nosianu

Unless we scale back our lives significantly, and are fine with a lot less stuff and vacations and devices and modernized living (houses and transit today are vastly more complex systems than a few decades ago), there simply is no way to let a large number of people live like rich people.

I grew up in East Germany, and while it was a total failure, they got at least one idea correct in the workers paradise: We need to work. (Never mind the implementation, I already said it was a total failure, okay? It's about problem recognition, not about the quality of the solution.)

And you know what? I'm actually like my grandfather, who without any need whatsoever continued to work well past retirement, privately, painting a house here, doing some paint shop there, designing and installing a sun dial somewhere. He only got off the scaffolding on a house's paint job a week before he died.

I too would hate to just laze around. I LOVE doing useful stuff. I worked and made money many times as a child already, and it was always fun!

What stopped the fun was the coming of The West (which I too went to the streets for and wanted, still, "side effects may apply"). While I studied CS I took a job in a chocolate factory, not because I needed the money, but because that's what I always did and was used to. Being in the production of stuff is actually FUN! Except then came some western management idiot to make it clear fun is over. I had just setup a machine to work as efficiently and as well as possible (because that's fun!), so now I had to wait a few minutes for it to finish. Just a few minutes, no time to start something else. So I briefly sat next to it and waited for it to finish. In comes the management idiot, immediately jumping on me, why am I lazing around??? That's not what they pay me for!

Just an anecdote, and of course it is much better in knowledge jobs, but that, and the fact that the money accumulates towards the top is what I think is a HUGE problem in today's capitalism. No wonder they have to make live as miserable as possible for the working majority, because there is no fun. The managers and owners think we don't want to work, and treat us accordingly. But it is THEM who are responsible for much of that.

I used Application System Heidelberg's Script II on an Atari 1040STFM with 72 Hz SM 124 black/white monitor and an Epson LQ 550 24 pin printer. That was some superb publishing system for the time (1991), for a low budget.

1 MB RAM, 1.44 MB floppy drive

SM 124: 640x400 pixels, monochrome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST https://www.atarimuseum.de/1040st.htm

The software used a special driver to get better than standard quality from the then most common 24 pin printers (laser printers where much expensive) by kind of double-printing, I forgot the details. It looked really good though.

https://www.planetemu.net/screenshots/Atari%20ST%20-%20Appli...

https://stcarchiv.de/tos/1990/11/script-2 (German)

"Script" was the cheap version of their better product "Signum".

https://www.application-systems.de/signum/screenshots.html

https://www.atariuptodate.de/img/signum.png

I'm not sure why you ask me what I say. I left it as a written comment for you to peruse at any time and as many times as you want to see what I'm saying.

Debt

That is the very basis of our currency, and the basic idea is a good one in an idea-heavy economy more reliant on innovation than natural resource constraints. Also, if truly becomes too much we will just have one of the many many currency changes. My grandparents lived with about five (could be as many as seven) currencies throughout their (German) lives, for example.

As long as the real values remain, the factories, the people, the roads, the buildings, that is not a problem overall. It's not like people can emigrate to alien worlds, and on earth the places with the best real economy will be where they will go - have to go.

Money is the carrot dangled in front of us to keep us moving and to create real value things. The carrot can be updated and changed if the current one starts to lose its appeal, it is not what ultimately matters. The point of view of an individual and the big picture are very different things.

The thing that surprises me is that people are simultaneously losing their minds over AI agents while almost no one is exploring playing around with what these models can really do.

I think we all do???

Even if I'm not coding a lot, I use it every day for small tasks. There is not much to code in my job, IT in a small traditional-goods export business. The tasks range from deciphering some coded EDI messages (D.96A as text or XML, for example), summarizing a bunch of said messages (DESADV, ORDERSP, INVOIC), finding missing items, Excel formula creation for non-trivial questions, and the occasional Python script, e.g. to concatenate data some supplier sent in a certain way.

