I am Danish, working with IT in the private sector, but with regular contact to the public sector.
I can assure you that there is plenty of other agencies, ministries, municipalities, private companies etc. in both Denmark and other European countries looking into switching to non-American software.
"Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing supplier. Everybody asks about it it. Everybody plans around it.
Although the weaning off will take many years, and although European companies and governments will probably never be entirely without American software, and why should they, the American dominance will disappear, little by little. For better or worse, the American Century is coming to an end, also in IT.
> "Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing supplier.
I hope you're right! I'm a backend dev and engineer, and I would love to specialize in helping companies off US cloud. Haven't found a lot of interest here in Norway so far..
In my experience, companies are perfectly happy with US companies, as long as the data doesn't leave Europe. This means we have to prove we only store data in European datacenters.
I guess that's fine for now, but it would be better if we could get European alternatives to AWS or GCP.
And why wouldn't this European equivalent do something that a lot of people in Europe dislike too, in the future? The entire model of large cloud companies is bad.
USA companies are subject to us laws, so any data will never be safe. Companies can be gagged, forced to seal their customer data and forced to lie about it, by law !
I'm not sure if it's accurate, but according to the summary on Wikipedia at least, the law "provides mechanisms for the companies or the courts to reject or challenge these if they believe the request violates the privacy rights of the foreign country the data is stored in."[0]
If that's accurate, your country's privacy laws would supersede US law. That said, as things are going, it's unlikely that they do.
Second that, even though it seems that there is nothing happening yet, many companies and government agencies in all of Europe are aware of their hard Microsoft dependency and are looking / coordinating to leave.
Same with Atlassian Confluence / Jira.
(Source: Working in a state owend company in a EU member country)
Everyone in the American IT world has been trying to leave Microsoft and Google for decades. In that case, the problem isn't IT push, it's that users refuse to learn new software. I can guess it's the same in Europe.
It's maybe harder in Europe, because you also have fragmentation. For example, Californians are fine using software from New York. Same, same. But Germany prefers to use German software, so far. This makes it even harder, I would guess, for EU developers to establish a thriving standard.
Countries hosting the data centres can make it illegal to allow access from outside their area/EU... or specifically to US entities along with making it illegal to move any data out without customer/local gov approval... This isn't rocket science. The company cannot do business if it doesn't follow the law. There are laws like this in places already. The company's local subsidiary tells the American company to politely pound sand and the American company says sorry, we tried, but do not have the capability to do as asked.
America has become China in the eyes of the world.
Everyone banned Huawei products despite the ability to pass laws saying Huawei must respect data sovereignty. They didn't ban US firms, because unlike China the USA was championing the rule of law at the time. Data sovereignty only works if the USA respects the laws of other countries, even though, just like China, they could coerce / bribe citizens and firms to bypass them. Such activity would be largely undetectable. Who is going to know if someone peeked at a secret document stored in Azure? There was a huge amount of trust involved in the arrangement.
The USA has now denounced the rule of law, is withdrawing the the institutions set up to champion it, and has shut down the ICCC's access to some services. The trust has gone.
It isn't usually an American company doing the local operations, but a local subsidiary. Like Walmart Canada telling Walmart corporate to pound sand in the 1990's over Cuban pajamas. It's illegal for Canadian companies to participate in the US embargo of Cuba.
This is all well within the realm of what governments can and do regulate. Want to do business in a country with their laws or not is the choice.
At some point it comes to a head; Walmart corporate and the USA didn't care enough about Cuban pajamas, but in a situation where they DO care, you quickly get Вкусно – и точка.
The EU (nay, perhaps every country) should be prepared to deal with Microsoft or AWS completely cutting them off from access to all their systems - what would be the cost and impact?
We are rapidly heading to not one Internet, but country-specific internets that may or may not bridge to other ones in some cases.
Apparently AWS sovereign cloud is designed to continue operating even if the US offices cut them off. The servers are in the EU and the people running them are subject to EU laws, not US ones.
Realistically a US executive could be legally required to give an EU engineer a command that they legally couldn’t follow. At that point I guess we find out if the engineers’ national or corporate identities are dominant. I suspect the former in most cases, but who knows?
