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A clip from a comedic fiction TV series? So much for a "strong case to be made"...

Could you elaborate regarding how exactly were eastern bloc countries "tricked" into joining by the UK? And what prevents them from leaving now that the tricksters from UK have long since left themselves?

> This is the other part: if associate membership is a thing then won't half of the EU start thinking that's their future?

Presumably by "half of the EU" you mean (sometimes) euro-sceptic states like Hungary or Poland? Well, these are not in EU because some illuminati/lizard people tricked them into joining and now won't allow them to leave, like some of their politicians would like you to believe, but because they enjoy billions of subsidies per year.

> They have shareholders, who wouldn't allow them to provide value for free, its just not obvious to you how they are extracting that value. Maybe its by capturing a huge % of unencrypted https traffic because if you let them do your certs it means they can read all your real traffic.

If it is "not obvious to you how they extract the value", you can just look for NET (their ticker) earning reports and SEC fillings since they are a publicly traded company instead of spreading conspiracy theories...

> When the US position gets hit with layoffs, do you still have comprehensive healthcare and unemployment coverage?

What does this have to do if the advertised base salary? You would pay for your healthcare and social security with huge taxes from that already meager salary, it is not like those 90k is all-taxes-paid-and-batteries-included offer.

> Underwriting gigawatt data centers and frontier models demands a fully realized European Capital Markets Union, a single energy regulator with cross-border grid integration, and shared fiscal borrowing power.

Care to elaborate why you consider this an absolute must? I don't see why, say, France can't build an "AI valley" somewhere near to on of their nuclear power plants and commit to provide X amount of energy for some fixed price for a decade. To me the main reasons for not building top AI labs with frontier models in EU seems to be:

- Venture money is not there (or people controlling the money are not on board to invest into such labs).

- Weak political will from countries who could do that to actually go for it.

- Top scientist who could work on it choosing to go for much higher payouts in the US.

> We're not in a good position on the supply chain needed. Right now it really means pouring billions on American corps, either by renting the compute or by building it.

You are saying "right now" as if EU is seriously investing into developing its own AI hardware (both training and inference) but I'm not aware of any serious attempts to build such supply chain in EU.

I agree with your message overall, but this kind of, I dunno, martyrdom posturing ("But we're in a social climate where I don't even dare write down examples of what those more effective methods would be, because if you're not luddite enough you're the enemy.", "it's not socially acceptable to discuss alternatives to orthodoxy") is funny to see on HN. This is not Xitter or Reddit, no one is going to ban or attempt to dox you and get you fired for saying "We should seriously consider injecting reflective stuff into stratosphere" here. In fact, your message will likely even have a positive rating overall.

> Imagine 8 years of Bernie

As a person who was born in the Soviet Union I can easily imagine that...

For oldschool shooter experience you can just install Quake Live from Steam. You won't have trouble finding active servers in it.

Are you referring to [0] as a "rational take"? Oh, sorry, it is 2026 already and that one was quickly swept under the rug already so I guess you were referring to [1]? Not sure those would appear very rational to anyone outside of your LessWrong bubble.

[0]: https://ai-2027.com/ [1]: https://ai-2040.com/

> Is Gemini really that bad?

It still produce full-blown hallucinations for me sometimes, even in 2026. The kinds ChatGPT stopped generating by 2025. It is cheap and fast though.

> Highlights on my smartphone are Fennec (Firefox), Termux, Cromite, Element, Syncthing, various videogames and other utilities.

What is even their motivation to not be backed up?

Yes, they may just be laying the groundwork for introducing compliance requirements for VPN providers while the concept of VPN itself as a tool will always remain lawful by itself. Same as a messaging apps - they are completely lawful but France would arrest CEOs of businesses around them if they are not cooperative enough with "law enforcement".

I would assume that the problem with California aquifer is (mostly) a consequence of its Democratic state government decisions and it is highly unlikely that electing Hilary or Kamala would have prevented it.