AI is so strange because it is BOTH incredibly useful and incredibly random and stupid. Among the latter, see a comment in my history I made earlier today, the AI does not tell me when it uses a heuristic and does not provide an accurate result. EVERY result it shows me it shows as final and authoritative and perfect. Even when after questioning it suddenly "admits" that it actually skipped a few steps and that's not the correct final result.

Once AI gets some actual "I" I'm sure the revolution some people are commenting about will actually happen, but I fear that's still some way off. Until then, lots of sudden hallucinations and unexpected wrong results - unexpected because normal people believe the computer when it claims it successfully finished the task and presents a result as correct.

Until then it's daily highs and lows with little in between, either it brilliantly really solves some task, or it fails and that includes telling you about it.

A junior engineer will at least learn, but the AI stays pretty constant in how it fails and does not actually learn anything. The maker providing a new model version is not the AI learning.

It's unclear if you are merely joking or whatever you are actually doing here. Your comments don't say much of anything. People here reward and want useful comments that take the discussion seriously. If you don't, what are you doing here commenting nothingburgers? YOU are the one writing short substance-free complaint-only comments, complaining about other people.

That said, a well-reasoned text should probably go on a blog site, not here, or here only as link. Otherwise you are wasting a lot of effort, with only few people even noticing your comment and the discussion soon entirely disappearing into history.

Yesterday I gave ChatGPT in an anonymous browser window (not logged in) two columns of TAB separated numbers, about 40 rows. I asked it to give me the weighted average of the numbers in the second column, using the first one (which were integer, "quantity", numbers) as the weight.

It retuned formulas and executed them and presented a final result. It looked good.

Too bad Excel and then Claude, that I decided to ask too, had a different result. 3.4-something vs. 3.8-something.

ChatGPT, when asked:

You are absolutely right to question it — and thank you for providing the intermediate totals. My previous calculation was incorrect. I mis-summed the data. With a dataset this long, a manual aggregation can easily go wrong.

(Less than 40 small integer values is "this long"? Why did you not tell me?)

and

Why my earlier result was wrong

I incorrectly summed:

The weights (reported 487 instead of 580)

The weighted products (reported 1801.16 instead of 1977.83)

That propagated into the wrong final value.

Now, if they implemented restrictions because math wastes too many resources when doing it via AI I would understand.

BUT, there was zero indication! It presented the result as final and correct.

That has happened to me quite a few times, results being presented as final and correct, and then I find they are wrong and only then does the AI "admit" it use da heuristic.

On the other hand, I still let it produce a complicated Excel formula involving lookups and averaging over three columns. That part works perfectly, as always. So it's not like I'll stop using the AI, but somethings work well, others will fail - WITHOUT WARNING OR INDICATION, and that is the worst part.

"permitted" is a pretty empty word in the given context. Because dropping such emails is equally "permitted". Sure, there will be no arrests made, but there will be consequences. And those are what this article is about.

GrapheneOS in Spain?

https://www.androidauthority.com/why-i-use-grapheneos-on-pix...

Police in Spain have reportedly started profiling people based on their phones; specifically, and surprisingly, those carrying Google Pixel devices. Law enforcement officials in Catalonia say they associate Pixels with crime because drug traffickers are increasingly turning to these phones. But it’s not Google’s secure Titan M2 chip that has criminals favoring the Pixel — instead, it’s GrapheneOS, a privacy-focused alternative to the default Pixel OS.

EDIT: Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44473694

other people would need to be poor

Just like billions are not about "being rich", this is about CONTROL. Control of the economy, and how people live, and control over one's own life.

Abstraction is a beast, putting everything regardless of what it actually is as some $$ number is terrible for understanding. The billionaires don't have Scrooge McDuck money at home where they swim in coins, they control huge parts of the economy.

And as long as they need workers, they will want them to live not too well - that would raise the price of labor, if people wanted to do work in places like Amazon warehouses to begin with, if they had better alternatives not working for the billionaires.

Being "poor" in this context means having a lot less control over how you live, not that you live on the streets. Although, as soon as you lose your value, e.g. by getting too sick, that is always on the table too.

