing 787 vs. A350, or C130 vs. A400, or Sikorsky vs Airbus helicopters? They’re comparable products that Airbus offer vs the competition. Did you know that 787 has got 1,900 sales and 1.300 deliveries, whereas A350 has 1,300 sales and 650 deliveries in the same time frame?
> It also has to build airplanes of quality, price and on time that can fly economically for its customers.
Did I say it doesn’t? Still, customers don’t have a choice. Boeing has been doing badly, yet the backlog of 737MAX is still more than 4.700 units and growing. No meaningful cancellation despite its problems.
Here is what happened: fear. Fear of patriotism getting us a second Hitler. Fear of war.
This is IMO the root cause of why most public services are going down the drain in most Western Europe: people are there to work for themselves, not for their country. And the higher people are, the worst it is. Keep the status quo, embezzle if you can and shut your eyes to not see we're in economic and cultural wars against the rest of the world.
Reminds me of a lot of the initiatives coming out of big companies. The grander the vision, the more vague they are, the more money and time they hoover up as people try to rephrase the initial vague aims in different ways.
And, bless they even have an architecture document which does nothing to bring this blurry vision into focus.
As I get older and a little lazier, sometimes I think I might want to find a way to get a completely pointless job that gives me a paycheck where all I have to do is write documents that nobody ever reads.
Then I look at something like this Gaia-X "milestones" list and think "Meh, this is probably not the job for me..."
I was involved in an EU funded software research project related to air quality [1] around ~2008. The bureaucracy was very real, we had to produce a boatload of paperwork (including a literal, on paper, printout of the source code, for some reason?). But aside from the weird paperwork overhead, we were fairly free in how we approached the project, and we got a lot of shit done. This was software R&D in the true sense. I don't know what happened to the project after I left, but I suspect the universities involved benefited from the research and some of it was probably spun off.
That is to say: it's not all just paperwork and paychecks, it can be greatly rewarding work.
[1] Strangely enough I was just talking about another aspect of air quality in another HN thread. Never noticed this was a theme in my life before.
Any suggestions on how to land such a role? I've had the last 48 hours off work, which I think is the longest stretch in the last month, but I'll be working this evening, and tomorrow, and tomorrow evening, and Tuesday, and Tuesday evening, and...
Look for companies that are funded as part of long, multi-year projects. I have been funded by institutions like the NSF, NIH, and a bunch of smaller philanthropic foundations. After leaving SaaS-world, I just went to LinkedIn and looked for a non-profit doing work I can stand behind.
The thing that makes it so chill is that we work on very long time scales, based on the length of whatever NIH (or similar) grant we're on. If you're used to building things in the private sector, the comparison I make is that what took us 3 months at my previous YC startup would take us 3 years at the non-profit where I work now. A lot of that is because there are many moving pieces to coordinate, and because you have to be careful when dealing with sensitive data and research ethics. Blah blah blah, at least part of it is also because the breakneck pace of VC-funded software hasn't got its fingers into this pie, at least not yet.
Downside: pay cut. I make $18k less than I did 4 years ago, despite having gotten promoted in this new spot. Also, it can be frustrating trying to actually produce software at a company with no culture for it. You find out that software delivery practices are something people have to learn, and at places that aren't software-oriented, they don't know about them.
What's to stop an American cloud hyperscaler from creating a "properly patriated" subsidiary that it simply licenses the tech to? Wouldn't that side step the "sovereign" protectionism?
An American company would run circles around this mess.
Google is doing this. German and French companies are building a datacenter to GCP standards, will license the code and run essentially whitelabel GCP under full jurisdiction of the EU company. Google can only push updates with their approval and has no visibility into the operations.
They get documentation and playbooks (which are pretty good), source code access, and of course direct channel to the "mothership" engineers for support.
I'm sure early days will be painful but there is no reason for this not to work.
Maybe you are misunderstanding the gravity of this problem. Thanks to US Cloud Act and the Patriot Act and similar acts, there is no way any US citizen or any US company may EVER be involved in such projects. It's completely legal for the US to rely on extraterritorial jurisdiction leveraging any US companies and US citizens they have access to.
But on the other hand, everyone else on out there will want to avoid that, so the only way to achieve that is to avoid involving any US citizens or companies for such sovereign projects.
Google will not be able to solve it via subsidiaries, and no nice promises from Amazon, MS etc. will ever change it.
Data sovereignity means all this.
This will probably escalate a lot more, it might involve the financial infrastructure used (SWIFT) or even currency used in the process.
This was a Microsoft 365 cloud hosted and operated by Deutsche Telekom in Germany. It was more expensive than the global version and had less features. It often took some years till new features were introduced.
They stopped this offering some years ago, I think they did not get as many customers as they expected, most of the German customers used the global version.
That's exactly what is going on nowadays, anyway. In Poland we have Chmura Krajowa (national cloud), aimed at public, non profit and finance companies. It's basically more controlled local Azure and GPC region.
In Hungarian the people I know use felhő and not cloud. I don’t know what they say in actual IT circles but to my ears “cloud” sounds very awkward if stuck in a Hungarian sentence.
It depends. If we’re talking about e.g. GCP we use “cloud”, but Chmura Krajowa is a Polish product and it has a Polish name, so we use “chmura”.
We basically use the original name in this context.
It seems to me Germans in general like to use English phrases, but on the contrary from other European places I know, they like to use the original pronunciation and spelling. Us, Poles, like to make it sound like Polish, add our own declension and so on.
> EU is a continent of old farts mostly reliant on Auto and Manufacturing industries and big burocratic corporations where there are 500 steps process to perform basic things and immensely risk averse to change to adapting innovation
You don't just sound like a cynic, you sound like an ass for basically insulting half a billion people.
Do you have much experience with big European bureaucratic corporations? I could tell you some stories of big American bureaucratic corporations. Old farts reliant on auto & manufacturing? By that token, the US is reliant on tar sands, fracking, and peddling SUVs.
So please, take a deep breath and try to find some more nuance to discuss, instead of producing a baseless cliché word salad.
Countries like the US and China are not afraid to subsidize strategically important industries in regions with proven capabilities.
Meanwhile the EU likes to waste resources on failed hopeless regions. For example the new investments into making EU independent on chip manufacturing is going to the failed hopeless eastern parts of Germany. I know East Germany had the strongest electronics industry in the former Eastern Bloc but nowadays it's a literal failed hopeless zombieland.
Countries like the US and China are not afraid to subsidize strategically important industries in regions with proven capabilities.
Meanwhile the EU likes to waste resources on failed hopeless regions.
The U.S. has a long history of subsidizing industries in so-called "hopeless" regions. For example, putting the FBI fingerprinting office in Clarksburg, West Virginia.
Doing things like that is how you keep "hopeless" regions from becoming even worse, and makes things better for the nation as a whole. You spend some money on jobs and opportunity, or you spend a lot more money on food subsidies and criminal justice.
Are you a European "Union," or not? If you want every region to fight for resources, then you'd might as well go back to feudal times.
Europeans on HN are always saying how it's the "civilized" continent. I don't see that in language like "hopeless zombieland."
..and, you know, maybe it's ok. Sometimes i fly over those countries and think to myself. Take Romania for example. Had a troublesome past. Currently not without problems I'm sure, but filthy rich by worldwide standards (not by US standards, but top50 gdp ppp per capita). Does some car stuff that got absorbed by France. Has some IT, some of it moves to/gets acquired by the US. Probably happy? why does everyone need to reinvent Google always.
