What's wrong with a sovereign nation taking steps to reduce or eliminate the influence of a non-citizen who they feel is acting against the best interests of that nation?
If a nuclear capable country like France decides that someone like Elon Musk is acting against the best interests of their country they can ask him nicely to stop and if he continues they can use force to reduce the perceived threat.
This all seems completely in line with the day-to-day norms of contemporary society as well as historical norms.
He is a citizen of the US and has full political rights. There is only one legal distinction between a foreign born citizen and a natural born citizen and that is that he can't serve as president. France is absolutely capable of using force against Elon Musk up to and including their nuclear arsenal. However, they would need to decide whether it is worse for their interests to tolerate Elon or to detonate a nuke on US soil, and that's a pretty easy choice.
What's fascinating and dismaying to me is that it's obvious that there exists sufficient capital and capability in the west to fix this.
I always wondered if we just lacked the ability to mobilize to solve big problems anymore but now I look at this 7% US GDP being allocated to AI datacentres and I realize that it isn't a lack of ability, it's a lack of desire.
Imagine if we had ram shortages because all the silicon was being diverted towards making solar panels. Imagine if we had copper shortages because it was going to the windings on wind mills. Imagine if all these economic disruptions were just temporary and for a better cause or eliminating carbon emissions and eventually moving to sequestration of carbon.
Instead we get chatbots. And funny picture makers.
Not the same silicon. Wafer fabs make pure crystals. Photovoltaics use polysilicon.
Obviously you mean purified silicon, but, remember silicon is what the Earth has in abundance (yeah I know it’s energy intensive, and there exist such profession as sand prospector.)
I'm not sure that's a fair characterization of a policy that promotes ads that hook the user within the first 200ms.
200ms isn't enough time for significant information to be transmitted to a person and for them to process it. You don't 'get to the point' in 200ms.
That means that the way to the user's brain and attention is with some irritating little jingle, a picture of a bunny beating a drum, cartoon bears wiping their asses with toilet paper, a picture of a caveman salesman or a picture of an absolutely artifical thing that looks like food but isn't. Stuff that stands out as unnatural.
But that isn't enough. You gotta pair it with spaced reeitition. Let them think about this every time they take a shit in the office. Hammer them with the same shrill sounds and garish images on every commercial break. Or after every couple of songs they're trying to listen to on youtube. Or in institials that are algorithmically optimized to pop up in their feed as they mindlessly scroll looking for gossip about their neigbhours to scratch that social group animal itch in all of us.
Exactly, 200ms is rather different than 'get to the point.' Here is a 'reaction speed test' site: https://reactiontimetest.net/ for somebody who doesn't intuit what 200ms is like.
You will likely be unable to click the screen in response to a box turning green faster than 200ms. To hook somebody on something within 200ms is largely appealing to casino like stuff where every single jingle, color, flash of light, and other aspect of their games is carefully researched in order to maximize addiction on a subconscious level.
I think there are two different definitions of "significant information" at play here. I interpreted the GP comment to mean "information about the thing being advertised".
The point of the flyer is that you need to get the person to process one bit of information in the first 200ms: scroll or stay. GP's point is that that has little, if anything, to do with the ostensible purpose of advertising, informing people about a product.
The lack of attention that you identify is a real issue with the project but the root issue is ultimately a lack of sufficient funding that would enable all these parts to receive the attention that they require.
Funding fixes all these problems and it has to come from big governmental and institutional players in Europe who are motivated by ending their reliance on American companies like Microsoft.
It's unfortunate that you have had that terrible experience and that the legal system in your location failed you.
I'm not sure however that there's anything to indicate that mom and pop stores are especially susceptible to these kinds of outcomes. It sounds more like you got a case of shitty neighbour which is possible whether or not the neighbour is a commercial lot or a small home.
If your negative experience had been with a neighbour living in a private home instead of a neighbour who owned a small business would that change your view around the matter of zoning for small businesses in residential neighbourhoods?
This was mentioned on The Daily Show this past monday.[0]
You're right that people on social media aren't talking about it very much for some reason but that doesn't mean that it isn't being talked about in American media.
Anyone who tried has failed. It’s in the interest of the group to actively silence the dissidents as well. And it’s pretty easy when you already have the power.
Because it seems clear to me that if an individual was to surveil and build up a dossier on any random stranger as much as an entity like Facebook or Google does that this would be considered stalking.
I've never been able to quite figure out why incorporating and doing it to basically everyone some how makes it legal. I think the secret ingredient is money but I'm not exactly sure how that works.
I’ve used matrix for years, ran my own federated server for a while.
I’ve been critical of the user experience and issues with how it’s handled by the matrix team before but I acknowledge that by and large these problems can be fixed with money.
Big players need to put their big boy pants on and throw a couple coins from their farcically large coin purse and they can drive a stake through the wretched heart that is Teams.
And this is the part I hope Europe gets. They don't have nearly as much money to throw at Matrix as Microsoft can throw at Teams, but they do have massive resources, and I bet that since Matrix doesn't have many of the same shitty KPIs as Slack and Teams, those resources can go much further.
The lack of shitty KPIs is the main thing. Hiring 10 full time devs to work on Matrix would probably be more effective than 500 full time devs on Slack/Teams with most of them stuck on weird Product Manager goals and renaming things to Copilot 365 Teams with Copilot.
> Are you saying that Microsoft is more wealthy than all of “Europe”?
"In 2024, the EU spent €403 billion on research and development" [1]. In 2024, Microsoft spend $29.5bn on R&D [2]. So about 20 Microsofts makes up the entire EU's R&D expenditure.
Alphabet, meanwhile, spent $49.3bn on R&D in 2024 [3]. It earned $350bn that year. So it would be correct to say that Microsoft and Alphabet's revenues, alone, rival the total amount Europe spends on research and development. (Non-EU non-British spending is insignificant.)
Nah I'm just saying that Microsoft has more disposable money to throw at Teams than Europe has to throw at Matrix because Microsoft is a corporation that is choosing how to spend its money internally and Europe (or the EU, but why leave Switzerland, GB, etc. out of the fun?) would be funding an external entity in a (possibly?) new way.
I'm still learning how the EU applies grants to open source projects for specific feature sets, but I'm guessing that there's a lot of friction that could be removed.
And yeah, I agree that the money needed to improve Matrix is nothing. It's about getting organized and applying that money well.
To me Europe's push for digital sovereignty has the potential to reshape open source software's competitiveness around the world and in turn, Europe's.
People right here and right now want to talk about this specific topic of the pushy AI writing a blog post.
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