There is one thing different though: Technology allows surveillance on a level and scale that did not ever exist before. I would expect that that in turn allows far greater levels of oppression than ever before. And with all payments going more and more digital, if the powers decide to cut you off you can't even buy anything any more. Or get a job. Or go anywhere without being seen and identified by various cameras.

Or, try organizing any kind of movement that those with power don't like. It does not even have to be violent! Here in Germany, as soon as the previous government with the Green Party was in power, a huge never-ending campaign started. Easy - after all, the vast majority of the important media is owned by very few, just like in the US. Funny enough, after inevitably that government failed, turned out the CDU failed many if not most of the promises made, and in other areas does exactly what they heavily criticized.

The point is, surveillance, "soft" punishments, and media control and reach are on a whole new level. Trump wanted TikTok for a reason, and Musk wanted X not for the money that company could make.

The more tech we have, and it's conveniently concentrated too, the worse it can get if you don't want to play that game.

On top pf that, debt and a system of law heavily skewed for those with money, just because of its complexity and to gain access, and no more competition for minds from a block of socialist countries, so no clear alternative apart from obviously stupid ideas most people won't want to vote for, and this "democratic" system can go very far towards being very controlling and restricting for many.

We can see for example in Iran, or few decades ago in China, or since it was founded in North Korea what happens when people protest - and how nothing changes. Now we have billionaires who would love to have similar powers, who don't want to be "held back" by laws and regulations.

I would argue that is still just symbols. A physical model requires a lot more. For example, the way babies and toddlers learn is heavy on interaction with objects and the world. We know those who have less of that kind of experience in early childhood will do less well later. We know that many of today's children, kept quiet and sedated with interactive screens, are at a disadvantage. What if you made this even more extreme, a brain without ability to interact with anything, trained entirely passively? Even our much more complex brains have trouble creating a good model in these cases.

You also need more than one simple brain structure simulation repeated a lot. Our brains have many different parts and structures, not just a single type.

However, just like our airplanes do not resemble bird flight as the early dreamers of human flight dreamed of, with flapping wings, I also do not see a need for our technology to fully reproduce the original.

We are better off following our own tech path and seeing where it will lead. It will be something else, and that's fine, because anyone can create a new human brain without education and tools, with just some sex, and let it self-assemble.

Biology is great and all but also pretty limited, extremely path-dependent. Just look at all the materials we already managed to create that nature would never make. Going off the already trodden bio-path should be good, we can create a lot of very different things. Those won't be brains like ours that "Feel" like ours, if that word will ever even apply. and that's fine and good. Our creations should explore entirely new paths. All these comparisons to the human experience make me sad, let's evaluate our products on their own merit.

One important point:

If you truly want a copy, partial or full, in tech, of the human experience, you need to look at the physics. Not at some meta stuff like "text"!!

The physical structure and the electrical signals in the brain. THAT is us. And electrical signals and what they represent in chips are so completely and utterly different from what can be found in the brain, THAT is the much more important argument against silly human "AGI" comparisons. We don't have a CPU and RAM. We have massively parallel waves of electrical signals in a very complex structure.

Humans are hung up on words. We even have fantasy stories hat are all about it. You say some word, magic happens. You know somebody's "true name", you control them.

But the brain works on a much lower deeply physical level. We don't even need language. A human without language and "inner voice" still is a human with the same complex brain, just much worse at communication.

The LLMs are all about the surface layer of that particular human ability though. And again, that is fine, but it has nothing to do with how our brains work. We looked at nature and were inspired, and went and created something else. As always.

The Heritage Foundation, billionaires and a lot of other people who want this are all US citizens, and they planned for this for a long time. Let's not blame others for something entirely US-homegrown.

As an ex East German, I wonder how much of it is the disappearance of the competing model. Some of the old communists actually warned about this. Don't get me wrong, I participated in the demonstrations back then, socialism had clearly failed as a society and economically. Does not make that particular idea wrong though. The powerful want to go back, take back the power they think is theirs, consciously or as a reflex.

