rdm_blackhole

> Therefore any agreement must either have ironclad verifiability, or must be limited enough that defection would not be militarily existential.

How does he propose that such a thing will work? Are we going to have US AI inspectors in China and vice versa?

Why would China agree to such thing in the first place since this is a winner takes all situation.

If the US slows down or stops altogether, China can continue to work on their AI and overtake the US, if China accelerates and the US keeps its current pace then it can overtake the US.

The only way out is on the contrary for the US to actually go faster and increase its lead so that China is always 6 to 12 months behind and/or reach AGI/ASI first at which point China will most likely develop its own not long after.

This would actually be the best outcome, just like the MAD doctrine contained the spread and usage of nuclear weapons, having two superpowers with AGI would ensure that they can't be used to arm anyone. Unless they escape their sandbox but that is highly theoretical.

Regarding these Embedded Evaluators who are supposed to be neutral: - who controls them? - who has oversight on their decisions? - can their decisions be challenged by the public or a government? - who has the final say whether a model is "compliant" enough? - what does "alignment" mean in this context and who decides if a model is aligned enough?

Teen reading slumps because the students are no longer forced to read enough to break through to the other side where reading becomes a pleasure.

It's like anything hard really. If you start learning how to play music, well the first few years are going to suck because you are not going to be a very good player, you won't be able to read the notes on the music sheets, you'll have to stop, restart and practice again and again until finally everything comes together and you start playing better and actually enjoying yourself.

But these days, the kids complain that the books are too boring or too long and then the parents complain because they don't have time to make sure the kids are doing their reading, in fact they don't even read to their kids anymore or barely.

Then the government changes the school program to include less reading and the cycles starts over.

The less the kids read, the less they'll want to read and that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy and of course, we should ban phones,tablets and computers in school so that the kids stop being distracted constantly.

The EU and Macron welcomed the new Syrian president who is a former ISIS fighter in Europe. So much about morals when hundreds of French citizens were killed by ISIS in France.

The EU is like the US, it does business with vile and despicable people if it is in its own interest.

> Geopolitics is way too complicated for such black and white thinking.

Your comment reeks of western superiority and exceptionalism.

Its not black and white thinking. It just hypocrisy at the highest level.

The EU does not spend a single day without going around telling anyone and everyone that human rights are very important and that we should do absolutely everything to keep things that way but then turns around and welcomes the head of a (former) terrorist group in Europe.

Even Macron welcomed the guy in Paris even though ISIS killed hundreds of French citizens.

Can anyone then reasonably blame China or India when they continue doing business with Russia? If so why the double standards?

The US and the EU love to criticize other nations but don't mind supporting war criminals and dictators when its suits them and even give them money and/or sell them weapons.

After the Ukraine war ends, I'll bet you you'll see Putin or his successor being invited to cocktail parties in Frankfurt or London, no question about it.

> communists

I was talking about France Unbowed (LFI) in France which is radical left parti (and allies of the French communists parti) that wants to burn the debt owned by the French state (their own words not mine) and could be in the second round of the French election vs the National Rally (far right).

Both the National Rally and France Unbowed are in favor of stopping Ukrainian foreign aid.

> Europe and the rest of the world will try to coup with the shock

The two major economies in the EU (France and Germany) are both facing severe recessions and a parliamentary deadlock + soon to be elections would will be most certainly won by Putin's allies and/or radical communists.

All of this to say I would not hold my breath on Europe doing much at all in the coming months/years.

> Unless they're full puppets for foreign interests,

The European parliament has been bought 10 times over by the lobbies.

See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/08/lobbyists-euro...

"By some estimates, they influence 75% of legislation"

> But even then, they could not have possibly been all mere puppets. And yet.

Even if the lobbying was not reason for all the bad decisions of the EU, the EU parliament has no way to actually propose any laws on its own. All the laws emanate from the commission which is also bought and paid for by you guessed it, the lobbies.

