_njyk

What was the jurisdiction ? France is among the most difficult countries for entrepreneurs in the EU (maybe the Germany too, with their written paperwork and rigidity).

In top of high taxes, there is a very adversarial administration and a philosophy of “I’ve told you, you should never have started this project”.

In the baltics it is easy for example, but your experience can vary a lot depending on the country as the EU business environment is not uniform.

I just made it softer (though I never mentioned race but economic migration), still can be too sensitive so let it be, just my opinion (I am in Eastern Europe and there the views are rather harsh, compared to Germany or France or Sweden)

I usually like to accuse people of the wildest privacy conspiracies, but here in the case of Orion, one day the founder approached me together to work with him, and I tried to see how far is he willing to do in practice (“ok maybe we could do X and Y or Z”).

He stopped me and explained to me that is his business model, and… it was to sell apps / subscriptions. He has no interest into anything else and strongly explained that the user pays and that’s it.

Eventually I didn’t work with him but I have a very positive opinion of him, so at least, based on my experience as a potential employee strongly trusts

Sounds like we don't live in the same EU. Banks are required to use Strong Customer Authentication, and they consider apps to be safer alternative than SMS. Revolut, N26 and co, are real banks, like any bank in the EU. In many countries, you cannot pay with small coins the bus driver. Shops can refuse cash. https://fullfact.org/online/UK-not-only-europe-country-legal... etc

If you want to use the Tesla supercharger network (one of, if not, the largest in Europe, so rather useful), you need the app. https://www.reddit.com/r/Polestar/comments/1hrzidy/do_i_need...

In Northern Europe it's very common not to have cash at all or to have it rejected. In Estonia, you can choose to login to services using... your mobile phone OR (if you are lucky and this is supported) a physical ID card reader, so realistically you want to have a mobile phone. Some services don't even have alternative. It's more like a German / Swiss thing to have cash everywhere.

Technically it's easy to come around restrictions (for example, where I live, RT.com is fully censored "to protect me").

But from a lawmaker perspective, the topic is not technical.

The question, at the end, is about the enforcement of the punishments that go with circumvention; and in some places there is punishment even when you are "just" trying to circumvent these restrictions.

It's easy to break-in into someone's place. What prevents you from doing it, is the punishment (and potentially ethics), not the physical barrier.

Not really if you are a Chromium fork. Difficult from ground-up but from Chromium it’s rather easy. Way easier than creating an LLM. Even easier when you can hire the Chromium developers.

I have tried it (testfromhn@ was my email) and it looks nice and clean.

If you push the idea further you could make it a business like https://shipfa.st/ did.

It seems you tried with SupaSaaS ?

Even the name was good, perhaps you can call this template SupaSaaS lite to bring prospects to you ?

Seems cool overall.

Three countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are disconnecting from Russia literally in 2 weeks for that specific reason, so it's an horrible idea to interconnect everything in the current world.

Google doesn't want the leeches, they throttle the buyers who don't win enough, and Google was forced by the law to make lot of privacy improvements.

For example, before the GDPR you would receive the full IP address of the user and the visited webpage URL.

123.456.123.456 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNvlZg_zh1s

Now you receive only:

123.456.123.0 and more limited information about the context

Though this better privacy has a cost, because it means less revenue for Google, but also less revenue for the publishers, and less relevant advertising.

I needed some Chromium devs for a project so I contacted a few of the active maintainers on different platforms.

Eventually had to give up: "sorry no I'm living in China, too complicated", which is sad because some of the people seemed really nice and smart.

From the public information, you can only guess based on the names:

One example: https://web.archive.org/web/20200920040602/https://mentors.d...

or https://space.bilibili.com/439205819 (seems also smart and nice).

I'm sure there are many counter-examples as well.

It's not good or bad, just very logical that people who don't want Google are the ones who get a HTTP timeout or a lockup every time they try to send a request to Google.

This is what happens with "autonomous" delivery robots that are operating on London campuses.

They are actually controlled by "robot operators" in Estonia, though officially it's "AI".

That being said, every day it's getting a little bit better.

It exists in Estonia ("thanks" to Googley Eric Schmidt!), it's a company that had codename White Stork.

Assign one safety driver per vehicle, the remote safety driver is responsible (like a driving instructor and its driving student, except the AI is the student).

This way, the internal safety drivers will do everything they can to have the company act responsibly, and refuse the work if the system is not reasonably safe.

It can also solve other problems:

In Estonia we have delivery "robots". On the paper it is "AI", but in reality they are actually remotely controlled by students aka "Robot operators".

The law makes the other drivers guilty if you hit one of these "AI-robots", which really sucks, because the law was changed due to intense lobbying.

I'd rather have people designated as drivers to be responsible.

Cute, as in the sibling language, Estonian it means “big” or “tall”

No, I wasn't referring to Kagi (which is done by a hard-working guy btw), just in general to the trend that the internet is now completely different if seen from a perspective of 2006.

Storage was expensive, and data wasn't seen as a goldmine as now, so most long-term logs went to /dev/null.

