“I said they were the best engineers in Canada”
(Great quote from the BlackBerry movie).
Rings true here. You can’t fight market forces. To push out the US tech you need to build something that’s better than the US tech. Anything else is just wishful thinking.
I can't think of a single thing that big tech has done to improve my life, or society for that matter, over the last 10 years.
All US Tech has is the backing of the US government and that is likely to change in the coming decade, without the pressure of the US government would these companies be as competitive? We see what happens when others try to, rightfully I might add, regulate them: they throw extreme hissy fits and pressure the US government to force the countries to back off (by threat of sanctions or military action).
And don't get me started on slopilot being everywhere.
Apple silicon has been pretty transformative for desktop/laptop-class chips.
Europe has been struggling and behind on tech and investments way before Trump. It’s policy and over regulation that prevents Europe from making any inroads
Cars are cheaper and better outside America, the so called car capital of the world.
Go to one of these SoCal car conventions, it’s amazing how all the car reviewers go wide eyed at the Chinese cars in display.
Not true at all, a perfect example from the ride-sharing world. Lyft and Uber left Austin a decade ago over a city ordinance requiring background checks, so a couple local tech folks pitched in a very small amount of money, relatively speaking, and built a non-profit version of Uber. Everyone loved it, drivers got paid more, it was cheaper overall because it was a non-profit, the app worked just fine, etc. The app buildout was somewhere in the seven figure range.
All was good until Lyft and Uber came back, artificially undercut the non-profit app until it died, and then drove prices back up.
And that was ten years ago. Today, a rockstar infra expert and product engineer could easily stand up a scalable ride-share clone. And if people are mad enough (and it sure seems like people are getting mad at the US), then the energy is there for users to make a change.
Most of the work is in network effects so you have a large pool of drivers willing to work below minimum wage and a large pool of riders interested in paying you a lot more than that.
I do think more infrastructure should be non-profit, but if someone makes a for-profit version that beats you there’s not really much to do other than hoping the government has your back.
The only thing that works is throwing up huge barriers against dumping. This is the norm for physical goods. US big tech, and really Silicon Valley, is based on dumping - burning VC cash to become a monopoly. This is not a hair better for a domestic industry than being flooded by physical goods that are cheap thanks to burning through (let's say Chinese) government cash. In the latter we love to call this "artificiallly cheap", though for some reason I've never heard this adjective used for US tech based on monopolizing by burning VC cash.
"Confidentiality", "Integrity", and "Availability" are a foundational concept of security (the CIA triad).
For non-US citizens "Integrity" and "Confidentiality" have been compromised for a long time, but these things have no day-to-day impact. They are only relevant as kompromat material once you become powerful and they want you to act in US interests.
What's new are serious, escalating threats and actions against "Availability". This is the most important pillar of security, and a whole different beast. Microsoft has blocked email accounts of international court of justice due to political pressure. Buffoons in US tech leadership such as Cloudflare CEO feel so emboldened that they openly threaten to cut off Italy. After TV performances by Musk, Thiel, Tim Apple, Zucky and Bezos in favor of trump there is no doubt they would cut off another country as form of pressure - and if it is only for a week.
In this week, our markets would be offline and nonfunctional. The market has a very high incentive to untangle from this mess of shitty bootlickers and impulsive convicted criminals.
It will take some time, but the market forces are clearly following the new incentives.
What surprises me here on HN that people who are seemingly US tech workers are quite ignorant to how it feels to be on the receiving end of this totally reckless, unprompted and idiotic behavior.
The US tech power is a bit like the US political soft power, it's there because it's huge and has momentum but it's not like it'll be here forever, especially given the current trajectory
It has to be better
The risk we need to mitigate is that some right wing doofus in the US gets triggered by a twitter reply and decides to block our use of all US software and services.
In that case, having libreoffice installed locally does not seem so bad.
This is the risk we are worrying about.
At the very least, you want domestic oligarchs determining your governments. Their power is based in your country, and they might have a bit of sentimentality on top of that. Leaving it to "market forces" is just watching, not participating.
