It's not helping either, EU just loves to do these things. Last year 600k to find evidence of uncompetitive behaviour of US tech giants[1]. Another 300k to know that Kronos Group has released something called glTF. Don't get me started on FiWare or GaiaX. People don't even believe you if you claim 100 mil is spend on nonsense. At least if they spend 10 mil on a sound wall for a road though a meadow, people might have some idea why that might be dumb. Put AI, cloud and blockchain on the proposal and you can get away with murder. Universities don't give a shit, sign off on all of it, better you get the easy money then the other guy. Innovation consultant talking out of their ass all day, or do you think Gartner has tested, for real, all the different cloud BI tools they put on their laggard chart.

Makes me feel helpless, nothing that can be done about it.

[1]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-tech-antitrust/eu-look...

There's some great shit too. Webinos was an absolutely fantastic, consumer-secure IoT platform[1]. It still feels like it fixes so much of what's wrong with internet-of-things technology: it's all on someone elses networks. Webinos used basically VPN technology to connect your systems to your self. I really wish they'd seen better adoption!

I hadn't heard of GaiaX. The mission statement sounds incredible though. It sounds like trying to create a democraticized online market-place. Rather than rely on big tech to intermediate all our search & transactions. It sounds amazing. So virtuous, so smart, so obvious. But I know nothing about implementation. And less about adoption.

There's a fairly popular post in this thread about EU looking grim[1], & the top reply is the US looking grim. The answer I wanted to put there was that it's the lack of efforts like this, it's the lack of big initiatives & trying things. That things feel stuck, that only the very wealthy get a chance to try & bootstrap things. Failure & bad efforts aren't great, but it's worse to have a society that's not trying, that doesn't have some surplus capacity dedicated to giving folks a chance to try civilizationally-benefiting radical & practical things.

There's a lot of bullshit & bad. Yes. And it does feel like we're falling away from seeing success. But this should be a rallying cry. It should prompt adjustment, a redoubling, trying to find out how we're not taking things seriously & finding ways to distribute the money more widely, to less classic figures, trying wider innovations, and see what we learn.

Also though some times big innovation is semi-necessary. I definitely have trepedation, a mix of hope & fear, but efforts like the EU chipmaking[2][3] plans are 100% what ought to be happening. Huge investment, but if it fails, my recommendation would 100% be to try again. Stop failing. Probably by failing faster, failing smaller, & working up to bigger.

As Kevin Kelly says, "over the long run the future is decided by optimists"[4]. Making your part of the world a place where optimists get chances, where things are tried, even when the criticism is correct & things are bad, is what keeps a place vital.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26544555

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56334210

[3] https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/04/22/drilling-down-into-t...

[4] https://twitter.com/kevin2kelly/status/459723553642778624

You had me believing there for a second. Webinos is death, link just doesn't work anymore, wikipedia lists a whopping 5.400 downloads on a budget of 14 mil[1]. Every fucking time, someone gets money to write software with as selling point to "enhance EU values" or a coalition to commodify the complement against EVIL American competition. You don't want to start business where your margin is competed away by marked forces, go and ask a poor cacao bean farmer.

I am all for big moonshots, but these project feel more like LARPing what the Americans did profitably 10 years ago.

[1]https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/257103

society has a real fucking problem adopting things that are good for them. we all hate iotshit, but how many of us go the extra mile to do ethical, consumer empowering iot? no one. folks like tp-link suddenly close down their devices & all the home-assistant & handful of webthings users cry & are sad. screw you, you bought unethical hardware & circuit/software bent it to your will, but now it's chuffed. it was never an ethical enough start, even though you tried to empower yourself, you got wicked wicked burned. rarely do ethical, proper chances come along to try & support.

webinos was so noble, so good, such a well thought of way to do iot. that had all the right priorities.

it's fair & easy to call this a catastrophe, a disaster. but it keeps feeling to me- and this is dark- that the real disaster is us, mired in a deep deep inability to evaluate the free market of ideas, & pick actual good ones.

it makes me absolutely desperate to believe the "1000 true believers" thesis, or as I once heard it, the "follow the alpha geeks" thesis. i want to believe change is not that hard, if you can get users empowering themselves & each other. webinos never got 1000 true devs. but, to me, we are all to blame. and we will suffer endless tales of how bad iot is for decades to come as a result. how can society better adopt?

Stop pretending your shit doesn't stink. Hunger is eating away at our lands and some nerds are working on networks without some perceived moral shortcomings.

way way way more nerds are getting bread off shitty bad failing products that society can't maintain or fix. there is incredible damage being done by the status quo that a very minimal investment proposed very excellent fixes for.

you are being extremely scarcity conscious in only the narrowest most self-selective view possible. doing good things ought be worthwhile & it could be. rather than shit on the attempters I think we should consider what beyond the tech made webinos not succeed? and how and what pieces are addressable and how?

Most of my IoT devices are made by European companies (Eve and Hue) so you'd think an EU standard could work. But nobody needs their lightbulb to run a "web OS interface". This standard seems to break the rule of least power compared to something like Thread or HomeKit.

That's just one example. The evidence of this has long been clear to anybody watching the space.

While they usually try to pretend everything is awesome in public, they are clearly in a shit position.

Arianespace has already publicly stated they need more political help (after just getting 3.5+ billion $). There have been a whole storm of demands that all European institutional costumers should be forced onto the Ariane.

The Germany military was politically attacked for launching on Falcon 9 (that was when they still didn't take SpaceX seriously).

Politicians, ESA bureaucrats and people from the European industry have all essentially said the same stuff with a different spin depending on their position.

German and European journalist who are not just institutional PR printers have had a field day calling them out on their idiotic statements they made about SpaceX between 2014 and 2019.

Agreed! 600k per organization seems like pennies compared to the Billions invested in SpaceX so far.

My reading of the article is that these monies are allocated for a report on what to do about SpaceX's lead.