Note that Europe, Germany in particular, are far from the "socialist" examples some, or many, Americans think, welfare state and all that. Fact is, when it comes to rigid stratification of society, who rules, who owns, Germany is far on the side of capital, and according to a study the few thousand people at the very top are from the same 4% of the population almost exclusively.

What is happening in the US is happening in more places. Here in Germany we too now have more and more attacks on social systems. It's never the fault of inept leadership, no the people must work more and longer! They have zero new ideas. That is the only one they can think of. I am not really exaggerating, even the representatives of our powerful "Mittelstand" (much of Germany's industry) heavily criticized especially the conservative CDU in the government only a few days ago, publicly.

I see no reason to try to blame the Chinese, or the Russians, or anyone. All of it comes from within, and not just in the US.

Like before - debt!

This prevents the consumers from slacking off and enjoying life, instead they have to continue to work work work. They get to consume a little, and work much more (after all, they also have to pay interest, and for consumer credits and credits that the masses get that adds up to a lot).

In this scenario, it does not even matter that many are unable to pay off all that debt. As long as the amount of work that is extracted from them significantly exceeds the amount of consumption allowed to them all is fine.

The chains that bind used to be metal, but we progressed and became a civilized society. Now it's the financial system and the laws. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” (Anatole France)

Are you seriously comparing chips running AI models and human brains now???

Last time I checked the chips are not rewiring themselves like the brain does, nor does even the software rewrite itself, or the model recalibrate itself - anything that could be called "learning", normal daily work for a human brain.

Also, the models are not models of the world, but of our text communication only.

Human brains start by building a model of the physical world, from age zero. Much later, on top of that foundation, more abstract ideas emerge, including language. Text, even later. And all of it on a deep layer of a physical world model.

The LLM has none of that! It has zero depth behind the words it learned. It's like a human learning some strange symbols and the rules governing their appearance. The human will be able to reproduce valid chains of symbols following the learned rules, but they will never have any understanding of those symbols. In the human case, somebody would have to connect those symbols to their world model by telling them the "meaning" in a way they can already use. For the LLM that is not possible, since it doesn't habe such a model to begin with.

How anyone can even entertain the idea of "AGI" based on uncomprehending symbol manipulation, where every symbol has zero depth of a physical world model, only connections to other symbols, is beyond me TBH.

Which it can’t.

The welfare state for corporate interests is alive and well though, and costs much more.

(2025) "Corporate Welfare in the Federal Budget" -- https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/corporate-welfare-feder...

(2024) https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2024/07/16/100-years-of-risi...

There is nothing to disagree about. With current demographics projection no amount of taxes can cover welfare states

Okay? Let's get rid of that much more expensive type of welfare then!

As if we have "real capitalism" - not even on a scale of local bakeries any more. Even the small businesses often are just a shop owned by a corporation. Not that I'm against some level of concentration, a lot of economic activity requires it. A lot of products are too expensive and require a certain scale to be viable at all.

What is the goal of economic activity anyway? For the few to live well, while the majority struggles? By "struggle" I don't mean that the majority already lives in the streets, to me it is enough that they have to be afraid. Of getting sick, of losing the job, of anything bad happening. I saw myself how a single unfortunate event could spiral out of control, and a guy making a lot of money in enterprise sales ended up alone, broken, and sick in the streets. I count all those having to fear such a development as part of the "losers", even if they are still making money and living in their house now. That fear, suppressed or not, should not be necessary, and it influences stress levels and decisions, consciously or not.

I mean, you are also right with your message, and I actually agree.

The flow of money around and away from too many people should not be happening. Being part of the economy should be easy for the majority, and real "welfare" should only be necessary for the sick and otherwise temporarily or fully disabled.

If a lot of normal people need welfare, something is not right.

But then you need an economy that provides those easy options to participate and get enough of a share.

You also need a system where an unfortunate event (or some) does not put you into an unescapable downward spiral, and provide a way back into the economy.

That's just not what has been happening in large enterprise projects, internal or external, since long before AI.

