Problem is that various officials in EU fired those particular guns many times at this point, and it's always been a dud.

Most of the time, it's just about EU graft and corruption. Friend of a cousin of a project manager and his family get a hilarious payday, project fails, and EU bureaucracy moves on to figure out what next project that can be used to enrich the next second cousin is going to be.

And ironically, one of the big obstacles to this every single time has been EU's privacy legislation. American giants have very experienced people who know how to manage that insane bureaucratic boondongle. Few if any others do. So every time some EU bureaucrat gets a great idea like this, it dies within a few years because they can't make it EU regulation compatible on any reasonable budget and time frame.

Literally all companies currently operating in the EU, including US tech giants are required to comply with these too. There is this fantasy that regulation alone prevents alternative players in the EU when in reality the "persecution" of US tech companies (as the US government would tell the story) is nothing more than actually demonstrating there's a level playing field.

The EU has literally countless software companies including startups. One of the major players in AI is French. Heck the *original* AI company (now owned by Google) was UK based - back when they were under the full EU regulations. The problem isn't startups, the problem is getting US companies to fuck off and stop destroying competition through acquisition (e.g. Kyndryl is the world's largest data services provider with double digit billions in the bank. Why don't they build their own datacentre in the Netherlands instead of attempting to purchase Solvinity?)

Yes billionaires prefer to invest is regulatory markets that allow the fucking over of the population and the development of wholesale monopolies. My friend, you can keep your billionaires. Don't want them.

Allowed != Recommend != Actively promoted. The EU isn't "allowing" anything with this regulation. If you use the correct word you may answer your own question.

What does a defunct US tech firm have to do with this story? Every time I see a story about AI I get angry. Then I see stories like this and think well... some editors deserve to lose their job to computers.

This sounds like an EPCM contractor.
"We want you to deliver: XYZ"
*delivers: WXY* *sends bill for WXY*
"No you numbskulls, we wanted XYZ"
"Sorry sorry, out mistake."
*delivers: XYZ* *sends bill for WXYXYZ*

I agree with you in principle. As I said the outcome of this will rest on legal arguments and edge cases. The certificate being nonsense in your eyes may be justified by lawyers and agreed by judges leaving us fucked over. This is no where near as clear cut as you make it out to be. EU law is often quite vague in such cases.

But either way, even if it does work out in our favour, don't expect it in the next couple of years.

Just googling "baseload" is like just googling "ICE car" and declaring it the only solution to a complex topic because it's the only thing you know about. Baseload is a description of a type of power generation, it's not the singular answer to what it means to design a grid, and indeed in the modern world it's actually becoming more and more important that we fill grid with dispatchable power instead of base load generation. Baseload becomes a significant problem for electrification, not a solution. E.g. you can't turn on a nuclear power plant only at night when people charge EVs and fire up their induction cook tops and heat pumps, so you end up ... needing storage anyway. And if you need storage anyway... I'll let you finish my thought for me.

Then you have exceedingly bad observer bias. You can correct this though, feel free to look at any of my China related comments on their car industry, their solar industry, their wind industry, feel free to check how I consistently counter the stupid racist idea that all they can do is steal and don't have any knowledge of their own.

Even now you seem to think what I said was negative, despite having just put China on par with the west by pointing out they have not one, but two of their own home grown nuclear licenses. If you think this was China in the 1980s then maybe you have an overly rosy picture of their past because they definitely have advanced in spades.

But their advancement doesn't change the fact that nuclear is insanely fucking difficult regardless if you're the relative new player (China) or the established expert (France), or the bankrupt has been (America - though to be fair France's industry went bankrupt too but they nationalised it rather than selling it off to an overseas company).

It's not just you though. You see this kind of comment literally everywhere. For some reason people confuse IP66 and IP68, and always have. I even went and looked up the standard yesterday seeing if it changed in some past revision and it didn't so no idea where this came from.

There is not. There may be some user complaints but Microsoft's approach to this is window-dressing and marketing. E.g. how they said they removed CoPilot from Notepad and proceeded to simply renamed it to "Writing tools"

Also it doesn't really make much sense. AI has a use case at an OS level to provide cross app integration. Now I don't intend to use it, but the use case exists for it. I see no reason why there would be any internal pressure for Micro-"We'll put a special copilot key on your keyboard and integrate it with Windows"-soft to step back from this.

Don't get too excited. You can expect any commercial product to a walled shitbucket chasing your captive attention.

I have a feeling it will. Microsoft isn't pulling the plug as much as not supporting a certificate renewal for something they indicated would reach end of a support period. It's precisely this kind of particular bullshit that legal wrangling rests on and which makes lawyers rich. The EU has enough of a problem with the "killing software" trend and they've done nothing in the meantime.

And even if it doesn't fly in the EU, the EU is a slow moving bureaucracy. They do not (and cannot) act on intent alone. They need to wait until something happens, then someone complains to a local regulator, then the regulator starts an investigation, then a year later concludes the investigation and starts legal proceedings, which then drag out for years too.

And in the end MS will get a slap on the wrist.

+1

Did it, done it, doing it tomorrow.

Abolishing Micro$oft Office from our list of supported products is one of the best moves we've ever made.

The surprising thing here is what the actual cost is. People have been completely and totally insulated from it until now as every AI company was effectively acting as a loss leader and no one in the industry was charging sustainable rates.

The system is starting to financially collapse, and maybe now that we start seeing the true cost we can back down from this insane bullshit path we're on.

Maybe the cost will finally persuade my employer will stop shoving CoPilot down our throats.