I don't see the appeal of this or the Phone 18 for the matter. I have an (old) iPhone 15 Pro that just works so the upgrade just doesnt seem worth it.

Also I think it would be quite bulky to carry the Duo in a pocket all day long.

Your framing is no better: Don't look at how much you are paying in taxes because somehow in the end you are getting more out of it.

Of course you should look at what you are getting out of it and scrutinize every euro spent by the state. This is the basis of the social contract between a country and its citizens.

Citizens pay money in the form of taxes and expect to receive decent services in return. If the state is no longer fulfilling its share of the agreement then what?

People are happy to pay high taxes if they see improvements in their lives but they do not: - Germany has had massive infrastructure backlog for the last 15 years that will not be resolved tomorrow - The German state is increasingly seen as a wasteful thing that still runs of paper and fax machines when we are well within the digital age - Germany's train system is so dysfunctional that only 60% of its trains are on time - Germany's healthcare system is one the most expensive in the world and people are paying more and more for a lesser service

This is the same problem that France is facing today.

> Let's be real: this "issue" is a strawman. It doesn't really exist, especially in that part of Germany. Just like pretty much everywhere else, the German anti-immigrant far right is strongest in the areas with the fewest immigrants

This is not a strawman. Even if you believe that the AFD is not correct in its diagnosis of the problems, why are you saying something that is a complete lie: https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/54441/germany-net-migra...

According to this organization which sits on the complete on opposite spectrum of the right/far-right, they write that 2.7M people immigrants moved to Germany in 2022 with a net inflow of 1.5M in a single year.

According to the same organization, today, immigrants make-up at least 20% of the German population and that's from an article from 2024 so that number is probably low. So if we extrapolate roughly 1 in 4 people living in Germany are not German.

That is exactly why the AFD is rising, people just bury their heads in the sand and pretend that there is no problem at all.

But I guess its easier to think that 44% of the inhabitants of Saxony-Anhalt are secretly Nazies than admitting that something must change. Lets continue doing that, its been working so well so far!

> to them, the "illegal immigration issue" is just a vehicle to gain power. Nothing more.

If what you said made any sense whatsoever, then the parties currently in charge would have stopped it along time ago. Because if according to you that makes the far-right parties grow stronger, then why would anyone in their right mind not do anything about it?

Why wait for these parties to use this issue to fuel their growth?

> Reddit

The problem with Reddit is that all the news subs and all the politics subs are just massive echo chambers and there is simply no way to interact with them unless you follow the agreed upon views espoused by the mods.

If you go on a conservative sub and say that you agree with 90% of what they offer but not the last 10%, you'll just be branded as a commie/socialist and the opposite is true on the left wing subs.

Nuanced comments are few and far between and the worst of all for me as someone living in Europe is /r/Europe which is very left-wing and honestly reminds me a cult of some sort. US bad, Europe great, left is good, right is bad. It is just insufferable.

I think on the contrary X/Twitter is more balanced as I can choose to follow different people on opposite sides of the aisle without fearing getting banned when I comment on some of their posts with views that may not be shared by the original poster.

I could technically vote in 3 countries but I vote in none.

My preferred voting system is the ranked choice one in Australia but Australia also has compulsory voting which I disagree with.

I think in a democracy, it is up to the voter to decide if and how much they want to get involved in the democratic process just like a person has the right to join or not a parti, listen or not to a political debate and so on and so forth.

I wish the blank vote was more represented in the democratic process somehow but I don't really have a solution for this problem.

> Not voting is consent to the status quo.

I disagree fundamentally.

Not voting is simply not making a choice. If the choices presented do not align with my preferences then I do not vote. Why would I vote for someone who I don't support? I don't pick the candidates that are offered. Want me to vote? Then get better candidates next time! Until then I will exercise my right to not vote.

