The difference is, Europeans used to trust their US partners, and built a lot of infrastructure on US services. This trust has been betrayed, so things now need to change.
It never existed to begin with with China, so no change is necessary.
There never was a relationship of mutual trust, it was always a relationship of Europe being under the wing of the US as a buffer against the USSR.
The US now wants to push Europe out of the nest, but most Europeans have only ever known life "living in their parents house".
Building an independent Europe is not compatible with the current European ethos of work/life/life/life balance, and will likely result in Europe either coming back to the US, falling into economic chaos, or moving into daddy Xi's house. They are a socialist country after all...
How much do you guys suffer about this work life balance, I can't wrap my head around the level of brainwash you guys have been through to use concepts as socialised wealth and wellness as a bad thing
these evil europeans wanting to have a break from work! how dare them!
Neither the European welfare state nor China's authoritarian leftism are socialist. They are, respectively, welfare-state capitalism and nationalist "socialism" (aka Naziism).
On the European side, socialism is a question of who owns businesses. If the majority of businesses are owned by the people who are working at those businesses, you have a socialist economy. Welfare states, regulatory regimes, and high tax rates do not change the ownership of businesses, they are about who provides the infrastructure around those businesses. If you have an economy where infrastructure is owned by a liberal nation-state, and businesses are owned by whoever gambled capital on the venture, then you get a capitalist economy. If your infrastructure is privately owned by individuals, then those owners become feudal lords and you get feudalism.
On the Chinese side, you might point out that there are laws that require CCP ownership of all businesses, eat the party line that says the CCP is the representative of the working class, and say, "hey that's a socialism". But this ownership and representation is purely nominal. The average Chinese worker has more or less zero political agency; speaking out gets you censored and harassed. How is that worker ownership? If, say, America started punishing individual shareholders who voted against Trump-aligned board members, we'd correctly recognize that the shareholders do not meaningfully own their businesses anymore.
"Moving into Daddy Xi's house" would be stupid. The EU and China are not aligned on basically any core value; it'd basically be a surrender of one to the other. Actually, to be clear, the EU isn't even aligned on basically any core value with itself[0]. In fact, I would argue that's a way bigger headwind than European workers being used to a top-heavy welfare state. The EU has the resources to build a sovereign cloud, or run its own military, or source its own energy. But for each one there are challenges posed by the uniquely decentralized structure of Europe:
- Europe could build a sovereign cloud, but probably not one for each member state. So they're going to have to agree what country holds the data, and agree that that country can and will spy on all the others.
- Europe could fund its own military, tell NATO to pound sand, and re-colonize America for the trouble. But who runs that military? Given the history of EU politics, it would be France and Germany, and every other country in the EU has a history of being colonized by France or Germany. They are not trustworthy.
- Europe could fix its energy dependence, but Germany thinks nuclear power is Satan and wants to backstop renewables with the dirtiest-burning coal you can mine.
You'll notice a recurring theme here. The problem with Europe is not its fiscal deficit, the perceived laziness of its workers, or what have you. It's the lack of trust. The most trustworthy member state of the European Union was the United States of America, and so that's why everyone put their data on American servers, and let America dominate NATO, and so on. This is not Europe getting kicked out of the nest, it's the kids realizing their parent is a gaslighting asshole and that all their siblings, including themselves, are cut from the same cloth.
[0] Trump's current tariff actions and threats of territory annexation have galvanized the European public against America's government. However, prior to Trump coming back, Europe was full of far-right nutjobs that were just as cringe. Actually, a lot of them are still in power in Europe, and they're way more competent and cunning than Cheeto Mussolini.
Ant did not include IF THEN ELSE, unless you added the contrib package.
If you understood the paradigm, you could write branches in Ant files simply using properties and guards on properties ("unless"). Using IF in Ant was basically admission of not having understood Ant.
This said, I used Ant for a very limited amount of time.
As of Ant 1.9.1, you can use 'if' and 'unless' attributes on any task or element in a target. I stopped using Ant a long time ago, but this was a pleasant discovery when I had to pick up an old Ant based project recently.
I agree, that is what I meant: there were people who installed Contrib to have <if> element, but in reality you did not need that you could just use Ant's built-in features like you said. In my opinion installing Contrib to use <if> was a demonstration of not having understood how Ant works.