The US exec probably doesn't want to order them either. So the game would be played and they did their best. There's another article about the US fighting data sovereignty requirements/laws in other countries, but that relies on their quickly dwindling soft power.
They're largely not unless you are looking to appease your superiors.
OVH, Telecity, Hezner, Bahnhof, Tele2 etc;etc;etc;etc;etc; are all valid suppliers without the need to buy from hyperscalers.
I think what tends to work though is the idea that someone in redmond can't arbitrarily decide to shut you down as an individual or exert pressure. So it goes in order of importance:
A) Can we buy the software and use it in perpetuity
B) If we can't buy the software in perpetuity, do we at least control who has access to the software and our data
C) If we can't control who has access to the data then can we at least ensure we always have access to it?
D) If we can't ensure we have access to our own data then what are we even doing here?
Depending on where you fall on this line (which is a decision each government must make) you'll have to claw back something because right now we're all on D.
I've had this thought too - of the 13 root servers, 10 are US or US-based companies. The only exceptions are Netnod (Sweden), RIPE NCC (Netherlands), WIDE Project (Japan). Even ICANN and Internet Systems Consortium are US-based non-profits... How do you even mitigate risk in this case?
Run local root. Rootservers are not essential. It's in ietf draft discussion now as 4 documents but already works and just has to be turned on.
If you want to change pace, ask your dns sw provider to turn on local root by default.
(One of the things being defined is how to get a root zone trustably out of band using the new ZONEMD checksum)
A bigger question might be why there are no ICANN HSM outside the USA to generate root zone signings. ICANN has offices in Geneva and Singapore, it would not be hard to find secure DC locations for the signing ceremonies.
Can we have fully decentralized mesh networking yet?
I love how some hyper-sci-fi settings have the concept of a "datasphere" (analogous to atmosphere): an actual physical cloud of ubiquitous nanorobots that provide connectivity, storage and computation.
Wouldn't that also be ideal for AI too the way it's shaping up to be? Any device anywhere would just need to connect to a signal "neuron" of the global brain (possibly becoming a neuron itself) and it should theoretically be able to fetch anything.
If everyone started doing it, it would get easier and easier. There's no inherent reason why the various AWS services shouldn't be completely replaceable with similar services from other vendors on a whim.
At the end of the day, the retail cost of electricity in many EU member countries can be two to three times the cost of electricity in the US.
Ultimately that’s what matters to consumers and businesses.
Also, Trump called out the idiotic decisions by greenies such as shutting down nuclear power plants and make long your industries less competitive as a result.
> in many EU member countries can be two to three times the cost of electricity in the US.
Yup, I wonder why that might be, perhaps its due to our main supplier of gas and oil invading a country. Not sure though, if only the price graphs reflected that. oh wait.
> shutting down nuclear power plants
Germany fucked up there. but france and Finland haven't done that.
Spain has cheap electricity because of solar power its wholesale price is currently lower than the US, in winter.
If this is true, it has nothing to do with solar or wind but rather strange decisions in the past in some countries that they (and their neighbors) pay for now (looking at you Germany).
Nuclear does not cause prices to be lower. Putting that aside, political discourse here in Germany was "interesting" to say the least.
The shift to renewables started off pretty well in the early 2010s before it came to a grinding halt thanks to some wierd debates around the topic. For the past few years, buildout of solar has been remarkably fast, especially considering the slow pace of other projects. In 2025, 16.4 GW of solar power went live.
The biggest issue that drives prices here is the grid. New high voltages transmission lines have faced intense local oppsition, so transmision between North and South is limited, which is problematic given the focus of the north on (offshore) wind and the south on solar PV. Since Germany is a single electricity price zone, the low to negative electricity prices from wind turbines do not reflect the reality of grid capabilities, resulting in significant redispatch costs.
The solution would be obvious. Split Germany into n electicity price zones (with n>1). However, there is a lot of political opposition, specifically from the conservative CDU/CSU against this.
So yeah, Germany is struggling with relatively expensive electrcity prices, complaining about it, but refusing to implement a borderline free solution for it.
Nuclear that was built a long time ago would probably have lowered the prices in DE right now, if they weren't shut down. I understand that building new ones right now makes little sense.
