In my company we sometimes cherry-pick parts of the AI summaries and send them to the clients just to confirm the stuff that we agreed on during a meeting. The customers know that the summary is AI-generated and they don't mind. Sometimes people come to me and ask whether what they read in the summary was really discussed in the meeting or is it just AI hallucinating but I can usually assure them that we really did discuss that. So these can be useful to a degree.
I just want to remind our overseas friends that the EU is not a country and Mistral is French company. The EU rarely bets on a single firm in a single country, there are always 26 unhappy countries when something like that is about to happen ;)
I am European and I do agree that we should support the European companies but such decision are always results of lengthy deliberations.
Does anyone know if there is any company that is proactively supported by the EU?
I am from the E.U :) . I also work for public administrations and have close relative working for E.U administrations, so I do have some knowledge about how the beast operate.
> The EU rarely bets on a single firm in a single country
Indeed, except when they do. While the various E.U administrations like to usually create funds that are distributed with grants (which are rarely evenly distributed evenly amongst the member mind you), there is sometime where they do invest in one horse. This is usually in high-tech, high-capital sector tho', like Airbus, Arianespace, where there is only a very few competitor, and the chance of having new one is very low has the investment in time and money to get a business up and running would be basically only feasible by a state.
So I don't think Mistral is that (yet at least). But it is still the only company operating at this level in the E.U (for now), making it a decent bet for ASML. Plus, as many pointed out, there is also the French connection :D
Both Airbus and Arianespace are quite distributed across the EU. While this seems to have worked fine for Airbus, it does not seem to work that well for space launchers under the Ariannespace umbrella - though some bits of the Ariane 6 & Vega C are built here in the Czech republic for example. So you can see some new programs that support small orbital launcher companies regardless of geographic distribution, just based on results.
Pointlessly pedantic. Everyone knows EU is not a country. Also, ASML and Mistral are from two different countries.
That aside, since the Draghi report last year (which was primarily about the innovation gap between the EU/US specifically in tech) and the overall lackluster economic projections, EU officials have been very vocal about losing out to the US (and this time China) in yet another race in a fledgling innovation.
There is without a doubt some level of influence & assurances from the EU behind this deal.
The EU has a very long history of killing entrepreneurship. It is not a coincidence the largest and more innovative companies in the planet are not from Europe despite having both the financial and human resources. This is very unlikely to change now, particularly in a domain so sensitive to data privacy like AI for which the EU parliament is very quick and efficient in launching new and more restrictive regulations. Thinking they are going to have a change of heart now is pretty naive. What ASML is doing is buying a seat in the AI train. They can now flex they are an AI company, and some investors love that. That’s all this is, forget about Mistral being critical to ASML R&D, it is not. Siemens would have been a much better fit for Mistral and vice versa, but that ship already sailed as Siemens is heavily integrated with OpenAI and Azure in the digital factory space.
What would have to change for you to consider it a country? It has a government, there has been talk of a European Army. It has a sovereign currency. If it is the squabbling between constituent states: hello from Canada! Check out our politics.
>What would have to change for you to consider it a country?
For one, having the leader be actually elected by the people and not second hand appointed by corruptible politicians.
And that would never work because then voters would just choose a candidate on the criteria of being of the same nationality as them, rather than on policies, which highlights the EU's biggest fault: the massive cultural divide, and people don't like being ruled by someone who isn't of their own culture because then they can't empathize with them, which is 100% valid point, as what would a German royal like Ursula who grew up in UK boarding schools with private security, understand about the life that someone in Greece, Romania or Bulgaria have when she makes deals and policies that negativity affect the least fortunate, like on energy?
And for two, a mandatory common language. Because over 70% of Airbus Jobs at Toulouse HQ are in French. Same for other companies and countries. So in theory you have job mobility, but in practice it's highly limited if you don't speak the local language.
>there has been talk of a European Army.
Since when do talks equal anything in reality? What can I do with talks? Can I spend them? If politicians' talks were cookies I'd have died of diabetes 500x by now.
