Just another vote against Markdown. Markdown is OK for simple docs, but very poor for wiki where inter-page links are the Magic Sauce. Creole markup is a lot better for wikiing imho.
I wouldn't store the file format in the file extension; rather store metadata properly as metadata. Chances are that the application wants to hold a lot more metadata anyway, so you're going to need a metadata storage scheme anyway. (Yes, I am a lone crusader for eliminating metadata from filenames.)
Word of mouth. Chatting with people in my socials, their recommendations/reads, and... blogrolls appear to be making a minor comeback. We're all drowning in the LLM shit, so the only thing we can rely on is each other.
I follow marginal revolution, astral codex ten, rob k henderson, and a number of others who put out links roundups. Those links roundups are very good and useful.
I think the point is that, rather than "requiring everybody on the planet to reevaluate how they interact with a computer", Maggie's idea is that computers should be reevaluated with regard to how they interact with people. Like another person earlier in these comments, I am much more skeptical than her that LLMs are "the answer" to enabling non-professional-programmers to create -- more importantly to modify and compose -- chunks of deeply custom software, but in principle I'm in sympathy with the sentiment. People do care. It's just that almost all software they interact with is deeply brittle, change hostile, black-box. You can change almost nothing about it beyond some superficial tweaks, and composing different pieces of software into a working "something else" is mostly impossible. I suspect that the very notion of an "app" is something we have to get past in order to make progress on this...
People love the very notion of an app. Computers went from something every user was expected to program to some extent to that brittle black box because users didn't want to program, they just want the benefits of software spoonfed to them. "We" evaluated the world where the computer was beholden to the non-programmer users ("our AS/400 administrator is some guy from supply chain, I put his data in an Access database for our team to process"), and then Apple made a gazillion dollars with "apps" because your average user thinks that shit is for dorks and a waste of their time. You would be floored at how many young people don't even own a computer beyond their phone because they see so little benefit to something they have control over. It is very much a values issue in the population at large.
> What the hell is the "wrong" way to use a computer?
Searching for your bank's website rather than bookmarking it, and entering your credentials into the phishing site that's the top result.
Installing Anydesk or something for the "nice gentleman who called me from Microsoft to tell me my warranty had expired and he needed gift cards to pay for it."
Those are the two most obvious ones I can think of. There's a multi-billion dollar "industry" separating especially older people from their money using computers.
Frankly if you've even been around computers for 50+ years and haven't encountered the many and varied ridiculous ways people can use them "wrong," I have to wonder whether you've ever had to deal with regular people using them in the real world at all.
Eh, I'm a pretty advanced user by any mean, and I still search for my banks website a non-trivial amount of time. I have a bookmark, but it's honestly just as fast to do it that way
Is not wrong because it is slower. It is wrong because it is a security problem. A typo in your search or a phisher who managed to SEO their results above the genuine one, and you end up on a malicious site identical except for a hard to spot detail in the URL. You enter your username and password, and probably even helpfully do the 2FA dance for them to let them drain your account.
What (if any) are the differences, advantages, disadvantages of this implementation over the Guava library's EventBus? From a fairly cursory look it seems much the same...
Trouble with my ('95) Corolla is that it's the body that's showing its age. (Rust, and not the good kind.) The ICE is just fine and probably good for another 1/2-million km, but the whole thing has got to go soon.
"Let it rust"? If you live near the sea, cars rust and there's not a lot you can do about it. You can attend to visible rust timeously, but there are plenty of hollow spaces where it can fester for years, all unnoticable, before it pops out through the paintwork.
I think that at least some of this comes about because it's still relatively early days for the form-factor. As the industry matures, as it becomes more cutthroat everything will become more comodified and therefore standardised.
Look at some of the cars of (say) the late-19thC where not even the steering wheel was standard. So, while e-bikes are probably not quite that early stage right now, they've not advanced terribly far from the plain vanilla bicycle yet.
