Europe needs digital sovereignty – and Microsoft has just proven why

Europe needs a whole new engineering culture if it wants to stay relevant in this field. It still is focused on outsourcing problems, people are too lazy for details and demand ready to use products.

I believe engineering in growing countries have completely different mindsets. They put the enterprise in enterprise and the results speak for themselves.

Of course you have to stay pragmatic here and not every battle is in the interest of a company. But engineers with the ability to pursue their craft, sensible knowledge management and training have become a rare sight. So R&D is just plainly better in other countries.

Problem is that this laziness of course empowers other players to grow to insane dimensions, like Microsoft did. Microsoft has many competent developers, but their success isn't due to software quality. Especially if you look at the latest cloud offerings. They are so large that they don't have to be good anymore.

And yet, we haven't found a good solution to that yet, and everybody uses smartphones controlled by Apple and Google, communicate via channels controlled by Meta and so on.

> His UK bank also blocked him

This is a 'funny' situation, and potentially telling as to who holds more power, given that the UK government has recently sanctioned two Israeli ministers: https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-britain-settl...

Are UK Banks (maybe only this UK Bank) more beholden to the US than the UK?

Is / Would this UK Bank also block(ing) those two Israeli ministers?

> credibly accused of being in the Epstein files

Is there a source of this other than Elon? Cause he’s anything but credible

Nero's music seems to have been as bad as Trump's golf skills. But you never ever tell the mad king that he isn't as apt as he thinks, you just let him win, for your own sake...

>Given that he effectively and literally ignited Los Angeles

Are we talking about the same LA? Because I only saw LA residents burning down their city. I didn't see Trump or federal law enforcement in LA burning down cars and looting stores.

So how do you get to blaming Trump for LA resident trashing their own city?

You forget one thing: ASML licenses american technology. They can't do anything out of the ordinary unless it has US' blessing. Hence, no leverage.

Also, the machines are just one part of the equation. You need chip designs, you need actual foundries where these machines need to be installed and so on.

>ASML, being Dutch, and crucial to essentially all cutting semiconductor production, gives Europe leverage

It doesn't.

Firstly, ASML's core EUV light source tech is licensed from the US who threatened to pull the plug if ASML sold EUV steppers to China. That's what actual leverage looks like.

Secondly, you also need cutting edge semi fabs, which EU lacks. If it were that easy ASML would open some fabs in its own back yard with its cutting edge machines and keep the highest profits for themselves instead of letting TSMC, Samsung and Intel have them, but it's not easy. EU semi fabs are behind Taiwan, the US, China and Japan in node sizes despite having ASML domestically which is a huge blow for domestic industry and leverage. That's like making the best hammers but having no idea how to use them effectively.

Thirdly, once you have the lithography machines and the fabs, you also need top IP to make cutting edge high margin chips with them, which the EU lacks. The highest grossing chips are all US IP: Nvidia, Apple, Qualcomm, AMD, Intel, Amazon, Ampere, while European chip companies are way down below the pecking order in profitability: Infineon, NXP, ST, making low margin chips the likes of Nvidia and AMD can't be bothered.

Fourthly(is that correct in English?), once you have your litho, fabs and high end chips, you can now put all those powerful chips into datacenters to create powerful cloud hyperscalers, which the EU lacks. EU has nothing close to AWS, GPC, Azure, Tencent, Alibaba.

This is what tech dominance looks like. And EU is third place behind the US and China.

ASML is a power house that stomps all for sure.

...but they're an outlier in a specific part of the chain, not an ecosystem.

When is the next Zeiss 7nm chip hitting markets?

But it's much, much easier with renewable energy.

We may have to mine coal, oil, and natural gas in specific places, but everywhere has access to the sun and wind.

It was Russia that stopped delivering gas through the pipeline. It was already non-functioning when it was blown up, the gas inside was static, non-moving, the pressure only kept up to prevent pipe-deterioration. That was unilateral, there were no sanctions, and Russia refused to take delivery of parts they had claimed they needed.

Even before the war, the German subsidiary of Gazprom had already started deliberately lowering the amount of gas stored underground in Germany, at a time when it was usually being filled up for the next winter.

Examples, there are many articles from around that time: https://www.dw.com/en/eu-gas-russia-nord-stream-crisis/a-666... (it shows the timeline, the explosions were inconsequential, gas had already long stopped flowing)

September 2022: "Russia cuts off gas exports to Europe via Nord Stream indefinitely"-- https://edition.cnn.com/2022/09/02/energy/nord-stream-1-pipe...

August 2022: "Nord Stream 1: Russia switches off gas pipeline citing maintenance" -- https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/31/nord-stream...

But Russia stopped exporting gas through that pipeline using nonsensical excuses a few weeks before it was blown up by the Ukrainians.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream

I never used a web based email client in my life, I don't personally know many people who still do so either.

You also need a good open source web client then…

FOSS != "makeshift solutions with pieces duck-taped together and inconsistent UX".

Many highly polished, widely-used pieces of software are also FOSS. Firefox, for instance.

FOSS can also be a software suite built by a well-funded international partnership for the specific purpose of making something that can replace Europe's current dependence on proprietary US-based software.

Yes, it's important to try to make sure Europe is in good shape with the software (and hardware) it depends on now, but a solid long-term strategy can—and, IMO, should—include building new packages from the ground up to fill niches not currently well-served by the independent, distributed FOSS community. It's likely to take years to truly come to fruition, but if done thoughtfully it will benefit everyone.

it's not a technical question simply.

this is a business/operations risk management question. compliance, legal liability, BCP, regulatory environment flux, and so on.

the case of the ICC obviously shows how little they cared about these things.

