The running gag for "what if" is that the Earth is destroyed and everybody dies along with the solar system in a cataclysmic disaster, in even the simplest of proposed scenarios
Man, sometimes I miss Quora's "Everybody Dies™". I loved to hear all the creative ways people came up with for how various things would end all life on the planet.
> AWS / Azure et al, who are also available in the EU
Because US-in-EU is fake-EU.
CLOUD act, PATRIOT act etc. etc. US headquarters doesn't escape the arm of US law.
Remember a long time ago there was a famous case where Microsoft fought the US DoJ when they came looking for somebody's data in Azure Ireland ?
That was then. Now is now. Do you honestly think Microsoft would put up the same fight today, especially if the US President decided to lean on them ? I don't !
CLOUD/PATRIOT etc. has gone from a theoretical risk to a real one. And now you have a US President in office who doesn't care much for bypassing all that anyway.
Is it a risk anyone cares about? There is very little actual switching. In many ways dependence is increasing as everything moves to apps (including the EU's own age verification app) that only run on US controlled devices.
I work in a European government institution. This is definitely a risk we care about, and we would switch to sovereign clouds in a heartbeat if we had any good ones in Europe.
TBF (and the subject of government tech and procurement aside) there are good ones in Europe.
The problem tends to be how much of the US-cloud cool-aid your organisation has drunk.
If you've drunk the whole bottle, i.e. the random alphabet-soup of interdependent microservices, then sure you'll have a tough time finding a like-for-like equivalent.
But if you've still got old-school IT brains in your IT team, then its perfectly feasible to find equivalence in Europe.
Not only that, but you'll probably pay at least 10x less in Europe because you're not paying through the nose for the alphabet-soup of random interdependency.
Also the EU providers price sheets are clear and it is easy to reliably forecast how much you will be paying. As opposed to the US provider's muddy price sheets full of small-print and all sorts of random invented proprietary billing units that are nigh on impossible to reason about.
Are you also going to switch your end user devices, or are you going to remain reliant on Google, Apple and Microsoft? The data flows through those.
Do other institutions care? Some people and some institutions do, but how many?
What about the private sector? Even if you moved all government services entirely away from the US, your economy can still be reliant on American suppliers and communications between the government and the private sector and individuals will too.
> we would switch to sovereign clouds in a heartbeat if we had any good ones in Europe.
What is wrong with the options you have in Europe? That comment suggests to me you do not care enough to do anything that takes effort.
Cloud Act: The CLOUD Act (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act) is a U.S. federal law passed in 2018 that allows U.S. law enforcement to compel U.S.-based tech and cloud companies to hand over customer data, even if that data is stored on servers located outside the United States
The data sovereignty stuff is mostly just lip-service. Both the EU and Canada are in the process of negotiating reciprocal CLOUD Act arrangements with the US government similar to what UK and Australia already have in place.
> EU-US agreement [1]
> Negotiations with the United States to facilitate cross-border access to e-evidence for judicial cooperation in criminal matters started in September 2019 and are currently ongoing. At present, US-based service providers collaborate with European law enforcement authorities through direct cooperation on a voluntary basis or through mutual legal assistance (MLA) procedures.
There are several regulated industries that need to have their computing done in the EU without ties to US companies. Sovereignty is currently a big political topic.
It's a bit sad that the only responses you get is "It's based in EU". If that's the only thing, it's not really impressive is it?
Don't get me wrong, as a European I'm all for EU, but we should offer products and services that are at least as good as abroad competitors. My company still relies heavily on US tech, for the simple fact that lots of it is plain better and/or cheaper.
I entirely agree - and we're not aiming to build the eleventh shitty Eurocloud.
We aim at building a platform that wins on product first and foremost. Some areas where we are good/great/best in class globally vs. hyperscalers and other neoclouds:
- End-to-end automated clusters (great)
- GPU VM setup time (best in class)
- Confidential Compute on high end GPU infra (great, only one offering this by default afaik)
- Kernel development support (best in class) - we have NVIDIA themselves using our platform for kernel development. Some exciting products coming out soon (tm).
- Customer support (good/great) Might sound lame but have you tried AWS as a sub 10M revenue customer?
Working hard on some hard engineering problems which will make this list longer!
You should probably say that you are the founder or maybe add that in your profile description so that other people realize you are not just a passionate employee ;) Congratulations to you and everyone at Verda.
