BjoernKW

the process being too convoluted and risky turns off some corporations from storing data entirely (maybe it's not complicated enough yet in that regard)

This is a common misconception by people who never had to deal with GDPR in a business capacity (including the politicians who have caused this mess). Corporations either simply don't care or they have their legal department deal with this. It's the small companies and self-employed solo entrepreneurs that suffer.

As for the economic ramifications, there will certainly be a massive short-term upheaval. However, going all Luddite - or even just slowing down the process locally - won't help. Regulation doesn't generate wealth, after all (although EU politicians would like you to believe that), and for something like UBI we need massive wealth generation.

GDPR has done wonders to prevent careless personal data leaks that are so common in the US, and other kinds of abuse.

Has it? I still have to see evidence of that. What GDPR definitely has achieved, though, is people engaging in pointless busywork out of fear some busybody is trying to have them fined for being in violation of GDPR.

In a more practical view though I'm not sure if it'll do anything to stop job replacement from automation as such.

Again, I fail to see how automating jobs is supposed to be something negative. If a job can be automated that means humans ultimately can engage in more worthwhile endeavours. Most modern jobs would have been completely alien to someone from the 19th century. The same applies conversely. How many farriers do you know personally?

In general I think it's good for the EU to try and slow down adoption of bleeding edge tech so the US population with its lack of regulations can act as guinea pigs and absorb most of the early damage until we figure out what is the best approach when we get around to adopting it.

Quite frankly, by that point there might be not be enough left of the EU to make such a (very) late adoption possible or even relevant at all. We're talking about a timescale of just a few years for a revolution that'll dwarf the Industrial Revolution (which took an entire century, give or take). Up until now, the benefits by far outweigh the downsides and if we're talking about catastrophic damage (essentially, the SkyNet scenario), EU regulation certainly won't stop a US AI from killing Europeans.

An old example is lots of late adopters going straight to gigabit fiber instead of being stuck on copper DSL.

That's actually a very good example of how overly cautious behaviour in European countries leads to those countries being left behind. Up until very recently, for example, Germany's last mile Internet infrastructure was largely DSL-based (perhaps, still is; at least they're trying to make more use of fibre optics now).

I don't subscribe to ideological categories such as "hypercapitalists". So, no, I don't see that.

We can debate the details and implementation but EU legislature is, at least in spirit, trying to protect human rights

That's an unfounded assertion. Of course, politicians will claim this to be the case. I don't see how patronising citizens protects their human rights, though.

Engineers are prone to overcomplicating matters.

Pieter Levels famously runs Nomad List as vanilla PHP application on a single Linux server, while people keeps insisting you need a fault-tolerant, multi-region cloud setup and the modern stack-du-jour to provide such an application.

Still, EU member countries even fail at cooperating where it'd absolutely make sense to do so (see FCAS, for instance).

Yet they keep yapping on about the EU being about tighter integration between its member states. If not in the area of defence, where else? So far, this has been an abject failure (recently, see: FCAS).

Care to elaborate?

While advancements in drone technology in Ukraine certainly have been accelerated by the war, the country was by no means unprepared. They have been preparing for a large-scale war ever since the Russian occupation of Crimea (and the dismal international reaction to that).

The EU isn't even capable of ramping up its own defence capabilities when being faced with the very real threat of a Russian incursion in the next few years, which has me wonder what would be required for them to finally wake up.

Stop honoring US copyright.

I suppose some people just want to see the world burn.

I'm by no means a supporter of copyright and copyright laws, but unilaterally terminating such agreements is a recipe for disaster. How do you think the US would react to such a move?

Linux is no EU project, but very much global. It just happens that its originator (who, quite tellingly, has been living and working in the US since the mid-90s) is Finnish.

It's way to late for baby steps. The EU is bound to become either a US or a Chinese protectorate in all but name in just a few years time now.

How isolationism and open source are supposed to stem that tide, is beyond me.

and develop domestic alternatives.

Therein lies the rub for the EU. They think they can just regulate such alternatives into existence, yet have time and time again failed to provide such alternatives.

It never ceases to amaze me how people scramble to defend the EU's failed policies over the last three decades. The EU managed to regulate itself out of all relevant markets and it only has itself to blame.

I think the right move for Europe and other countries would be to effectively ban US tech and follow the Chinese response to Nvidia (delivered personally to Trump: we want to build our own AI chips).

How would the EU replace US tech? There simply are no equivalent providers of such technology in the EU, regardless of pipe dreams in that respect EU representatives regularly conjure up (privacy industry, "European Google", "European Facebook", you name it ..,).

Maybe, however, such a move would actually be consistent with dominant EU policy. The EU seems hellbent on becoming poor and economically irrelevant, after all.