I would assume because water-wasting concerns are just another tool for the left to use against their political opponents, not an actual concern most of their constituents deeply care about. Same, for example, as right-leaning people suddenly discovered concerns regarding wind turbines killing birds or spoiling views from the shore (I bet those birds covered in oil after spills enjoy it and are a treat to the eye!).

Western lefties consider farmers their class allies, and white-collar engineers and tech billionaires their class enemies. Which is not universal BTW because those kinds of farmers that hold water right in California would have a hard time in Soviet Union, for example.

> Google acting like a normal but competent company that's just chugging away

People are too quick to forget racially-diverse Nazi soldiers and other hilariously incompetent stuff that has been going around their generative AI efforts just a couple of years ago. Google look like they finally getting their shit together under immense competitive pressure but I would keep my eye on them for a few more years before starting calling them "competent".

That is okay. The optimal amount of "issues" is greater than zero.

Not necessary. People who still transfer their life savings to some "I'm with MicroSoft tech support" guy shouldn't be allowed to vote either TBH.

Besides paying or accepting being tracked you also have the option of not using web services that require that. Some things you can self-host (email, Mastodon instance, etc), others are sponsored (HN). I still don't get why you expect to dictate to businesses how to price their products - voting with your wallet has always been the way to express your disagreement, not "EU mAkE eViL Zuck serVE mE fOr fRee!!!11".

> Because advertising does not require invasive and pervasive tracking.

Okay, so just ignore tracking-advertisement supported option and sign up for payed account. What is your issue with this again?

> What you're proposing isn't opt in either. You're proposing "pervasive and invasive tracking, or pay an arbitrary sum randomly defined by the tracking industry". That is, literally pay for access to internet without tracking, or else.

This is incorrect. GDPR already forbids tracking without consent, so services you didn't sign up for (the whole internet) can't legally track you. Obviously, then everything would cost you actual money not just social networks.

> Here's a direct link. And no, this pop up wasn't on an "opt out social network". It was on a random site (can't remember now which one): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GTe23o5WwAACyNJ?format=png&name=...

This has nothing to do with the topic of this thread. GDPR already forbids random sites and ad networks from tracking you without your explicit consent.

This looks like a very narrow ruling regarding copyright. It doesn't guarantee that EU bureaucrats won't try to ban VPNs that don't verify user age (for starters to make NPCs support the bans, then they will inevitably attempt to enforce some kind of KYC or logging to "catch terrorists and pedos".)

> Advertising does not require invasive and pervasive tracking.

Why are you so opposed to pay for a tier without tracking? I'm still not following.

> Why the hell are people defending 24/7 monitoring at scale that would make even Stasi or Stalin pause and think "are we going too far?"? 1984 wasn't an instruction manual.

Stasi or KGB weren't "opt in" for their citizens while social networks definitely are. For example, Twitter won't allow me to access the images in the post you linked because I deleted my account as soon as Musk completely enshittified it and I'm doing just fine without it.

How is "Payed subscriptions tier without tracking" not a product? Isn't it exactly what Instagram offers in Europe?

This is actually a step in the right direction. I don't want to share my id and selfie with every stupid social media app/site. I would much rather allow parents to configure their children's devices to share their age.

> making payments for non-tracking illegal

This keeps surfacing in discussions about tracking. I'm wondering how do you propose for b2c software companies to make money if they can't either properly advertise or require you to pay to opt-out? Is this just an entitled leftie thing ("Elon Musk should pay for my Instagram!") or is there a genuine though-out plan for another reasonable business model?

Not sure I would consider public schools a fun experience though. At least not for the majority of pupils.

Yeah, my favorite one is how Chrome users are not smart enough to handle case-aware web-page search toggle. Although to be fair their Chrome team is very arrogant even by Google standards.

You keep spamming variations of this comment without explaining how could apps actually bypass security without several steps that the user needs to take in order for it to work. Are you just farming down votes for some weird reason or will you finally get to the technical details instead of one-sentence snarks?

The word you are looking for is "universal" not "free".