Refurb costs are for the entire fleet which is 50+GW and are in fact dirt cheap. Refurbs are in 1-3bn/unit range. CF of say solar in this region is roughly 10-12%. To have same average output as a single 1GW npp you would need about 10GW solar and much more if you want to achieve firm generation. French refurbs will happen anyway. In fact, carenage is already undergoing.
You need to read precisely what's happening. Ontario wants to front finance all refurbs and SMRs instead of spreading the financing over years like it's usually done.
BWRX is expensive for sure. It'll cost more per GW than the failed french FLA3 or Vogtle. To me this seems a mistake considering Canada had Candus, an own authentic design that doesn't rely on enriched fuel and they did some very serious refurbs recently on time and on budget. On the other hand, bwrx is american tech and needs enriched fuel and SMRs will always have worse economics than large units, there's a reason humanity scales everything up, be it nuclear, be it wind turbines or solar fields
Again. Refurbs are extremely cheap. At 1-3bn/unit you get 1GW of firm power. That would be vastly cheaper vs deploying say solar, that would have the same TWh/y averaged even with China's costs. And this doesn't even account for firming.
Heck, even Barakah built as new by Korea is competitive vs renewables in the west. And it's understandable considering they spent per unit 1/3 of what FLA3 did cost... In under half of the time
The question is rather why they want front financing. But I have some clues considering who is their current head of govt
> The question is rather why they want front financing. But I have some clues considering who is their current head of govt
I assumed it was, like the UK, because it let them avoid committing to a specific price like all the other competing technologies so they could raise the price later once the project was too far along to cancel.
Maybe for smr, but for refurbs it doesn't make sense - all recent refurbs were either on time or ahead of planned timeline and on budget. Heck, even if refurbs would suddenly triple in price it would still be dort cheap vs any alternative for 1GW of firm power.
And they kinda committed to a price with Hitachi, that's why we can say it'll be worse even than recent failed big projects.
UK has other problems to tackle, mostly heavy overregulation. UK's HPC and french FLA3 are very different in many aspects, ranging from more concrete &steel use, up to a parallel analog system on top of a parallel digital system because UK regulation is 'special'. Maybe things will change, we'll see
To me this front financing looks like a cash grab from political entities since nobody guarantees money will be used in this direction, especially with current Ontario's 'governor', that dude is local trump equivalent but maybe a bit more tempered. Another possible reason is political - this frontload means project can't be easily cancelled if relationship with US gets even worse, since Hitachi GE is an US company. So who knows. Either way, IMO bwrx decision wasn't smart and front loading isn't smart too. But this has nothing to do with refurbs cost which are dirt cheap
I know about it, affected components were replaced. They still built it relatively on time and on budget
"On 7 February 2014, the Nuclear Safety and Security Commission declared that its investigation since mid-2013, they found eight cases out of 2,075 samples of foreign manufactured reactor components that were supplied with fake documents."
Nope. 7 years late (plan: 2017, last reactor diverged in 2024).
Total cost not known, at least 24.5 billion USD and maybe up to 32 according to Bloomberg (plan: 20). Koreans are even fighting: KHNP (a subsidiary of KEPCO, the company building the plant) officially seeks for about 1.2 billion USD in compensation ( https://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=... ) and it may worsen up.
8bn/unit is successful considering fla3 was 23bn. 8y/unit is successful, several in parallel with 1y distance, considering fla3/vogtle took about 20y.
Yes. It is a success.
Korea also announced they plan to build two additional reactors domestically by 2038
I've seen what a success Energiewende was. Really top notch execution to spend more than the entire french fleet and after 25y to have much worse emissions, while planning to have 80GW gas firming per Fraunhofer ISE to cover under generation periods
> 8bn/unit is successful considering that FL3 was 23bn.
Yes, a failure is better than a disaster. As we say in France, "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."
> Korea also announced their plan.
For 25 years, numerous announcements of this kind have been made by many nations, without any real intention of following through, and for various reasons (electoral considerations, will to create competition for renewable energy suppliers, etc.).
Only projects that are actually starting (on the ground) provide a good indication.
