Hacker News Reader

Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

Here's my hypothesis of what is going on:

1. Europe can't do computers. This is bad for them, because foreign companies, who can do computers, make money in Europe and beat out the local competition.

2. But the EU has discovered that it can extract money by threatening to ban the foreign companies for reasons of privacy, data protection etc.

3. Since the EU is a valuable market, the companies accept the fines as a price of doing business.

4. Italy is getting in early by firing a shot across the bows of OpenAI, which is not yet a huge moneymaker, but may be in future.

View on HN

Europe can't do computers. This is bad for them, because foreign companies, who can do computers, make money in Europe and beat out the local competition.

Not this again. Europe fails on producing unicorn that grow by exploiting people's addictions (Facebook), externalizing cost (Uber, AirBnB). However, Europe does fine in computing. The chips in you cell phone and computer are most likely made with an eUV machine from ASML, it probably has a bunch of NXP chips in it too. Europe has huge business software companies like SAP. Europe also has plenty of unicorns, like Klarna, Spotify, Revolut, Mollie, Just Eat/Takeaway etc. You may not know about all of them, because they operate primarily in Europe, like there are also plenty of US unicorns that barely have any footing in Europe.

Americans tend to assume every successful tech company is founded in America. Whenever Ubisoft is in gaming news, there are always Americans surprised to learn they're French.

Activision-Blizzard, Epic, Microsoft, Take-Two, Electronic Arts, and Sony (partially) are all American and have 10x the revenue. China and Japan are both ahead of EU as a whole.

>Ubisoft

As an European I currently wouldn't be proud with Ubisoft.

I'm not saying anyone should be. But they are a large successful tech company.

So Ubisoft is?

Activision-Blizzard, Epic, Microsoft, Take-Two, Electronic Arts, and Sony, as mentioned by the comment above you, aren't companies to be proud of, either.

The European Union has 100 million more people living in it than the United States alone. You named a single video game studio.

The European Union is far behind, it's both pitiful and unproductive to suggest otherwise. The reason American's are surprised to hear certain companies like Ubisoft are from the EU is because it's that uncommon, no one gets surprised when a company is Japanese.

I wasn't trying to create an exhaustive list. I was giving an example to support my point.

>plenty of unicorns, like Klarna, Spotify, Revolut, Mollie, Just Eat/Takeaway

Other than Spotify, most unicorns in Europe are copies of businesses first successfully pioneered in the US. PayPal first did digital payments in the 20th century.

Bad example - PayPal was the fruit of the (then) massively underdeveloped banking system in the US. Europe has SEPA and there was simply little to no need for something like PayPal. Whenever I hear that cheques are still in use in the US, I scratch my head, because outside of the UK I never used a cheque in my life.

PayPal is used a lot in europe[1]. Maybe the Wirecard scandal could have been avoided if only someone had explained that SEPA makes any kind of fintech obsolete.

[1]: https://sifted.eu/articles/paypal-tops-european-downloads/

Nobody really uses it tough... it just gets downloaded for those one in a life time transfers that go outside the EU

Why is PayPal so popular in Europe then?[0] Significantly more popular than even Visa/MasterCard directly it seems.[1] I didn't even know the extent of it until just now but this is very surprising. 80-90% market share across various major countries.

[0] https://ecommercedb.com/news/paypal-usage-around-90-in-europ...

[1] https://ecommercenews.eu/top-3-payment-methods-per-european-...

Well, Paypal has been around for longer and works across the world, which explains some of it.

But I question the accuracy of these stats - I would expect to see SEPA wires and direct debit being significant everywhere, Multibanco and MBWay[0] in Portugal, TWINT in Switzerland, giropay in Germany, etc

Also, even if they are accurate, they rank Joe's homemade soap shop the same as a major retailer, and don't consider how many customers actually use each payment method.

[0]: https://www.marktest.com/wap/a/n/id~2985.aspx

Because credit cards have traditionally not been popular in Europe. Up to a certain age, my dad was the only person I knew had a credit card. For a long time, PayPal was the most straightforward way to deal with US merchants, because you can link it to an EU bank account.

I don’t actually know anyone who uses PayPal for anything but purchases outside the EU. Virtually all payments for online shopping here in The Netherlands are done using IDEAL (which is a system shared by all banks). When I lived in Germany, I did most online purchases through IBAN (you basically give your account number, do a 1 cent verification transaction and it is linked).

At any rate, IDEAL is so much better than dealing with all the PayPal crap or using credit cards. Select your bank, scan a QR code, confirm with Face ID and done.