Your status quo also assume that either one or both candidates are presenting you with potential change to what has happened in the past whereas most of the time, the choices are simply a continuation of what has been happening aka tinkering on the margins without pissing too many people off.

I am not sure why you are being downvoted, because IMHO you are correct.

If Trump was an isolated incident, sure, but he is not. In Europe the far-right and far-left parties are rising in many countries and the traditional parties are crumbling.

I think there is a serious lack of trust in the institutions and in the politicians that is spreading around the world at a quick pace and many people are just fed up with the status-quo that has been in place since the fall of the USSR.

People want change, not small marginal tinkering on the edges, they want to see that things move decisively in one way or the other and they are not afraid to flip the table and see what happens.

I disagree with your take. You have the right to not vote when you disagree with all parties running.

In fact, from a moral point of view voting for the lesser evil is highly objectionable because you are voting for someone who you do not even support just so that another person you support even less does not get elected.

Its perfectly fine to say, I don't agree with either and I am going to sit this one out otherwise you end up in weird political dynamics that you can see playing out in real time in France for example.

> Most commenters here clutching their pearls as if Claude and Gemini Pro didn't do it already.

That's not the point though. The problem is that in the minds of lots of people including here on HN or otherwise, a service based in the EU is de-facto "more" respectful of digital privacy.

You can read the comments on threads related to the EU tech where you will find people defending to the very end that privacy is better in the EU and that EU providers will never stoop as low as their US counterparts.

As always the truth is a lot murkier than that.

Yes, some services based in the EU are better in terms of privacy but it's not a given for all of them and it depends entirely on the service. Unfortunately such a nuanced take is not wildly popular in the tech world in this day and age where every US company is labelled as an evil data hungry entity and EU companies are portrayed as saints in this regard.

That's where the first problem lies.

The second problem is that for years now, people have been singing the praises of Mistral as a privacy friendly alternative the the US juggernauts because Mistral's headquarters is located in the EU and unfortunately today it seems some people are waking up to the fact that Mistral is doing the same thing than its US counterparts and they are disappointed which is understandable.

Who is to blame for this dichotomy? Is it Mistral who leaned too much on this marketing angle (the European Chatgpt without the invasive tracking/ better privacy settings) or is it the users who failed to realize that EU or not, Mistral wasn't going to pass on the opportunity to improve its models this way?

My hunch is that it's both.

If you read /r/europe, you would be convinced that the reason that some people are against the EU is only because of: - Russian trolls - US trolls - Chinese trolls

Its never the EU's fault. Never is there a sense of saying, maybe we should try to understand why people do not agree with us.

It's my way or the highway and if you don't agree or criticize the EU in any way shape or form then you are just a far-right extremist or just plain dumb.

It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

There was already a tweet/post from the Signal CEO in which she said that if the Chat Control v2 law was enforced (aka client side scanning of messages before encryption), that they would simply leave the EU market instead of complying.

> with far right trying to turn people against EU.

The far right does not need to do that, the EU is doing it itself just fine.

Secondly this push like the one for Chat Control comes from the commission itself and as far as I can tell the far right has not taken over the commission so what you are saying makes no sense.

> now EU is fascist.

Chat control V1, Chat control V2, various data retention schemes (aka invasive metadata storage), DSA (aka censorship), age verification law and so on...

Don't believe me, see for your self: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/going-dark-expert-gro...

Here is small excerpt:

The #EUGoingDark group aims to develop access and monitoring paths to our devices (e.g. smartphones, smart homes, cars) and applications. In doing so, it relies on industry cooperation, influencing technology standardisation committees and standardised access protocols. The group wants to establish the concept of “security by design” in the EU. This means that technology should be developed according to the wishes of police forces and intelligence services and designed to be interceptable from the outset. In short: investigating authorities should be able to gain access to data on all our end devices. Even if the group explicitly denies it, this is about backdoors in one form or another.

War is peace, freedom is slavery and all that.

No that is not what they are doing.

