I really wish the EU leaned heavily into the cloud basic building blocks.
There's a lot of stuff in big cloud that is genuinely hard to duplicate especially with network effects, but I don't see why they can't throw a billion or 3 at ensuring you've got a homegrown stack that can do VMs, S3, function, container registry, database, block storage, firewall etc - with guaranteed funding, clear licenses, handful of local options perhaps with some sort of local guaranteed certification etc.
Baby steps are better than no steps & a lot of things can be made to run on those building blocks
If push comes to shove and Europe needs to part ways with the USA, to greater or lesser degree, there will still be machinists, mechanics, and actual facilities in place to keep making Fords. That is a positive from the standpoint of European sovereignty.
The EU probably has rules in place to strongly encourage US manufacturers of automobiles to put facilities in the EU. The US has similar rules and many Toyotas, Hondas, &c, are made in the US, using US suppliers for parts.
It's not hard to imagine an approach to digital services that trends in a similar direction. In the EU or Canada, the US parent company would supply technical data, software, specifications, &c, to a domestic company with its own facilities and operations. It probably requires a combination of regulations and regular stress tests; but nothing prevents the domestic company's operations from being as de facto severable as a car factory.
Geopolitics aside, tech dependence in general has tipped from net helping us to hurting us. AI dependence is going to make social media dependence look like nothing.
Made a Ask HN, but screwed it up by editing the text.
Anyway, good ideas/tools for evaluating LLMs ?
Naturally, as a Dane, I am moving away from Claude, but I’d like more than a gut feel about how much I may have given up to do so.
Openrouter.ai shows the location of providers, you can find just a few European services, but also Singaporean and Canadian. Unfortunately, I could not find a way to filter easily.
If we want to meaningfully reduce our dependency we "just" need more capital. All founders in Canada will tell you that Canadian VC suck: they are risk averse, their due diligence is painful and their terms are made so they can't lose. It is not rare in Canada for ex-founders of failed startups to be hundred of thousands of dollars in debt. That's why we are always advised to go seek funding in the US.
In Canada we like to give money to big established monopolies, that's our thing. The SR&ED program is a prime example of that, as a bootstrap business it took us 3 years before we could apply since we didn't have enough money to front full salaries for 1.5y before receiving a grant.
It is not really a complex problem to solve, the entrepreneurs know the solutions but our politicians and wealthy people are so small c conservative it's pathetic.
It's only a small contribution, but last week we have ended our Dropbox subscription (12 * 20 Euro = 240 Euro) and moved our data to Proton Drive. We are also moving out photos out of Apple Photos (12 * 10 = 120 Euro per year for storage). And I have also moved my mail out of Fastmail (to Proton Mail), which is a nice Aussie company, but their main servers are hosted in the US, so too risky. We also just moved all our backups from Backblaze B2 to Hetzner + local (between me and my wife 12 * $15 = $180 per year). Besides moving to Proton and Hetzner, we are increasing donations to non-profits like Mastodon.
I encourage everyone outside the US and in particular Canada and Europe to move your data out of the US and away from US cloud companies now. Putting your data there is not safe anymore and can and will be used for blackmail (see Microsoft cutting access of the International Criminal Court's (ICC) chief prosecutor's email). Trump is now blackmailing countries with tariffs to get them to back off support for Greenland (not going to happen), so things are going to get ugly.
If you are heavily into tech or an activist, etc. it's also a good time to pick up an extra phone like a second hand Pixel to run GrapheneOS as a backup. Or (less secure) a phone that can be unlocked and run something like /e/OS.
I know that it might take years to get all companies, governments, etc. off American big tech products. But that's not a good reason for not safeguarding your own data. Besides that, the more funding non-US alternatives get through enthusiasts, the better they are positioned to improve their alternatives.
