Yeah no, it's just not how it works. They're trying to support fundamental research and they have limited resources to accomplish them. Some random dude who wants to build a company that generates pretty AI pictures is just not the target audience, and he rightly got rejected.
And frankly, the dream scenario that Pieter describes where he somehow would qualify for these resources also wouldn't help kickstart the tech industry, and it's also not how it works in the states.
What does help, and what European governments (at least the one in The Netherlands that Pieter is from) actually do, is more funding for startups. If you're a startup founder in NL almost every angel you talk to has a matched funding deal with the government. That's such a smart way of keeping up with the US. Do you think US startups get free compute from the government? They don't even get subsidies most of the time. What they get is better funding because there's more capital available, and helping investors with that is exactly how you solve that.
I don't think what you're saying is inconsistent with what I'm saying. I think you are making a big deal out of the difference between state investment funds and subsidized GPUs but I think they basically work by similar mechanisms.
> What does help, and what European governments (at least the one in The Netherlands that Pieter is from) actually do, is more funding for startups. If you're a startup founder in NL almost every angel you talk to has a matched funding deal with the government. That's such a smart way of keeping up with the US.
Does government offering matched funding to investors actually help startups who are struggling to find (any) funding? If a startup can't find (any) funding, matching is irrelevant.
> Do you think US startups get free compute from the government? They don't even get subsidies most of the time. What they get is better funding because there's more capital available, and helping investors with that is exactly how you solve that.
Umm. I'm not really convinced that the political elites in Europe understand how to do any of this stuff well.
Yes, and consider how an animal that lives only 2 years gets Alzheimer's in the first place. They must be genetically engineered to have super turbo Alzheimer's. Normal Alzheimer's doesn't progress so fast I think.
This is a really important thing to keep in mind with these studies, we don't actually know that we're curing Alzheimer's in these mice. We don't even know if mice really get Alzheimer's in the way we do. What we're curing is mice who've been genetically modified to overproduce a protein that's associated with Alzheimer's, and we think that's a good model because the overproduction seems to cause symptoms that look like what Alzheimer's would look like in mice, but it's still just a model.
I am sort of surprised we even have an arm of government quick and authoritative enough to be able to intervene here. I always assumed the government would just let any frogs boil.
I am too. Although it appears computer and computer machinery, like chips amongst others, are the 2nd largest export[1]. I'm guessing these types of companies are very important to economic stability within the country and economic posturing in outside the company in global trade.
We really would like to keep these companies alive. Geely buying Volvo is a nice example of a proper acquisition and Geely has - as far as I know - always played by the rules. What happened here would not fly under any management and China should take note, ownership does not give a pass to 'do as you please', we have many stakeholders including employees and customers, not just owners and managers.
De ondernemingskamer is not a paper tiger. Ask Sanderink about that.
They rarely make decisions that I disagree with, even if I realize I usually don't have all of the facts. Business continuity, employees, shareholders, customers. Those are the priorities and management is definitely not acting with impunity. The shareholder angle here is an interesting one, that route has been stopped off preemptively it seems.
So it seems, but also this seems to have been dragging along since 2023 so it's less sudden than the press makes it seem. The contract with WSS that's underlying the complaint by the former management has apparently been allowed to progress to the point where the US is threatening to simply consider Nexperia a Chinese company for the purposes of sanctions.
And rightly so. The timeline here is fairly typical: until the day there is a judgment nothing changes and going through the process usually takes a while. And then everything changes at once. It is clear that they were no longer making decisions in the interest of Nexperia or its customers but solely to benefit Zhang's interests. What is interesting is that Wingtech actually was being defrauded but chose not to act. That's the bit that doesn't make sense to me, unless Zhang also controls Wingtech somehow. In one article it was said that they bought many more wafers than needed in order to destroy them, that's textbook mismanagement.
China, meanwhile has announced 'retaliatory measures', which seems a bit silly because that will just hurt their own exports, and shows that it wasn't necessarily Zhang that was the problem but someone much higher up in the party structure.
I'm a bit surprised by this move as well... If only someone had done similar to protect the gutting of Sears and K-Mart, even if both companies made several years of bad decisions themselves, the way they were cleaned out is disgusting.
America voted for Ronald Reagan in the biggest landslide victory the US had seen in a very long time.
Reagan promised "deregulation" and "get government out of business" etc, and had a very clear mandate to execute, which he did, IMO to our detriment, by doing things like telling the FTC to just let companies do whatever, and outright not enforce anti-competitive laws if you couldn't show "consumer harm", which explicitly meant you had to show prices going up before you could prevent the monopoly from forming.
Reagan was out of office by three decades when Sears finally collapsed, and 16 of those interim years was with a Democrat in office, and Democrat control of both houses for several of those years.