Do your banks not issue debit cards? I understand credit cards being unpopular because the rewards are weak because the transaction fees are low but hard to see how either IDEAL or IBAN are superior to using a physical debit card that you can just tap, or a debit card added to Apple Wallet or equivalent. This will work the exact same way worldwide, whether you're in Europe, the Americas, or Asia, so I don't see how IDEAL is a superior system.

I am far, far from a PayPal fan but the ability to seamlessly deal with merchants across the globe from you seems like a pretty good value add. And again, you didn't dispute why PayPal is so popular in Europe.

Banks do Issue Debit Cards but up until recently you couldn’t use debit cards online.

For local, in person, transactions my experience tells me the ratio of Debit vs Credit has to be in the order of 10 to 1.

Again, that’s just my experience living in Italy in not a huge city.

But Europe is definitely not homogeneous so other people will probably have a differente experience.

As for getting paid by people across Europe, in my 10+ years as a freelancer I never had to rely on anything different than SEPA direct transfer.

If we’re talking about online payments:

> In Europe, however, non-secure shopping was already happening online as early as the 1980s. Terminal-based services including Germany’s Bildschirmtext (launched in 1983), and Minitel in France (launched in 1982), offered various services including the ability to purchase air and train tickets.

https://www.kevin.eu/blog/history-of-online-payments/

Which would appear to be a whole decade before PayPal?

>Europe fails on producing unicorn that grow by exploiting people's addictions

Not true, there's plenty of scummy dating apps for the German speaking market funded by Swiss and Bavarian VCs to exploit single lonely desperate men. European tech founders don't hold some holy moral high ground compared to the US ones. They can all be equally unscrupulous when it comes to making money. Does Wirecard ring any bells?

>machine from ASML

Not this again, if I had a biscuit crumb for every time the chip hipsters on HN mentioned ASML as an example of European tech dominance, I would have died from obesity several times over. The simple fact that Europeans can only name ASML (and SAP) every time when discussing EU tech dominance, speaks volumes that we actually don't have much of a tech industry relative to US. (I'm also European BTW)

Short story: the only reason ASML won lithography and its competitors Canon and Nikon lost, is that US decided to license its domestic EUV tech From Sandia labs to ASML, and denied it to Canon and Nikon, purely because ASML acquired Silicon Valley Group Inc, US's leading lithography supplier at the time, giving ASML a strategic US presence on US soil, versus their Japanese competitors.

Longer story: [1]

>it probably has a bunch of NXP chips in it too

NXP mostly makes relatively low margin chips. The margins US semi companies like Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Micron, Quallcomm, Broadcom make, dwarf NXP and EU semi makers by orders of magnitude.

>Europe has huge business software companies like SAP

Companies? That's plural. But you only listed one. Which other large business SW companies do we have?

>like Klarna, Spotify, Revolut, Mollie, Just Eat/Takeaway etc.

That's it? A music streaming service that's potentially unsustainable[2] and a bunch of local food delivery and scummy online payment apps nobody outside of EU has ever heard of?

Where is EU's IBM? Or Oracle? Or iPhone? Or Android? Or Windows? Or Intel? Or AWS? Or Office365? Or Google? Or ChatGPT? Or Xbox? Or Steam? Or Netflix? Or Nvidia? Or AMD? You know, the big international money makers in the tech world, not some local EU ones that make peanuts.

US's handful of top tech companies outmatch the EU's entire tech sector combined (including UK, Switzerland and Norway), both in market cap and sheer numbers. It's not even a competition.

Or why did Linus Torvalds, Bjarne Stroustrup, Guido van Rossum or Andrej Karpathy move to the US to make their impacts in the tech world instead of staying in their native European countries and doing it here?

Europe is basically completely absent in terms of raising international champions in SW and HW products and services, especially in the consumer facing market. Our strength is making innovations and start-ups that end up swallowed by US money/entities and relocated across the Atlantic in some Delaware holding where they flourish on US soil. A few local payment and food delivery apps doesn't tilt the balance much for us. Even India ca do those better.

[1] https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/65642319

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMRsU

Thanks for this realistic and nuanced assessment

And using SAP as an example is, let's say on par with citing Exxon...

Europe suffers from a lack of initiative, vision and financing, much more than regulation. The Nokia fumble is just one of several examples.

On the other hand there is a lot of tech development in Europe "hidden" inside big "classical" companies. Has anyone heard of Cariad for example?