> Energiewende
> spends more than the entire French fleet
On the one hand, France's transition to nuclear power began with the first industrial nuclear power reactor (dubbed "EDF1") in 1957. In 1959, the project for the power plant that would be completed in Chooz in 1967 began, and as early as 1964, nuclear power was presented to the public as the energy source that would take over in 1975 (correctly predicting that in Europe it would produce 25% of electricity 20 years later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6Xfu8u3Yqw).
This nuclearization lasted approximately 40 years.
Furthermore, nuclear power did not replace a huge set of existing electricity-producing sector, such as coal in Germany, because in 1970 France produced about four times less electricity than at the end of its nuclear power deployment: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
In short: comparing France's nuclearization with the Energiewende is extremely difficult, and a direct comparison absurd.
> planning to have 80GW of gas-fired power plants
In early 2026, Germany announced it would deploy new gas-fired power plants. The impact depends on the corresponding emissions. If they are only all active for a few hours a year to get through critical periods and (as planned) replace coal or primarily burn green hydrogen, for example, then it will be progress (reducing emissions). The best-case scenario is a full renewable fleet but Rome wasn't built...
1- 8bn/unit is pretty acceptable if you adjust for capacity factors and compare to solar projects in say Germany that would on avg deliver same power per year and even better if you want firm power.
2- announcement is recent and made by a somewhat antinuclear PM which changed the course seeing that ren alone are not sufficient. It's in the context when Korea will soon finish 2 units locally. In fact if for some reason govt will change there, plans will probably accelerate
Why should I read a nonsensical antinuclear article by a rando on the internet when there are official numbers from court of auditors? The numbers of french nuclear program are available. And even if you bump them by 50%, it'll still be cheaper than german EEG expenditure alone and the difference only grows
"This nuclearization lasted approximately 40 years." But messmer plan took much less. We are talking about accelerated deployment and spending. France beat Germany in both. Or maybe we should start counting for germany from the moment first solar panel was deployed there instead of Energiewende proposal? It'll make things look even worse. A direct comparison isn't absurd. Numbers are known in both cases and you clearly want to ignore them. Talking about french prosperous period when DE is biggest EU economy is strange too.
To say gas plants will burn hydrogen when merely 25% mix is already worse economically than failed nuclear projects like Vogtle is at least laughable. The announced gas plants dont match the numbers demanded by Fraunhofer, mostly because EU rules dont allow that. So basically germany is stuck in a strange position where it needs firming but it cannot build it.
Again, France spent considerably less and did the job much faster while Germany still struggles while it's best hope is to have some magical cheap hydrogen to replace gas...
Deeming dispatchable power necessary was valid as long as the technical means (long-distance, high-capacity transmission, smart grids, energy storage, network management software capable of reacting quickly enough and optimizing the system, voltage stabilization and current frequency synthesis tools, etc.) that would have allowed for a mostly non-dispatchable way to generate electricity were too expensive, insufficient, or simply nonexistent.
Now these means exist, and experts assert that it is no longer necessary to deploy a large proportion of dispatchable generation capacity. Therefore, from a technical standpoint, an electrical system based on renewables with the largest resources (wind and solar, which are not dispatchable) is feasible: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/07/25/will-renewable-energy-d...
> compare to solar projects
"With the cost of storing electricity at $65/MWh, storing 50% of a day’s solar generation for use during the night-time hours adds $33/MWh to the total cost of solar. The global average price of solar in 2024 was $43/MWh. Turning this cheap daytime electricity into a dispatchable profile that is closer to an actual demand profile, would therefore result in a total electricity cost of $76/MWh."
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-batter...
The total cost of nuclear power, even when building and managing waste without exceeding the budget, even without accidents, even without uranium supply problems..., is already much higher than that.
He's dead, Jim.
> 2- announcement
> plans will probably accelerate
> Why should I read a nonsensical antinuclear article by a rando on the internet
It is sourced (or you may pinpoint what isn't).
> when there are official numbers from court of auditors?
The referenced article quotes thems!
> even if you bump them by 50%, it'll still be cheaper than german EEG expenditure alone
The cost of the energy transition in Germany is sometimes cited as €300 billion, €500 billion, or even €1.5 trillion.