This is written from a Canadian perspective, but even within America, there are good reasons to stop giving money to American tech companies and find alternatives. The founders and executives and investors of all of these companies have become wealthy and powerful. Now they are dismantling the country by funding a certain political group and looking the other way as that same group seeks to deport 100 million Americans (basically all non whites), invade allied nations, and terrorize people in the streets. There’s no escape from the reality that dollars given to American tech companies is dollars given to that same machine.
Re/ deporting 100 million Americans: The actual number would be 53 million and I'll explain. The USA Department of Homeland Security made an official statement two weeks ago which included an image of a classic American car on a beach with blue sky and the headline "America after 100 million deportations."[1][2] According to the US Census there are fewer than 47 million people living in the USA who are foreign born.[3] So even if every single immigrant is deported, including legal residents and naturalized citizens, hitting the government's goal of 100 million deportations would require deporting approximately 53 million people born in the USA who are, according to the 14th Amendment, entitled to citizenship. The Supreme Court has said the exceptions to this citizenship right are 1) children of foreign diplomats, and 2) children of an occupying enemy force. I'm going to say #1 is tiny and #2 is zero. DHS appears to have a goal to deport approximately 53 million Americans.
Re/ invading allied nations: For months the world has listened to the American president and republicans threatening to annex and control allied nations, such as Canada and Greenland. I don't think that claim even requires a citation, does it?
Do you think a lot of US tech workers feel the same?
From my personal interactions these past few days on HN it is very disappointing how ignorant and devoid of facts the arguments are which come from people who seem to be US tech workers.
The easiest was of escaping the trap of US tech dependence, is to buy your tech from China. Everything they have is very advanced, and cheap to boot. Huawei instead of Apple, WeChat instead of WhatsApp, etc. Everyone wins except Trump.
The downside is that this tech stack is also being rolled out to Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Venezuela to build their own local versions of the Great Firewall. It is currently being used to crush dissent and imprison anyone who disagrees with the regime.
I guess if you consider that “winning” then definitely continue to support Chinese dominance.
Isn’t China buying 50% of Russia’s Gas and supplying them drone parts and gunpowder which is directly being used to kill Europeans and destabilize Europe?
Oh sorry, right the US just kidnapped a singular leader this year while bombing and killing people.
Glad you pointed that out and everything just peachy with the US foreign policy of just some bombing and kidnapping and threatening to annex Greenland! Go murrica!
Please, just leave already. Stop talking about it and just do it. It’s like people talking about how awful social media is. Just don’t fucking use it.
Nothing would make Americans happier than an alternative. Europeans, go build your own big tech that can compete and win against Microsoft/Copilot. It’s not a big lift.
“You told me these were the best engineers in the world!!”
“I said they were the best engineers in Canada”
(Great quote from the BlackBerry movie).
Rings true here. You can’t fight market forces. To push out the US tech you need to build something that’s better than the US tech. Anything else is just wishful thinking.
Is US tech even good anymore? Do none of us not encounter the massive amount of shit from companies like Google, MSFT, Apple, Amazon, etc as users? Truly terrible bugs or user flows from engineers that clearly don't care while everyone is just collecting their own share of blood.
I can't think of a single thing that big tech has done to improve my life, or society for that matter, over the last 10 years.
All US Tech has is the backing of the US government and that is likely to change in the coming decade, without the pressure of the US government would these companies be as competitive? We see what happens when others try to, rightfully I might add, regulate them: they throw extreme hissy fits and pressure the US government to force the countries to back off (by threat of sanctions or military action).
I sell/work as a consultant for m365 and azure and the services are definitely getting worse. AI translated garbage docs in which "plane" is translated as aeroplane (Flugzeug), Exchange as "Umtausch" (literal meaning of to exchange something) and so on. Obviously those are the ones I can remember because they were funny. There are also other errors that are not as obvious.
And don't get me started on slopilot being everywhere.
I see US (software) tech going the way of Boeing and Intel in the next decade. I’m not sure what their long term goals are, or if they even have any beyond chasing large/quick short term profits, but you can only enshittify your product and abuse your customers for so long before they start abandoning you.
