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It's not like US is not capitalist in anything: it's still state-of-the-art in software, which preoves that the problem is not with capital markets.

It just probably overregulated hardware manufacturing out of existence with unionizing and other too strong regulations.


Agreed. The children yearn for the mines and the 12+ hour shifts in factories.

There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT. They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations.

As a European I'm happy to use their product (and pay for it), I just ask one tiny little thing from them: build a better model with lower latency.


No. No one really gives a shit about AI other than the tech industry and vocal CEO culture which is just using it to bury recession and regular lay offs. Otherwise it's novelty value and frustration but no one is going to use it or pay enough for it to be viable as an economic backbone.

There are many more important things to consider. Like literally everything else society sits on top of.


AI is great at translating, doing a task in seconds which would take days. For almost no cost.

That is quite significant on a continent like Europe, with dozens of different languages.


I have a friend who's a professional translator. No it isn't. She's forever cleaning up after the mess it left people in. In fact business for her is really booming thanks to people who think that is the case.

And I'm not talking about LLMs here but DeepL etc.


AI translates correctly, with a few minor imperfections which don't impede communication. Compare that to waiting a day and paying hundreds of euros for each message.

AI translation is comparable to the telephone or e-mail in how it improves communication.


The end-user costs are slim to none, but for OpenAI alone they're hundreds of billions USD.

LLMs certainly have their use and are here to stay but it remains to be seen how they can be commercially successful without constant injections of venture capital.

These days even the French (!) speak English.


> They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations.

What failed with Mistral?

Which anti-AI regulations are we talking about, and don't these apply to any solution distributed in the European Union, hence also to American ones?


> build a better model with lower latency.

That's mighty impossible for the european mindset - people here are not so risk-eager as to through hundreds of billions on infrastructure for something that might return a profit.


The US capital markets are truly a wonder to behold. There's no way to replace that. For good and ill, you'd only get weird looks in Europe if you asked for €10 billion for an unproven business model in what's somehow also a competitive market.

To be fair this example does look a lot like insanity.


>There's no way to replace that.

Nothing is truly irreplaceable


It's not really a wonder, Americans will simply lose their pensions if the AI business models don't work out. The same way it happened many times in the past.

This is part of the answer.

I have a theory about the second part; European consumers have an even more suspicious view of "corporate overlords" if they are domestic/European than if they are American. Not because Americans are more trustworthy, but because they see Europeans as "anonymous masses" and are therefore more "neutral" to the internal struggles in Europe.

Signing up to a service owned by a European "dynastic" family, possibly in a neighbouring country, feels like more of a surrender of autonomy.


Hasn't this also something to do with the cultural dominance that US have had over the EU? We considered US services more valuable just because they where from US. But that cultural dominance might not be as strong anymore, maybe because of social media/TikTok?

You don't have to love risk to build something you need.

>There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT. They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations.

I think the idea of a Eurostack is more compelling: standard office productivity tools that aren't beholden to Microsoft, Apple, or Google. That means email, calendar, spreadsheets, word processing, slide decks, video conferencing.

Imagine if every government and corporation in the eurozone stopped paying for Windows licenses and O365 subscriptions.

LibreOffice exists, of course, but it lacks an alternative to Outlook and Teams/Zoom. It would benefit from a benevolent corporate sponsor with deeper pockets than TDF which AFAIK is purely volunteer-driven.


> There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT

Before or after the bubble pops?

What does chatgpt has over competitors again? Besides a deranged ceo of course


Brand recognition.

Uhhh... 800m active users?

Uhhh... barely 5% paying users?

The day they ask 1 cent from free users they'll go to the countless alternatives


Lolol

They’re not going to. You’re rooting so hard for a downfall that won’t happen. They’re going to be an advertising giant.


1. ChatGPT is shit

2. We prefer anti-AI regulations and not having a stupid Musk indoctrinating half the country


,,1% is still plenty good, especially given the historical malaise here of only like 2% growth but it's not like industrial revolution good.''

You can't compare the speed of AI improvements to the speed of technical improvements during the industrial revolution. ChatGPT is 3 years old.


