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European Tech Alternatives

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Re: European Tech Alternatives

#111

Post by [deleted] »

ph4rsikal wrote: post #94
anonymous908213 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, every person calling LLMs "agents" never had any credibility to begin with. Despite my many attempts to coerce an example out of people here, I am still waiting for one (1) singular demonstration of "agentic software" that is capable of replacing production-grade software at scale. Software created by agents that solves a real-world problem and is used by tens of thousands or millions of people. Candidate…

I build agents for banks for a living and can tell you for sure that you are wrong.

[deleted]

Re: European Tech Alternatives

#112

Post by plagiarist »

dwedge wrote: post #83
wald3n wrote: post #64

I don’t understand why Mistral gets so little recognition. They consistently have a top model on benchmarks such as LiveBench and their models are open source. Hugging Face is French, Black Forrest Labs (Stable Diffusion) is German, Weaviate is Dutch, Hetzner for IaasS. There’s AI here. Maybe hardware production is the bigger problem?

Do they? That's surprising. I saw them come up here twice for their OCR model, I tried using it on a 200 PDF that was just printed text without embedded OCR and it failed miserably - got less than tesseract and I ended up with a $5 bill. I figured Mistral was a nice idea and liked because it was a European competitor more than because it competes. I'll be happy to be wrong if it has improved

I tried the API on a coding task and it did worse than I would've hoped. Also $5. They still have a ways to go, I think.

I also use their chat pretty frequently, it seems to "misunderstand" me more often than other models. But that's free and it isn't as irritating to rephrase a question as it is backing out code changes.

I like that they have local models available, I plan to try those sometime.

Re: European Tech Alternatives

#113

Post by brabel »

shiroiuma wrote: post #92
jmchuster wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Famously, the first iPhone was actually expensive trash: no apps, no 3G, couldn't even cut and paste text. Also famously, while the tech elitists complained about all of its shortcomings, the broader consumer market fully embraced it and it single-handedly drove an entirely new generation of consumer electronics.

The consumer market embraced it despite its shortcomings because it looked nice and was easy to use; the alternatives were not. Yeah, it didn't do that much, but it did more than a flip phone. The alternatives wanted you to use a stylus just to use your phone, and tried to basically recreate the MS Windows UI on a tiny screen; their UI was terrible.

I had a flip phone at the time and it certainly did more than the iPhone, but admittedly harder to use and not as good looking.

Re: European Tech Alternatives

#114

Post by RobotToaster »

Towaway69 wrote: post #98
wafflemaker wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the whole plan with the space servers. As soon as we sort out a few problems, we're good to go. Problems: Solar flare & radiation resistance. Heat dissipation. Energy (more effective solar panels, for things as close to sun as we). Partially solved - getting to orbit. And as much as we hate musk, SpaceX might solve it once Starships start flying commercially. If we would separate energy part out and beam it so…

Wait a one minute, who owns those space Servers? The same guy who runs starlink? The one who uses that power to threaten to cut access to those who refuse to do his bidding? Come on, pull the other one, surely it can’t be that something so useful can be used as a tool for Mafia style politics.

As someone extremely sceptical of musk, I do have some hope that competition between spacex and it's Chinese competitors will make space somewhat accessible to hobbyists.

Re: European Tech Alternatives

#115

Post by brabel »

karel-3d wrote: post #35

European startups, when they are successful, will eventually end up being bought by Oracle or move to USA. Such is life.

Is Spotify US based? They did get listed on the NY Exchange but I think they are still headquartered in Sweden. Not that one example says much but if true, at least one tech giant managed to not succumb to American capital.

Re: European Tech Alternatives

#116

Post by aljaz823 »

isodev wrote: post #59
andsoitis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel sad for the 20-year-old me who really believed in the declaration of the independence of cyberspace. Cyberspace depends on physical reality and everything that comes from that. Resource constraints, economics, politics, arms races, warfare, etc.

Cyberspace promised us we can all work together to create things, like one species coming together to solve problems. Now in 2026, we need to “space” for every little tribe…

It was in no position to make such promises.

Re: European Tech Alternatives

#117

Post by Towaway69 »

RobotToaster wrote: post #114
Towaway69 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait a one minute, who owns those space Servers? The same guy who runs starlink? The one who uses that power to threaten to cut access to those who refuse to do his bidding? Come on, pull the other one, surely it can’t be that something so useful can be used as a tool for Mafia style politics.

As someone extremely sceptical of musk, I do have some hope that competition between spacex and it's Chinese competitors will make space somewhat accessible to hobbyists.

Hobbyist is another name for consumer, so yes, consumer will have access as long as they pay.

Those that can’t pay or are politically undesirables, will be excluded from the global commons of space.

My take is that the great dream of unifying humanity through the internet won’t be helped by having it run in space.

Re: European Tech Alternatives

#118

Post by Nursie »

vjk800 wrote: post #88
jimnotgym wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Using a European solution just because it’s European sounds wrong to me. That depends who you are, and what you are doing. If you have information stored such that having it in US infrastructure is a national security risk, then you might think differently. >but governments should copy some of the reasons the breeding grounds in the US and China exist. Which reasons should they copy? Massive government subsidies? L…

> Which reasons should they copy? Massive government subsidies? Large grants masquerading as defence contracts? Threatening foreign governments to force market access with taxation lower than the native businesses? Are you saying European governments should favour European companies just because they are European? The US and China pulling all this shit is exactly why the whole European alternatives thing is trending.…

I think that it's more a case of "Before Trump started threatening everyone, there were problems with using US tech but we chose to ignore them because it was too hard to do anything about it"

To my reading the US, despite the 'safe harbour' assurances, has never been somewhere that European people's data should have been sent, because we know that the US requires its companies to give access to that data on demand, usually secretly. So any assurances that data is entirely confidential are meaningless.

It's one of the reasons I was so incensed with gov.uk using google analytics and Zendesk (even though Zendesk has its origins in Denmark, it's now based in SF). Their pleadings that 'data is anonymised by google' were not reassuring at all, and it constitutes a complete record of UK citizen interactions with their own government, handed over to a US company on a silver platter.

At least now people are thinking about this stuff a bit more.

Re: European Tech Alternatives

#119

Post by Lio »

shiroiuma wrote: post #78
joshuaisaact wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of a little company called Arm Holdings? It was a travesty that the UK government let it be sold, admittedly.

UK isn't European. They made that clear when they voted for Brexit.

We are. Do you think someone dragged the whole country to new location?

Norway, Iceland and Switzerland are also not in the EU. Are they also on a different continent?

Re: European Tech Alternatives

#120

Post by Semaphor »

RobotToaster wrote: post #93
shiroiuma wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such an idea never made any real sense, and never will until you can figure out how to move IT infrastructure into a separate dimension where governments have no authority. Those servers have to sit somewhere.

Doesn't have to be a different dimension, international waters or space would do.

All this, and no mention of Sealand [0]? An unrecognized micronation in (formerly) international waters, with a hosting company (back then) that allowed almost everything, and its own coup and counter attack by the "legitimate" royals (and then Germany having to negotiate POW release of the coup organizer).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand

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