For new .NET SDK style projects you hardly ever need to customize the defaults and I know it's used for more stuff than .NET, but I just wanted to give an example where it actually doesn't suck. Also, you may not need to do everything in MSBuild, for some more complex stuff, you can use something like Cake (https://cakebuild.net/) in .NET for example and skip the programming in XML.
.NET made into my toolbox before it was announced to the world, thanks to be working at a MSFT partner that was selected to be part of the Portuguese launch event for .NET with ready made products.
Never seen any big corp using alternative .NET build tools, rather wrestling MSBuild, or before it came to be, nmake.
You say that, but people in OCaml keep bemoaning the use of mostly declarative s-expressions in the Dune build system. Imagine the reaction if MSBuild used an actual Scheme.
On a related note, I used to have a gaming PC. I don't game much any more, so every time I booted up the darn thing, I had to wade through a thick bramble of notifications, updates, ads. It got so bad that lost my will to game altogether.
Enough was enough, I sold the PC, and replaced it with a Steam Deck. What a breath of fresh air! No notifications, no OneDrive, no would-you-like-to-use-Edge, no Copilot, no Windows Updates, Windows Store Updates, Driver Updates, Firmware Updates, Browser Updates, let-me-show-you-what's-new-popovers.
Install phone company app, login, and click migrate eSIM to this phone. Whole process can take up to 5min depending on how fast wifi is to connect to your phone company.
I don't install the samsung dishwasher app or the mcdonalds value points app or the Mountain Dew summer of fun app ... why would I install some random national carrier telco app ?
The flip-side to that is what if your phone had been stolen or lost? You're out of luck with a physical SIM, but eSIM could be transferred to a new device.
When my wife’s German T-Mobile eSIM vanished during transfer to a new phone, their portal for downloading a new one required a token sent to that very phone number we just lost access to.
This meant we had to do a trip to their store where they said that there’s no process for the store to supply us with an eSIM, but they’ll setup a new traditional SIM which we could then convert to eSIM. Ridiculous! At least it was all free - apart from the time spent.
That was a few years ago, though. So, I very much hope they’ve improved on the process.
How do they know it's you, what makes you able to download the subscription token onto your device but not me? Do you need to receive a letter, or email via WiFi somewhere? Do mobile carriers accept unauthenticated devices to let them download SIMs, or does it require WiFi always?
You scan the QR code and then download. Sometimes there is like a code you have to enter. It's a prepaid SIM, the carriers--particularly in East Asia or Africa--aren't particularly concerned with authenticating that much.
The only tangible difference between then and now is that many more problems have already been solved. This certainly leaves fewer holes where an enthusiastic developer can flex their muscle.
Then again, I did spend some time in e.g. lisp and Haskell just for the heck of it. And there ate still plenty more unsolved problems outside of the mainstream today.
There are still a ton of vertical markets that have crap for technology stacks, e.g. public transit. There is tons of opportunity out there to improve processes and optimize work.
I like mapy.com as a Google Maps replacement. It's essentially a very good OSM renderer, with a great website and app, including offline access, routing, and real-time traffic. Also very good bike/hike routing, if that's your jam.
But there's no substitute for GMap's POI database.
I second mapy. I've replaced Google maps with this one ~5 years ago and never looked back. You can download specific maps for a country and within that specific federal states to reduce space consumed. I use it mostly for biking and hiking - you can plan tours with scaling duration/kilometers which is nice for a region you are unfamiliar with. Like parent wrote, offline access, routing, RT traffic. Can recommend.
> But there's no substitute for GMap's POI database.
I was surprised to see that Kagi uses Apple's POIs for searching maps. It seems to be pretty decent, and Apple is at least a little more privacy-friendly. Lately I've been using Kagi to search for businesses then opening the directions in Google Maps.
I tried using OSM directions, but the walking time calculations are always really far off from what Google Maps says. I don't drive anymore, only walk and public transit, so I can't really speak to how well OSM's driving directions are.
This rings true to me, but I'm not a frontend dev. So I'm not a good judge if what makes good frontend code. Where I do know my stuff, I'm not at all impressed by LLM code.
So perhaps LLMs are just entry level devs in general. Who can't learn. Who won't ever gain seniority. It would make sense, after all, they were trained on the Internet and Stack Overflow, which is mostly filled with entry level questions and answers.
It never existed to begin with with China, so no change is necessary.
That's not "melodramatic".
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