Fusion is a number of dollars away, not years. It gets almost no funding because it’sa science and engineering experiment that most likely will not lead to economically viable power plants in a market dominated by renewables.
My impression back then from those profs was that it (fusion) would be inevitable but you do have to think long term, really long term. I'm old enough now (55) to understand that mentality.
I'd put money on something useful fusion related happening within the next 10 years or perhaps 20. I'm not up on the current state of experiments etc but it will happen.
AFAIK superconductors are a major limiting tech. But we are slowly getting better ones, both by discovering more and by learning to mass produce superconducting wire.
With superconductors you can make magnetic bottles.
There’s also some interesting inertial confinement work happening. There the limiter is both confinement and the efficiency of the driver. Look up MagLIF for a hybrid magnetic inertial approach under study.
... and room temperature superconductors! If only we could sort out the feasibility, interdependencies, and priorities, but we just don't know, or well, I just don't know haha.
My biggest issue with Europe is not that we work less. I lived in the US for a while, and I can confirm they stay longer in the office but get the same amount done.
My biggest issue is that we have focused for too long on managing (regulating) and redistributing wealth instead of creating new sources of wealth.
We are obsessed with slicing and controlling the pie instead of creating new ones for everybody.
That mindset might cost us the future of our children.
Is there a point where enough (per capita) wealth has been created? Where there is enough pie to go around for everyone, and we have no need to create more pies?
I am sure we can all argue about where that point is, but I wonder if we agree that there is such a point? Or do we have to keep increasing our wealth forever?
You are right. European civil society does not reward initiative and so its political class chooses to mislead than bring clarity. Work is not rewarded.
From recent events, I like giving example of Deutschland Ticket. The German transport minister during 2020/2021 took a huge political risk of challenging existing system, made life much more easier for normal person. What happened to his political career? The guy is nowhere to be seen.
I think because most people, even tech savvy ones don’t understand how this might effect their lives. It’s too abstract. At least how it’s portrayed here.
Contrast that with chat control.
My government can read my WhatsApp messages? Not good!
The non-technical narrative is very simple: Google, Apple, or the German government can revoke your ID at any time. You cannot purchase or sell anything[1], sign any contracts, have a job, rent an apartment, use public transportation, or receive any kind of government services without an ID. This should sound extremely alarming to everyone regardless of technical knowledge.
[1] Maybe with cash, for now, but cash is clearly not long for this world, and your bank account will be inaccessible already.
It also makes you sound like a conspiracy theory nutjob, and the current political climate in Europe is such that people are really sensitive to this sort of alarmist messaging (which they erroneously perceive as fascist rhetoric) and will not listen to you because they don't want to be associated with those people.
I don't think we can win this fight. Personally I tried to advocate against eIDAS in Austria and I've had negative success. After my warnings, people like it more.
I feel like if you frame it against the Americans you might have more success? Given this implementation is fully Google/Apple-based. Then it's not "conspiracy theory" but "something that is literally happening and in the news already", where you can point to the Europeans who were sanctioned by the US. But after demonstrating the American threat is real, it is also important to turn around and ask whether your own government should have that much power either, and for what benefit do you stand to gain by giving them that much? For those people who think you sound like a fascist nutjob, I would ask: you might be okay with the current government having this power, but will it still be okay if the FPÖ comes to have this power?
But then again, maybe there is nothing that can be done. It boggles my mind that even on HN most people are defending this. It seems like freedom is a completely lost cause.
If you live in Europe you should care for the EU: not only it's the reason why there hasn't been a war for 80+ years, but if we can have a voice on the international stage it's because we are united instead of 27 small independent countries.
US dependency did bring a lot of value to a lot (albeit not all) of Europeans in past, specifically 1938-1988.
If you were born, raised and lived in that timespan, you might have developed a deep seated and hard to break habit to rely on that dependency for security and lifestyle/wealth.
Also, that same lifestyle is based on ignoring externalities applied to commons and/or events happening “somewhere else”, even when factually proven.
Little wonder and tiny bit ironic that the same principle has embedded itself so deeply, that it holds true even when the damage is inward, just a few indirections away.
On your side, yes, I think that “people in Europe” intuitively understand that, it just needs time to blossom.
The reputation/trust damage self inflicted by the current US administration is triggering a pushback that will expand into the future.
As a point in case, it will lead to reconsidering assumptions on habits that many generations of US businesses and diplomats have built.
Many in this thread point at difference instances of services that should be decoupled.
Connecting the dots, the larger picture looks painfully obvious to me: Silicon Valley never was a partner to be trusted, and certainly not after they built or bent every business to rely on an ad ecosystem that exploits users.
That original sin, on which a huge portion of Wall Street rests, is now at the center of discussions.
Hence, the EU will build tools to address this because it has to, but consumers will flock to them especially from the US, since at this point no one can trust SV companies on data privacy (since Snowdens at least), no one can trust the US administration to protect citizens (since Trump at least), and about half of the US is scared about what’s going on deeply enough (the emotional push needed to break the habit).