No, US tech is driven by investors willing to risk allocating a ton of capital towards companies and products that have a good chance of succeeding.
Europe has been struggling and behind on tech and investments way before Trump. It’s policy and over regulation that prevents Europe from making any inroads
> To push out the US tech you need to build something that’s better than the US tech. Anything else is just wishful thinking.
Not true at all, a perfect example from the ride-sharing world. Lyft and Uber left Austin a decade ago over a city ordinance requiring background checks, so a couple local tech folks pitched in a very small amount of money, relatively speaking, and built a non-profit version of Uber. Everyone loved it, drivers got paid more, it was cheaper overall because it was a non-profit, the app worked just fine, etc. The app buildout was somewhere in the seven figure range.
All was good until Lyft and Uber came back, artificially undercut the non-profit app until it died, and then drove prices back up.
And that was ten years ago. Today, a rockstar infra expert and product engineer could easily stand up a scalable ride-share clone. And if people are mad enough (and it sure seems like people are getting mad at the US), then the energy is there for users to make a change.
Your story makes the point that the nonprofit app only worked under new government regulations and could not survive in the free market?
I do think more infrastructure should be non-profit, but if someone makes a for-profit version that beats you there’s not really much to do other than hoping the government has your back.
The nonprofit app worked because the existing players didn't want to do required background checks on drivers and exited the market to make the local government look bad. When that tactic failed, they came back and used some of their VC billions to recapture the market by artificially lowering the price of their services. That's not at all "free market", that's buying your way to a monopoly (or more technically an oligopoly in this case)
A ride sharing app is ridiculously easy to create.
Most of the work is in network effects so you have a large pool of drivers willing to work below minimum wage and a large pool of riders interested in paying you a lot more than that.
You absolutely can fight market forces. China did it for decades with their car industry. Chinese people were financially forced to buy inferior Chinese cars to support a domestic industry until it learned to compete in the global market. Very difficult to do this in a democracy, though.
You’re getting downvoted because you touched on a sensitive spot with some folks, but you’re right.
If other countries want to stop their reliance on US tech then they need to build better tech. Your BlackBerry quote shows that playing out in reverse. A non-US company dominated the market, a US company built something better (the iPhone) and the non-US company imploded.
The US tech power is a bit like the US political soft power, it's there because it's huge and has momentum but it's not like it'll be here forever, especially given the current trajectory
Your "better" assumes that availability is not a problem.
The risk we need to mitigate is that some right wing doofus in the US gets triggered by a twitter reply and decides to block our use of all US software and services.
In that case, having libreoffice installed locally does not seem so bad.
This is such an American take diametrically opposed to reality. You literally could not be more wrong. The correlation between "effort to fight market forces (i.e. protectionism" and "independence from US tech) is 1:1. It's China, then Korea, then the rest of the world which is all 100% dependent on US tech. China is independent entirely thanks to protectionism and banning right from the staft, Korea is inbetween thanks to the exact same.
The only thing that works is throwing up huge barriers against dumping. This is the norm for physical goods. US big tech, and really Silicon Valley, is based on dumping - burning VC cash to become a monopoly. This is not a hair better for a domestic industry than being flooded by physical goods that are cheap thanks to burning through (let's say Chinese) government cash. In the latter we love to call this "artificiallly cheap", though for some reason I've never heard this adjective used for US tech based on monopolizing by burning VC cash.
No, you have to build something that can work reasonably well, get rid of being fucking dependency slave in strategic areas and then try to catch up. Of course does not work for small countries
Only if you think that government's only purpose is to look pretty. Economies are planned. You can either plan them as governments, or let your oligarchs and foreign oligarchs plan them together ("market forces.") These only look the same when you allow oligarchs to determine your governments.
At the very least, you want domestic oligarchs determining your governments. Their power is based in your country, and they might have a bit of sentimentality on top of that. Leaving it to "market forces" is just watching, not participating.