I went to reply that Bosch is similar in terms of having some really interesting highly technical research going on under the radar, then realized that Bosch is now collaborating with Cariad on some of those topics. Fun!

It's funny that you mention AirBnB, because there were several well-funded german attempts to clone it[1][2]. But now that these failed, the grapes were always sour.

[1]: https://www.eu-startups.com/2011/04/9flats-and-wimdu-the-ger...

[2]: https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/01/airbnb-buys-german-clone-a...

Now this is not an AirBnB clone, but booking.com is even scummier then AirBnB or those German-clones (don't know how big they're outside of Europe tough)

That has always been Europe's model. Lean back and wait to see what innovation establishes itself, then copycat it and get the copycat sold to the US original.

I don't think this changes my argument, though it is an interesting point. (NB: I'm from the UK, so I know about these companies.) I still claim that Europe's record in software is far behind the US - even if you think some of those unicorns do bad stuff.

Arduino and Raspberry PI were created in Europe also.

Nokia/Siemens were replaced by Apple and Android (Google)

In car tech is moving to being built on top of Android.

Cloud computing-Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Sure Europe has some smaller companies, but it’s behind in tech and the reasons are:

- regulations

- bankruptcy laws, where US bankruptcy code encourages risk taking which is needed in a fast moving industry like tech

The problem that I think a lot of americans don't get is that Europe isn't the US. It's not "money above all" "move fast and break things" "disrupt everything and ignore the law until you're profitable".

We do care about privacy, worker's right, &c. and we do understand that allowing foreign, especially american, companies to break things isn't a net benefit for us.

Uber abusing their """contractors""" despite the fact that they clearly are employees and should therefore have the same rights as other employees

E-mobility companies using public infrastructure (paid by local taxes) while themselves tax evading their profit

Airbnb allowing people to transform their regular flats into full time 365/365 hotel rooms despite the housing crisis

>We do care about privacy

Nobody in the world actually cares about privacy. All the GDPR stuff did was ruin every website on the internet, most people click accept all, few people click deny because they are paranoid, everyone still uses instagram, facebook, and iphones which constantly broadcast your information to Apple. e.t.c. But at least the politicians get to strut around pretending like they did something.

>worker's right

No, you guys care about worker equality. Workers right means that if I want to work extra to beat my colleagues for promotion, and forgo having a family, I should be able to. EU laws say, "No, you cannot do this because its unfair to all the people that want to have families and work less".

To be clear, worker equality is not a bad thing, since it does guarantee a lot of protection, but on the flip side, it doesn't allow for as much innovation.

EU could easily beat US if it allowed the same level of corporate freedom instead of trying to pass labor regulation laws, and focused resources of worker protection on things like unemployment insurance.

> All the GDPR stuff did was ruin every website on the internet, most people click accept all, few people click deny because they are paranoid, everyone still uses instagram, facebook, and iphones which constantly broadcast your information to Apple. e.t.c. But at least the politicians get to strut around pretending like they did something.

Then you clearly don't know what GDPR is and how different companies treat data in the US and in Europe.

> No, you guys care about worker equality

Ok, call it whatever you want, is it mathematically and objectively inferior to your superior American Standards Of Ethics And Morals ?

Just follow the damn law, it's really not that hard. Add a pop up, ask for consent, detail what the data is used for, don't collect what you don't need. It really isn't hard, if you american super-geniuses can't do that you should stop flexing your tech capabilities.

90% of what is in GDPR should be standard when handling data, if you can't comply with it you don't care about data privacy in the first place.

> EU could easily beat US

Beat it at what game ? You're exactly the stereotype I'm talking about, if all that matter is money then you're 100% right. But then again if we talk about social security, paid parental leave, paid vacation, work life balance, &c. it's a whole other story. Feel free to do whatever you want in your country but don't come to other continents and try to force it down out throats

> EU laws say, "No, you cannot do this because its unfair to all the people that want to have families and work less".

Which law are you referencing ?

You are way overestimating the actual effect that GDPR has on what people think data privacy is, i.e companies not having insight into personal lives.

> if all that matter is money then you're 100% right.

Money is the only thing that matters. Every EU benefit that you get costs money, its just paid for indirectly.

"No-one cares about privacy, they just pretend they do" is a dismissive non-argument. "You don't care about workers' rights, you care about worker equality" is word games: you are just re-defining what that expression means.

How many people do you know that run a rooted android phone with nothing google, no social media apps, and use something like Firefox focus for browsing?

