There is no single large market in Europe, everything is fractured by language and different cultures in each country. Monetizing it is also difficult.
Yes… but from my point of view, if there is an alternative solution without those restrictions, I’ll go with that. I’d only consider a solution with such restrictions if its other advantages were so compelling as to overcome that (and even then, if one has to ask legal, it isn’t guaranteed they’ll say “yes”)
For the goal of the interview - showing your knowledge and skills - you are failing miserably. People know what LLMs can do, the interview is about you.
One difficult to replicate thing is visibility rules and rollbacks, with postgres you can abort and your changes are hidden, no such luxuries worth this architecture unless you make it very complex with partial states, drafts or something similar.
I wonder if it's partly about the well-known phenomenon where new product people come in or are promoted and feel they have to assert their dominance by making a change just for the sake of making a change.
you should probably disclose what you work on as this makes you not exactly impartial, it would be quite bad for you to criticize value of what you sell:
> I'm the CEO of Hipposys Ltd, a boutique Data & AI Engineering shop (www.hipposys.com). We specialize in building RAG systems, Data Warehouses, and anything else related to the intersection between Data & AI. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me at edan@hipposys.com, and we can see if we are a good fit!
First of all, I'm not sure what you mean by "disclose" - you took that from my HN profile which is a click away. Do you think I should mention this in every comment I make about LLMs?
Secondly, you're confusing cause and effect. I've been in the industry for more than twenty years working on many different things, and my company has done mostly data engineering work for most of its existence, the AI engineering is a relatively-new (past year or so) shift.
I don't think highly of AI because I work in AI - I work in AI because I think highly of it!
The problem is that many decisions in the EU require exactly 100% support of member states, which is a problem if you have a country with wildly different ideas than others (now Hungary, a few years ago Poland).
> The problem is that many decisions in the EU require exactly 100% support of member states
We have long known that unanimity holds us back internationally, and that the switch to majority vote is way overdue - but leading European Union member states to accept that is going to be a long slog. We'll get there and we have started on the path: trade policy for example is already qualified majority voting.
The Qualified Majority Vote has been being used in increasing scope of policy areas for many years.
QMV was part of stuff from the 1986 SEA, and got a major boost in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, since it was recognised as practically being necessary to make any progress towards (and within) the Single Market.
Yes, not much progress since - apart from Russia, China and the USA increasing pressure... I suppose they support our federalist project and try to motivate us !
The requirement for unanimous voting has not existed for more than a decade. It was removed in response to the tactical shenanigans of Visegrad countries.
In practice most decisions are still technically unanimous, because it looks better politically and it doesn't cost anything more (since a majority can simply pass whatever they want, they are not forced to concede anything to the obstructionists; with the newer rules, it's smarter for any isolated bloc to immediately trade any publicly-stated opposition for any minor favour they can get).
This is the reason why Orban, despite all his bombast, has no influence whatsoever on the actual decisions; but also why German resistance against overdue fiscal reforms has basically melted.
>you have a country with wildly different ideas than others (now Hungary, a few years ago Poland)
Why single out Hungary and Poland specifically? Is it worse than when Austria, Netherlands, France, etc. have a different opinion to the rest of the union and torpedo progress just to pander to the right wingers in their country?
Leaving aside personal preferences regarding the previous Polish and current Hungarian governments, the electoral processes are generally viewed as fair regarding the absence of major direct fraud related to vote counting. However, the fact is, that the state resources were used by the ruling parties to promote themselves.
The removal of the former Polish government was largely driven by public disapproval of state fund mismanagement. In Hungary, a key element of the current government's platform appears to be the promotion of national identity, including ties with diaspora communities formed after WWI (The Treaty of Trianon), potentially with implications for future "geopolitical alignments" (the likelihood of which is debatable).
These results, while influenced by the d'Hondt system, reflect the sentiment of the voting population, which is a democratic process, in principle. The ruling methods are not 100% democratic though (rule of majority with respect for minority rights)
However, the opinions of my "more Western friends" on those topics "diverge from on-the-ground realities".
Still, Hungary and Poland are consistently brought in as the bad apples for opposing mass migration quotas, and recently Hungary for the milder tone towards Russia, but it's ignored that everyday plenty of countries oppose many other resolutions.
That's hilarious (not), given that so much discourse is about just how much democracy should be shaved off to get the desirable Democratic(tm) results (Supermajority for Brexit! Ban AFD! et al.).
How are they authoritans? Do you just look at the optics, or do you look at the damage done to the EU in monetary terms? Because those are two different things?