If some guy in Canada builds something better than current US tech, he's going to sell it to a US oligarch and probably move there, too.
edit: "Our ambition cannot stop there though. In far too many cases, our governments, universities, schools, and other public institutions—not to mention private businesses—are run on Microsoft or Google services. Now is the perfect time to get governments off Microsoft 365 and schools off Google Classroom by properly resourcing a new public agency or Crown corporation dedicated to building technology in the public interest."
This has always been the only answer, but it requires a relatively clean government. The government has to maintain ownership of these things, and cannot subcontract out the work.
You talk about "market forces" and you don't seem to understand them at all.
"Confidentiality", "Integrity", and "Availability" are a foundational concept of security (the CIA triad).
For non-US citizens "Integrity" and "Confidentiality" have been compromised for a long time, but these things have no day-to-day impact. They are only relevant as kompromat material once you become powerful and they want you to act in US interests.
What's new are serious, escalating threats and actions against "Availability". This is the most important pillar of security, and a whole different beast. Microsoft has blocked email accounts of international court of justice due to political pressure. Buffoons in US tech leadership such as Cloudflare CEO feel so emboldened that they openly threaten to cut off Italy. After TV performances by Musk, Thiel, Tim Apple, Zucky and Bezos in favor of trump there is no doubt they would cut off another country as form of pressure - and if it is only for a week.
In this week, our markets would be offline and nonfunctional. The market has a very high incentive to untangle from this mess of shitty bootlickers and impulsive convicted criminals.
It will take some time, but the market forces are clearly following the new incentives.
What surprises me here on HN that people who are seemingly US tech workers are quite ignorant to how it feels to be on the receiving end of this totally reckless, unprompted and idiotic behavior.
You're running Linux? Oh fine... on which hard- and firmware? Intel? AMD? Apple Silicon? Qualcomm? All US.
You're using the Internet? Via Cisco routers?
Europe and other regions would have to put in huge efforts to really gain independence.
There's a lot of stuff in big cloud that is genuinely hard to duplicate especially with network effects, but I don't see why they can't throw a billion or 3 at ensuring you've got a homegrown stack that can do VMs, S3, function, container registry, database, block storage, firewall etc - with guaranteed funding, clear licenses, handful of local options perhaps with some sort of local guaranteed certification etc.
Baby steps are better than no steps & a lot of things can be made to run on those building blocks
- Gmail -> ProtonMail
- Whatsapp -> Telegram
- I installed Linux to my parents laptops. They like it.
- YouTube App -> Newpipe and Smarttube
Also, my next car will be a BYD. The current one is a Ford.
If push comes to shove and Europe needs to part ways with the USA, to greater or lesser degree, there will still be machinists, mechanics, and actual facilities in place to keep making Fords. That is a positive from the standpoint of European sovereignty.
The EU probably has rules in place to strongly encourage US manufacturers of automobiles to put facilities in the EU. The US has similar rules and many Toyotas, Hondas, &c, are made in the US, using US suppliers for parts.
It's not hard to imagine an approach to digital services that trends in a similar direction. In the EU or Canada, the US parent company would supply technical data, software, specifications, &c, to a domestic company with its own facilities and operations. It probably requires a combination of regulations and regular stress tests; but nothing prevents the domestic company's operations from being as de facto severable as a car factory.
Are you talking about some other kind of AI?
Anyway, good ideas/tools for evaluating LLMs ? Naturally, as a Dane, I am moving away from Claude, but I’d like more than a gut feel about how much I may have given up to do so.
Openrouter.ai shows the location of providers, you can find just a few European services, but also Singaporean and Canadian. Unfortunately, I could not find a way to filter easily.
In Canada we like to give money to big established monopolies, that's our thing. The SR&ED program is a prime example of that, as a bootstrap business it took us 3 years before we could apply since we didn't have enough money to front full salaries for 1.5y before receiving a grant.