MS closed the account? where are the offsite/independent backups? etc.

> The OIC effectively controls the ICC

That's a pretty crazy claim. 125 countries have joined the ICC. The OIC only has 57 members (not all of them even have a Muslim majority).

Of the three judges who issued the arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, two are European (one is French, the other Slovenian).

The US has the same problem with the ICC as it does with the ICJ: the US government does not want to be subject to international law. The US is used to acting as a superpower, in whatever way it wants. It just fundamentally does not accept the premise that its actions should be in any way constrained by international law.

In this particular instance, the problem the US has with the ICC is that the US is Israel's primary backer. The US provides the money, weapons and diplomatic support that Israel needs to continue its war against the Palestinians and occupation of the Palestinian territories. The US itself is heavily implicated in the crimes that the ICC is prosecuting here.

An ongoing illegal occupation for 50 years is reduced down to 33 lives...

It wasn't clear that outsourcing a bunch of infrastructure to the cloud was economically effective, but here we are.

AI is inevitable, for better (open, transparent, self-hostable) or worse (closed, opaque, cloud-only).

I don't think he meant going to such absolute extremes...

Regulation is good, it keeps actors in line and prevent cheating, but then overregulation comes into the picture and shoots them in the foot while expecting them to compete on the world stage.

Think balance.

> that it justifies throwing away privacy and even copyright law

That's why I wrote that we don't want to do that. But not doing that comes with a risk that we need to be aware of. There's two sides to the coin and we need to look at both before we pick a side.

I don't have an opinion on which side to pick, since I think it's one of the hardest decisions of our time and I value our sovereignty and privacy. I just don't know if we can keep those in the long term if we start lagging behind on a global scale.

Is this really true though? UK is building new reactors, France has many. Wind and solar are both massive successes across the continent. The North Sea still has oil and significant new LNG storage capacity has recently been built.

> Europe chose degrowth

Through regulation. Regulation is more than just regulation of software. We're also at a disadvantage because of regulation on employee rights, wages and payments in stock options. In the US it's way easier to pay with theoretical money (like options) than actual money. So the start-up scene is way more interesting for young people who work hard and hope to become part of a unicorn to hit it big.

IIRC I read somewhere that ASML depends on some components provided by the US, if so, then it's not 100% in Europe hands yet.

But does Mistral stand a chance to make a state of the art model?

People will always want to use the best model. Like they use the best search engine.

How would Mistral catch up with US companies, who spend tens of billions of dollars per year on improving their models? As far as I know, Mistral raised something like $1B so far.

Yeah, and there's a _lot_ of Intel fabs in the EU. In any real geopolitical conflict, it's unlikely that their property would be respected.

Salaries in Europe are just a fraction of what you can get in the US. The quality of life for a good Software Engineer in most of the US is very high. As a foreign-born Software Engineer living in the US, I'd never trade it for Europe during my working years (nothing against Europe in particular).

Certainly not in terms of electricity generation:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-generation?ta...

It would be powerfully symbolic of the state of Europe if their energy sector was best summarised as planning to - at some unspecified point in the future - generate useful energy.

You are not actually leading until you win/achieve something.

Europe has severed itself from major sources of the fundamental driver of civilization, energy, it has bet on “renewable energy” in reckless ways, which was demonstrated by the small black swan event energy grid collapse just mere weeks ago. Germany has totally abandoned nuclear energy and has no real alternatives as it imports the majority of its energy and all its renewable energy sources are subpar, at best, and are unsustainable without massively distorting government command economy subsidies keeping afloat what is essentially a Ponzi scheme with decreasing real marginal returns. Germany, the engine of Europe, which keeps the whole EU boondoggle afloat has an avg of €0.44/kwh electricity prices.

That does not really indicate energy leadership.

Maybe Germany can get productive fusion energy online, but it also does not solve the deeper issue of a political system and control mechanism that is self-harming.

It’s the near future: Germany has successfully provided operational fusion energy. German politics and psychological control will all the sudden just give up on blaming, punishing, and hating its own people?

Everyone in Germany gets free AC and free unlimited heating? Free cars and free transportation because fusion basically nullifies the cost of energy? No, the German/EU political class loathes its own people and is recreating aristocracy, which for its own purposes relies on control and suppression of the masses. If anything the EU Lords would use that de facto unlimited energy to create unlimited AI surveillance and thought-crime robot armies to control the serfs.

Except the US doesn't really care about Europe that much. Having a government bureaucracy try to rebuild the entire US cloud software ecosystem because of one four year presidential term (which is already dramatically losing popularity in the US) sounds wildly silly to me.

Meanwhile turning away from the US means running into the arms of the Chinese for most things. And they are the much bigger threat to the EU economy given their superior manufacturing abilities -- which still today is the base of the EU's prosperity.

Once European industrial companies start losing to the Chinese, it's over for Europe's entire way of life and the social benefits systems all collapse. I'm sure they'll try USSR-style blanket protectionism before this happens, but will just lead to falling even further behind.

Linux kernel is developed in the US. Russia felt it hard way, when their developers were cut from submitting patches. One Trump word and Europe developers will follow. That's just an example. US is a locomotive for the whole computing. I want to underline that IT production chain is incredibly long and excluding US from this chain is impossible, simple as that.