Does China struggle if the US cuts off lots of these things? Sure. But they have a local ecosystem that has been forcibly, and which much complaint from big-tech, separated from the US ecosystem.
Are they reliant on Android? Sure, but only the open source bits. Google isn't allowed the same strangle hold over the rest as it is in the west.
I'm not necessarily sure that this is to China's credit, but if this is the discussion that Europe wants to have, then it is a good contrast.
According to the article you linked, most Elbrus CPUs are made at TSMC, not locally (click any CPU in the list). Apparently the newest Elbrus produced locally in Russia was Elbrus 4S, from 2014, 800 MHz, 65nm, 4 cores.
Independence is often achieved with violent struggle, or just a lot of struggle.
US and EU used to be good partners. Still are, but maybe not as good now. Achieving independence would be costly, because cooperation increases efficiency, and cutting it incurs costs and discomfort. There should be quite a bit of incentive to e.g. drop AWS or stop using Google. Building local equivalents is not impossible, but again is pretty costly and slow.
In other news, all of the world's most advanced semiconductor manufacturing, everywhere, depends on machines produced my one Dutch company, ASML. A ton of actual production depends on one small island nation, Taiwan. There is a number of examples like that. Achieving autarky, North Korea-style, is really really costly, and slows you down quite a bit.
It's like buying a plow; you use the plow to till your land and if a better plow exists (or, tractor) you go buy it.. or if your plow breaks you buy a new one.
But, we're in a situation where the plow can be taken away from us, arbitrarily, and the consequence is that people could possibly starve to death.
The situations are materially different in this aspect, but yes, trust breeds interdependence, which ironically is the point of the EU: if we all depend on each other then we won't go to war with each other anymore; seems to have worked. Longest peace in history.
There is no kill switch which might be pressed only under circumstances that may never be "adapted to current situations". So who does said plow belong to?
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-21/asml-tsmc...
the way the EU should retaliate to the US tariff clown fiesta is by adding a levy on purchase of any services supplied by US hyperscalers (or any companies under their control, directly or indirectly)
start at 1%, increase by 1% every month until it hits 50%
the aim is being not to raise revenue, but to remove the threat to national security posed by the US regime
whilst providing a boost for your own domestic industry
How do you propose we do that? If you buy AWS cloud services from Amazon, you don't buy from Amazon Inc. Seattle USA, you're buying from Amazon S.a.r.l. Luxembourg, an EU company. It's an EU-to-EU business contract. Same with Google, Microsoft, etc.
Unless you wanna start tariffing EU companies of foreign origin IP now, which would be a great if your goal is to torpedo all foreign investment in the EU.
I'm not sure why only the USA is capable of creating state-of-the-art LLMs. As for Europe, I can say that it has a simple but effective strategy to keep falling behind:
1: Prevent innovation via regulation
2: Problem: Being dependent on foreign technology
3: Fight the problem with more regulation
4: Goto 1
7: Continue speaking 48 different languages and teach english too late so you have fragmented markets that on average can barely talk with each other at a 1st grade level
8: Have wildly different regulatory, legal and tax schemes within each fragmented mini-market such that EU-wide expansion is difficult
9: Cement social welfare expectations based on economic and population-driven realities that no longer exist, making competitive taxation regimes impossible
10: Force almost all private capital into centralized government run pension systems that are massively underinvested in risk assets, starving the business/venture ecosystem of capital while not meeting the social welfare expectations.
Is it worse than in the United States? Each state has those, too.
- hiring a human representative in each state and paper-based filings and correspondance in different languages for the VAT register
- Joining a dual-state system for financing the recycling of the packaging
- Registering with a package register who has the right to refuse your product over marginal differences
- Changing the packaging language for each state
- Having your supply chain examined by officials of each state, in different language (better hire someone), for things they don't like
- Hiring a local representative in each state to manage interactions with regulatory bodies related to EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility)
- Treating your IT systems in each state differently based on nuanced data rules and compliance
Yes, it's worse than the US. California is the most regulation-happy US state and they're a cake-walk compared to interfacing with EU beaurocratic idiocy (in many different languages!).