They will move their data it the EU (where else? China?).
This will be compounded by the fact that everyone tries to build better LLMs and to get AGI, while forgetting that LLMs work on data pipelines.
> The reputation/trust damage self inflicted by the current US administration is triggering a pushback that will expand into the future.
This barely even seems like the relevant part. If Google was founded in Japan and Apple in Brazil, it would still be foolish to entrench them as a dependency. It would barely even be better to do it with a local company.
> They will move their data it the EU (where else? China?).
This feels like hopium. Network effects are powerful and as long as the internet is actually global, there are really only two options: 1) Centralized megacorps, and then the US ones have both the US apparatus behind them and the incumbency advantage, or 2) open protocols where no corporation of any nation is a gatekeeper.
So for Europeans to get the hooks of the US incumbents out of them, their best chance by far is the second one, and that one is also mostly to the advantage of the Americans who aren't the existing incumbents, which is why it works. Start making phones with open hardware and social networks with open protocols and you can get people outside of your own country to use them because they don't much like the incumbents either, and that's how you reclaim the network effect. Try to clone the US megacorps without the US apparatus to get them established in other countries and they don't because they're wary of foreign central control, which in turn means you don't get the network effect and you lose.
But then it's not so much that data ends up in "the EU" as that it's on your own device and then backed up or distributed as encrypted chunks in a distributed network which isn't tied to any specific jurisdiction.
Relying on open protocols to make all the difference is much more potent hopium than what GP wrote.
Open protocols are kind of thing techies do when in cooperative mode, when industry isn't looking. But this is not this kind of problem - this is an economic, geopolitical problem. It's not about your local school moving off Windows to Linux, it's about the European corporations moving off Azure to some other cloud solution offered by European corporations (do we even have any?).
I'll grant it, the turmoil of such transitions is a perfect moment for pushing for open protocols, federated solutions, etc. - the industry is distracted, there's more space to sneak in some good solution before everyone notices, and EU has cultural and political tradition of pushing towards FLOSS (even if largely just as an alternative to Microsoft) and associated values/memetic complex. But open anything won't save the day - more corporations will.
It's a blind spot for some software folks, because they forget that FLOSS is an exception here; everything else in the real world - including computing hardware and supporting power and network infrastructure - plays by rules of market economy, with proprietary solutions and clear structures of ownership.
It makes no sense to try and fight this here - but it does make sense to go along with the flow and improve things by pushing for more globally optimal solutions, especially that EU is known to be favorable to using openness in protocols and standards as a policy vehicle, both internally and externally.
> It's not about your local school moving off Windows to Linux, it's about the European corporations moving off Azure to some other cloud solution offered by European corporations (do we even have any?).
But why is it about that? Why isn't it about e.g. governments in Europe funding the development of Linux virtualization so that it's simple to buy some hardware, put it in the back office and have an interface to it which is as easy for people to use as the incumbent cloud providers?
The vast majority of companies don't need "flexible scalability" etc. They have modest and finite loads and only ended up "in the cloud" because for ten seconds it seemed like having 100 VMs in the cloud was going to be a lot cheaper than having 100 physical servers, until it turns out that you can put those 100 VMs on two physical servers in your own possession and it costs less to do that than the cloud providers charge and then you keep control of your data and infrastructure.
> everything else in the real world - including computing hardware and supporting power and network infrastructure - plays by rules of market economy, with proprietary solutions and clear structures of ownership.
This is pretty wrong. Hardware companies sell hardware. A lot of them will try to lock you into their shitty software if you let them, but that is neither required nor desired. And some of the better ones don't, e.g. there isn't that much lock-in happening with AMD or Intel servers. We just need that to be happening for phones. And smart hardware companies can fully understand "commoditize your complement" as being in their own interest while still making a profit selling the hardware that isn't locked to any particular software.
> It makes no sense to try and fight this here
It's not clear what you're even suggesting.
Suppose you want Europeans to have access to a phone platform that isn't controlled by an American megacorp.
If they release a domestic proprietary one then other countries won't want any part of it. They don't want to be under the heel of a European megacorp any more than an American one, and indeed many will be suspicious of it and actively try to thwart adoption. And then you lose the network effect and can't get traction.
Whereas if you do something like require phone hardware to allow the user to replace the OS, and then fund development of open source phone operating systems and make sure they're required to be supported within your jurisdiction, then they can easily spread outside of your jurisdiction because people aren't nearly as suspicious and oppositional to something where you've precommitted to not putting people on the enshittification treadmill. And then everybody gets out from under the thumb of those corporations.
great counterpoint! (no i'm not an LLM, it is a actually a crucial perspective)
i especially agree with
> But open anything won't save the day - more corporations will.
i am not advocating for a pure "open source will save the world"
there are just a few points i'd like you to consider, and hopefully give me insights i can learn from
* other than code, open source has also given us governance "experiments" capable of running critical systems. As another poster was mentioning, the risk is to fallback on "big corps", usually run by "big man", and we are back to zero. The hope? expectations? is that the open source governance ecosystem has tackled this space in enough dimensions to be able to build something over this.