There will be no EU army since, just like my previous point, not only do citizens of France won't want to be controlled by a German general, and vice versa, but also all EU countries have their own different geopolitical interests, often in conflict with other members.
So we'll just have mutual defense agreements whose practical enforcement will always be questionable when shit actually hits the fan, because it's easy for politicians to write mutual defense cheques, but when they have to ask their citizens to go die in another country especially a country they don't have cultural ties or fondness towards, those cheques become very hard to cash.
> For one, having the leader be actually elected by the people and not second hand appointed by corruptible politicians.
That's a strange requirement considering the executive of most EU states is not directly elected by people either. Do you not consider Germany or Italy to be countries?
> That's a strange requirement considering the executive of most EU states is not directly elected by people either
At least, it's usually the leader of the party the people voted for in the legislative elections.
In the EU there was this Spitzenkandidat idea floating around ten years ago, but it was never enacted in texts and died at the first opportunity (naming Von der Leyen back in 2019 when she wasn't the leader of the PPE), because the heads of members states (particularly the French) weren't willing to give up their designation power.
In practice there isn't even European political parties, the European elections are just national elections represented by national parties and most citizens don't even know the names of the European coalition of parties (PSOE, PPE, Renew, etc…).
Depends. What is a country? The land borders? The people? The government? The leader? If you take out all the Germans out of Germany and replace them with other people is it still Germany?
My point was that accountable democracy requires direct vote from the people and not via second hand, not that Germany or Italy aren't countries. And if EU wishes to be a country it needs that level of direct accountability which is impossible.
Otherwise if you force it it's gonna be another Yugoslavia or USSR where most people are pissed because they're not being ruled by someone of their own culture that they can directly vote for.
These forced multi-culti nation states under one roof abominations don't work. It's been known since the Tower of Babel yet the elite ruling class think this time it will be different because it worked in the US, a country younger than most universities in Europe.
> Depends. What is a country? The land borders? The people? The government? The leader? If you take out all the Germans out of Germany and replace them with other people is it still Germany?
Theseus' ship? Isn't that "Umvolkung" nonsense again? Philosophy, political sciences, and law have have rummaged about these questions for the last few centuries and have developed some pretty good answers. Of course, they are mostly not simple and all too long and intricate for this forum, but I guess you can pick up any modern book on theory of the state to get your answers.
But I get the distinct notion that you have a certain idea what a country, state, or nation is, considering the conflation with culture, and it is not very embracing of pluralism. I'd wager you'd like Schmidt, maybe Zippelius, but not Böckenförde.
> What would have to change for you to consider it a country?
Almost as many things as what you'd have to change to consider the UN a country.
> It has a government
No it doesn't. The Commission isn't a government, it has no autonomy from the member states as it takes it's orientations directly from the European Council, which is the meeting of the heads of all member states.
> there has been talk of a European Army
There has been talk about fusion power for decades as well, we know it's not happening anytime soon (creating a European army would require all 27 member states to enact a new treaty replacing the current ones, this hasn't been done since they were 15 and the adoption of the previous one was very chaotic and left deep scares). Also, it's very unlikely to happen since there are too much diverging interests (the Baltic and former eastern states being too reliant on US security guarantees, France being too attached to its strategic independence and Hungary being straight up aligned on Moscow).
> It has a sovereign currency
No it doesn't… There is a common currency between some of the member states, but not all of them.
> If it is the squabbling between constituent states: hello from Canada!
Since you are from the other side of the Atlantic I don't blame you for not understanding this well (as I said, most European don't), but the EU really is as close to international organization like the UN as it is from Federal countries.