That the normality now is to ask users to create an account, have data-scientists (whose goal is precisely to find needles in haystacks), etc.

Norway is (I believe?) the flagship country for Tesla, so it may be more difficult to pierce.

I remember EV's penetration is super high there.

Very cool link to see the imports!

I was questioning availability of the cars, because I think this is the key issue for BYD.

I wouldn't want to buy a car where you cannot get support.

In Estonia for example, Tesla's are not very popular for that reason, because for a long time, you couldn't even buy them from the official website (so you had to go through gray imports and drive to Finland for the routine maintenance), it's somewhat better now.

But BYD is simply unreasonably difficult to purchase, and if you do, then just doing a routine maintenance (or if you have an accident) sounds much more difficult than Tesla.

Once they solve that distribution problem (and don't get under political sanctions), I think they can be really great cars.

San Francisco, Zurich, etc are quite different from other places in the world.

No mountains here + no garden for me, Yosemite is thousands of kilometers away. The sea has no waves. It's -5 degrees.

Which is "fine", but it means that indoor activities are more prevalent, including computers.

And I'm sure for some other people their options are way more restricted.

The quality of life is Eastern Europe (and some countries) in North of Europe is great (and even greater than France and many places), but the risk of war spreading among these European countries is a real issue :/

One anecdote, I live in one of the European countries that put sanctions onto yours, and I cannot use many Google of services either.

This European country simply doesn't exist in many of the Google forms, despite being on the "good side" and being no different than Finland or Germany.

It's true that in Western Europe it's fine to show the communist symbols.

To Westerner, they never saw communism in action, only propaganda.

Which means that kids can proudly wear their capitalistic-made Che Guevara t-shirt at school.

However, in Eastern Europe it's an absolute no, wearing such shirts is worse than the nazi symbols

because it shows support to extreme atrocities in front of people who were victim of them.

The permissions are the Chromium ones.

There is literally no ads nor external SDK or ad-tech or whatever you are referring to (before there was AdMob, but it didn't make much money anyway).

https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.kiwibro...

The way Kiwi makes money is by partnering with Bing / Yahoo.

You launch the browser, it starts with Bing or Yahoo (depending on your country), and... that's it.

Bing then pays back a revenue-share to the browser each time the user uses the search engine.

The same way that DuckDuckGo gets a revenue-share from Yahoo and Bing too when you use DuckDuckGo.

So, if you prefer Firefox and Google, or Kiwi and Bing, this is just a matter of choice.

If you are really really in a rare situation where you want to use Bing and block Bing search ads:

kiwi://extensions

Press: + (from zip)

Load uBlock Origin

Finished.

Not that dramatic + auto-update works.

It would be sketchy to offer an out-of-the-box experience that blocks the search pages of Microsoft and Yahoo (they pay us).

Remember the fact that if a browser has an established and visible business model is way better than a browser where you don’t know how they make money.

With Kiwi, if you use Bing or Yahoo, Microsoft and Yahoo share with us the costs and the revenues (both ways).

Simple model and no need to sell crypto, fake VPNs, user history or whatever some others do.

I’ll do a change in Kiwi edition 116 to make it selectable in the UI (it’s almost a full rewrite of Kiwi and it will go out in about 10 days).

Most likely to add a setting to make it optional.

The main issue we had was with search partners, if we allow adblocking by default, then search engines still pay for the request, and this means… we pay. And by we, I mean “I” pay :)

One solution that some competitors found is to integrate Adblock Plus (when you develop a browser they pay you for that) or AdGuard and let them do the whitelist (so in appearance the blame is on them, but I am fine to take the blame myself).

Some browsers don’t allow external adblockers so they don’t have this issue at all; you can’t block their ads anyway (not 100% sure but I think Google, DuckDuckGo, Brave, etc are like this).

Yandex who was the pioneer of Chromium extensions on mobile (before Kiwi) has similar mechanisms, except they fully block the extension, instead of whitelisting it on certain URLs.

It’s currently possible to go around the whitelist, just by loading manually an extension.

And yes it’s logic that Google Chrome doesn’t block Google search ads by default unless you load a workaround.

The same that Kiwi doesn’t block Microsoft search ads when our main funding is Microsoft Bing, and to be fair, getting funded by search is the cleanest business model a browser can have.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/newt-gingrich-trump-would-recon...

"Estonia is in the suburbs of St. Petersburg.

The Russians aren't gonna necessarily come across the border militarily. The Russians are gonna do what they did in Ukraine.

I'm not sure I would risk a nuclear war over some place which is the suburbs of St. Petersburg"

Unless I misunderstand, I already see the speech: "we saved millions of Americans thanks to my mastermind diplomacy, we send our prayers to all our allies, good luck!"

Article 5 says that in case of an armed-attack of a member of NATO, that other countries have to provide help. Each member of the alliance then decide, about how much help, when and how at their own discretion.

It doesn't necessarily mean that Washington would attack Moscow, and vice-versa or that they would be war outside "disputed" territories.