Thats what caring about privacy is. If you use an iPhone or Mac that sends all your data for Apple to use in their own ad servers, but claim that you are against companies tracking you, you are a hypocrite, plain and simple.

As for rights vs equality, no, its not word games. They are two very different things. Rights is the ability to do things without anyone getting in your way. Equality means that protections (and restrictions) are offered to everyone regardless of how much money they make

Replying about the GDPR point, it is not about putting cookie banners and in my country alone I have witnessed it's benefits several times when companies who used to abuse people's data got in trouble.

Few examples of positive outcome doesn't mean that there was a net good. https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/10/most-eu-cookie-consent-not...

If EU wanted to privacy right, the solution would have been a technological one instead of a policy one. The whole GDPR thing was simply a show put on by politicians, nothing more.

Not this again. GDPR references cookies only once, along with IP addresses and other things, as examples of things that can be used to identify people. It made no law on how all of those things should be handled.

It was the ePrivacy Directive that actually regulated cookie use.

https://gdpr.eu/cookies/

This is pure bullshit. Nobody in Europe is preventing anybody to work himself to the death if he wants to. What it is prevented is to have somebody work himself to death on UNPAID overtime. This is just exploitation .

EU Working Time Directive of max 48 hours?

Exactly. Americans worship their own corporations and hold them above the law. Calvinism hundreds of years later. Money is everything, perceived status is everything.

I'm sorry, but this is lazy at best.

> But the EU has discovered that it can extract money by threatening to ban the foreign companies for reasons of privacy, data protection etc.

So your argument is that the EU, with trillions of dollars in GDP, decides to shoot itself in the foot by blocking one of the biggest inventions ever in order to "extract" a few millions of dollars here and there.

At least it would not be pure short-sightedness. They would be shooting themselves in the foot for something.

That sounds directly correct. I don't see a problem with intelligent regulation, especially around what kinds of decisions or interactions involve the technology.

But it seems like the people who want to "pause" or stop it span the spectrum from jealousy to inferiority to straight up lack of capability. If they'd got there first, they wouldn't be trying to shut it down.

All that said, it would be good to see some intelligent regulation, the development of which involves real businesses that have uses and not the usual suspects.

I question whether or not regulators and policy can keep up with the pace of AI. Where we are going (and fast) seems to be a place where the tools themselves can write policy and tooling better than we can. That has to shake the upper ranks of government around the globe, their job is policy and laws that the laymen can’t really interpret or understand, yet provides some sort of societal service.

Regulation on facts and how AI can know the truth, and be ethical - we already have those rules for humans, we should just build these regulatory instruments as extensions of that or begin the work of discussing AI rights, and use all our hard work on those laws and save some time and heartache. Obviously it’s not sentient, but we are getting close to the point that it could happen at any moment.

  we are getting close to the point that it could happen at any moment

No.

> Since the EU is a valuable market

For how long? A market is large because it has highly productive economies. If Europe can't hack computers, as you say, their growth potential will be curtailed.

> Europe can't hack computers, as you say, their growth potential will be curtailed

European industry is alive and well, and it can buy the tools it needs from American companies. To the degree "Europe can't hack computers" is less of a ridiculous oversimplification, it's with pertinence to the consumer market.

Is it really alive and well or is it mostly booking profits for activities conducted elsewhere in the world? How much R&D, manufacturing, or distribution do the ABBs and Siemens of the world actually depend physically on the EU for?

> How much R&D, manufacturing, or distribution do the ABBs and Siemens of the world actually depend physically on the EU for

European heavy industry expertise is deep [1]. It also undergirds a lot of America production; Rheinmetall, for instance, designs and builds the M1 Abrams’ gun. In light industry, ASML is the product of a distributed precision manufacturing culture.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_man...

They could make other things and trade them with the people who do computers?

The EU has a higher GDP than the US (albeit they're very close). A lot of strong engineering comes out of Europe, for example Arm or the self-driving work by Mercedes.

(I did not downvote the parent comment.)

> The EU has a higher GDP than the US (albeit they're very close).

In case anyone was curious, the IMF currently believes that the US's GDP is 50% higher than the EU's = 40% higher per capita.

https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/profile/EU https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/profile/USA

You're right per capita, but as a total market the EU is larger.

It's literally not though. EU has a higher population and lower total GDP.

You’re right, I was looking at 2015 data

US GDP per capita: $75K (PPP), $75K (nominal)

EU GDP per capita: $54K (PPP), $37K (nominal)

It's not even close.