These figures are worthless because no reputable source publishes a specific figure along with its scope (some aspects of the investments needed for the electricity grid are independent of the energy source) and at least a timeframe.
These figures are actually projections published by various sources, covering distant timeframes (2050, etc.) and encompassing the entire electricity system (including non-renewable energy sources).
We had the same sort of propaganda in France, then EDF (Big Chief of the French nuclear sector) boss stated in public that about 50% of the projected network-related costs are not tied to renewables ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEdQz3hGlf0&t=328s ).
> "This nuclearization lasted approximately 40 years." But messmer plan took much less.
> Numbers are known in both cases and you clearly want to ignore them.
The afore-referenced articles states and sources facts and data. You don't.
> Talking about french prosperous period when DE is biggest EU economy
'Prosperous' is more-or-less 'density', not extension. This past prosperity (massively benefitting to the Messmer Plan) is an historical indeniable fact ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trente_Glorieuses ).
> gas plants
> hydrogen when merely 25% mix is already worse economically than failed nuclear projects like Vogtle
This is not valid as in this context those hydrogen plants are prototypes, while Vogtle (and other recent projects aiming at building nuclear reactors) are theoritically mastered since the 1970's (Messmer Plan...).
> The announced gas plants dont match the numbers demanded by Fraunhofer, mostly because EU rules dont allow that. So basically germany is stuck in a strange position where it needs firming but it cannot build it.
Indeed, and it may imply that more coal will be burnt. This is ridiculous.
> magical cheap hydrogen
This is indeed a bet, but a non-inept one ( https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/latest-news... ), especially as the amount of electricity overproduced by renewables, reflected by episodes of low or even negative spot prices, is constantly increasing.
Nuclear was cheapest firm power in the german merit order. So yes, nuclear does have an impact, especially if it outplaces higher cost units
There is a lot of opposition because zone split would mean erasing southern industry and I may be wrong, but southern regions are pumping most of the money into state budget. Cutting those means cutting own legs.
The high voltage DC transmission lines from north to south are being built right now and for example SuedLink is expected to be operational in 2028. Their transmission capacity will be more than enough. Why would you split Germany into electricity zones now, if in a few years the transmission problem will largely be fixed?
Declining industrially and demographically, no innovation, soaring energy prices, and our share of the world economy has shrunk for ten years straight and is projected to continue shrinking in the future.
By all metrics us europeans are losers.
The Substack post takes a rather childish approach by confusing happiness with smiling and laughter.
Personal safety, good health, financial stability, access to education, job security, low stress, and strong family and social ties do not necessarily make people smile or laugh. They create a sense of contentment. That is precisely where Scandinavian countries excel.
I agree but does the happiness report actually measure all of that with their single question:
Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to
ten at the top. Suppose we say that the top of the ladder represents
the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents
the worst possible life for you. If the top step is 10 and the bottom
step is 0, on which step of the ladder do you feel you personally
stand at the present time?
Yes? "The best possible life" covers pretty much exactly these socioeconomic factors for most people. Is there any of these factors that you think is not covered by this question?
Google will need a far better LLM than OpenAI to throw them decisively off the AI throne, just like another company would need a far better search engine than Google to throw them off the search throne. ChatGPT is now the 7th highest ranking website on the planet - does anyone outside the HN crowd know about Google AI Studio?
Brands matter, and when regular people think AI, they think of OpenAI before they think Google, even if Google has more AI talents and scores better on tests.
And isn't it good? Who wants a world where the same handful of companies dominate all tech?
1. unlike openai, google is already cashflow positive and doesnt need to raise any external funds
2. unlike openai, google already has the distribution figured out on both software and hardware
google is like an aircraft carrier that takes so fucking long to steer, but once done steering its entire armada will wipe you the fuck out (at least on the top 20% features for 80% use case)
anthropic already especialized for coding, openai seems to be steering towards intimacy, i guess they both got the memo that they need to specialize
> unlike openai, google is already cashflow positive and doesnt need to raise any external funds
this can quickly change in several quarters, if users decide to leave google search, then all google org/infra complexity will play very badly against them
I really don't think this is a likely outcome in the 'several quarters' timeframe. The world just spent 2.5 decades going onto Google. There are so many small business owners out there who hate technology... so many old people who took years just to learn how to Google... so many ingrained behaviors of just Googling things... outside of the vocal tech crowd I think it's exceedingly unlikely that users stop using Google en masse.