I feel like this will be an enternal debate on HN. I also think there’s no need to come up with a definitive answer. The EU and US have fundamentally different perspectives on a bunch of things that results in a very similar but mildly different society. Trying out different ideas is good. Variation is good.
Don't forget that while we have competing interests and disagree strongly on many things - overall we are friends. When someone does something that works we all benefit. Sometimes we decide what "they" did is better can switch, other times we decide what "they" did is worth overall but they did develop something that we didn't that we can use. Even if "they" are clearly worse, "we" cannot do it all and so both of us specializing in something different results in both of us getting the benefits of both to at least some extent.
And that's all we're asking, guvner. Can we try not having "tech giants"? We've tried and there are all sort of issues that negatively affect society, privacy, innovation, ...
I would be surprised. Sure money is good, either direct (if taxes are paid) and the trickle down stuff from a lot of big salaries. But we don't tolerate employee 'abuse' that is rampart in US, we don't like too-big-to-fail, mega corporations messing massively with laws that should govern them.
And the massive success in US is at least partially a side effect of being able to be harsh, move very fast (ie fire half of company when needed). We don't have such adaptability, some say for good reason, some disagree.
I don't think any smart politician doesn't see this clearly, but we lean way more left generally than even democrats in US, so at the end directions taken are roughly in same direction, but otherwise unique.
As long as there is overall freedom of movement and thought and cca fair competition we are all better off as such, I have US colleagues who love it here, and I know few folks who are happy across the pond.
Yes, but afaict not with the lack of giants. It's more "we want to have lots of successful startups like in silicon valley". Some become giants, most not.
Come to think of it... don't politicians in Alaska, Washington, Colorado, Nebraska, Arkansas, Florida and so on also want startups like in silicon valley?
Boulder, Colorado is where Tech Stars (the 2nd most successful incubator after YC for most of the past 2 decades) started and despite having a population of ~100k people, Boulder is where many of Tech Stars biggest successes happened.
Washington is home to Microsoft and Amazon, so it's doing okay, too.
It’s a second order weakness. The first order weakness is the relative lack of capital availability vs the United States which made it less likely to spawn EU native tech giants. The lack of tech giants means that there is a brain drain effect to the US or US tech giants functioning in Europe.
Also culture and regulations. For example Austria and Germany, Netherlands and Belgium, might share borders and the same languages between the pairs but having different regulations in certain areas, meaning that starting a company in one country might be difficult to expand in the other due to a difference in regulations which is usually by design born out of local protectionism.
Contrary to the US, EU is not a united country, but a collaboration of fiefdoms with often diverging interests, where every one of them wants to be king and won't hesitate to sabotage other members for their own gain, even if it holds everyone back. This high level of internal squabbling and fragmentation is ultimately what keeps EU unable to scale businesses of any kind, not just tech, as easily and as fast as in the US.
What many founders do, if you're developing a SW product in the EU, is forget the EU market altogether and launch directly to customers in the US, and only when you succeeded there and made your money, you can afford to break into the EU fragmentation and expand locally. Sounds counter-intuitive but that's the reality for many product based EU start-ups that want to succeed, like Spotify for example. Why do you think Apple only launched the VP in the US and nowhere else?
> the bigger problem of language still remains
> the true power of the US is that it operates in the global lingua franca
It is true that language is a problem but I suspect not as much as you say. ~51% of the EU population speaks english as a 1st or 2nd language, but a larger percentage in the wealthier western nations (e.g. ~57% in France) and an even larger percentage in the major metros (e.g. ~60% in Paris). [1] I couldn't find figures but I suspect an even larger percentage of university graduates in the wealthier EU nations speak english. Tech Giants disproportionately emerge from and draw from the University Graduate population. If they had the capital availability and culture/regulatory regime (as acknowledged elsewhere in the thread) amenable to the emergence of Tech Giants then they wouldn't need a big boost to English proficiency to get by language-wise.