I spend 90% of my tax/regulation effort on handling EU VAT, which is <10% of my revenue.
It really makes the IRS seem like Google in comparison to EU revenue services.
People talk about UBI as a solution for this but the money for UBI has to come from somewhere. Are corporations going to voluntarily pay a new tax to support UBI?
China is pretty close to state of the art.
https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/text
I wish I could try myself. I wanted to test via their website:
But the website drives me crazy.
It makes the fans of my laptop spin at full throttle. And you don't get the plain text reply from their LLM. You get a mingled html-rendered version that chops up code left and right, so I can't test it.
Ultimately it always came down to money. And AWS/Azure/GCP are apparently so much cheaper that nothing else matters.
It's a sad state of affairs.
It's been the case for a while, but we've been sliding more and more into the hands of the US.
Microsoft used to ship software that was local first, and removing the activation servers wouldn't have affected deployed software, now though? A removal of a subscription is an immediate revocation.
It's worse with Google Docs.
And of course, nobody knows how to run servers anymore unless they're in US tech company owned and operated datacenters, this is absolutely terrifying, but truthfully it's the office products that have the most capability to cause harm.
True, but the US don't control the entire supply chain, which is spread all around the world. It's a much desired stalemate that will hopefully persist.
Oh, and we would probably stop paying our bills, so, who pays for American pensions ?
However, I'm terrified at "Bezos / Musk / Zuck / whoever decides to shut down EU". And I'm terrified at "AWS just gets hacked and stops working for a few days."
But, hey, we can't really fund efforts to switch, we have pensioners to pay.
If you want to have competitive business both sides of the pond, the logical choice is to put the money on the American side and achieve ROI before the EU dishes out noteworthy fines for non-compliance. In maybe 10 years when you have outgrown those sums. Much cheaper/easier than the other way around: build a company in Europe and to European standards.. and then try to make it skip all the costly procedures it may legally skip when doing business with/against Americans.
No. Nope. It was. Then after 20 years it got bought. It has been terrible since 2023. Domain prices increased by 100, 400 percent.
Pure enshittification. Run.
If left it for this reason, but it didn't become bad, let's not push it.
It has solid foundations.
oh right, no longer Europe ...
EU Eyes Ditching Microsoft Azure for France's OVHcloud
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44331045
SUSE launches new European digital sovereignty service to meet surging demand
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44507166
'Europe must ban American Big Tech and create a European Silicon Valley'
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44552389
SourceHut moves business operations from US to Europe
Granted, US politicians also don't know how computers work, but they they have a tech empire that's a large part of their economy and constantly lobbies them, so they're forced to learn a thing or two about the economies of the tech industry. See Jensen Huang's famous million dollar diner with Trump or the fact than many US politicians have shares in big-tech so it's in their interest to protect it and help it grow, which is not the case in the EU's with it's lackluster tech industry.
Since EU has not many tech giants, labor and politicians don't care much about by this industry as it doesn't bring much lobby money, jobs and votes and see it just as a cost center. It is that simple.
The article is missing one big and critical sector as well: defense.
I think is pretty obvious that buying military tech from the other side of the world is an extremely poor choice. China and Russia (in terms of development) are the examples to follow.
On the other hand it can take many decades and ridiculous amounts of money to develop the defense industry to be neck to neck with the west (if such thing is achievable).
When I see countries praising jet fighters like the F-35 and acquiring or wanting acquire them, do they really understand that is not their fighters at all? If total control over mundane CPUs and hardware is already a reality imagine what level of control the might have over those machines.
JPLeRouzic•3h ago
*I have an immense admiration for Fabrice Bellard*, but he is an exception among these school populations.
bombcar•2h ago
There are a few that may be comparable, but all we can do is make sure we don’t prevent the next Bellard, not make more of them
BiteCode_dev•1h ago