I can't tell anymore if this satire or not, because there are more than few people who actually believe isolationism and red tape such as the AI Act or GDPR is beneficial to the EU's economic welfare.

Exactly this.

A few years ago, I saw a talk that made a point about how prosthetics that mimic original human body parts are often designed from an able-bodied point of view. They look inoffensive and are designed for the wearer to blend into what's considered normal.

However, these prosthetics frequently are not all that useful. Once one starts to rethink from first principles in terms of function and efficiency rather than aesthetics this opens up an entirely new space of solutions that might be much more efficient than the original "solutions" they replace - the most famous example probably being Oscar Pistorius' running blades.

The same applies to digital transformation - and by extension AI and robotics. We don't need faster horses. We need to rethink and replace existing processes entirely.

Data is proving otherwise. While locally shortages do happen, in general there more resources available than ever: http://awealthofcommonsense.com/2023/04/50-ways-the-world-is...

Frankly, I'm not sure anymore what the name of the interactive terminal software was

Might've been either NComm or Term. Another piece the puzzle I just remembered was compression utilities such as LHA (and later LZW).

1) Having been an avid Amiga user, for the most part I used an A1200 to log into BBS. Frankly, I'm not sure anymore what the name of the interactive terminal software was, but for point protocol connections (basically, downloading any new mail, forum, or newsgroup posts you were subscribed to for offline consumption) I used Microdot.

Later on, on Windows machines it was CrossPoint. Again, I can't really remember the name of the interactive terminal software, but I think it was HyperTerminal.

2) Basically, via word-of-mouth from fellow local geeks. In the usual lingo, they wouldn't have been called servers at that time, though, but BBS (or "mailbox" in some places)

3) There were local hubs, but generally it was pretty fragmented and decentralised. To this day, I find it absolutely fascinating how local BBS regularly connected to regional hubs, which in turn connected to continental hubs, from which data then got exchanged with the rest of the world via the Internet and TCP/IP. An email from Europe to the US or a newsgroup post could still take a few hours to arrive at its destination.

4) In general, I want to say it used to be both kinder and more sophisticated than on most online sites and social media (figures ...) today, but to some extent that might be nostalgia talking. However, I particularly remember dedicated politics newsgroups where actual discourse about delicate and controversial subjects was possible - with people even agreeing with you, if your argument was conclusive - can you believe it?

That doesn't mean it was all nice and civilised. Trolls and very vocal people with extreme positions existed at that time already.

5) Some things I remember: Amiga vs. ... (Atari, Mac, later on PC); the future of the Amiga; RISC chips

Another fond memory that just came up is playing VGA Planets, which was a play-by-mail, multi-player turn-based strategy game. While technically you could actually play it via snailmail (what the cool kids used to call traditional physical delivery of letters at the time). the most common way of exchanging the data updates for each turn was via BBS.

What are on about? That article contains no em dashes.

Besides, it's from 2016. Unfortunately, I don't own a time machine.

As indicated by the title, I wrote this post almost ten years ago: https://bjoernkw.com/2016/04/03/accounting-in-2016/

While minor aspects have improved since then, the overall problem indeed remains.

Because that particular article is biased in framing the pager attacks as a "terrorist attack" while, actually, those attacks were precisely targeted at Hezbollah personnel.

Those weren't devices for personal - or civilian - use, after all.

The WHO hardly is a reliable, neutral source. It's a political organization that's subject to all sorts of outside influences.

How would you suggest to improve it? In my opinion, for its purpose, UI - and UX - of Hacker News are pretty much close to perfect.

Every medication can have severe and permanent side effects

SSRIs are by an order of a magnitude worse than any other common medication in that respect.

Moreover, like I said there's little evidence these drugs actually achieve any quality-of-life improvement beyond a placebo effect.

"This person must have extraordinary grit and determination!" Because when a criminal gets out of prison, the entire system and the entire society is set up to try to oppose his rehabilitation and get him back into prison. Overcoming this active hostility must take a remarkable person.

This is precisely the story of Les Misérables - that remarkable person being Jean Valjean.

The rationale is that most sexually active people have already been infected with HPV anyway, so the largest benefit of administering the vaccine is at a young age.

One rarely talked about aspect of this is that doctors - generally speaking - only trust other doctors. They won't buy an EMR system from someone without the necessary "street cred" - however well-designed that system is.

I know of a large EMR software provider that went as far as to hire physicians as salespeople because having doctors talk to other doctors made sales a lot easier for them.

Quite to the contrary, the C64 instantly booting into what was both an operating system and a readily accessible programming environment to start creating with right away already was an immensely powerful concept - an empty canvas to fill with your own creations.

I wrote about this subject in more detail here: https://bjoernkw.com/2016/03/13/load81/