It’s still possible to order new and original parts for SAAB models, almost 20 years after they went under. The spare parts are made by a separate company which is still going.
Human eyes are much better than cameras at dealing with dynamic range. They’re also attached to a super-computer which has been continuously trained for many years to determine distances and classify objects.
There seems to be a huge business opportunity in Europe right now, to sell support and customization of open source software to government players. Has anyone heard about a European company that’s been successful in this area?
If what they sell is the open source Nextcloud, it is a horrendous product.
Its architecture is weird, with a proxy inside you can harden only by editing data inside a container that is volatyile by design (and has to be).
There are numerous issues opened on that topic, Nextcloud response is "live with it".
We use it at work and everybody I asked loves it. I also recently moved my personal data to Nextcloud from Google Drive and it's been extremely pleasant to use
As a Frenchman involved in creating an open source Dropbox (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash) that can connect to any kind of storage and can expose itself as not only a web client but also SFTP, webdav and S3, with virtual filesystem capabilities and tons of other cool stuff, out of 60 customers, only 2 are French, the only people I see coming from France are only ever interested in open source because they don't want to pay anything (other countries in Europe are different though)
If anyone involved in this transition read this, please contact us, we already got open source technology to replace box / Dropbox / OneDrive and Gdrive
Yes, the problem is capital. US has loads of it and Europe does not. So a lot of European startups have 3 options: remain niche, get bought out buy US investors, move the corporate seat/brain trust to the US.
There are many small European startups who do not have infrastructure to take on large European multinationals as clients. A lot of EU labor laws have hard requirements at 50 and 100 employees so startups stay below those lines and remain tech lifestyle companies.
Well the other large advantage is that the US is one single market with one common language (English) and while there are variations by state, pretty much one set of rules. So by starting a company in the United States you of course have access to incredibly deep capital markets, but you also have access to 350 million people mostly operating under one set of rules with one common language and largely one common culture. It's the same market advantage that China has, by and large.
It's one of the big ironies of the EU - every time it gets larger (good! increases market size) it also gets more fragmented in terms of languages, retained local rules etc. (bad, obviously).
Now up to 24 official languages and still potentially growing in the future (although this is a bit of an overcount because some of them are mutually intelligible to various degrees, it's still a lot).
It's interesting to think that at the time of original ECSC treaty there were only four languages (French, German, Dutch and Italian). That's just about manageable, now it is a bit of an issue
I've been working with European companies for a decade, language is not a barrier for scaling, local laws are.
E.g. why eu has some laws in terms of data and privacy, local laws take precedence (unlike in e.g. agriculture that it's entirely EU's business). Scaling across borders is expensive and difficult for regulatory reasons.
To be fair the US is not immune to that issue either, some states (looking at you CA) are very fond of making random extra state laws that don't exist at the federal level and affect commerce
Also culture. I had a friend try with several German companies, but she said the leadership would default to "no", and every decision would need too much review. She even worked with some that opened offices in SF hoping to learn to move fast, but even those were way too cautious to succeed. Lots of premature optimization, and trying to establish structures and systems before any proof of concepts could be made.
Obviously, this is just anecdotal but she had a real desire to have European growth in SF communities.
What we lack is risk appetite, young people dreaming to be entrepreneurs, talent, a truly unified market, regulations and proper corporate law. Say what you want but stock options essentially don't exist in Europe, so you either give equity upfront or you don't at all.
My impression was that Europe had a lot of old money. A lot of traditional and family banks that were only willing to risk it on "a sure thing." The startups I did work at were the founders did a stint in SV after being recruited from Europe. Came back with the knowledge and culture of startups. Tried to replicate it there and ultimately couldn't climb out the bureaucracy.
The capital is locked up in traditional large multinationals. I've watched them launch one boondoggle after another. And it fail because of endless meetings and fearing to know their customers.
I kind of wonder, capital wise. the GDP isn't too far off US and there's def companies/families w/ insane amount of capital esp in luxury goods etc. Unless they're just hoarding it like Smaug and not investing it back into the economy, in which case the problem isn't capital but business culture.
European per capita GDP is half of the US average. Total GDP is between 60-75% of the US with an extra ~15% population. I'm sure Europe does have enough capital to do this build-out but its a shrinking pool as Europe loses ground to the US every year.
It could be similar to when China kicked out a lot of non-domestic players. They even had a nickname for it. From the link below.
Fengkou fēng kǒu 风口
n. wind tunnel; an area or sector where, for a period of time, all investors want to invest in.
Everyone stands a chance to fly when there is favorable wind blowing from behind.
Can you do audio calls with their free plan? They say no "audio conferencing", but I see a call button. And if I get the SMB plan, can I invite externals to a video conference or do I then have to pay for plans for them as well?
