I am fascinated by lisp but only had the time to mess with clojure for about a year.
My weird take is that lisp would have a better shot if one would replace the parentheses with square brackets. It might just be me but the round parenthesis make it visually painful to look at code blocks. I feel square brackets would fix that.
What should worry everybody is the big picture (trying to abstract from politics, ideologies and specific situation). In recent years we had:
- Europe is now at war with Russia (neighbor)
- Its relationship with the US is rapidly deteriorating (main partner, de facto protector)
- Its relationship with China is also rapidly deteriorating
- It is getting very antagonistic with it own citizen and some individual member countries (such as Hungaria or Romania recently)
So there are a lot of justifications in each case but the overall picture is worrisome. You can't be antagonistic with everyone.
There is a reason why the North Korean regime is still around, they never forgot they need to keep a good relationship with at least one powerful ally.
Exactly, the entire AI industry has been trying to create an AI powered security arm race. I am not necessarily blaming them.
Hard to know how much has been thrown into this but I would bet a lot.
So far I have been very surprised we haven't been flooded by those type of announcements. If you look you will always find something and OpenBSD is the top price.
> Also, EU countries in Eastern Europe do already have a high military spending, and even Western European countries are improving.
I would really challenge that idea that increasing military spending will create a solid and useful military force.
Most of the money you inject within the military industrial complex is wasted and stolen. At some point it can become counterproductive, we can see it with the US military where recently Iran’s $30k shahed drone destroys $300M US radars.
Note that today's politician never state goals in practical military terms but rather in billions and trillions spent. So they are always victorious.
I do not remember Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte or Genghis Khan stating their objectives in terms of money spent.
The head of the executive is elected, that makes quite a big difference.
> You’re missing the point I’m making, which is about how „democratic“ is a nuanced spectrum.
Yes and some have the right to argue that China is a democracy. They do have a lot of elections.
And the CCP has a very broad spectrum of ideas and politics within it, in fact much broader than the people you will find in the EU Commission.
In the end it is about how much you perceive the common will is represented and served by the regime in place. Chat Control has openly gone against it for years and is being shove down our throat.
And there is a reason why farmers have been driving their tractors to Brussels from all over Europe for decades. The trip ain't cheap.
The way the EU is designed has nothing to do with the US or France. First the Parliament and Council (the bodies democratically elected) do not have power of legislative initiative.
Then the Commission, which is a "super" executive power, is not democratically elected. Unlike France or the US (the two you mentioned).
The EU has an architecture that is fundamentally different from the US or French system. In many way it is actually closer to something like the UN or PRC.
One of the very dangerous side effect of this is it pushes a lot of people out of the ability to own a decent car legally. The camera, AI chip and all supporting electronic supporting it will raise the price of the entry level Dacia (a Dacia Spring is already more than 15k euros). So people will keep old cars as long as they can.
You already see a lot of people driving very old car in Europe (20 - 30 years old). For those it becomes hard and often expensive to pass a yearly technical inspection. I believe without the mandatory technical inspection most insurers won't cover you, so why even pay for it?
If you get in an accident with someone like this, who has its back against the wall legally there is a good chance they will just run away and you might not get the emergency life saving attention that you need.
In my experience most of the electronic that appeared in the last 20 years is highly unreliable. I only had problems with it on premium german cars.
On a new car I remember I was so blocked by the problems that I would literately turn off and on the car every dozen of kms on the highway at cruising speed to "reboot" the "computer". For a few second you loose all power steering and most of the breaking.
I had to do that for a few years because the car maker had no idea how to fix it.
I was told by Brussels insiders a few decades ago the Commission people are not really corruptible. They are guaranteed a very comfortable life and the sanctions are harsh. That might have change, I don't know.
What I was explained is the system is designed for lobbying. The main input is by the lobbies, not the people.
Most of us assume the EU is designed like the US system or individual countries like Germany, Italy or France but it is not. The power of the Parliament is very limited, but we see here that little power has become too much of an inconvenience for the people in power.
For anyone daring to look into the boring design of that thing will come to the conclusion it is absolutely not democratic.
I found Hister a few month ago and was amazed by it.
Now for many of us the browser extension approach is not possible (mobile usage, security, etc.)
My feeling is for a lot of users there is really a third way apart from the MiTM proxy or Browser extension approach. I actually do not want my "personal" / "logged in" pages to be indexed. This is a bit like the MS recall nightmare (self hosted version).
Any way to get the list of URL visited (with something like Privoxy, or maybe one of those popular ad blockers like Pi Hole but I guess they just get DNS queries?) and then importing it with some filtering rules with a nightly batch job is good enough for a lot of people.
The browser import [1] is great but I guess hard to use with mobile...
> SearXNG is my daily internet search now +5 years
Same here
> with YaCY Backends and else as fallback.
Do you run your own "super fast" YaCy instance? or with specific settings?
My experience with YaCy is it doesn't fit in the backend of SearX since YaCy kind of slowly stream results for about 30 seconds...
I also have a local `kiwix-serve` serving ZIM files of wikipedia, wiktionary, gutemberg, archwiki, etc. but same problem the kiwix search engine [0] doesn't really fit as a backend for SearX as it returns too many results and pollute the SearX result page.
What I haven't done yet is trying to plug SearX to a local Recoll instance [1]. But Recoll doesn't support indexing ZIM files... but could be useful for other archived html documents.
I would be curious to know more about a working setup since search is hard to get right.
- First you get the idea, framework and influence from academic "centers", foundations and Think Tanks in the US.
- Then you have the lobbying from Big Tech and specialized firms (content scan, censorship, moderation and everything "compliance") from the US, France, Israel, etc.
- Last most of your politicians are largely interested in the system to be kept in place at any cost. So mass surveillance might be the difference between a comfy life and the pitchfork in medium or long term.
> 1. use "giant polluting AI data centers" in the US or China
> 2. build "giant polluting AI data centers" in the EU
> 3. do without modern technology
I think we need to start brainstorming on options 4 and 5.
Option 2 doesn't make any sense. Europe do not have any strategic advantage here, not the cheap energy, it actually doesn't have the money and it doesn't really have any strong enough capabilities in the hardware or software (yes I know about somes like ASML and open source software). Plus the price of RAM is out of control now.
Usually when you are at a strategic disadvantage you need to start thinking out of the box, or bet on the next thing. AI and "The Cloud" are not gonna be the last technology frontiers, in many ways it might be yesterday bet. It is like buying a stock close to the peak of a bubble.
The Taiwanese did not try to compete with Toyota in the 80s, they created TSMC.
Of course do not expect the EU bureaucrats to do be able to do any out of the box thinking.
My weird take is that lisp would have a better shot if one would replace the parentheses with square brackets. It might just be me but the round parenthesis make it visually painful to look at code blocks. I feel square brackets would fix that.