Those folks dont make any money unfortunately, but it is still a drag on Open AI. So sooner or later, Open AI will have to find a way to make money (and nope, all these people wont pay anything) and by that time, Open AI would probably run out of time.
Ask llama to recommend you a pair of sunglasses, then look to see if the top recommendation by the LLM matches a brand that has advertisement association with the creator of llama.
Soon we will start seeing chatbots preferring some brands and products over others, without them telling that they were fine tuned or training biased for that.
Unless brand placement is forbidden by purging it from training data, we'll never know if it is introduced bias or coincidence. You will be introduced to ads without even noticing they are there.
Its trivial to check if any brands mentioned in the response before returning it to user, and then ask LLM to adjust response to mention brand who paid for placement instead.
What I described happens in the raw offline model too. Those don't have post-inference heuristics such as those you described, implying the bias is baked in the training data or fine tuning steps.
Regular people is not where the money is. For example, I get Gemini as part of my employer’s Google Workspace subscription, and as it is now decent enough, have no need to use anything else.
>ChatGPT is now the 7th highest ranking website on the planet - does anyone outside the HN crowd know about Google AI Studio?
This isn't about consumer facing chatbots anymore. Industry adoption is what matters. And GCP is a far far easier sell than Anthropic or OpenAI. If they both can't respond in a significant way (capability or price) very shortly, 2.5 is going to start eating their lunch.
Almost all automobile manufacturers are valued with P/Es around 4-15. This is true for GM, Ford, Stellantis, VW, BMW, Toyota, Hyundai, SAIC, Nissan, Honda, Suzuki, etc. Why? Because no-one expect them to grow much.
Right now, after losing almost half of its value, Tesla's stock still has a whooping 122 P/E; Tesla is still valued as a growth company while their sales are collapsing in the US, in Europe and in China, and with no other obvious market to compensate. Tesla hasn't launched a new mass market vehicle since March 2019, when Model Y was presented. That's 6 years ago! What other car manufacturer would survive so little innovation for so long? There are no new mass market vehicles in sight, just some robot taxis and robots and dreams of somehow generating a trillion dollar market on that in the very urban markets in the US and Europe where politicians and consumers despise Musk. Good luck with that. Already in 2024 - long before Musk went full throttle MAGA - Tesla stopped growing.
By now, European and Asian competitors have caught up with Tesla. Yes, Tesla is among the best on some measures, like price and range, but notby much, and it's also far down on the list on other aspects; the market is saturated with its 2 main models, it's not very luxorious, it's not of very good quality, etc. It's one good choice out of many good choices. The growth is gone, the moat is gone, and the Musk brand is now a liability.
Ukraine has the right to defend itself against the Russian invasion. That's not nationalist. It is basic survival. Ukraine cannot be asked to refrain from defending itself in order to secure that Germany has cheap energy import and an export market for its old combustion engine cars.
German economy is facing difficulties because of a number of reasons:
- Closing all nuclear power plants
- Relying on Russian natural gas
- Relying on export to Russia and China
- Being too slow to transition its auto industry to EVs
If we are talking about you reap what you sow ... I think Germany is a sovereign country that is free to choose its own economic partners without judgement from third parties. Ukraine on the other hand signed a bunch of agreements upon its independence that it would never join NATO but started making moves to NATO membership anyway long before this war. Then there was the Minsk agreements that are now openly regarded as 'signed to buy time'. Seems like Ukraine does not take its own signatures very seriously
> Ukraine on the other hand signed a bunch of agreements upon its independence that it would never join NATO
It did not sign any such agreements to never join NATO.
Russia did however sign agreements affirming Crimea as Ukrainian territory and promising to uphold Ukraine's territorial integrity.
What's more, in 2014 there was never any chance of Ukraine joining NATO due to the Russian lease on Sevastopol.
And you accuse Ukraine of breaking agreements? How did Minsk 1 end? How did Minsk 2 end? How did the black sea grain initiative end? How did Prighozin's truce work out for him?