This argument is often brought bu but has a critical flaw - English is not not the working language in most EU countries. The ability to speak english is moot, what matter is the language of business and law which is not english.
The point about university graduates is also moot because they are not the majority, even in a country like france that had the most number of university degrees awarded in 2022. Only about 35% of the french working age population has a university degree.
Language, is, in fact, a much bigger problem than many want to admit.
From an ethical perspective, tech monopolies aren't a very good idea. However, from a purely economics standpoint, tech giants make up a not insignificant part of the US's GDP.
The classic argument for laws regulating monopolies/abuse of power is that overall this worsens what consumers and countries care about. Both that it lowers quality for consumers (lack of true competition) and slows growth by eliminating the push for new things/efficiencies.
> However, from a purely economics standpoint, tech giants make up a not insignificant part of the US's GDP.
Yes. It would surely be better to have a large field of non-giants competing for customers taking up the same proportion of GDP though right?
Large scale - in some things - allows for higher quality at lower prices since you divide the costs of designing and building between more people. For many complex things you have to be a large enterprise to build it. Building a reliable engine that meets modern emissions standards isn't possible for a single human, or even a small group - a large (monopoly) can make that investment and divide those costs between many customers and so the price is cheaper than a small company that would have to divide the costs between many less customers. Tech tends to be similarly complex and so needs are large investment in R&D to be acceptable, which in turn means that they need to be large to make the costs divided between all customers acceptable.
The real question is where do those competing considerations meet up. A monopoly is bad, but you can go too far in the other direction as well. I don't know how to decide what the best answer is (I'm not even aware of anyone who has made a useful argument for any particular compromise)
Those things are not linked. Large and monopoly are very different. Your example of engines is good, there isn't afaik a monopoly on building engines. Even a small number of huge auto makers are still competing against each other.
> A monopoly is bad, but you can go too far in the other direction as well. I don't know how to decide what the best answer is (I'm not even aware of anyone who has made a useful argument for any particular compromise)
I agree, I think the general aim with the EU makes sense which is about use of power in one field to control another. So google are good at search but that doesn't mean they get to make their own shopping attempt rank higher than others. If they have 90% of the search market then fine if that came from being better than everyone else but their shopping offering has to be better than others.
Disruptive tech monopolies upset entire existing industries for the sake of their owners/shareholders/employees, which is usually tiny compared to the said industries.
(Think of FB/Google advertisement centralisation as the end of other media providers.)
From an economics standpoint, does that make tech giants good, or does it make the US's GDP weaker since so much wealth is concentrated among so few players?
I keep wanting to push back on whether GDP is the best way to measure an economy, but most of the articles I find bring in concepts like "[GDP] doesn’t meaningfully account for successful management of priorities like public health, economic equity, climate action, or racial justice."[1] But you're making it clear you're talking from a purely economics standpoint. So pushing back on the ethics of applying GDP doesn't even apply.
> tech giants make up a not insignificant part of the US's GDP.
Indeed. So could the US reliance on these monopolies and tax-avoiders have anything to do with the US's relatively unimpressive growth compared with the EU?
But most of the US tech giants don't produce anything of value. They just suck out adverting money from companies that actually produce wealth. Its the same as the Germans 1944 GDP or Russians current. The numbers go high when you burn a tremendous amount of money.
There's lots of value in being able to influence huge portions of the population. The fact that you consider it morally wrong does not make it invaluable to others.
Agreed. Also just so you know, invaluable is one of those weird words that is intensified with in-, not negated. It means even more valuable, not worthless
Don't be so literal, it's a weak contribution. I think OP's sentiment is clearly along the lines of "disproportionate little value to humanity in regard to their economic power".
Ad companies like Google actually produce negative economic value, because advertising is a Red Queen's Race with no upper bound and every dollar wasted on advertising is a dollar that the company must recoup by increasing the price of the product, at absolutely no benefit to the consumer.