That's just the cabinet, so lawmaking is on hold for now, but the government and the ministry of economic affairs is still operational. A government can't just stop working because a small (albeit important) part of it is waiting for the elections.
in the NRC article it says that board members started to complian that the CEO was "making choices that were not in the interest of the company". Four days later they were fired.
"It was at that moment that Nexperia alerted the ministry of Economic Affairs"
Right, I suppose at that point there was some chauvinism or at least fear of being held accountable for it. But the thing that surprised me was that there was actually someone listening at Economic Affairs. Perhaps at that level a board of directors has connections at the government. Either that, or there's some AFM type branch that listens to directors' complaints.
I don't think that's the same thing. If you add a fruit juice concentrate to bread, that counts as added sugar. If you have a fruit juice and it contains fruit juice concentrate that's not added sugar. I don't think it's that easy to work around at all. All things that naturally contain sugar you don't need to put a label on it, and all things that don't you put a label on.
I think it's the hard work arounds that will eventually break it. Like we're already growing strawberries that are naturally sweet, in the future maybe our bread will be made of wheat that has "natural" sugars in it or something. But I feel that for that to happen the "no added sugars" labeling would have to be exceptionally effective.
> If you add a fruit juice concentrate to bread, that counts as added sugar. If you have a fruit juice and it contains fruit juice concentrate that's not added sugar.
What if you add it to a soft drink? Or a ready meal? What about using it instead of fruit in a ready meal?
Yeah this is insane. This is basically what was already happening, i.e. cloud companies offering a Redis service under some generic name. It barely slows them down. I can't understand how legal counsel would not have objected to adding this clause, and who would push for such a clause? It effectively removes the innovation from it. Why choose EUPL over GPLv3 if it can just be relicensed?
It makes a difference in that it allows the cloud providers to monetize Redis without having to deal with the Redis team. Which is fair and in the spirit of the original license of Redis, but don't paint it as some great achievement of open source ethos.
What Redis did by embracing a bad license shouldn't be applauded either. But the problem is that there isn't a great copyleft license that prevents embrace, extend & extinguish of great cloud projects. EUPL might've been it, and this weird clause just kills what would have made it perfect.
Alternatively, maybe redis wouldn't have seen great adoption if it was under any non-compete license.
That is, to be able to be hosted by someone else is a necessary factor in widespread adoption and success.
The open source ethos is to give code that you are allowed to do as you wish with, including forking.
The idea that there should only be one canonical project is... just wrong.
It's not about non-compete, it's about copyleft. What's blocking redis and and with them a whole generation of open source based startups from embracing true open source licenses is that there is no copyleft license for the cloud age. GPLv3 is 18 years old by now, and the big cloud providers have captured the OSI to prevent a GPLv4 from ever happening.
The open source ethos is not to give code to do as you wish with. It's to ensure users have control over the software and are not controlled by it.
It's not about blocking competition, it's about levelling the playing field. You are supporting the cause of trillion dollar megacorporations in their campaign of capitalizing on open source software over the backs of passionate trailblazers.
The maintainers of Valkey are being tricked by these companies to continue to develop for a project that can be easily exploited.
And of course there's oxide.computer making motherboards with full control of the entire hardware stack running open source software specifically for customers like the Idaho National Laboratory.
As far as I can tell it's one of their most significant features, and certainly one of its most capital intensive. And I don't know how many startups land institutions like INL as their launching customer, and enough other big enterprise leads to warrant their follow up investment.
If you remove that component from their value prop, they're not that much different from Dell.
Just a quick point of clarification that while our boot architecture is very important (e.g., a service processor in lieu of a BMC, the elimination of UEFI entirely, etc.), we are quite a bit different from Dell beyond that. There are certainly many hardware-level differentiators (e.g. DC busbar-based design, blindmated networking, built-in switch, etc.) but the big differentiator is really what these things allow: entirely integrated software. The Oxide rack comes with all of the software to run elastic infrastructure (that is, the distributed system that comprises the control plane), including switch software, storage software, etc. And then (critically!) the capacity to update all of this.[0]
All of it is a far cry from the offerings of Dell/HPE/Supermicro, which rely on others to provide the software that turns the hardware into real infrastructure.
Right, my apologies for downplaying it. That you control both the hardware and the software through the entire stack has tremendous benefit, especially for this type of customer. My point was if you as a customer don't value that aspect of Oxide's pitch, which you obviously are much better at fully conveying, then you'd be seriously considering Dell/HPE/Supermicro as well.
For what it's worth the last time I had to procure a small cluster the offer Dell made was ridiculously overpriced, didn't meet the specifications I asked for, and the whole experience didn't inspire confidence in the software they were pitching either. We were a small underfunded startup so we were never gonna drop 200k on that storage solution (0.5PB HDD + ~80TB SSD), but if we did have that kind of budget we probably would have gone with one of the smaller but more focused parties there instead like maybe TrueNAS, I bet there's a beautiful market for Oxide as well in that segment.