Waymo is years ahead of anything coming out of Mercedes.

Which cars can you buy with Level 3 self-driving in the US? What states allow Waymo Level 3+ driving? Yes I can get around the SF Finance District if I sign up to be a beta tester with Waymo, and they do run in Pheonix, but Mercedes has full Level 3 signed off in Nevada. In fact Mercedes have said they will take ownership of self-driving accidents while Tesla for example points it to the individual driving.

We're talking about the engineering capability, not how the product is monetized. If a company had flawless L5 but it was exclusive to millionaires driving cross-continent, it would be impressive engineering albeit a niche business.

>Mercedes has full Level 3 signed off in Nevada

I wonder why they're testing in Nevada and not the EU. Could it be that the EU stifles innovation with its strict laws?

Or maybe it was actually started to roll out in Summer last year in the EU?

Mercedes Level 3 cars expected to be priced at $50k, competitive with Tesla.

https://etsc.eu/europes-first-cars-with-level-3-automated-dr...

I think many people do not read the article, this is not about AI technology, there was data leak and OpenAI did not follow the law and disclose this to the affected people and follow all the steps. Not they are investigated and other illegal stuff was found.

At this moment there is no "EU wants to ban AI" attempt. So OpenAI competitors, make sure to follow the laws and you will have a market in EU.

Why is the EU a valuable market? Canada, Mexico, Brazil, middle east, South Korea, Philippines...? Big markets are out there.

For tech, mobile games and advertising, it is 15% of global market.

I'm saying for a company like OAI, is Europe really that valuable? There's a lot of market out there, I'm not sure the EU moves the needle in the long run for a technology like this. I'm not trying to pick a fight, just that for OAI, Europe might not matter.

1, Europe cannot do hardware very well... on this I agree, software is okay but not close on the scale of US/China (or they start in Europe).

2 3 & 4, Wüt? That's not how these bans work... So could you please elaborate further?

Is your view specifically applicable to EU bans on US related tech, or would you extend it to the US bans on Chinese related tech? If there's a "but" in there then maybe your hypothesis isn't too solid.

China bans US tech, US bans China tech, tit for tat. The difference between US and Europe is that US actually creates things.

Your generalization of an entire continent is quite offensive (more towards yourself, really). But going past that, sometimes creating things comes with a cost, like privacy. And now you see this dissonance where on one hand we lament the status of today's privacy, while at the same time calling any attempt to limit the damage a sign of incompetence.

As for your "tit for tat" explanation, it would hold a lot more water if the bans didn't target (almost?) exclusively the areas where China is pulling ahead.

It's not a generalization, it is a verifiable observation: Europe creates significantly less. If that's offensive to you then it's time to reflect on what caused you to be in this position.

> The difference between US and Europe is that US actually creates things.

If you want to generalise like that you can even remove the US and swap it for "California" or even "the 100km surrounding mountain view"

It’s always been my opinion that GDPR and some of the other European regulations are simply trade tariffs draped in a more publicly appealing disguise, given the only tangible outcome they’ve achieved is extracting money from foreign companies. This isn’t an opinion that’s ever been welcomed on HN though.

They apply equally to EU companies as US companies. They're very much not a trade tariff.

Actually US companies have an advantage as it's much easier for them to just ignore the laws / they have certain ways of getting around the laws that do not apply to EU companies.

Go look at the enforcement statistics and tell me again how equally they apply. Even if you presume there is no enforcement bias whatsoever, it’s still going to act as a trade tariff due to the enormous trade deficit the EU has in regards to digital services.

OK I have experience here: US companies are far more likely to break the law. It's extremely hard to get US based CTOs in particular to understand the GDPR, they literally ignore it. Then stuff happens and they get in trouble.

What makes it worse: the GDPR itself is a great example of cultural differences: Americans are happy to eat bleached chicken and for all of their lives and personal data be there to make big companies lots of money. Europeans very much do not think like that. Which is good, different strokes for different folks.

Which is to be expected: GDPR basically is a harmonisation of the various privacy laws that existed in various member states before.

What do you mean Europe can't do computers? ASML is based in the Europe. America can't do much computer wise without ASML machines

>America can't do much computer wise without ASML machines

That's such a narrow minded view, and that's coming from an European. Can you do much in Europe, computer wise, without Office365, Android, iPhone, Gmail, Google, AWS, Intel, AMD, Apple, Quallcomm, Azure, Windows? Go ahead and try to buy a PC with European CPUs, GPUs, ruining European software. Or buy a European smartphone ruining an European SoC and modem with an European OS.