>But most of the US tech giants don't produce anything of value.
That doesn't really matter at the end of the day when you're discussing finances. All that matters for people, countries and governments in capitalism is that they have more money in their pockets than the rest, not how ethically that value gets generated or if their work produces much social value to society.
Much of Europe sees businesses only as employment programs. They see the economy as managed or run by the state - it's the state that (believes it) drives the economy through employment law, tax rates, subsidies, "development programs", etc. Businesses are not there for serving the public, or making money, or advancing technology, or as free enterprise - but convenient as docile employment programs.
And for that purpose it makes sense to prefer giant corporations. It's easier to steer them, talk to them, model them, regulate them (you can talk bureaucrat to bureaucrat), twist their arm, occasionally get services or equipment from them.
And from that point of view, it's useless to try and favor startups: it will be years before just a tiny fraction of these are relevant in number of salaried people.
It depends whether your priority is a dynamic, lively, resilient economy which delivers technology advances including healthcare, internet and handheld super-computing.
Or if it's levelling things by cutting heads.
It's a policy choice, of course. And one set of features doesn't prevent the other of course, but you still can choose priorities and get the corresponding result. For Europe, the priority is overwhelmingly "employment of the masses". Nothing else comes close.
And anyway, European corporations are not exactly run by middle income families!
Yes that's exactly how the script goes, meanwhile the life expectation in the "dynamic, lively, resilient economy which delivers technology advances including healthcare" goes... down somehow and basically everyone runs on paracetamol if not worse.
Even putting monopolies aside: tech isn’t a great industry to have in your community. Our former au pair went back to Germany and now has a great office job in logistics at a Dannon factory that makes baby formula. She lives in a small German town and there’s no highly paid engineers driving up the cost of everything. She never went to university but lots of career paths are open to her. At a tech company, you’d be a second class citizen without a degree (unless you were a genius programmer).
> there’s no highly paid engineers driving up the cost of everything.
Pretty sure there must be affordable small towns in the US without SW engineers to drive up the cost of everything.
But your point is rather poor. Those US SW engineers might cause local gentrification, but they also contribute a huge amount in state and government taxes, taxes that I'm sure the likes of Germany would also like to collect if they could, to fund their welfare, education, army, healthcare, etc.
And it's not like many large German cities aren't already gentrified and overpriced despite wages being lower than the US. Try moving to Münich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Hamburg or Berlin, look at real estate market then at the local wages. It's the same disease everywhere.
It's not "limited space". In Germany, as in many parts of the US, strict zoning disallows building housing where people have to work/want to live at the cost of workers to the benefit of rent-seekers.
> Pretty sure there must be affordable small towns in the US without SW engineers to drive up the cost of everything.
There are. Cedar Rapids is great! It would be even better if we had more industry in those places, and less of the industries that generate outsized returns for a few, like tech and finance.
> But your point is rather poor. Those US SW engineers might cause local gentrification, but they also contribute a huge amount in state and government taxes, taxes that I'm sure the likes of Germany would also like to collect if they could, to fund their welfare, education, army, healthcare, etc.
It's not worth the tradeoff. I've only visited Munich, but it seems much less shitty for an average person than NYC or SF.
Surely that apples to any well-paid jobs? Think of the distorion caused by finance (New York and London), oil and gas (Aberdeen, Edmonton), gold mining (1860s San Francisco), government (Washington DC, Beijing, Paris). But you can't run a functional country while trying to ban well-paid jobs.
It doesn't apply uniformly. Well-paid jobs in finance and tech are especially concentrated among a small cognitive elite. Industries like oil and gas or chemical refining generate a much broader distribution of well-paid jobs for average workers. Houston is a much flatter place economically and socially than the New York or SF.
You need some critical mass of finance, tech, etc., but you can manipulate industrial policy to generate more of the jobs that create broad prosperity and less of the jobs that create outsized returns for a few. Contrast say the heavily financialized economies of the U.S. to the more industrial economies of Germany or Japan.