It is not really a complex problem to solve, the entrepreneurs know the solutions but our politicians and wealthy people are so small c conservative it's pathetic.
I encourage everyone outside the US and in particular Canada and Europe to move your data out of the US and away from US cloud companies now. Putting your data there is not safe anymore and can and will be used for blackmail (see Microsoft cutting access of the International Criminal Court's (ICC) chief prosecutor's email). Trump is now blackmailing countries with tariffs to get them to back off support for Greenland (not going to happen), so things are going to get ugly.
If you are heavily into tech or an activist, etc. it's also a good time to pick up an extra phone like a second hand Pixel to run GrapheneOS as a backup. Or (less secure) a phone that can be unlocked and run something like /e/OS.
I know that it might take years to get all companies, governments, etc. off American big tech products. But that's not a good reason for not safeguarding your own data. Besides that, the more funding non-US alternatives get through enthusiasts, the better they are positioned to improve their alternatives.
You think these are statements of fact?
Re/ deporting 100 million Americans: The actual number would be 53 million and I'll explain. The USA Department of Homeland Security made an official statement two weeks ago which included an image of a classic American car on a beach with blue sky and the headline "America after 100 million deportations."[1][2] According to the US Census there are fewer than 47 million people living in the USA who are foreign born.[3] So even if every single immigrant is deported, including legal residents and naturalized citizens, hitting the government's goal of 100 million deportations would require deporting approximately 53 million people born in the USA who are, according to the 14th Amendment, entitled to citizenship. The Supreme Court has said the exceptions to this citizenship right are 1) children of foreign diplomats, and 2) children of an occupying enemy force. I'm going to say #1 is tiny and #2 is zero. DHS appears to have a goal to deport approximately 53 million Americans.
Re/ invading allied nations: For months the world has listened to the American president and republicans threatening to annex and control allied nations, such as Canada and Greenland. I don't think that claim even requires a citation, does it?
[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/DS8Tx3XCRLQ
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/03/homeland-sec...
[3] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/POP645223#PO...
From my personal interactions these past few days on HN it is very disappointing how ignorant and devoid of facts the arguments are which come from people who seem to be US tech workers.
https://youtu.be/3C1Gnxhfok0?si=uKDlYn33IIYevj8p
I guess if you consider that “winning” then definitely continue to support Chinese dominance.
Euro tech already exists. Add in Nova custom and Star labs. I understand many components are still made in China but this is the first step.
China is a good alternative for a lot of hardware, but in terms of software it is not an option.
Glad you pointed that out and everything just peachy with the US foreign policy of just some bombing and kidnapping and threatening to annex Greenland! Go murrica!
Still China is a great alternative to US in terms of hardware, because all the things you would buy from the US is just made in China anyways.
While the US are acting like foolish, uneducated hotheads China is silently benefiting from all parties involved.
Nothing would make Americans happier than an alternative. Europeans, go build your own big tech that can compete and win against Microsoft/Copilot. It’s not a big lift.
“I said they were the best engineers in Canada”
(Great quote from the BlackBerry movie).
Rings true here. You can’t fight market forces. To push out the US tech you need to build something that’s better than the US tech. Anything else is just wishful thinking.
I can't think of a single thing that big tech has done to improve my life, or society for that matter, over the last 10 years.
All US Tech has is the backing of the US government and that is likely to change in the coming decade, without the pressure of the US government would these companies be as competitive? We see what happens when others try to, rightfully I might add, regulate them: they throw extreme hissy fits and pressure the US government to force the countries to back off (by threat of sanctions or military action).
And don't get me started on slopilot being everywhere.
Europe has been struggling and behind on tech and investments way before Trump. It’s policy and over regulation that prevents Europe from making any inroads
Apple silicon has been pretty transformative for desktop/laptop-class chips.
A lot of the Apple Silicon magic is also due vertical integration with the OS IMHO.
