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Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

politico.eu

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Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#421

Post by baud147258 »

thamer wrote: post #14

It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful service by an American company. Qwant[1], launched as "The French Google" with a focus on privacy, serves 10 million searches a day (a ridiculously small number). No one has heard of it, no one uses it, and it's another project with a dream of restoring France to…

Though Bull doesn't exist anymore as independent company.

I did an internship there (before it was bought, in 2012), the river of public money had mostly dried up and I felt like the company didn't really knew what to do, even if there was some nifty tech being developed here and there.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#422

Post by davedx »

dukeyukey wrote: post #326
davedx wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah in the Netherlands here, and I’ve spent some time recently integrating a German fintech vendor. The cross of new and modern and old beurocratic way of doing things has been almost dystopian and really slowed everything down. Contrast to similar vendors in the UK is quite something.

Can you go into more details on this? I've only worked closely with UK/USA companies and I'm really interested how they compare to German/French ways of doing things. Does the Netherlands more closely align to the Uk/USA on this?

Germans have a lot of legal requirements, red tape, old ways of doing things. Netherlands and UK are more streamlined, more parts of govt and daily life are digital, bank systems are more modern.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#423

Post by CountSessine »

joelbluminator wrote: post #394
afr0ck wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should really reconsider your assumptions about server scaling and AWS business in general. AWS builds truely complex and ahead-of-time distributed systems that humans could never build before because of lack of knowledge and concentrated efforts. Distributed systems are really hard and not very well understood and algorithms are immensly complex and even harder to to engineer espeically on AWS scale. See DynamoD…

The main business in AWS is not DynamoDB. I'm not even sure what it is without checking, and seems like people hosting on Google / Microsoft / other big corp can do without. Nor does Europe need to copy 100% of AWS's feature set.

And ASML has competition as well in Canon and Nikon, although they’re ahead of them in EUV.

Are you an EE? Or a Physicist? I’m wondering why you’ve shrouded ASML in such a golden halo? They’re a company doing basic research in solid state physics, but there are a lot of companies like that.

And the issue here isn’t EU vs US - it’s private vs public industry. ASML is a private company that was spun off of Siemens. Building any kind of a successful venture that actual produces real value is hard - private and public. But public ventures have more money and can’t weed out failures as aggressively as the tough justice of the market.

We’ll have to see how this Gaia-X turns out, but I’m not optimistic.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#424

Post by Axsuul »

joelbluminator wrote: post #308
Pedrit0 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe those you can meet in Europe... But on Hacker News, Europe is (most of the time) a laughing stock for Americans.

As I said, not the last few years... there are things U.S did great. Building a sustainable, democratic society isn't one of them.

America's diversity is its biggest challenge.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#425

Post by FrojoS »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #238
gspr wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the two first points are more specific to Germany than to the old world as a whole. Up here in Scandinavia, we often laugh at how much Germans interact with humans, send letters and faxes, and make phonecalls in their business lives. They are woefully far behind. From what I understand the same is true for the south. While I agree with the basic premise of the last point too I think you maybe underestimate th…

It's not just Germany though. The UK is absolutely obsessed with making phone calls. Lots and lots of completely useless phone calls. Most of them could easily be replaced by an online booking system. Others serve no purpose at all, because all that's required is for them to take some action. Same with US corporations. I recently tried to sign up for Microsoft's partner network because that's required for an Office 3…

Same in Switzerland. Ordering mechanical components without a phone call or at least email exchange is often impossible. In some ways that's useful, you get free expert consultancy, but sometimes I feel like they almost don't want to sell their stuff. Like you need to ask an employee just to get the price. And even then they often can't tell you immediately.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#426

Post by allendoerfer »

hackissimo123 wrote: post #167
allendoerfer wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not shielding their market, putting everything behind a firewall, requiring joint ventures. Instead they actually respect human rights and the power of law. They don’t even use a non-latin language.

I think the residents of Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and the entirety of central and eastern Europe (except Romania) would be surprised to hear that they don't speak a Latin language.

German might not be a Latin language, but has very obvious roots there. Which are btw. more apparent than in English, because the grammar has not been simplified yet. I suspect the way to learn both languages is not that different. It also has to be way easier if you already know a similiar language, which was my point.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#427

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

ardy42 wrote: post #415
gspr wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the two first points are more specific to Germany than to the old world as a whole. Up here in Scandinavia, we often laugh at how much Germans interact with humans, send letters and faxes, and make phonecalls in their business lives. They are woefully far behind. From what I understand the same is true for the south. While I agree with the basic premise of the last point too I think you maybe underestimate th…

> Up here in Scandinavia, we often laugh at how much Germans interact with humans, send letters and faxes, and make phonecalls in their business lives. They are woefully far behind. From what I understand the same is true for the south. I wouldn't necessarily call it "being ahead" to embrace increased isolation from other human beings.

It's not about the isolation. It's about enabling absurd business models by all sorts of outsourcing, promising to simplify, but in reality complicating things by having to implement all sorts of intrusive anti-fraud checks, because anything automatic can and will be defrauded. Which in turn leads to misery of all involved legit parties, loss of quality of life, by being reduced to some cog in some machine. Oh, of course jobs! The bullshit ones. With the exception of the few at the top.

/me snorts...

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#428

Post by buboard »

heipei wrote: post #164

As a German who's been exclusively working in the US tech space for the past few years, there's so many anecdotes that come to mind to highlight how far behind the old world is, both in tech as in spirit: - Article about Gaia-X in major German newspaper FAZ explained that on AWS you can spin up your own infrastructure, "sometimes even without talking to anyone from sales", from your home! - When I tried to read or wa…

What bugs me more about the EU "tech" sector is the reliance on public and EU sector money. Making "something people want" will still make you less money, you won't be able to scale it up properly, and pretty much anything risky is illegal.

On the other hand, completely mediocre companies can survive and even thrive by applying for every kind of EU subsidy and getting money from overpriced bureaucratic contracts that they overpromised and underdelivered.

Every EU endeavour, be it GDPR, research grants, or this one aims to primarily increase bureaucracy so more do-nothing jobs can be created.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#429

Post by benhurmarcel »

jlangenauer wrote: post #268
thecleaner wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech salaries in Europe really are a joke. Even American companies don't pay well here because why would they, the market itself sucks. Combine that with easy immigration to US for Europeans and good affordable education it seems unlikely that talented people would choose to stay here. Part of the reason is the old money in this ecosystem. The problem with digitization in Germany specifically is that our paperwork is…

Despite what you may think, there isn't some nefarious conspiracy keeping tech salaries low in Europe. It's that this is where the market is, an equilibrium between supply and demand for engineers. It's precisely the same reason that salaries in certain US markets are so high: FAANG don't pay high salaries because they have fundamentally decided that engineers should be paid X amount, nor because someone has read Mar…

> the median salary for engineers outside the NY and the Bay Area is something like $100k, not the stratospheric packages often discussed here

$100k is €88k. As an engineer in Europe I'd consider that very high. Not sure I'll earn that much even at end of career.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#430

Post by 121789 »

namdnay wrote: post #141
enriquto wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A junior developer cannot at all afford renting an appartment in Paris with his basis salary. For other jobs outside of software, it is even worse.

> A junior developer cannot at all afford renting an appartment in Paris with his basis salary To be fair, that's the same in London or SF :)

a junior developer in SF can pretty easily afford to rent their own apartment straight out of university. most won't, but they could.
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