As long as people claim it's revolutionary it's fair to compare it to other revolutions.

I mean you can compare, but at the start it was also super small improvements.

The main difference is that people had no idea of the disruption it would cause and of course there wasn't there a huge investment industry around it.

The only question is about ROI of the investors will be positive (which depends on the timeline), not whether it is disruptive (or it will be after for example 30 years from now), and I see people confusing the two here quite often.


Some feedback from me (not a likely user though):

- It was easier to find a link to where you worked at than your repo (https://github.com/skaldlabs/skald?tab=readme-ov-file), you should have linked it visibly

- I had no idea what / why I should use it so I looked at the demo video and it didn't seem to solve any particular use case for any particular problem, it was more a ,,config'' video instead of a demo video

- From reading the (quite interesting) article it seemed like you are focusing on pivoting instead of iteration speed. Have you tried for example to just query an LLM to build the whole project that you have done? How much time would be to vibe code it?

I know that HN is mostly against vibe coding, but if the project could have been created in 1-3 days and you took 3 month, that's a bigger issue than growth itself. In that case the metric that should be looked at is iteration speed instead of just growth (both are super important though!)


> "- It was easier to find a link to where you worked at than your repo (https://github.com/skaldlabs/skald?tab=readme-ov-file), you should have linked it visibly"

Genuinely curious, can I ask why this is relevant to point out? This seems like just a general blog post, about raising money for a startup and personal reflections on it. Why would a link to a github repo be an important part of that?


It's just part of both getting feedback and general sales.

For engineers it feels too pushy / not genuine, but after spending time / effort on a great non-generated interesting article, inserting a link for people who want to check it out isn't pushy.


It's not just 1 old man. Most of the wars Trump does is just a logical continuation of the military industrial complex strategy, he just doesn't hide it at all.

Venezuela was already a target, Panama was already conquered, and I'm sure Greenland was in plans already.


The US already has 1) a base in Greenland, and 2) and agreement with Denmark that they can arbitrarily increase their presence there. America could increase it's presence a hundredfold and start putting missiles there, and Denmark would be fine with it.

America is threatening Greenland for one reason: Trump wants to brag that he added Greenland to America.


Venezuela has been an issue for all administrations since Bush. Greenland has never been an issue because there is absolutely no rationale for it. The US can put as many troops there as it likes and is welcome to try to profitably extract minerals from a frozen wasteland. This is just Trump wanting legacy because he’s a narcissist.

Wrong. Greenland has been an issue all the way back to the times of Seward in 1868.

Why stop there, let’s reconsider the Louisiana Purchase and the War of 1812.

Greenland has not been an issue in over 100 years.


Still wrong though.

Not really, I'm on the side of the constitution, I'm usually on the other side (ICE), but here they could and should have easily just waited, went through the law to be able to deport to Liberia again and do the whole process legally.

It's because there is extremism both on the left and right: the left thinks that the right wants a power grab to stop left from coming back, and the right thinks that if they don't keep their power now, the left will take it and keep it using immigrants.

Both of them are right: unless there's a civil war or moderate president (which probably needs ranked choice voting) the most probable scenario is that one of the 2 extremes succeeds.

I also miss the old HN btw and wish that there wouldn't be any right/left politics, just the old classic libertarian property/privacy/opennes right debates, but it looks like those days are gone.


This is peak “both sides”. Just today Trump said he thinks there shouldn’t be any midterms. No Democrat is saying anything remotely like that.


> the left thinks that the right wants a power grab to stop left from coming back

It would probably help if Trump didn't fantasize about this publicly all the time

> the right thinks that if they don't keep their power now, the left will take it and keep it using immigrants

The left will "take it" by being elected, if they are in fact elected. That's the extremist threat the right is worried about?

What does "keep it using immigrants" mean?


It's quite simple, some states want to allow voting without identity cards that prove that they are citizens of the country.

I don't know of any other country that would allow it, but I know other countries where people in power used other ,,tricks'' to increase the chance of being reelected


There's no evidence of noncitizens voting in meaningful numbers, but I'm aware that's a popular right-wing talking point.