This is the same thing they tried to do with Chat Control v2, that is to force providers to access data before it is encrypted and store it in case one day someone becomes a criminal.

You should look up all the past posts on HN on this very topic.

The end goal is to track and collect everything and/or make it possible to decrypt what they need when they need it including: emails, chat messages, posts on social media, images, and who knows what else.

And the EU has the gall to criticize Russia and China for cracking down on freedom of speech and on digital rights, what a joke!

There is no safe backdoor just for the "good" guys. It doesn't exist, never has and never will. It's that simple.

I agree that interests rates between trading partners have to somewhat match but the issue here within Europe is that Germany is so big that by default what they say goes.

So, if you have Estonia that is in a slump and needs a boost, it can go to the ECB and say, look we need to lower the interest rates but if Germany is happy with the current rates, the likelihood that Estonia gets its way is basically nil.

Right now Germany is feeling the pain and despite the inflation picking up above the 2% target rate again, the ECB has not raised the rates further, why? My hunch is because Germany can't afford it and neither does France.

A monetary union is great on paper, in reality the big fish still eats the small fish. The only difference is that the small fish can try to do something outside whereas in the union it just goes along and hope for the best.

Finally, another big issue with the Euro is that there is no fiscal union between the states. So if a state like France struggles then if a federal Europe was to happen, the states who have money would give it to France in forms of tax transfers but doing so punishes the countries that have made the reforms, that have invested, that have saved money and reduced their deficits and will only incentivized countries which have not done so to continue having deficits in the future.

How would a German politician or Austrian politician explain to his/her constituents that there is no money for new schools or hospitals but there is cash to bail out Italy or France for the nth time because these countries have refused to do what was necessary to reform their country?

In any case, since the exchange rates are no longer providing the feedback that the markets used to give by repricing the currencies that existed before, the markets now use the interest rates of the debt as proxy for their confidence in each European state. Right now, there is a 85bp difference between France and Germany and its widening as time goes on so something will have to give soon.

Either the ECB caves and lower the rates which can increase inflation or France risk triggering a Euro crisis that will be much much worse than the Greek one.

And since a lot more countries are now in the Euro compared to the 2010s, the spread of the crisis will be greater by default.

I think your analysis is not complete.

Yes the Euro is/was stable but not because there are many big countries using it.

The Euro is/was stable because behind it there was stable and relatively well managed democracy named Germany. Unfortunately Germany is not doing so well at the moment and that could deteriorate even faster in the future with the right wing populist gaining grounds who are openly campaigning on leaving the EU and the euro.

As you can imagine, without Germany, there is no euro.

The Euro also spreads the risk to other countries which means that one state's failure can propagate to others.

Look at what happened with Greece and the panic that it caused at the time and that was for a small country witha small GDP. Now look at France who is indebted to its eyeballs and on the verge of electing either a far-right or far-left president who both are EU-skeptics and will try to work around the EU if not completely undermine it.

What happens then? As always in a chain, you are only as strong as your weakest link and unfortunately for the Eurozone, France and Germany are both doing badly at the same time and it doesnt seem that there is any light at the end of the tunnel for both of them currently.

Italy is doing slightly better but its economy is smaller and it is still heavily indebted and it will not be able to carry the Euro itself if either France or Germany decide or are forced somehow to exit the Euro.

The AFD is openly campaigning on it and they are currently the most popular parti in Germany.

The French RN is not openly campaigning on leaving anymore since its pretty scary to the voters but the intention of Le Pen is to hold a referendum to ask the French people to recognize the supreme rule of French law above EU law which would act as a soft exit since that means that France would no longer be bound by directives and other regulations which it doesnt agree with.

The other major parti France unbowed is even more direct and wants to set "fire" to some of the debt which would most likely trigger a Euro/Eu crisis and force either the ECB to bail out France or force France out of the Euro.

Joining the Euro is not the panacea that everyone thinks it is.

