The problem with the European independence story is, that it seems Mistral runs its own stuff also on US cloud act affected infrastructure. This makes them a very weird value proposition: If I accept a level of "independence" whereby I run on AWS or Azure, I could as well pay for Anthropic or GPT to have SOTA performance.

If I do not accept that level of independence but want more, I need to buy what's on OVH, Scaleway, Ionos etc. or host my own, but that usually means even smaller, worse models or a lot of investment.

Nevertheless, the "band" that Mistral occupies for economic success is very narrow. Basically just people who need independence "on paper" but not really. Because if I'm searching for actual independence, there's no way I could give them money at the moment for one of their products and it making sense, cause none of their plans are an actual independence-improvement over, let's say, Amazon Bedrock.

I really really want to support them, but it must make economic sense for my company, too, and it doesn't.

I don’t care about the servers, they are a comodity already.

The key is to avoid chantage, remember Oracle with DBs, people learned not to build on top of unreplaceable stuff

They are building their own infra - south of Paris and another one was announced in Sweden recently.

Then why does their list of subprocessors list Google and Microsoft "for cloud infrastructure", specifically for "Le Chat, La Plateforme, Mistral Code"? Sounds to me as if they're mainly running on Azure.

Also, they're listing CoreWeave as inference provider in "EEA" area, but CoreWeave is of course also an US company. Even if they have their data center physically in the EU, it must be considered open access for the USA due to the CLOUD act.

https://trust.mistral.ai/subprocessors

If what you say is true, they have a communications problem and they need to fix that urgently. Right now, this is why they don't get my business. Others will have made the same decision based on their own subprocessor list.

Or did you mean, they're like, right now building it and plan to move there, but it's not up yet?

They are not up yet. The Paris one is expected in 2028, the one in Sweden in 2027.

My wife used to fall for every Firefly season 2 hoax on social media in the past because she wished it to be true. It was very funny when I could come to her to announce there will be a season 2.

Mixed feelings about it being animated. The older I become, the more I have trouble relating to painted characters, no real clue why, so I couldn't even enjoy things I should have enjoyed like Arcane.

Also, of course, no Shepherd Book :-(

Anyway, I hope I'll like it. Really loved season 1.

They can probably get a Shepherd Book voice actor much easier than a Ron Glass doppelgänger for a live show.

With AI they good probably replicate it perfectly. For good and bad.

Just bad imo. No reason to do that when there are many talented voice actors out there who will do just fine.

The way I see it: I'd rather have animated characters than everyone looking like a fossil. Really put a damper on Star Wars Ep. 7 for me (among other things), but Harrison Ford didn't look or feel like Han Solo. I'm glad they're not doing the played-out "aging crew" trope with Firefly. If it's animated, the characters can still run as far and jump as high as they could 20 years ago.

I just call it "The Season" because there was no Season II.

There wasn't even a whole season 1 :(

> will be

This is just an announcement that they want to make it. Nobody has signed up to make even the pilot. It's not even a kickstarter.

Just talked with a colleague and we used this as example where vibe coding is already brain draining people.

Exactly. Guess what: I've been on Apple for 26 years. iOS 26 is already a shit show, the new Watch OS even more so, and never ever will I allow it to update my main work platform, my Macbook Pro, to something which promises to be even worse.

Hmm, I second this. Haven't compared Qwen3.5 122B yet, but played around with OpenCode + Qwen3-Coder-Next yesterday and did manual comparisons with Claude Code and Claude Code is still far ahead in general felt "intelligence quality".

There were times when we couldn't await to upgrade to the next Mac OS version. Tahoe is not one of those versions.

Already iOS 26 made me consider switching to Android, and now I've pondered returning to Linux after 26 years on Mac OS. Bizarrely, right now it's the quality of the hardware alone holding me at Mac OS. Wouldn't have expected that 6 or 7 years ago.

Sick of the forced UI refreshes and "modern" designs. Will Apple understand again this is where I work and basically live in and not some kind of entertainment system where I need design refreshes so it feels all shiny and new?

Some things sound very clever in your head until you say them aloud.

It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt

Next step: Start Chrome in emulated X86CSS and start X86CSS in emulated Chrome.

One of the major problems of MySQL and its many derivatives is the splintering of the ecosystem.

Would rather prefer people would cooperate on ONE fork, e.g. get your extension framework integrated into MariaDB or something.

> This assumes the code you wrote is already correct and giving the correct answer, so why bother writing tests?

It catches regressions. Which is the one thing where such semi-automated testing is most useful in my eyes.

No clue though why they gave it that weird "expect" name. Basically, it's semi-automated regression testing.

Expect is a classic Unix testing utility. So naming it expect gives it a connection to that heritage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expect

Hmm, yes, I know that one and one of the reasons why I considered the naming weird. Original Tcl expect is rather automation than testing in the slot in my mind it occupies, even if it maybe could be (badly) used as a testing tool.