Not true at all, a perfect example from the ride-sharing world. Lyft and Uber left Austin a decade ago over a city ordinance requiring background checks, so a couple local tech folks pitched in a very small amount of money, relatively speaking, and built a non-profit version of Uber. Everyone loved it, drivers got paid more, it was cheaper overall because it was a non-profit, the app worked just fine, etc. The app buildout was somewhere in the seven figure range.
All was good until Lyft and Uber came back, artificially undercut the non-profit app until it died, and then drove prices back up.
And that was ten years ago. Today, a rockstar infra expert and product engineer could easily stand up a scalable ride-share clone. And if people are mad enough (and it sure seems like people are getting mad at the US), then the energy is there for users to make a change.
I do think more infrastructure should be non-profit, but if someone makes a for-profit version that beats you there’s not really much to do other than hoping the government has your back.
Most of the work is in network effects so you have a large pool of drivers willing to work below minimum wage and a large pool of riders interested in paying you a lot more than that.
Cars are cheaper and better outside America, the so called car capital of the world.
Go to one of these SoCal car conventions, it’s amazing how all the car reviewers go wide eyed at the Chinese cars in display.
If other countries want to stop their reliance on US tech then they need to build better tech. Your BlackBerry quote shows that playing out in reverse. A non-US company dominated the market, a US company built something better (the iPhone) and the non-US company imploded.
The US tech power is a bit like the US political soft power, it's there because it's huge and has momentum but it's not like it'll be here forever, especially given the current trajectory
It has to be better
The risk we need to mitigate is that some right wing doofus in the US gets triggered by a twitter reply and decides to block our use of all US software and services.
In that case, having libreoffice installed locally does not seem so bad.
This is the risk we are worrying about.
The only thing that works is throwing up huge barriers against dumping. This is the norm for physical goods. US big tech, and really Silicon Valley, is based on dumping - burning VC cash to become a monopoly. This is not a hair better for a domestic industry than being flooded by physical goods that are cheap thanks to burning through (let's say Chinese) government cash. In the latter we love to call this "artificiallly cheap", though for some reason I've never heard this adjective used for US tech based on monopolizing by burning VC cash.
At the very least, you want domestic oligarchs determining your governments. Their power is based in your country, and they might have a bit of sentimentality on top of that. Leaving it to "market forces" is just watching, not participating.
If some guy in Canada builds something better than current US tech, he's going to sell it to a US oligarch and probably move there, too.
edit: "Our ambition cannot stop there though. In far too many cases, our governments, universities, schools, and other public institutions—not to mention private businesses—are run on Microsoft or Google services. Now is the perfect time to get governments off Microsoft 365 and schools off Google Classroom by properly resourcing a new public agency or Crown corporation dedicated to building technology in the public interest."
This has always been the only answer, but it requires a relatively clean government. The government has to maintain ownership of these things, and cannot subcontract out the work.
"Confidentiality", "Integrity", and "Availability" are a foundational concept of security (the CIA triad).
For non-US citizens "Integrity" and "Confidentiality" have been compromised for a long time, but these things have no day-to-day impact. They are only relevant as kompromat material once you become powerful and they want you to act in US interests.
What's new are serious, escalating threats and actions against "Availability". This is the most important pillar of security, and a whole different beast. Microsoft has blocked email accounts of international court of justice due to political pressure. Buffoons in US tech leadership such as Cloudflare CEO feel so emboldened that they openly threaten to cut off Italy. After TV performances by Musk, Thiel, Tim Apple, Zucky and Bezos in favor of trump there is no doubt they would cut off another country as form of pressure - and if it is only for a week.
In this week, our markets would be offline and nonfunctional. The market has a very high incentive to untangle from this mess of shitty bootlickers and impulsive convicted criminals.
It will take some time, but the market forces are clearly following the new incentives.
What surprises me here on HN that people who are seemingly US tech workers are quite ignorant to how it feels to be on the receiving end of this totally reckless, unprompted and idiotic behavior.