You changed what I wrote: it's not about non-citizens voting or not, it's about requiring identification by law at polling, which is required in every other democratic country.

As an example in in late 2024 in California Governor Newsom signed SB 1174, which explicitly prohibits local governments (like cities or counties) from passing their own laws to require voter ID.


Yeah, remember when Biden deployed a personal army on red states and threatened to cancel the election?

What world do you live in where you would expect equally extreme behavior from a democrat president?


He didn't have to if he could just get Trump be thrown out of social media.

It's not only US, it's global.

I drive quite a lot throught southern Europe with my EV, and it's super frustrating that gas stations have the infrastructure on the highway while for my EV I have to go just outside the highway to a fast charger (wasting time), then I need to pay again (and waste a lot of time to go through the gate) to get back on the highway for example in Italy.


Toll gates in general are a waste of time. I use bip&go + telepass lanes in Italy to get through them faster.


I will order it, thanks! I see that it's good for 4 countries, that's great


One interesting thing for me is NVIDIA coming out with its reasoning model for self driving.

If it works well, Tesla's strategy of keeping the car minimal/cheap to produce but with enough sensors and an upgradable hardware may become extremely useful as new techniques are coming to tackle the long tail of self-driving cases to handle.

I'm sure Tesla will soon copy Nvidia and put a reasoning model in its cars as well.


In theory Greenland is independent, but Danish government doesn't treat it as independent


If Greeland declares independence, Danish army would arrest all the local resisting people for terrorism, unlawful orders, etc (or shoot at them if needed).

They don't have a choice, they can't split away from Denmark right now, they are like in jail.

If someone tells you that Greenland can declare independence tomorrow without consequences from Denmark this is not true. They would first need to do great PR "we want freedom" and spread in the news that Denmark is evil and forgot about them, etc.


If you had read the article, you would know that

In 1979, Greenland achieved Home Rule, which included the formation of the Greenlandic Parliament, and it gained self-rule in 2009 through the passage of a law that included a ‘blueprint’ for seeking independence. The 2009 law firmly established that the decision to go for independence from Denmark would now rest with the Greenlandic people.

There is no doubt that the majority of Greenlanders want to use this option eventually. Polls show this. Independence has been accepted in Denmark as well. However, polls also consistently show that Greenlanders do not want independence if the price is the collapse of the Greenlandic welfare state.


"If Greenland declares independence" -> "If Greenland unilaterally declares independence"

Of course, you can't do that, there are criminal consequence: yes you can get arrested for that. Like in any country.

There are even worse: financial consequences (600M USD lost per year!).

But what if a richer buddy offers you protection and more money ?

In that specific agreement:

> "The agreement on independence shall be endorsed by a referendum in Greenland. The agreement shall furthermore be subject to the consent of the Folketing [Danish Parliament]."

It's "yes, you can leave, but you need our permission".

Today, Danish parliament is not really happy at the idea of giving away Greenland to anyone.

https://www.euronews.com/2026/01/08/danish-soldiers-would-sh...

They won't shoot at the US, but they can repress protests if that gets too far.


1) They want a new source of funding, ideally one they develop on their own (e.g. a mining and refining industry), to maintain their welfare state. It's a preference of theirs, not something imposed on them by the evil Danes.

Finding a new "buddy" to replace Denmark makes no sense. Why would they want to swap their dependence on a country which likes its welfare state (and is demonstrably good at administering it) for one which takes a notoriously dim view on such things?

2) Greenland becoming independent implies changing the borders of the kingdom of Denmark. That obviously requires a decision by parliament, no way around it.

Anyone interested in the facts can see the law in question here:

https://www.lovtidende.dk/api/pdf/125052

It would obviously not exist if Denmark was hellbent on denying Greenland its independence. All it does is lay out an orderly and straightforward process for the transition.


Factually, I agree with you on both points. Like from the rule of law perspective.

Statistically you are right, but in practice I would be cautious. I'm betting on the fact that a mad world is going to be even more mad (I couldn't imagine US threatening to invade Denmark... though I understand the US opportunity as well).

10 years ago I would totally agree with you.

So let's see.


You are insane


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