If tomorrow they have to choose between saving Tallinn or San Francisco, they'll make some choices, but not irrational ones.

The main TV channel in Russia openly threatens of an hybrid-scenario like in 2014 in Ukraine where they sent soldiers without bearing insignias or flags (so officially it was not an attack).

Let's say Estonia is in a situation in some way similar to North Korea vs South Korea.

Very peaceful and nice country inside but with a risk of getting into a dangerous military situation and some support guaranteed by the US and other allies if things goes bad.

The ambassadors of both countries kicked out each other in harsh ways, the customs don't collaborate together anymore, etc.

No panic, but still good to keep in mind, just in case.

Very far, you don't need to speak Estonian unless you plan to work as a local job position that requires doing customer support (such as shop-keeper). In such case (or policeman, lawyers, doctors, etc), it's mandatory to learn the language, and there is a special police that checks if you can speak and write in Estonian (Keele Inspektsioon).

This is done for a good reason, it's to make sure that everybody can get a good service and to protect Estonian heritage and culture (otherwise imagine older people, if their doctor can't speak with them).

You can fully live and work without speaking a single word in Estonian.

It's totally normal here to speak English. Even at the cinema, movies are in English, subtitled in Estonian and Russian. When you go to shop, many products actually have labels in English (or in German).

Estonian is a difficult language, Estonians know about it.

A bit generalising, but to get the idea: Estonians don't want to speak Russian, Russians can't speak Estonian well. So you have this society fragmented in half.

So overall, everybody settles for the easiest language that doesn't upset anyone: English (and German as a fallback).

It's easy to find schools in English too.

Even the tax board speaks to you in English, all the website for public services ( https://www.eesti.ee/ ) is all in English, even all the laws are officially translated in English ( https://www.riigiteataja.ee/ )

To IT foreigners, the country is very welcoming and very very easy-to-settle in my opinion. To other foreigners, it's not true, because it's considered stealing jobs, bringing criminality, etc (basically same stuff that you have to prove when applying for an H1-B in the US)

To get a flat, real estate agents all speak English. They won't get offended if you speak only English, it's normal for them.

Telecom companies speak English. All apps (taxi, food delivery) are in English, because most startups and apps are not made for the local market as its too tiny.

From a political perspective, the country is now pushing more and more English; they'd prefer that you learn English than Russian.

So some shops are even removing Russian, and some administration now addresses you in 3 languages: [Estonian, then in English, and then Russian] (whereas before it was [Estonian, then Russian, and then English]).

The country is very well managed and organised, main issue with the country is:

- Darkness (coldness is fine, but half of the year you essentially live in the dark, almost like if it is always night). Summer is awesome though because you get day and sun almost all the time.

- A really unstable neighbour country on the East (it's not totally impossible that a war could break-out, though unlikely at the moment).

- Taxes may raise in order to fund the current war in Ukraine and balance the government budget.

but otherwise it's a really good place to live and raise a family.

Low taxes, efficient administration, easy visa, high personal safety (except in case of war), a good marketing as well, and almost all services are now natively in English (living in Estonia for 10+ years, and it wasn't the case before).

It's not more annoying than a skippable YouTube pre-roll ad (which is sometimes directly encoded into the video feed by the streamer).

From an advertiser perspective, of course it works if you have a product to sell to the audience visiting the website (a mobile game, etc...).

A popunder is really no different from YouTube ads, except the advertisement doesn't cover the page content nor blocks it.

Some of the networks are even so confident that they will bring you new revenues and make you profitable that they will take the financial risk on their side (you just give the product and agree on a revenue-share and they pay all the traffic acquisition from their pocket).

Not even AdWords offers that (you take all the risk, and when you are down 100K USD, Google just says "hey, too bad, but thank you for the money, if you want you can put 500K again to make a test")

The fun fact: when you live in Estonia, you get German gov-supported Facebook Ads to incorporate your company in Germany.

For example, recently getting a new one: https://start-ups.invest-in-bavaria.com/

It's a mix, but startups clearly skew prices higher.

Salaries gets higher too because of much corporate cash, there is this nasty infinite loop of inflation -> salaries -> inflation -> salaries.

This is why in the newspapers we occasionally see rants from the population that foreigners destroy the quality of life by pushing prices higher.

One cause is that there is a limited amount of space in Tallinn but high attractivity for IT foreigners (due to low taxes and high startup funding).

This means that good housing is though to find for a decent price (check kv.ee for example), and that there is not enough housing for everyone.

Not enough housing means lot of construction needed.

Lots of construction worldwide + scarce construction supply + abundance of money + lot of people = potential housing catastrophe.

Concretly, for example, I wanted to buy a reasonably priced house in the countryside (500K EUR for 160m2 / 1700sqft), and someone who sold his Pipedrive or Transferwise shares (I don't remember) came and offered over 100K more than the list price. This is very broken (and I say that though I am also a startup guy, so I feel it's sad/wrong for the non-IT Estonians).

The city also have 50K to 80K refugees that came in a few months. Where do you host them ?

Well, you pay high price for rent.