On the other hand, many things attributed to chance are actually the aggregate effect of other people's choices. If we make choices based on not just what's best for ourselves but what's best for all of us, we will all suddenly become more "lucky". And vice versa, if we only think about ourselves that luck will diminish.
I was thinking something very similar as I read the letter and hear people talk about luck in a similar way. I think attributing things to luck, while seemingly humble, can be dismissive and/or simplistic. Yes, we're all lucky to be in our situations -- living in this time, fed, privileged. Though, whether this luck is experienced positively or not is entirely subjective. Also, to ascribe our given situation to luck dismisses the concerted efforts of all living things of this time and past that have guided us to our current situation -- once again, without qualifying it as good or bad. It is almost disabling in it's message. The flip side is that many things happened that were dreamed, planned, intended, and carried out to land us in our situation. This to me feels more empowering, hopeful, appreciative, and also responsible than casting off as merely luck.
I was searching for what to answer people who attribute everything I’ve done to luck. There’s the classic “It’s strange because the more I work the more I’m lucky”, but that’s very condescending. Thank you for offering me a positive alternative. In a sense it makes me owe work to my society.
If you accept that the world is not "just" (just-world-fallacy), then you will also believe that rewards are indeterministic. It follows that rewards are attributed to luck, while effort and results are (by definition) not.
There is no accusation of dishonesty in this argument, and no need to feel accused of scamming.
(One point is that people who persist longer, receive more awards because the "area" under their luck-curve is larger. And people who have lots bad luck in the beginning get discouraged and stop trying ...)
That's a nice point. A society where everyone makes everything just a little bit better for the next random person will be a society full of nice surprises, rather than nasty ones.
Western Europe (not only) social system is based on such belief. It kept working till a lot of immigrants from pretty bad corrupted countries came in, abusing the system in ways it wasn't planned for.
Couldn't agree more. Many (most?) of our opportunities are afforded by the family, community and society in which we grew up. Of course individual talent and choices make a difference, but it's my feeling that many people wildly underestimate how much their external life circumstances contribute to their success or happiness. In fairness, it goes against our sense of self-efficacy.
Like a lot of things recently, it reminds me again of Timothy Snyder's book On Freedom. I think the world would be on a much better path if more people took its core message to heart: that your "freedom" in how to lead your life is not just an absence of oppression, but something made possible for you by an entire society collaborating on giving others these opportunities, by maintaining infrastructure, education, emergency services, etc. etc.
I like the thought experiment of considering how much of your current life's comforts and liberties you would still have if you lived as a hermit in the woods. Nobody tells you what to do there, but you'd quickly find out how much your luck depended on society.
Being able to buy my food at the supermarket instead of having to go hunt and forage for it every day gives me a lot of additional energy and time to exercise other freedoms.
What are you trying to say with this, that you disagree, or that it's an intelligent perspective afforded to those who are not hopeless? I don't see how anyone can disagree that the aggregate actions of your parents, your locality, your culture, your nation, play the largest role in the cards you are dealt from the beginning.
I think the point is that this only works in the aggregate. Individuals in a group/organization/society can make small positive decisions that improve the likelihood that any individual in that same group will get "lucky".
There's a sort of "freeloader" problem, though, which is that the ones who get "lucky" don't themselves have to be making positive choices. In fact, being a selfish individual in a group of generous ones can be an easy way to get ahead - as long as you can get away with it without being noticed or punished.
I read it as in alignment with the previous definition of luck; meaning that a number of previous conscious decisions have created a world where they could come to this understanding of luck
Nice to only have to push the layers that changed. For me it's been enough to just do "docker save my-image | ssh host 'docker load'" but I don't push images very often so for me it's fine to push all layers every time.
Same (perceived) reason my bank and brokerages (and I think even my kid's school website does this) pop up a warning every time I click on a link that will take them outside their website.
I think there's a valid reason to think "if it's OK and common for banks and brokers to do it, it's OK for me to do it" and also to think "this will help protect users from being scammed by other apps who might pop open random links without any notices".
There is probably nothing whatsoever the judge could have done about this action by itself. The issue is the conversations around it, which established intent. The chat logs provide hard evidence that it was done in bad faith and with criminal intent.
Now that I think about it, I wonder how much of the current backlash against remote work is to avoid this exact situation. Face to face conversations don't end up in evidence. Written conversations do, and video chats are increasingly being summarized and recorded by AI.
From a positive point of view: so that app makers can't open up malicious payment screens. Of course, I don't think there's anything stopping them now.
From a more negative point of view, so Apple knows how much it happens and gets to have some influence over it.
I have my parents use iOS because they couldn’t help themselves from downloading malware on Android. It wasn’t from Google, but it didn’t matter, because the whole Android system’s reputation was reduced because of it.
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