Famous example - but by no means do I want to single out that company and product: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

From my own experience, I kept this post bookmarked because I too worked on that project in the late 1990s, you cannot review those changes anyway. It is handled as described, you keep tweaking stuff until the tests pass. There is fundamentally no way to understand the code. Maybe its different in some very core parts, but most of it is just far too messy. I tried merely disentangling a few types ones, because there were a lot of duplicate types for the most simple things, such as 32 bit integers, and it is like trying to pick one noodle out of a huge bowl of spaghetti, and everything is glued and knotted together, so you always end up lifting out the entire bowl's contents. No AI necessary, that is just how such projects like after many generations of temporary programmers (because all sane people will leave as soon as they can, e.g. once they switched from an H1B to a Green Card) under ticket-closing pressure.

I don't know why since the beginning of these discussions some commenters seem to work off wrong assumptions that thus far our actual methods lead to great code. Very often they don't, they lead to a huge mess over time that just gets bigger.

And that is not because people are stupid, its because top management has rationally determined that the best balance for overall profits does not require perfect code. If the project gets too messy to do much the customers will already have been hooked and can't change easily, and when they do, some new product will have already replaced the two decades old mature one. Those customers still on the old one will pay premium for future bug fixes, and the rest will jumpt to the new trend. I don't think AI can make what's described above any, or much worse.

So literally every article will be labeled as AI assisted and it will be meaningless.

The web novel website RoyalRoad has two different tags that stories can/should add: AI-Assisted and AI-Generated.

Their policy: https://www.royalroad.com/blog/57/royal-road-ai-text-policy

In this policy, we are going to separate the use of AI for text, into 3 categories: General Assistive Technologies, AI-Assisted, AI-Generated

The first category does not require tagging the story, only the other two do.

The new tags are as such:

AI-Assisted: The author has used an AI tool for editing or proofreading. The story thus reflects the author’s creativity and structure, but it may use the AI’s voice and tone. There may be some negligible amount of snippets generated by AI.

AI-Generated: The story was generated using an AI tool; the author prompted and directed the process, and edited the result.

Why do you choose that single example, which I said was just that, and pretend my whole statement hinges on it?

You are either misinformed, willfully ignorant or lying, and I've had it with this discussion style.

Yes, people who use "no one is illegal" do also say "no more borders". Not every single one, clearly humans are diverse, but your statement is just false.

Here a UK example even combining the statements (as I said, the movement is not limited to the US). https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.11073215

Another example, also showing this is an older movement (2005): https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/news/2005/apr/int... ("No Borders/No One Is Illegal campaigns")

Consumers is nice, but far more important are the big corporate purchases. There may be a lot of people there too who don't want AI, but they all depend on decisions made at the top and AI seems to be the way to go, because of expectations and also because of the mentioned prisoner's dilemma, if competitors gain an advantage it is bad for your org, if all fail together it is manageable.

Honestly, I don’t want to be.

I don't get it.

On the other hand, programmers are happy to work with AI, which is incredibly limited and a pale shadow compared to the real "I" in educated and experienced meat brains.

Also, networking - in both space and time (among the living, the latter with the dead, one way from them to us) - is THE gigantic advantage of humans. Not to want to bother with it is an equally gigantic mistake, if you want to use being human to more than a tiny fraction of its potential.

If you are interested in creating solutions and useful systems, "politics", human networking, should be THE number one priority. Long before anything technical.

Important scientists and engineers were great networkers and communicators. They also knew which connections where worth making. Just like in the brain, fewer good connections are better than wildly cross-connecting everything.

Those using memes along the lines of "nobody is illegal" (sometimes "on stolen land" is added)? This is a movement not limited to the US. Here in Europe there is a similar movement, using that same slogan. They don't want any borders or border enforcement at all.

Merely for illustration, a single example: https://abc7.com/post/protests-expected-socal-part-nationwid...

Protesters were seen carrying flags, signs and spraying graffiti on nearby property, including on the U.S. Courthouse sign where it read "No one is illegal on stolen land".

Yeah, the cost of doing it on the moon would be even more astronomical. Then there also is the three second of round-trip latency to consider (ca. 2.6 s just the signal, but processing adds a bit more).