It comes with some major drawbacks: - no control of interest rates since these apply to everyone in the Eurozone regardless of the current economic situation of a particular country. - no more devaluation to get back some competitiveness on international markets - strict financial guidelines in theory (3% deficit max per year and 60% of GDP/debt ratio)

Finally, the biggest problem as it's been highlighted by many economists is that it spreads the risk to the whole Eurozone which sounds great in theory until you find yourself drowning in debt like Greece was in the 2010s or like France is nowadays.

Because now your government is borrowing in Euros, the markets move very slowly and the full impact of the finances of any Euro government is completely subdued since in the pool of countries that use the Euro there is Germany which is very good and very trustworthy creditor.

Take a look a what happened with Liz Truss in the UK, she made some rather stupid announcements and the markets reacted as they should and that lead to her removal and to a change of plans.

In France by contrast, no such changes have happened despite the fact that the French economy has been going downhill for awhile due to their 5%++ yearly deficits and their 120% debt ratio.

If France still had the Franc, then the markets would have forced the politicians in charge to either course correct and/or eventually to pass on multiple painful but necessary reforms.

Instead what we have is complete political paralysis and many presidential candidates are openly calling for a roll back of more pension reforms, lowering the retirement age to 60, increasing the pay of all the civil servants by 20% and more complete out of control spending.

The supposed EU fiscal rules have never been enforced anyway which means that countries don't really have any incentives to curb their spending since the ECB is always backing them.

> it's not ethnic cleansing because this time the Jews really ARE evil, okay

You are right, let's just all push the rhetoric to the max and completely forget how to have nuanced discussions about complex topics.

It clearly is a lot easier to scream "nazis" from one side and "woke" from the other. I am sure we will get somewhere fast.

> There’s a recurring theme where the EU can do no wrong, despite repeated negative outcomes that only make sense to read as well-meaning but misguided regulatory overzealousness.

Forget it. It's like talking to a wall. Go to /r/Europe and criticize anything regarding the EU and you'll be called a nazi or a far-right extremist.

Something good happens in Europe and you get the constant refrain that without the EU it would have never happened so everyone should just go dance kumbaya around the fire while singing the European anthem but if something goes wrong or is wrong with EU regulations it's because the lobbies got to it/watered it down/ changed it somehow and so on...

That's how you get people who with a straight face will tell you that digital and privacy rights are a 1000 times better in the EU even though the commission has been pushing Chat control V1 and V2 for the last 5 years.

It's complete madness and more akin to cult than anything. Is the EU doing something good sometimes? Yes. Is it the panacea that everyone wants you to believe it is? No.

Heck, even on HN which is usually visited by people who I would like to believe can have a nuanced opinion about certain topics, I have been accused to be some sort of Russian troll or far-right troll just because I dare to criticize the EU regulations that I disagree with.

Yes, I criticize frequently EU tech and EU laws because I live here and I am the one who has to live with it everyday but for some people voicing a disagreement in this day and age is akin to treason.

France is about to have either a very far-right or very far-left president and neither party like the EU very much so I wouldn't count on that.

As for Germany, Mertz is disliked greatly and the AFD will most likely win the next state elections in the east which could accelerate his departure.

Finally Germany and France are both facing many internal issues including migration, debt and low economic growth prospects.

All of this to say that change will not come from there.

Why is someone critiquing the EU such an affront to you? Is the EU above reproach for some reason?

You shouldn't.

The French government is not to be trusted with the data you give it.

https://cybernews.com/security/ants-hack-france-19-million-r... https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2026/08/14/french-t...

Two cyberattacks that we know of happened this year and the extent of the second one is still unclear at this stage.

This is the same government that has pushed for: - Chat Control v1 and v2 (client side scanning) - Id requirement for social media (that just struck down by the courts) - Arrested of the founder of Telegram because he refused to hand over its users data to the French government and used dubious charges to arrest him