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)
You havent said anything wrong about immigration. People who misunderstood you are racist themselves as they have dismissed cultural issues of your country and tried to impose their own views. So dont listen to them, they are just ignorant at best.
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
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.
>Banks are required to use Strong Customer Authentication
Not impressed by the pseudotechnical bullshit. The law provides several ways to authenticate. I tell my bank that I don't have a smartphone and they have to send me (at 0 extra cost) a code card: a piece of plastic with numbers on it that no one is ever going to hack. I routinely transfer tens of thousands of Eur between my accounts at real banks within the EU without a problem with my plastic card. When I have used up all the numbers on it they send me another one. I don't know in which EU you live in either.
>Revolut, N26 and co, are real banks
They are collectively known as "neobanks" for a reason. The official name is "e-money institution". Those are financial casinos, not real banks, operating with non-full banking licenses, peddling all the tech-bro bullshit: trading on memecoins, pulling out of countries when the regulations that real banks have to follow irks them, with a horrible track record of IT security: customer data leaks in the millions, horrible track record of staff abuse, unpaid hours, null customer support: exclusively in-app, where your customer support is "other customers that answer to your in-app post"; the staff shows up once in every 200 messages to write a one-liner and go into hiding again. I do not do business with bullshit "lean" business that operate at cost. Look at their wikipedia pages sometime.
>In many countries, you cannot pay with small coins the bus driver
Simply not true, not gonna argue this one.
>Shops can refuse cash
No, they cannot. Many businesses don't want to handle cash and they will make it hard and send you an invoice with a surcharge but they must accept any form of legal tender, no way around it. There are exceptions like you cannot buy a car with a truckload of coins, or give a 5000 Euro note to a taxi cab but those fall under "unreasonable" and it's a very high bar. Also, there is a long tradition of countries delaying implementing EU directives for many years, and then getting it wrong several times. The EU is very lenient, but accepting cash everywhere is EU policy. The fact that some wise-ass members drag their feet for decades is not news and doesn't prove your point. If you push back at the dentist, for example, they will send you an invoice with a surcharge, and you can pay that invoice with cash at your bank.
>If you want to use the Tesla supercharger
Lol no I don't finance retarded imbeciles - incidentally, all the other charging networks allow you to pay right there without subscription, smartphone or app. It's called "drop-in" payment, and it is there because the law says it must be an option.
>In Northern Europe...
No, you confuse the EU policy of allowing cash in transactions with money-laundering directives. Those prevent you from buying a house in cash, but you can buy anything, say, under 10000 Eur or equivalent NOK/SEK
>No, they cannot. Many businesses don't want to handle cash and they will make it hard and send you an invoice with a surcharge but they must accept any form of legal tender, no way around it.
Not true in the UK. The House of Commons Treasury Select Committee has been considering this issue (Apr 25): BBC News - Shops could be forced to accept cash in future,
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.
> 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.
It's illegal to steal a macbook that has been abandoned on the train. Try leaving yours and see if the more important thing is the physical barrier or ethics/punishment/existence of laws.
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.
You clearly think how they think. It's just so EASY to do. Practically done already. With an attitude like that how could they not succeed in tackling a really, really hard problem that requires nearly endless thankless investment?
If it were rocket science it would be less surprising to me that they would want to be spending their time on it.
It's clear that they envy Google's position of owning a web browser (that everyone uses). But a play like this that involves entering a highly competitive market with openly vicious level of scrutiny... Like, what would you say if Facebook announced that they were announcing that they would be starting their first hospital? That's a hypothetical, but IRL Amazon tried to convince people that they wanted to be operating a chain of hair salons. My point is that it was easy to tell from the outside that this was corporate whim and they weren't going to be very willing to put up with it for long if it turned out to be genuinely hard, because there just wasn't enough alignment with the mission.
So yeah, I've no trouble understanding why they want to own a browser in theory. And since they can print money and want to hoover up talent anyway, why not just hire some engs. It looks good for the company's future growth prospects if people do believe you're serious. But it just seems to me that thus far they've shown no real hard commitment, no philosophical alignment, and no appreciation for the reasons what they're doing is difficult: it's a social problem not just a hiring one
It's actually super easy. I modified Chromium's internal code myself to do what I wanted, I added some logic in C++ and then compiled it. It just works. They mainly want to gather more data and have access to more functionality, so the LLM agent isn't constrained by the plugin API etc. It's not really hard. They won't do any browser level stuff, instead they'll basically create their own plugin on top of Chromium with full access to everything, and that's it.
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.
Wouldn't it be best to leave the connections open just in case? I get not wanting to give the Kremlin a big button that says "black out Estonia" but as long as they can also get juice from the EU grid too, what's the problem? I suppose it's an issue of grid synchronization? If so, DC links could be used on politically tenuous connections on the global power network.
That seems like a problem of a single large provider and not a connectivity problem. It's a monopoly issue that would be less of a problem if a single or even a minority of players were not the largest producer.
At least electricity can be produced more broadly than gas where you had to win the lottery of location or game of Thrones of imperialism.
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.
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.
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.