If some guy in Canada builds something better than current US tech, he's going to sell it to a US oligarch and probably move there, too.
I encourage everyone outside the US and in particular Canada and Europe to move your data out of the US and away from US cloud companies now. Putting your data there is not safe anymore and can and will be used for blackmail (see Microsoft cutting access of the International Criminal Court's (ICC) chief prosecutor's email). Trump is now blackmailing countries with tariffs to get them to back off support for Greenland (not going to happen), so things are going to get ugly.
If you are heavily into tech or an activist, etc. it's also a good time to pick up an extra phone like a second hand Pixel to run GrapheneOS as a backup. Or (less secure) a phone that can be unlocked and run something like /e/OS.
I know that it might take years to get all companies, governments, etc. off American big tech products. But that's not a good reason for not safeguarding your own data. Besides that, the more funding non-US alternatives get through enthusiasts, the better they are positioned to improve their alternatives.
Euro tech already exists. Add in Nova custom and Star labs. I understand many components are still made in China but this is the first step.
Still China is a great alternative to US in terms of hardware, because all the things you would buy from the US is just made in China anyways.
While the US are acting like foolish, uneducated hotheads China is silently benefiting from all parties involved.
Glad you pointed that out and everything just peachy with the US foreign policy of just some bombing and kidnapping and threatening to annex Greenland! Go murrica!
China is a good alternative for a lot of hardware, but in terms of software it is not an option.
I guess if you consider that “winning” then definitely continue to support Chinese dominance.
From my personal interactions these past few days on HN it is very disappointing how ignorant and devoid of facts the arguments are which come from people who seem to be US tech workers.
You think these are statements of fact?
Are you talking about some other kind of AI?
Anyway, good ideas/tools for evaluating LLMs ? Naturally, as a Dane, I am moving away from Claude, but I’d like more than a gut feel about how much I may have given up to do so.
Openrouter.ai shows the location of providers, you can find just a few European services, but also Singaporean and Canadian. Unfortunately, I could not find a way to filter easily.
- Gmail -> ProtonMail
- Whatsapp -> Telegram
- I installed Linux to my parents laptops. They like it.
- YouTube App -> Newpipe and Smarttube
Also, my next car will be a BYD. The current one is a Ford.
If push comes to shove and Europe needs to part ways with the USA, to greater or lesser degree, there will still be machinists, mechanics, and actual facilities in place to keep making Fords. That is a positive from the standpoint of European sovereignty.
The EU probably has rules in place to strongly encourage US manufacturers of automobiles to put facilities in the EU. The US has similar rules and many Toyotas, Hondas, &c, are made in the US, using US suppliers for parts.
It's not hard to imagine an approach to digital services that trends in a similar direction. In the EU or Canada, the US parent company would supply technical data, software, specifications, &c, to a domestic company with its own facilities and operations. It probably requires a combination of regulations and regular stress tests; but nothing prevents the domestic company's operations from being as de facto severable as a car factory.
Nothing would make Americans happier than an alternative. Europeans, go build your own big tech that can compete and win against Microsoft/Copilot. It’s not a big lift.
In Canada we like to give money to big established monopolies, that's our thing. The SR&ED program is a prime example of that, as a bootstrap business it took us 3 years before we could apply since we didn't have enough money to front full salaries for 1.5y before receiving a grant.
It is not really a complex problem to solve, the entrepreneurs know the solutions but our politicians and wealthy people are so small c conservative it's pathetic.
There's a lot of stuff in big cloud that is genuinely hard to duplicate especially with network effects, but I don't see why they can't throw a billion or 3 at ensuring you've got a homegrown stack that can do VMs, S3, function, container registry, database, block storage, firewall etc - with guaranteed funding, clear licenses, handful of local options perhaps with some sort of local guaranteed certification etc.
Baby steps are better than no steps & a lot of things can be made to run on those building blocks
analyst74•1h ago