I am looking specifically at the area around licenses (mariadb, redis, ...) and just overall governance frameworks, as in "deteach business ownership from ethical frameworks"
* in order to build anything this big/reliable, without megacorp budgets, you can just ... pay FLOSS? They are one of the 2 majorly screwed groups by the current SV setup (with PLENTY of cavaets,amongst them that SV is a huge open soure contributor)
The other one being content creators.
Slogan? "For this to succeed, you need the best coders and the best marketing departments in the world"
Looks to me like incentives are aligned towards them being available.
Talking broadly on a systemic level: details need refinement, and space beyond this single message.
* EU (the political instituion) desperately needs this. An innovative tech ecosystem (not startup, not product) driven by "european values" that puts them on the spot. Start with redefining it: there are no users, but citizens.
Something effectively out-innovating SV, not just trying to get on par.
The risk of "being bought out/copied" doesn't really apply, since (as I said in my original comment) the discriminator is existential: US companies cannot be trusted because they built the existing system.
Any attempt to block this (stop users from getting their data back) is going to be challenged by the EU (GDPR violations cannot be brought to court by citizens, only by nation's data authorities, which means a citizen gets big guns and doesn't ned to pay).
Also, go on and explain that to all you other (US and not) users.
* A EU cloud provider doesn't have to provide the same services an US provides. That would hardly be innovative.
You also don't need to focus on corporations. Provide data storage for citizens, that will be the basis to build a privacy focus cloud, and then business might want that.
There is a possible continuation into "advantages of storage&privacy based vs compute", that i skip.
But essentially, to me it seems that an open source, true, "give me back my data" business driven initiative has never been as actionable as now.
I short, such a project can make 2 bold statements
"We are more innovative than SV"
"We have better freedoms than the US"
> But then it's not so much that data ends up in "the EU" as that it's on your own device and then backed up or distributed as encrypted chunks in a distributed network which isn't tied to any specific jurisdiction.
100%
i launched into a long trajectory from the comment i was originally answering to, and stopped short
i think-of? dream-of? try-to-build? what you just said
my "in the EU" claim is mostly around legislation (EU art 8 vs US CLOUDS act vs vs China approach to citizen's data)
the legislation is there, since GDPR
it's a matter of tools
since corps built tools, they "forgot" to add the third button on cookie banners: "give me back my data" ... (and fourth: "delete it")
but the legal framework is there, as well as most of the tooling (google takeout, and so on from all other major players)
it's not that pipelines for moving data from US corps to inidividual do not exists, it's more that, up to now, whenever i was talking about "data rights" to people, even in tech, i got yawns back
now we have a "perfect storm": distrust towards US (administration, collpasing onto US businesses) + global uncertainty towards AI (where lots of people just perceive something happening but lack any tool that gives them control over it)
this is what i perceive as a tectonic shift that can be used innovatively, by EU businesses, hopefully leveraging open
for completeness, i have indeed wrapped "EU" as the spearhead for this, given the incentives to build it, but yes, central authority over this should live inside of each citizen nation framework (see, Japan and South Korea, both providing legal frameworks for data protection)
"My government can read my XXX" also affects only a tiny percentage of people today, but due to historical precedents and a lot of history and civics lessons, everyone thinks it affects them personally.
But there is nothing abstract here. A private entity, situated in a country that is very hostile and pro-Russia, controls parts of the software stack and implementation here. That's a law written by lobbyists.
Starting 2026, Ukraine at least has restrictions on women leaving the country as well.
Women in the civil service, law enforcement agencies, or those registered in the military and serving under contract may face restrictions on traveling abroad, particularly for non-official purposes.
You mean "some women in specific situations", not women in general. 2 weeks ago my cousin's wife and her 2 daughters got in an out for my aunt's funeral, in Ukraine. She is 50 years old, former teacher, no restrictions, the daughters are in the early 20, no restrictions either.
Right, a lot of the draft law being male-only reflects a combination of the reality that, relatively speaking, not much war has been waged since the end of WW2, and that much of contemporary gender equality is still somewhat new on a historical basis. So they're really just out of date laws with not much of an impetus to update, at least until recently. The worldwide trend is pretty clearly in the direction of making service and conscription, where needed, more gender agnostic. There are still some realities that don't really change here, such as men being most useful for direct combat, so even if women are conscripted it's likely they'll still avoid much of the worst of warfare simply by virtue of not qualifying for stringent standards.
It is not like they had a choice. The article is about
1939, the events were well progressed then. Only very few were able to hide themselves and stay hidden for years.
Not sure what point you are trying to make. Does that justify the law and its consequences? Does that mean people who did not register were doing something wrong or stupid?
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