It's not just kids. MrBeast had me convinced he has a perfectly good business model making more money than he gives away without having to pull shady things. And with me plenty of reasonable adults judging from his interactions with public figures.
I mean, it was obvious to me they couldn’t have been able to pull $10k of money per video at the start. Maybe now, with 400M subscribers that would work just fine.
"For example, tell it to “compile customer feedback from Slack, Notion, and email into actionable insights” and watch it research across your tools, synthesize findings, create a structured database, then notify you when it’s done."
I wonder when for the first time a team of humans will complete a full project based on a finding that turned out to be hallucinated in a sub step of an AI agent.
People building "safety critical" systems already pay for a "secure" ecosystem. It's called Microsoft. We don't need regulations to have Microsoft exist. Do you think some random med tech startup is going to pay to have libxml2 maintained? They'll see the regulation and go "oh ok, Windows licenses it is".
It's not the "safety critical" software that needs this fixed, it's all software in general. There's a million software systems that have important privacy sensitive data or safety relevant processes that fly under the "safety critical" radar.
Read your Microsoft licensing agreement. If you don't have one, read the EULA for OEM windows. The warranty, fitness for purpose and damages exclusion is not as extensive as what the grandparent cited, but it basically boils down to "as limited as legally possible, and the most damages you will get is your license fee back". You also won't get a binding requirements document anyways, so you don't even really know what the software microsoft sells you is fit for. At any point in time, there could be some knowledgebase article saying something like "oh, and btw, don't do this because it breaks", so per their warranty agreement you signed they are free from any responsibility simply by documenting the problem.
Really safety-critical stuff like ASIL-D, ISO26262, IEC61508 (and tons of other magic numbers) isn't something you can buy from microsoft. At best, you can sometimes get a reseller to sign something a little more binding, but with tons of restrictions that basically boil down to "use the microsoft stuff for the readout gauges, but the critical control part goes somewhere else".
It's not about warranties, it's about having a stable ecosystem with some guaranteed measure of maintenance. The point is not that there's even more stable and expensive options than Microsoft. The point is that there's very little space for OSS here. Go to any hospital and count the amount of Windows devices and compare that to the amount of other operating systems you see. The second something becomes even a little safety oriented, there's going to be proprietary software.
So when these regulations that OP would start to take hold, would we get companies to sponsor random open source dependencies like libxml2? Or would they gather around some stable proprietary ecosystem like Microsoft's and maybe some big innovative solutions built on top of Microsoft?
Even the "guaranteed measure of maintenance" is not guaranteed. You don't get an SLA on patches or bugfixes from microsoft. You don't get an uptime SLA. Its all "best effort" or worse "when we feel like it". And the few SLAs they give you, e.g. on cloud stuff, are useless because it basically is "get your money back for that month". And the SLA measurement is done by their own downtime announcements, so a complete joke. Software lifetimes exist and are published, but guess what? Within that lifetime, you get "updates", but nowhere do you get any kind of guarantee about what is updated, what is fixed, how fast, if ever.
And no kind of safety-oriented anything will run windows or any microsoft software. There is no windows edition of therac-25. The stuff you see in a hospital is normal workstation PCs for non-safety-relevant data entry and display. As soon as it becomes safety-relevant like controlling your heart-lung-machine, auto-dosing your medications, controlling the x-ray beam, you are far away from anything microsoft.
And actually, OSS is used more often in those safety-relevant settings. Why? Not because the OSS maintainers themselves would themselves provide any support, SLA or warranty. But because the nature of OSS provides third parties the possibility to certify, maintain and guarantee for their special 'safety-relevant-libxml2-fork'. Sometimes this is done by the device vendors themselves, sometimes they buy this from others. But it happens, and it is growing in frequency.
There is tons more. Basically any compiler for safety-relevant embedded stuff is either clang or gcc under the hood. Linux is frequently encountered when the real-time requirements aren't too strict. With Linux also comes the usual Linux ecosystem of OSS libs and services. It won't look like your normal desktop OS, but quite a lot in that area is OSS.
Nothing at all from microsoft (except a useless BS certification "you can use Azure Devops as a code repo to store you ASIL-D code...").
And frankly, the dream scenario that Pieter describes where he somehow would qualify for these resources also wouldn't help kickstart the tech industry, and it's also not how it works in the states.
What does help, and what European governments (at least the one in The Netherlands that Pieter is from) actually do, is more funding for startups. If you're a startup founder in NL almost every angel you talk to has a matched funding deal with the government. That's such a smart way of keeping up with the US. Do you think US startups get free compute from the government? They don't even get subsidies most of the time. What they get is better funding because there's more capital available, and helping investors with that is exactly how you solve that.
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