1.8 Million to study is not "freaking out".
Makes me feel helpless, nothing that can be done about it.
[1]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-tech-antitrust/eu-look...
I hadn't heard of GaiaX. The mission statement sounds incredible though. It sounds like trying to create a democraticized online market-place. Rather than rely on big tech to intermediate all our search & transactions. It sounds amazing. So virtuous, so smart, so obvious. But I know nothing about implementation. And less about adoption.
There's a fairly popular post in this thread about EU looking grim[1], & the top reply is the US looking grim. The answer I wanted to put there was that it's the lack of efforts like this, it's the lack of big initiatives & trying things. That things feel stuck, that only the very wealthy get a chance to try & bootstrap things. Failure & bad efforts aren't great, but it's worse to have a society that's not trying, that doesn't have some surplus capacity dedicated to giving folks a chance to try civilizationally-benefiting radical & practical things.
There's a lot of bullshit & bad. Yes. And it does feel like we're falling away from seeing success. But this should be a rallying cry. It should prompt adjustment, a redoubling, trying to find out how we're not taking things seriously & finding ways to distribute the money more widely, to less classic figures, trying wider innovations, and see what we learn.
Also though some times big innovation is semi-necessary. I definitely have trepedation, a mix of hope & fear, but efforts like the EU chipmaking[2][3] plans are 100% what ought to be happening. Huge investment, but if it fails, my recommendation would 100% be to try again. Stop failing. Probably by failing faster, failing smaller, & working up to bigger.
As Kevin Kelly says, "over the long run the future is decided by optimists"[4]. Making your part of the world a place where optimists get chances, where things are tried, even when the criticism is correct & things are bad, is what keeps a place vital.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26544555
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56334210
[3] https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/04/22/drilling-down-into-t...
[4] https://twitter.com/kevin2kelly/status/459723553642778624
I am all for big moonshots, but these project feel more like LARPing what the Americans did profitably 10 years ago.
webinos was so noble, so good, such a well thought of way to do iot. that had all the right priorities.
it's fair & easy to call this a catastrophe, a disaster. but it keeps feeling to me- and this is dark- that the real disaster is us, mired in a deep deep inability to evaluate the free market of ideas, & pick actual good ones.
it makes me absolutely desperate to believe the "1000 true believers" thesis, or as I once heard it, the "follow the alpha geeks" thesis. i want to believe change is not that hard, if you can get users empowering themselves & each other. webinos never got 1000 true devs. but, to me, we are all to blame. and we will suffer endless tales of how bad iot is for decades to come as a result. how can society better adopt?
you are being extremely scarcity conscious in only the narrowest most self-selective view possible. doing good things ought be worthwhile & it could be. rather than shit on the attempters I think we should consider what beyond the tech made webinos not succeed? and how and what pieces are addressable and how?
While they usually try to pretend everything is awesome in public, they are clearly in a shit position.
Arianespace has already publicly stated they need more political help (after just getting 3.5+ billion $). There have been a whole storm of demands that all European institutional costumers should be forced onto the Ariane.
The Germany military was politically attacked for launching on Falcon 9 (that was when they still didn't take SpaceX seriously).
Politicians, ESA bureaucrats and people from the European industry have all essentially said the same stuff with a different spin depending on their position.
German and European journalist who are not just institutional PR printers have had a field day calling them out on their idiotic statements they made about SpaceX between 2014 and 2019.