It has some federal components (like the fact that their is a legislative process to enact laws that are immediately applicable in member states without ratification) but it lacks a good part of it: no army as said above, but also no justice system, more importantly no autonomous budget (the budget is mostly decided by the European Council, the Parliament having pretty much no weight in the process) no ability to raise taxes (with the exception of tariffs, all of Europe's revenue is made of member states contributions, and even tariffs are raised by member states administration on behalf of the EU which doesn't have it's own capabilities). More strikingly it doesn't have a territory of its own: its territory is made of the territory of member states and they can unilaterally change it without the EU having a say on the matter. Two example:
- had Scotland gained its independence through referendum a decade ago, it would have automatically left the EU because it's not the territory or the people that belongs to the EU but the member states (Scotland could have re-joined later as a new member state, but there's no process for splitting a member state without one part leaving the EU, like the UN, see China).
- France has territories that aren't part of the EU, but it can unilaterally change their status to make them part of it (and did for Mayotte 15 years ago) or the other way around, and the EU has no say in the matter.
All that to say that EU isn't a country, it's a “unidentified political object” (this is a quote from former head of the European Commission Jacques Delors).
I wouldn't mind "security in exchange for better economic treatment" deal, but I don't understand how anybody still trusts US in terms of security. They clearly showed that they fear Russia, plus Trump made several allegations that they may not provide military help even to NATO allies. I am from Poland, theoretically we have US troops stationed here but over 70% of population (including myself) don't believe they will stay here long once we're attacked.
US got concrete economic concessions in writing in exchange for words about security.
A good example we just saw today. Countries with security arrangements with the USA can be bombed freely by those with more favor with the current US leadership.
Yes, I have a lot of bookmarks. When I bookmark a page, I add some keywords to the bookmark's title so I can easily find it in the future. It's not strictly tagging, I just try thinking of words the future me could use when searching for a particular bookmark.
However, I've never used any bookmarking service. It makes sense if you want to share your bookmarks, but I prefer to keep them private.
What could be the benefit of paying $20 to Ollama to run inferior models instead of paying the same amount of money to e.g. OpenAI for access to sota models?
I feel the primary benefit of this Ollama Turbo is that you can quickly test and run different models in the cloud that you could run locally if you had the correct hardware.
This allows you to try out some open models and better assess if you could buy a dgx box or Mac Studio with a lot of unified memory and build out what you want to do locally without actually investing in very expensive hardware.
Certain applications require good privacy control and on-prem and local are something certain financial/medical/law developers want. This allows you to build something and test it on non-private data and then drop in real local hardware later in the process.
> quickly test and run different models in the cloud that you could run locally if you had the correct hardware.
I feel like they're competing against Hugging Face or even Colaboratory then if this is the case.
And for cases that require strict privacy control, I don't think I'd run it on emergent models or if I really have to, I would prefer doing so on an existing cloud setup already that has the necessary trust / compliance barriers addressed. (does Ollama Turbo even have their Trust center up?)
I can see its potential once it gets rolling, since there's a lot of ollama installations out there.
Running models without a filter on it. OpenAI has an overzealous filter and won’t even tell you what you violated. So you have to do a dance with prompts to see if it’s copyright, trademark or whatever. Recently it just refused to answer my questions and said it wasn’t true that a civil servant would get fired for releasing a report per their job duties. Another dance sending it links to stories that it was true so it could answer my question. I want a LLMs without training wheels.
That's true in the world without budget constraints. Sometimes minimal changes in the design result in drastic changes to the implementation effort. Sure, I can build anything, but the client may not be happy if I spend a couple of months rewriting entire front-end just to accommodate designer's dream.
Thank you for the examples. I tried the one with a pink cake. Turns out that on my machine only web browsers are capable of displaying the image properly. All viewers (IrfanView, XnView, Nomacs, Windows Photos) and editors (Paint .NET, GIMP) that I've tried only showed the "washed out" picture.
Yeah. We were able to get buy-in from some big players. We cannot contact every group, though. My hope is since big players have bought in, others will hear the message and update their programs.
Sooooo file some bugs :D
Also, be kind to them. This literally launched yesterday.
It's interesting that Paint.NET supports the vivid image if you screenshot the cake (Win+Shift+S) and paste it. But, opening the PNG opens up the washed out picture.
I do. Housing prices are constantly rising, when you take a loan you are buying an asset which (with some luck) may appreciate in value more than mortgage interest rates. That's why in some countries it's worth taking a loan as soon as possible without saving for too long.