Billionaire money is not like money for the normal person. It is a placeholder for how much influence you have on the economy - and even the state.

It is not just a number, as it is for people who just save a few dollars, for whom it really is just a number until they withdraw money to use it. The billionaire's money is not "money", it is actual working assets, and the abstraction of turning this into a number does a terrible job, the result now misunderstood by many. Assets being companies doing stuff mostly (holding non-control-giving paper assets is different and not what being a top capitalist is about, only used as an additional tool below the actual goal). Which they fully control (the small investor does not even have any control worth mentioning when they own shares of a public company).

They don't just play with money, they play with real things! And they want to play with ever bigger real things. They don't just want to improve some minor product. They want to control the fate of civilization.

OT:

I hate this money view with a passion, this is what too many people discussing wealth inequality issues get wrong. This is not Scrooge McDuck and his money pile. Money is an abstraction, and it is misused terribly, hiding what is actually going on for too many observers who then go on to discuss "numbers".

That is also why the idea to "just redistribute the money of the rich" is a failure. It isn't money! It is actual real complex organizations. And you can't just make everything into a public company, and also, even when they are, for better or worse owners don't lead like managers. Doing the socialism thing (I grew up in the GDR) where everybody owns a tiny bit of everything just does not work the same.

We will have to look at what those super-rich are actually doing, case by individual case of ownership, not just look at some abstract numbers. Sometimes concentrated control over a lot of assets is a good thing, and other times it is not. Ignoring the objection of "who would control that?", because right now they control themselves so it's never nobody.

The radio receiver and transmitter are additional hardware and energy consumption. They add to the heat, not subtract from it.

Because that is useless? The physical phenomenon is so very, very different in biological systems compared to the metal-wire electricity our electrical devices are based on that they are entirely different things.

For example, charge carriers are electrons in metal wires vs. ions in biological systems. That has huge implications, because moving around ions is a lot harder, and slower.

In a metal wire the electrical field is established from beginning to the end, and that means that the electrons at the end start moving at pretty much the same time as the ones at the other end, no matter how long the wire. That means in a metal wire signals move at a significant fraction of the speed of light in a vacuum, because it is the speed of the electrical field and not that of the charge carriers that matters.

In a biological system electrical fields are tiny! The way the signal propagates in an axon is much more cumbersome, expensive, and slow. Speed of signal propagation is ca. 1/2 to at most 100 m/s (for thick myelinated axons). The signal is propagated by jumping in very tiny steps along the axon's inner surface. (https://youtu.be/tOTYO5WrXFU)

This also makes The Matrix movies' main premise about humans as batteries a little strange: Sure, there's lots of electrical activity, but it is in trillions of very tiny places across nanometer distances. And it is created by moving ions around (at great energy cost).

So anyway, what actually physically happens in an electrical grid of metal wires, or in a biological system are vastly different things. It is not the same "electricity", the only thing they have in common is that electrical fields and charge carriers (but different ones) are involved. But the way it is structured, created, propagated is entirely different in both cases.

When I asked Google out of curiosity what it had to say it showed this:

Despite their differences, both are fundamentally, at their core, the movement of charged particles driven by electrical potential differences.

This is just not correct! The "the movement of charged particles" part specifically. Again, wires have one electrical field, but in biological systems propagation is entirely different, and slow, and expensive! The methods used to propagate a signal are not even remotely comparable. That's a difference not even a Radio Yerevan joke could make use of.

God forbid the price of food ever goes down.

They did give it away for free...?

And not letting farms go bust is not the worst idea. Crops are not like industrial products, how much gets produced has a significant random component. Relying on market forces alone does not appear to be the best solution in this field, no?

That's independent of how much big agro-businesses benefitting from policies they asked politicians to create for them is a problem too.