And ASML's golden goose, EUV tech, is an US invention licensed to ASML which can be revoked anytime if they sell EUV machines to China or any other US adversary, the restriction which is hurting ASML's bottom line as China is hungry for lithography machines and will pay top dollar for them.

ASML got to where it is precisely because of the US assistance: https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/65642319

And Carl Zeiss is probably also using some US invention?

Your point?

Do you think companies should be allowed to scan your face and deny you entry if your Linkedin profile ties you to a law firm?

This is more or less all wrong. GDPR is not there to make companies pay and keep on committing crime, but rather to make them correct their business to be compliant.

Fines are laughably low.

Besides, the whole GDPR is in place to protect European citizens from abuse of a fundamental right, which is privacy, from commercial and not commercial actors. If you are willing to give out everything about you for the latest new iToy and not receive a cent, be my guest, nobody is going to stop you in America. But here, we have regulations in place to prevent the overselling and oversharing of customer's own data.

Besides, "Europe can't do computers", Linux is a Finnish creation, as an example. You are confusing factories that produce hardware with the software that runs on it.

It's not that there isn't some truth to what you've said, but to assert that this is the fundamental underlying motivation for political perspectives throughout Europe is an indefensible conspiracy theory.

I agree it's complicated and European politics particularly so. It seems more like they don't have any economic interest in letting it spread quickly so slowing it down and taxing it "just in case" is a perfectly rational political action.

Meh, Hanlon's Razor.

I don't know about Italy, but so far, I don't expect legislative action regarding ChatGPT in Germany. It would be an insanely unpopular decision and contribute nothing to SPD/FDP's voters. It doesn't add up, and the article is full of nothing.

The state of privacy in Germany can be summed up nicely by quoting the data privacy officer of Hamburg from a couple of weeks ago: "Principles for avoiding and minimizing the processing of personal information, which are enshrined in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), among other things, "will be unable to be upheld."

Pet peeve but I think Hanlon’s Razor is fundamentally wrong. Any ecosystem where it’s believed is an ecosystem which evolutionarily favors malice, which implies that it’s not true.

Thus, you should follow Hanlon’s razor only if others don’t.

I'm not sure I follow? You don't think the current ecosystem favors malice? Even if I don't have actively malicious intentions, I think it's fair to say that if the actions I take to advance myself over others have negative externalities (at various scales obviously), I've engendered "malice" in the ecosystem.

It took a couple reads, but I believe what they meant was:

Any ecosystem where incompetence is assumed over malice creates material incentives for malice, because plausible deniability is fundamental to its environment. Therefore, malice is encouraged and becomes more likely, invalidating the theory.

As for your reply, I'm not actually sure what to make of it or how it relates to the previous comment, so I can't comment.

Indeed, and let this be a lesson to myself in writing clearly!

Or 5. American companies have shown a complete disrespect of (privacy) laws and thus get hit by the appropriate regulators.

I can't see it this way. The recent leak was entirely due to the redis-py bug. Any other company that used redis-py together with asyncio would have had the same leak (and this is fixed already), but, for some reason, only ChatGPT is being punished. Also, short of running all third-party source code through expensive auditors and insurance companies, there was no way to prevent or mitigate this.

If they continue to enforce this without also making all liability-limitation clauses in software licenses invalid (and thus killing non-commercial software, including OSS), I would treat this as something very hypocritical.

I don't understand this thinking. The gdpr is law since years, this is SIMPLY a case of a company not respecting it and paying the price, there is literally nothing else going on

We might not do computers, but we can do software just fine. With all the published research out there, and the base of the datasets being out there, and the fact that Europe has boatloads of money it's only a matter of time until there's a European GPTX alternative.

Maybe delaying ChatGPT by a little opens up the market for an EU competitor, China style. I don't think that's very realistic because the EU doesn't move fast enough but who knows.

EU is very different from China. Environment is not friendly towards software entrepreneurs.

> 1. Europe can't do computers. This is bad for them, because > foreign companies, who can do computers, make money in Europe > and beat out the local competition.

As a huge Microsoft fan and Linux hater I totally agree. Europe can't do computing.

;-)

[EDIT: can't believe I have to state this.. but this is a joke. That's why I'm winking. Poking fun at the idea that "Europe is bad at computers" when the dominant server OS is literally European with the field being established by the late Alan Turing who was.. British. Who also made the first programmable digital computer].

Reply on news.ycombinator.com