> At a tech company, you’d be a second class citizen without a degree (unless you were a genius programmer).
That's definitely not true. When I was at Groupon I met a couple of people in sales who didn't have a degree and yet were most definitely not second class citizens. If you can make it rain, companies nobody cares about your traditional credentials. The same is true for marketers, too.
Apple was nowhere near a tech giant when the iPhone was introduced. Facebook was a student's project. Consumer tech innovation just doesn't happen in Europe, I think that's the real issue Europe should be tackling, given how influential consumer tech is.
European countries used to have their local Facebooks and Twitters, but they got wiped out once the US companies got better at localizing their services.
Which is not in itself a natural phenomenon - Spotify for example did not get wiped out by Apple Music or Google Play/YouTube Music. Europe's local Facebooks and Twitters just weren't that good.
The problem is that we are at the whim of tech giants anyway, they're just not ours. I.e. not having an European Google doesn't mean my phone is running an OS from some European non-giant, it's running Android. How is this not a weakness with respect to at least having a local alternative?
> How is this not a weakness with respect to at least having a local alternative?
Scale - it is a lot of work to create a local alternative. While you could develop that local alternative, to make it a useful competitor to Android would take a lot of resources - mostly trained programmers. Those programmers in making your android alternative would then not be doing whatever it is they are doing right now and so less total output is done.
Is it worth the loss of those other things? There are a lot of different things going on in any country. Perhaps some of them are not worth doing. However even if you stop doing those things is there something else it would be better to spend that effort on?
There are often complaints here that American programmers earn more than their counterparts in Europe and other continents. American tech giants pay well in the U.S.
Most white collar jobs pay better in the US than Europe, be it in Power Engineering, Automotive Engineering, Pharma, Finance, etc (and all these jobs come with insurance provided).
If you're a skilled professional, you always end up earning more in the US than most other countries.
This is not to say Europe is bad - hell Europe is a continent so broad brush stereotypes are stupid, as my argument with an Italian yesterday about ICT market dynamics in Romania vs Italy proved. You'll earn a higher salary in Amsterdam as a SWE than you would as a SWE in Jackson MI, just like a MechE in Minsk will earn a pittance compared to a MechE in Munich.
That’s a huge difference $30k, I don’t think taxes in Amsterdam are that high. You really should be comparing the greater Jackson area also, I’m sure salaries in Clinton for a SWE is going to be higher, Jackson is limited to state jobs. My dad was pulling $100k in port Gibson as a systems engineer and that was a couple of decades ago.
Port Gibson is where the state’s only nuclear plant is. Vicksburg also has waterways, but you don’t get many tech job centers in that part of the USA. Clinton was hotter before Worldcom imploded.
Lacking some domestic equivalent, "not having tech giants" means that hundreds of billions of euros annually are flowing out of the region to benefit someone else instead of the citizens of that region. Forever.
Add to that the political and cultural soft power accrued and also brain drain that both come with that and, yeah, that does seem to be a pretty big weakness.
Some tech giants of the US are legitimate technology giants, others are just land grabbers that do something simple at scale(i.e. sharing status updates with peers).
EU lacks on the second one, also its the one that has all the controversy.
Yet, I wouldn't downplay the USA's hard tech capabilities and talent pool. IMHO the US is special, as it doesn't have the baggage from the history that spans thousands of years on the record.
EU is the old neighbourhood that once had all the cool new stuff but now is focused on preserving what they accumulated, life is good there but not much is happening. The USA is the newly built neighbourhood that got hip and trendy and has all the new cool stuff. China is this neighbourhood that once was great, lost its lure but lately it is up and coming with some of the coolest new stuff being there.
> IMHO the US is special, as it doesn't have the baggage from the history that spans thousands of years on the record.