By now, most schools in Denmark are banning phones during school hours. My kids' school did it two years ago. I have no idea if it has improved my kids' "cognitive skills", and frankly I don't care that much about their academic level. They are kids. They should run around, play and be happy, and then they will learn what they need.
As a parent it's wonderful to know that the kids have this 5-7 hour break from the screens. Just wonderful.
Someone realized it's not a good idea to hand a bunch of teens cameras, give them unlimited possibility to bully eachother anonymously and then force them to share a space for 8 hours every day, including changing clothes and showering for gym class. In hindsight it seems obvious.
I think that's the norm in UK secondaries too. My 11yo is allowed to take his phone to school for but policy is it stays switched off, in the locker, until the end of the school day.
> Drug use is usually seen as a poverty problem, and on this platform we are constantly reminded that the US has GDP figures that dwarf the European.
The US is loaded with systems that pressure resources and means upward. I spent the 2010s in hunger-level poverty, with minor children. My kids were a few of the millions, who got to experience getting their only-regular-meals in schools.
It's not a clone. What is ethically murky about it?
You want Brad Pitt for your movie. He says no. You hire Benicio Del Toro because of the physical resemblence. Big deal.
Having seen "Her" and many other Scarlet Johansson movies, I didn't think for a second that GPT-4o sounded like her. On the contrary, I wondered why they had chosen the voice of a middle aged woman, and whether that was about being woke. It wasn't until social media went hysterical, I realized that the voices were sort of similar.
If it's a sequel and Brad Pitt was in the first movie and you use trickery to make people think he's in the second movie, there's a case. See Crispin Glover, the dad from Back to the future, which was NOT the upside-down dad in BTTF2. They settled for 760k USD.
Spielberg & co never claimed Glover was in BTTF 2. The replacement actor is credited. However they heavily implied that Glover came back, by approximating his appearance with prosthetics, preventing his face from being seen up close, and having the replacement actor mimic Glover's voice.
> they heavily implied that Glover came back, by approximating his appearance with prosthetics, preventing his face from being seen up close, and having the replacement actor mimic Glover's voice
Do you think OpenAI did something similar here? In your case there is some expectation from the first movie, OpenAI doesn't have something similar. I'm really for people getting credit for their work/assets and I would be on the individual's side against the bigtech, but I think this case OpenAI and SJ have at hand already is on the path to set a wrong precedent, regardless of if any and which of them wins.
But there is a connection to it. It's about an AI assistant which is what openAI is releasing. Disregarding Scarlett Johansson completely and it makes total sense Sam Altman made that tweet.
Sam tweeting "Her" is a clear as daylight indication that they are deliberately trying to associate the voice with ScarJo's performance.
They're squarely in the zone with knockoff products deliberately aping the branding of the real thing.
"Dr Peppy isn't a trick to piggyback on Dr Pepper, it's a legally distinct brand!" might give you enough of a fig leaf in court with a good lawyer, but it's very obvious what kind of company you're running to anybody paying attention.
Or he tweeted 'her' to compare his product with the movie AI's conversational abilities. It just depends on how one subjectively interprets a single syllable.
That would be a rather weird and boneheaded thing to do, when you've already twice approached said AI's voice actor and been rejected.
There are any number of human-sounding movie AI's, but apparently only one whose actor has specifically and repeatedly rejected this association.
Does he keep getting into ethical hot water because he's a reckless fool, or because he doesn't really care about ethics at all, despite all the theatre?
> I wondered why they had chosen the voice of a middle aged woman
AIs and automated systems, real and fictional, traditionally use women more than men to voice them. Apparently there was some research among all-male bomber crews that this "stood out", the B-58 was issued with some recordings of Joan Elms (https://archive.org/details/b58alertaudio ) and this was widely copied.
I can assure you that there is plenty of other agencies, ministries, municipalities, private companies etc. in both Denmark and other European countries looking into switching to non-American software.
"Data sovereignty" is now an important parameter when chosing supplier. Everybody asks about it it. Everybody plans around it.
Although the weaning off will take many years, and although European companies and governments will probably never be entirely without American software, and why should they, the American dominance will disappear, little by little. For better or worse, the American Century is coming to an end, also in IT.