Sure, without mortgage you may not be able to afford a house at all but it does not change the fact that mortgage is a "good" loan (i.e. you benefit from taking it)
Mortgages with low interest rates are also one of the (main) reasons houses are so "expensive" in the first place.
The cheaper money (credit) is, the "higher" the prices will go.
It's not so much that houses became expensive, it's more that money to buy a house (specifically mortgages) became relatively cheaper. Low interest rates did that.
I don't know about this - when I see quotes on build cost in my area they add up to more than similar properties sell for in some cases, and generally aren't a whole lot different than buying to the point that I've wondered why it's like that.
This is a one-time effect, though. Or at least, an effect that only changes periodically (and should reverse) when interest rates change. 30-year mortgages have been standard in the US for most of my life, and houses have gotten a lot more expensive during that time.
The effect may pause when interest rates change, but it's unlikely to reverse significantly. People who have homes now aren't going to want to sell for less than they paid for them, so there's a lot of inertia against prices going down.
Home prices have doubled in most areas since 2009 (and worse in many areas.) when people complain about prices in 2025, this is what they’re talking about. This is not driven by the novel existence of 30-year mortgages and interest rates are at a near-term high.
Median home prices aren’t very interesting because most of the increase is limited to specific competitive areas, and median US home prices hides that effect. I’m sure houses in deeply rural areas haven’t gotten much more expensive, but it isn’t relevant to me.
Well over half of Americans are living in Urban areas so median here is a measure of urban home prices.
Further average home prices reflects overall economic gains. The top 10%, 1%, 0.1%, etc getting richer buy nicer stuff driving up the average but that says little about overall affordability.
House size, build "quality" (the details in the house), resource scarcity, and zoning policy are the drivers of cost. Cheap credit and lifetime loans allow the system to continue.
Every time a municipality levies a requirement upon new development the price of everything that could be used the same way goes up by that amount since it's the "next best thing". I got told I need to spend $20-50k on engineered assessments and plans to clear an old farm field that was left to grown over for 30yr and is now considered "forest" by (a single unelected employee of) the municipality.
Game out the economic implications of that sort of regulatory behavior across the entire real estate and housing sectors and suddenly a lot of stuff that makes no sense makes a lot more sense.
Housing prices are _generally_ rising. It's entirely possible to buy a house and wind up selling it later, having lost money in it. Many times through no real fault.
I hope most people haven't forgotten about 2008 financial crisis and how it was caused by declining housing prices (and the banks/markets not taking that risk into account)
Housing prices typically appreciate up with inflation over the long run, although local markets don't always follow the same pattern. (IE, Silicon Valley is a case where real estate appreciated faster than inflation.)
Remember, it's over the long run. There can be periods where a house will appreciate faster than inflation, and other periods where the real value of a house doesn't keep up. If you understand this dynamic, you can make a lot of money. (IE, flipping and then becoming a landlord when the market turns.)
Since the not-yet-homeowner is no doubt paying rent, home appreciation can slip by some measure below the rate of inflation and still have been a wise investment.
Of course there is home insurance and repairs to consider. But also there is the increase in rent to consider on the other side as well.
My house is 7 years old and the various amount of things I need to fix is making me miss being a renter.
That being said, generally the reason why home ownership is a "good deal" in the US is because you can accumulate equity, even when the value of the home keeps up with inflation. (Technically it means that inflation works in your favor if you have a fixed-rate mortgage.)
Depends on how long the not yet homeowener will live there. If you live in the same house for the next 40 years you are almost certainly better off owning it. However if you have to move after a year (which might not be in your control) you probably will lose money. 7 years is a good rule of thumb for minimum time you need to live in a house before it is better than renting, but exact circumstances can be very different.
Just kill it with uBlock.
The more elegant way would be to inject a proper parameter to session storage with some kind of extension. Or switch to the light version of the service https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/
edit: I can see that in a comment below @yegg shared an even better way - switching to https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
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