Could you elaborate on your last point about AWS? I am interested in what you mean exactly since a lot of companies in Finland fall under that sub 10M umbrella and use AWS / Azure extensively
The economics of it are the same as for Hetzner. AWS is trying to split the difference by offering services that are supposedly run exclusively by EU citizens, from data centers located in the EU. The reasoning is pretty solid for at least the next two or three years. It might take another five to restore trust in US tech. Not a bad amount of runway.
Well I mean Verda is significantly cheaper than the hyperscalars for the exact same device so that’s one thing.
Maybe one argument could be there’s very little value added services required over the raw compute in this new world, and they’re structurally setup to capitalise on that whereas hyperscalars are not.
Them putting services in EU (even as subsidiaries) is just a marketing strategy where they are straight up lying to customers so they can get more money.
I'm on vanilla Ubuntu 22.04 but have also tried vanilla 24.04, with an Nvidia card.
That said, I thought steamdeck was just the handheld device - not sure if this would help with my Ubuntu situation - but I don't know enough about steamdeck so perhaps I am misinterpreting your comment.
It was the late 90s, my very first day at a new school, I was asked to introduce myself at the front of the class, I mentioned I like computers, one guy at the back of the class blurts out “En Taro Adun” and without skipping a beat I replied “J’tokoh zohl”, and we instantly became best friends.
Coincidentally, the midnight theme was created specifically for the reason you asked this question: for using HN while lying down next to a toddler/partner. It has a reduced white point because most dark modes are too bright to use in bed near others. Def not a great daytime dark theme though – that's what the others are for :)
I don't know much about robotics engineering, so I just wanted to give kudos to the Robocurve team on this write-up.
Even for an absolute robotics newbie such as myself, the article was interesting to read, and easy to understand. Plus it was straight to the point, with no unnecessary waffle.
> He sees these scientists as strong men, willing to wrestle with the tragedy of existence by increasing the amount of happiness in the world. That struggle makes them optimists.
He points out the value of introspection, which the literary culture has in spades, but the scientific culture utterly lacks.
If we get the worst outcomes from AGI, the scientists who worked so hard to enable it are unlikely to reflect deeply about it. If they had that capacity, they might do it ahead of time. And some do…but not enough to stop the inevitable tide.
Ironic, given the role that chance and statistical prediction plays in the mechanisms of AI. Free will is in fact a thing, and moral choices have moral consequences.
> He points out the value of introspection, which the literary culture has in spades, but the scientific culture utterly lacks.
Maybe this was true at one point but I don't think modern literary culture has much capacity to be introspective. The politicization of academia hit the liberal arts harder than anywhere else[1], and when it comes to politically charged topics there's little room for disagreement left. Introspection is not possible if questioning the status quo can be a career-ender[2].
The scientific method is inherently introspective. Studies seek to affirm or falsify the null hypothesis. Those studies are subject to peer review. Verification and falsifiability are baked into every step.
There are numerous examples of fraud in science. When this occurs it is a scandal. There will certainly continue to be fraudulent papers being published. Hopefully these will be caught and retracted.
This comment is probably not talking about peer review and verification, however. The notion is likely that scientists are progress-oriented and not thinking whether an advancement should be done, not whether it can be done.
However, for virtually every scientific advancement, the leading scientists write extensively about the implications of the technology! Specifically to the commenter's example of AI research, it's trivial to find long essays by the leading AI researchers, company leaders, and venture capitalists. It's more uncommon for an accomplished AI researcher to not have a series of essays about their work.
Contrary to the assertion that AGI scientists are not introspecting, their introspection dominates discussion on this website.
The only important question in this space is how to balance the speed of development of this technology with safety. And globally, as a human race, our answer is: speed. Yes, lots of AI scientists spend lots of time and energy on safety. But all the incentives (economic, reputational, professional, geopolitical) are on the side of speed.
So sure, there are introspective AI scientists. I fear their role in the history of this period will be a footnote about cautionary voices.
> He points out the value of introspection, which the literary culture has in spades, but the scientific culture utterly lacks.
I think you're drastically overgeneralizing. There exist many scientists who think about the impact and ethics of their work, and choose what to work on accordingly, as well as trying to discourage or mitigate harms.
There aren't necessarily enough, but I wonder how much of that is actually lack of introspection, rather than lack of being in a position where their reflections are able to amount to much. I wish everyone were empowered to follow their ethics without worrying about their next paycheck.
> If we get the worst outcomes from AGI, the scientists who worked so hard to enable it are unlikely to reflect deeply about it.
If we get the worst outcomes from AGI, which are also the modal outcomes from AGI if we don't thread the needle, there won't be anyone left to reflect.
Damn I love HN.
reply