The US or Trump can’t switch off your chips or your networking equipment on a whim - and if they ever designed hardware that could do that, no one would buy such hardware as soon as that capability became known. Using cloud software is a much bigger risk - your access can be turned off anytime and data access is part of the deal.
Sovereignty is not about building everything yourself. Division of labor advances civilization, but it doesn’t have to come at the cost of sovereignty. Sovereignty is about designing the work contract such that you don’t become entirely beholden to another party. You build hardware for me, but after that it’s mine, not yours. I trust you to build the hardware to fulfill that contract, and if you ever break that trust I’ll find someone else to build that hardware. That’s sovereignty. I don’t have to build everything myself.
What you are missing is that, unlike US citizens, Europeans don't hesitate to fire their political parties. New parties will appear and take the power. The republicans from Sarkozy were swiftly replaced by Rennaisance by Macron, a party with just ten years of life.
Even more, Sarcozy was jailed later by corruption, a symptom of a healthy democracy that US should try sometime (It would fix a lot of the current and future US problems).
Jumping in the Trump circus in Europe one year ago, maybe could work; now it equals to political suicide after Greenland, the Middle East mess and the more and more obvious symptoms of Trump's dementia and disgusting behaviour. Definitely didn't worked for Elon in the past Germany elections. European politicians are very aware of this, currently.
The elections in Hungary are probably ultra-rigged at this point, but we will see if Vance performing as guest comedian for the pro-Russian party Fidesz will help Orban (or Vance) in the long term.
I continue to be amazed at American capital allocation. $17M for an idea to improve Git? For a fraction of that money Ukrainian housewives build anti-drone air defence systems in their garage that protect their country. For that kind of money you could build an apartment block to ease the housing shortage. You could invest in electricity resilience and build mini nuclear power plants or a small wind farm. Soviet capital allocation: while they were pouring money into their space program and building the "biggest baddest military helicopters" there wasn't enough bread in grocery stores.
It’s 17m for a tool which hopes to serve companies and charge money and make more than 17m in profit as a result.
If you look at the set of dev tooling, teams will frequently pay many hundreds per dev on things like CI, Git tools, code review, etc.
And to be fair, GitHub is really quite bad for a lot of workflows. I haven’t used gitbutler, but my team pays ~$30 a month per dev for tools which literally just provide a nicer interface for stacking PRs, because it saves us WAY more than that in time.
This isn’t even an egregious example of VC, it’s just an enterprise dev tooling bet.
So it's gambling that they can extract money from open source project, by repackaging most of the existing features through a nice UX and hope business gamble their tech stack on it.
But that’s not what VCs are doing. They’re not buying software that saves time. They’re betting on a teams ability to extract rent from a market through monopolistic practices like vendor lock-in. The most profitable software companies like Microsoft don’t make the most time saving software, in fact most of Microsoft’s offerings are garbage (ahem Teams) compared to alternatives. But Microsoft makes the most money due to marketing and distribution not because they make “time saving” software.
After a decade of negative interest, there is still a lot of excess capital looking for high-risk-high-gain investments. Perceived future economic value is unfortunately not in the stuff we know and understand to be useful, essential.
Use value != sales value; hype sells.
Ps. not too sure how far $17M gets you toward mini nuclear power plants, but I catch your drift.
You'd have thought the same about all the big tech companies when they were startups. Yet now they're making piles of money and contributing to America's overall economic success.
Just some numbers ~1.5M housing units are built in the US with an approx cost of $300k - $400k. That is $450B to $600B going into housing units construction every year.
On the other hand VC has maybe $1T AUM in the US. Maybe 10%-20% of that is deployed every year? So $100b to $200B.
What is wrong with that ratio? Could there be better solutions to make more housing cheaper? (lower regulations, efficient permitting, etc)
Money moving from VC to housing seems without a first principled approach on what problem your solving and how is silly.
The problem is they’re pouring insane amounts of money into non-problems. I use Git every day. There’s no problem with Git. Real problems that people suffer with everyday like healthcare and housing and even defense are doing so pitifully and we’re spending $17M on improving Git? If you don’t see the ridiculousness you really are in a bubble.
The worst part about what I see here is the inequity or imbalance of what we're seeing about where money gets allocated, and the material effects of what that inequity brings about. It's not "I have a good idea and a great team" it's "I am X, or know Y" and... ugh.
There's gobs of amazing technology being built by people who just love to build, have great ideas, and huge talent (now exponentially compounded by LLM assistance, even) -- and 99% of it is ignored by people with $$ and none of them will be paid to work on these things -- let alone get funded to build a business around them -- and the reason isn't the inadequacy of the technology or "lack of a workable business plan": it's lack of social connections or pedigree.
And what this tells me is two things
1. there's a fundamentally sickness to the VC culture coming out of Silicon Valley and it's gotten worse not better with the new restraints in the post-ZIRP era. It's an echo chamber and a social circle, not a means for creating new profitable companies or good infrastructure, and it serves mainly just to feed a pipeline of acquisitions into much bigger fish rather than building tomorrow's new businesses or ideas. This is very different from 80s, 90s tech culture that I grew up in.
2. there's clearly a desperate need for more actual incubators or labs for actual technology, paying people to build "good stuff" independent of the vagaries of what VCs and their ivy league friends are able to pitch.
Frankly: The $$ out there in heavy circulation has been mostly corrosive, not helpful.
But then again, for a fraction of the money US-Americans pay for health insurance, we actually have public health insurance here...
Yes, we have higher taxes, yes, we pay more in social security... but in the end we have far less "Working Poor" and I know very, very, very, very few people who have more than 1 job.
But I guess that's just socialist bullshit.
What I am trying to convey is: The US lives in its own bubble, just like the rest of us does.