Interestingly, there were civilizations in America thousands of years ago, as there were in Europe. The USA was founded a coupla hundred years before the EU.
The EU didn't conquer and replace the old society, most of the governments in the EU predate the EU. The US did take many concepts from Europe (common law, republic government), but threw away many others.
The EU looks a lot like the US articles of confederation which the US scrapped after about 10 years for the current constitution because the articles were not powerful enough. (though I personally think the articles only needed some minor tweaks - that is a different debate not worth getting into). The EU's is seeing the same problems those who wanted to replace the articles with the constitution were seeing - but are the worth replacing/fixing is an open question that the EU should be debating.
Sure, the the EU has _massive_ cultural baggage because it's comprised of civilisation whic, by-and-large, have thousands of years of history with each other, on the same (limited) land. The US is vastly more culturally homogenous, with more land, and a unified government.
> have thousands of years of history with each other
Not really.
In many parts of what is now Germany, people spoke dialects that were incomprehensible even to people in the next valley; this was as recently as the 19thC. In the 20thC, a British leader could speak of Czeckoslovakia as "a faraway country of which we know little". Modern Frenchmen would regard their countrymen from 2K years ago as completely alien. Modern Greeks speak a language that is recognizably derived from ancient Greek, but in other cultural respects, modern and ancient Greeks are very different.
Those ancient societies regarded their neighbours as barbarian enemies, not as neighbours they shared a culture with. It's only since (say) the 5thC AD that European culture began to become more homogenous.
BTW, the idea that the US government is "unified" looks like a sick joke, from my perspective.
If Europe had 50 small companies doing what big tech does I don't think there would be a problem, but the problem is that Europe doesn't. So it gets a smaller slice of the economy and has to "import" social media, operating systems, mobile phones, etc.
It depends on whether you want to have a part in writing the rules, because guess what: The rules are always written by those in power, which in this case are mostly American tech megacorps.
If exerting tech leadership is among your goals, not having your own tech megacorps is a weakness.
I think it is true that if you do the work you write some of the rules. But that's through value added to people who use your stuff. It's not by unearned fiat.
Tech giants, while getting worse in terms of lobbying etc. are still much more benign than the old-school industry giants we have in europe. The European Roundtable for Industry [1] is particularly disgusting. The bigcorp lawyers are essentially writing EU law…
The so-called legislators and “lawmakers” in the USA also don’t write laws. The process is complicated, but at an overview level the real lawmakers hire lobbyists to go find an office holder to rubber stamp a bill they have written and want enacted. The lobbyists are just bagmen of course.
That is well said, but there is a difference between good regulation on monopolies preventing tech giants versus structural problems preventing competitive high-scale companies from emerging.
The USA is going to have to deal with its monopoly problem, but the EU has to deal with the problems making them uncompetitive in the tech scene.
For a good portion of the world I think you'd have to add, "...at a price roughly equal to [insert large percentage, in places exceeding 100%] your monthly income," to get a more realisic response.
I think in the places you’re thinking of, using starlink as backhaul for community wireless is more likely ?
There’s always going to be capex to bring the internet to far-flung places, but my point was that starlink means it’s no longer “dig a 100km trench and install a fibre” expensive.
Although I am rooting for Intel, the leadership is just not an execution machine. Pat is a very good CEO, and he understands technology as much as the business. But the next level simply doesn’t have that charisma to deliver. I wouldn’t be surprised to see many delays and eventually a product which is years behind competition.
What's annoying about this spending spree (from the perspective of the gov) is that this is supposed to secure chips production in North America (motivated by the China threat on Taiwan), but the government doesn't really seem to care about delays as it forbids TSMC/Intel to bring external talent & include DEI clauses in their deals.
I wouldn't store the file format in the file extension; rather store metadata properly as metadata. Chances are that the application wants to hold a lot more metadata anyway, so you're going to need a metadata storage scheme anyway. (Yes, I am a lone crusader for eliminating metadata from filenames.)
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