Anyway -

my recommendation for potatoes is "Kartoffelpuffer"! Can be combined with a large number of things, applesauce is the most simple and laziest choice.

https://youtu.be/obs5MhNA4Rs (German Potato Pancakes | Kartoffelpuffer | Reibekuchen Homemade)

This is very easy to make, the only problem is that you may end up with a lot of oil splashes around your pan. I cover everything around the pan with kitchen paper towels, carefully leaving a few millimeters of space around the heating circle, so that afterwards all I have to do is collect them at the end, no other cleanup necessary.

They need to be as brown as shown at the beginning of the above video for best taste, and not too thick.

They do it all manually in the video, but I just use a mixer, which is much faster and the resulting texture is more to my liking anyway compared to having solid stripes of potato in there. It is also the more common method. Do it like in the video if you prefer them made out of small solid stripes.

"Possible" is everything that does not violate any laws of the universe, that is not a useful criterion!

Oh and thanks for ignoring everything I wrote I guess. Not that I expected anything different, it is always the same in these threads after all. Why bother with arguments, especially those of the person you respond to?

But you see, this "laziness" actually supports my point. Not even you want to do the hard thing and bother with what somebody else thinks when there is a much easier path. But you expect others to care about the things that you care about, without spending much effort even merely understanding their position.

Somehow I think the stars might be aligning this time though

governments around the world are loudly thinking about how to reduce dependence on US tech

I am definitely sympathetic, after all, I worked for a major Linux company for quite a few years, started using Linux RH) in 1994, and even wrote some network related kernel modules.

However, this switch to Linux is not going to happen (apart from where it is already used heavily, from servers to many non-PC systems).

I have been in projects for large companies but also government on and off. Now, I manage the IT of a small (<50 employees) non-IT business with people in several countries.

People who actually comment in these discussions seem to be entirely focused on the OS itself. But that is what matters the least in business. Office is another, and even there most people who don't deal with it at scale are way too focused on some use case where individuals write documents and do some spreadsheeting. It's almost always about a very small setup, or even just a single PC.

However, the Microsoft stack is sooooo much more. ID management. Device management. Uncountable number of little helpers in form of software and scripts that you cannot port to a Linux based stack without significant effort. Entire mail domains are managed by Office 265 - you own the domain and the DNS records, you get licenses for Office365 from MS, you point the DNS records to Microsoft, you are done.

Sure, MS tools and the various admin websites are a mess, duplicating many things, making others hard to find. But nobody in the world would be able to provide soooo much stuff while doing a better job. The truth is, they keep continuously innovating and I can see it, little things just conveniently showing up, like that I now have a Teams button to create an AI script of my conversations, or that if more than one person opens an Office document that is stored in OneDrive we can see each other inside the document, cursor positions, and who has it open.

Nobody in their right mind will switch their entir4e org to Linux unless they have some really good reasons, a lot of resources to spare, and a lot of experience. Most businesses, for whom IT is not the be-all-end-all but just a tool will not switch.

But something can be done.

The EU could, for example, start requiring other stacks for new special cases. They cannot tell the whole economy to switch, not even a fraction of it, but they could start with new government software. Maybe - depends on how it has to fit into the existing mostly Microsoft infrastructure.

They could also require more apps to be web-only. I once wrote some code for some government agency to manage business registrations, and it was web software.

The focus would have to be to start creating strong niches for local business to start making money using other stacks, and to take the long road, slowly replace US based stacks over the next two or three decades. At the same time, enact policies that let local business grow using alternative stacks, providing a safe cache-flow that does not have to compete with US based ones.

The EU also needs some better scaling. The nice thing about the MS stack is that I can use it everywhere, in almost all countries. The alternative cannot be that a business would have to use a different local company in each country.

I read a month ago that EU travel to the US is down - by only ~3%. Just like with any calls for boycott of this and that, the truth is that those commenting are a very tiny fraction. The vast majority of people and businesses are not commenting in these threads (or at all), and their focus is on their own business and domain problems first of all. Switching their IT stack will only done by force, if the US were to do something really drastic that crashes some targeted countries Microsoft- and Cloud-IT.

Now if only you had read to the end of my comment, to recognize that I was setting up for something, and also applied not just one but several HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, under "comments")...