The difference is that the US hears the US propaganda and the rest of us heard the US propaganda for decades as well, through Hollywood and media.
Europe is far from perfect though. In all the three countries I'm familiar with (UK, Sweden, Spain) the healthcare system is really struggling. Extremely long wait times are becoming more common, for more procedures, even in the emergency departments.
But the taxes remain very high, especially on income so it hits middle-class professionals the hardest. In some countries like Spain (and increasingly Sweden) they are contributing to a high structural unemployment, especially youth unemployment, too.
So in the end, the problem isn't just higher taxes, but higher unemployment and therefore lower gross salaries (before those higher taxes are even taken into account).
I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment. We are definitely heading in the wrong direction. It's the same development here (not UK, Sweden or Spain)
I'm paying maximum social security and in previous generations the service you got in the public healthcare system was way better.
For some procedures I definitely go to private doctors as well nowadays. It's not a huge burden, but e.g. I will never go to a public skin doctor ever. The stories you hear about them are... brrr!
But overall the system is still miles ahead of the one in the United States.
I've been there on multiple occasions and witnessed first hand, I have friends there and I know both systems. (Obviously I know the European system or rather the one in my country of residence even better)
Long wait times are increasingly also a major problem in US healthcare, so I'm inclined to believe that the root causes behind wait time problems aren't related to public vs private insurance systems.
I do this at my homelab and it’s a really fun thing to do. Collect old laptops and install Linux or Tart for macOS and suddenly you have a fleet of computing power equivalent to paying thousands to AWS. Building reliability and failover is actually a fun engineering problem, use CockroachDB and RustFS. Adding capacity is just about scouting for second hand ewaste.
And this is also why all institutions rot over time. When the original experts and founders are gone, only the codified superficial knowledge remains. The result is bureaucracy coasting on the resources and reputation built by the original founders. Works until it encounters real problems that are not solved by superficial rules.
Right.. Countless times I see people struggle with something then complain about the fact that nobody wrote anything down ahead to hand hold them through the problem. As if the old experts would've known to write that. And often times they did write stuff, but it either wasn't read or it ran into this issue of instruction being incapable of transmitting everything you actually need.
There's another perspective on this, which is that the entire function of mature corporations is to codify what's needed to perform certain functions mechanistically, eliminating the need for expertise. Sure, you might have product development or R&D but they're not part of the daily customer-facing function of the corporation.
That's why when private equity buys a company, the first thing they often do is shut down any new product development or R&D. They want to run the machine and extract profit from what it does now - a cash cow - without taking risks on changing a working model. In this model, new product development is for startup ventures, not mature companies whose DNA doesn't tend to be a good fit for it anyway.
tl;dr: What you're describing is the system working as designed and intended. For better or worse.
Absolutely agree. And this is why America cannot simply bring outsourced industries like manufacturing back. Expertise is built through hard-won experience and there is no easy way to transfer or replicate it. And this is why the best forms of instruction are akin to apprenticeship. You can’t teach expertise through a book, but you can guide a person to develop their own expertise and speed up the process.
This seems to be a negative form of American exceptionalism. If Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China and Vietnam can do it, what is it about the USA that makes you think the USA cannot do it. At the very least we could bring experts from other countries in to demonstrate, teach, etc.
Manufacturing in the USA is slowly improving.
"The Manufacturing PMI® registered 52.7 percent in March, a 0.3-percentage point increase compared to the reading of 52.4 percent in February. The overall economy continued in expansion for the 17th month in a row."
> The obvious way to do this is to just give the agent a real filesystem. Most harnesses solve this by spinning up an isolated sandbox and cloning the repo. We already use sandboxes for asynchronous background agents where latency is an afterthought, but for a frontend assistant where a user is staring at a loading spinner, the approach falls apart. Our p90 session creation time (including GitHub clone and other setup) was ~46 seconds.
Am I the only one who read this and thought this is fucking insane? Who in their right mind would even consider spinning up a virtual machine and cloning a repo on every search query? And if all you need is a real filesystem why would you emulate a filesystem on top of a database (Chroma)? If you need a filesystem just use an actual filesystem! This sounds like insane gymnastics just to fit a “serverless” workflow. 850,000 searches a month (less than 1 request per second) sounds like something a single raspberry pi or Mac Mini could handle.
It’s far more difficult to replace a data center than to replace transformers. Ukraine’s electricity grid has been under attack for years and manages to replace and rebuild transformers and restore power within hours.
For the first time in history we are seeing multiple signals of USD losing its #1 position to EUR, all within the last year :
1. Euro-denominated interest rate derivatives (IRD) overtook US dollar-denominated contracts in the over-the-counter (OTC) market for the first time in history and the scale of the crossover is staggering.
2. EUR Real Effective Exchange Rate (REER) which measures actual purchasing power (not nominal price) is going in the opposite direction of USD real purchasing power (RTWEXBGS). 2025/2026 is the largest divergence in history: 10 percentage points in a year.
3. US treasuries is no longer a number 1 foreign reserve asset. EUR reserves grew 2.5x faster than USD reserves when measured in its own absolute terms.
Unlike the Eurozone which maintains a fiscally responsible budget with reasonable debt and a trade surplus, there is simply no foreseeable fix to the problem of ballooning US debt and trade deficits. Nothing can fix the US budget mess.
Anyone who is paying attention to the numbers would certainly have more confidence in EUR over USD.
Sovereignty is not about building everything yourself. Division of labor advances civilization, but it doesn’t have to come at the cost of sovereignty. Sovereignty is about designing the work contract such that you don’t become entirely beholden to another party. You build hardware for me, but after that it’s mine, not yours. I trust you to build the hardware to fulfill that contract, and if you ever break that trust I’ll find someone else to build that hardware. That’s sovereignty. I don’t have to build everything myself.
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