Stranger43

And completely understandable once you understand the narratives of both system.

An autocrat is supposed to be "Powerful" beyond all else and typically aren't required to be accountable to anyone so as long as the narrative of "Powerfully competent" holds corruption is merely an part of the narrative.

In democracies the leadership is very much meant to be by and off the people and held accountable under the same legal standard they enforce on everyone else, and when that leadership start to act with the impunity of an "entrenched" aristocracy and stop following the rules the narrative breaks.

And lets not forget that the original feudal aristocracy held their position almost entirely by the mechanism of unchallengeable property rights in an zero sum economy* and we begin to understand why the accumulation of property/wealth into fewer and fewer hands is a almost unmanageable threat to the narratives of western democracy.

*We are returning to an zero sum economy as the planet have essentially run out of unowned/unused resources and that means that modern western economic solutions(grow grow grow) is simply not available anymore.

We saw how fast and decisively modern states can move doing covid, so what is being suggested here is that at the end of the day the current leadership of the EU(especially some of the more US loyal smaller states) is not really ready to believe the US wont restore that trust at the next election.

I am from Denmark and it's been interesting seeing our politicians dance around the very plausible direct invasion threats made by the current US president against Greenland, where our PM made strong declaration while her ministry of defense kept increasing it's dependency on American planes ect.

And it's the same story almost everywhere for the digital sovereignty stuff, yes they claim to want it but when the legislation arrives it's nothing and there is no urgency within the technical departments actually running government it to change anything.

Lets talk numbers, rather then just sling cheap unfounded allegations

The problem with the way they talk at the big conferences is that there is almost no link between the rhetoric of existential crisis and the bills being passed at the national level.

The last numbers from Ukraine was a army of maybe 900k uniformed troops(thats up there with America) and as a response to that army's failure to drive Russia back Germany is talking about raising their armed forces less then a 3rd of that by 2030 thats just not real mobilization and thats my point about not taking the logistics serious.

Were the EU to mobilize as if it mattered to the actual population of the EU it could raise several time the army Ukraine have but nobody is actually suggesting that because the people in charge of the actual policy making don't really believe that Russia is a threat to any of the NATO member states.

If they committed more then words maybe, the reality is that the national parliaments for the most part aren't willing to commit significant resources to the Ukrainian cause.

If the EU were to actually mobilize(which is not on the agenda) it would be more then a match for Russia but thats not actually whats being discuses at the EU level because that requires buy in from the national parliaments for tax raises and austerity programs not seen since the last war to end all wars.

At most what's being discussed is a expeditionary army of at most 1/10th the size of the current Ukrainian force(which pealed at around 900k men about a year ago), and the Ukrainian army isnt some 3rd world paper force armed with 2nd rate equipment but an force that rivals anything currently in existence.

My point is that the EU economy is not being committed to securing an Ukrainian victory, because most of the words are coming from people that have nothing but words to offer.

No nor does it have logistical capability to deliver even half of the equipment currently being promised/discussed within a time-frame of less then 5-10year.

It's all dependent on the national government voluntarily following the advice of Brussels, and in most cases they don't really have the resources the EU wants them to commit to "The Ukrainian nationalist Cause".

The reluctance of the EU leadership to so anything materially significant about anything they claim to care about is kind of telling.

It's either that the leadership is so caught up in their own ivory tower bubble of pure rhetoric to realize they havent really put in the logistics to actually affect reality or that they somehow don't really want the consequences of actually changing things.

For this is pretty clear what they need to do to create any real digital sovereignty and yet the seem to not really be willing to take the obvious step of just banning the use of any technology that have any dependency of foreign owned/managed cloud services or closed source products, and ordering their technical staff to start making changes even if it makes stakeholders annoyed, and yet the keep letting companies like IBM/RedHat and Microsoft pretend they can and should be a part of the digital sovereignty transformation project.

We saw the same when safe harbour collapsed and with the cookie directive where rather then doing something effective they found some way to fix it by changing a few words in an mostly unenforced set of click wrap contracts/licenses. .

Well either that or completely privatize the infrastructure needed to operate those cars like multi-lane roads and parking lots with no mandatory minimums for road width and parking lot size.

I think you underestimate what can be done with actual code because the devops industry seems entirely code averse and seem to prefer a "infrastructure as data" paradigm instead and not even using good well tested/understood formats like sql databases or even object storage but seems to lean towards more fragile formats like yaml.

yes the possix shell is not a good language which is why thinks like perl, python and even php or C got widely used but there is a intermediate layer with tools like fabric(https://www.fabfile.org/) solving a lot of the problems with the fully homegrown without locking you into the "Infrastructure as(manually edited) Data" paradigm that only really works for problems of big scale and low complexity which is exactly the opposite of what you see in many enterprise environments.

But why does it have to be the case that the leadership of an opensource project have to emulate the desperation and authoritarianism of a potentially stagnant tech sector.

I don't think it's malevolence from the mozilla leadership team but more that if you hang around people who have bet their lifesaving on the success of cloud based LLMs, being cautious and making their use "optional" might begin to sound like a really controversial position even if that's actually what the users/community want from Mozilla.

Firefox market share have been declining and it's not easy to point to any obvious technical problem, so the reason for the decline is likely that the Mozilla corporation keep messing up the narrative by acting like just another Silicon Valley tech firm.

Taking the moral argument aside the fact that the largest best funded navy run by the wealthiest country have to call in airstrikes against barely(if at all) armed fishing vessels, that may or may not be smugglers, rather then board arrest and at least make an attempt at tracing the cash flow back to the wealthy businessmen who is organizing/funding the smuggling reeks of weakness and desperation rather then being the signal of strength and competency it's intended to be.

Sure it's a widely understood and often repeated problem with especially western naval and military doctrine that the peace time buildup favors white elephants(battleships, F35s etc) that, as was the case of the British high see fleet of WWII, end up inactive while entire new(often much cheaper and less sophisticated) classes of ships like destroyer escorts or Patrol boats have to be build as replacements. But still the US haven't quite deteriorated so badly yet that it couldn't reacquire whatever boarding capacity got lost in the relentless pursuit of military industrial complex profits quite quickly.

I think a fundamental lack of understanding/humility is the core of this conflict along with Mozilla's long and storied history of creating controversies/problems out of thin air.

The Mozilla leadership seems to have a unfortunate tendency to emulate the behaviors of the tech companies that their core Firefox project is often seen as an alternative too.

Firefox is a good browser but is prevented from capitalizing on the skepticism the consumers feel toward the tech sector by Mozilla using the exact same language and dark UI pattern to promote things like pocket that the user-base never asked for, and jump on to the lets enforce the use of AI everywhere that's driving discontent within the proprietary ecosystems, and this is yet another example of this class of behavior from the Mozilla leadership.

Why do we want them to donate money rather then time/people.

Why would we even want that, the whole point is to break the monoculture and single vendor dependency not to create an new mostly irrelevant one to be stuffed with has-been and rejects from the national levels the way most of EU's big prestige projects end up being run.

One of the thing that sets EU apart from most federations is that it kind of enables a lot more regional independence in how things are actually implemented while still guaranteeing the rights of the individual citizens, this lead to a lot of dynamism at the local level despite the failings of the central level, and allow this kind of projects to succeed and create paths for others to follow at their own pace.

But doesn't the codeless "infrastructure as code" kind of smell like cargo cult practices, i mean there might be places where having your infrastructure defined as data is a really good thing, but at least in my work i keep hitting roadblocks where i really wish i was writing actual logic in a modern scripting language rather then trying to make data look like code and code look like data, which is what a lot of devops tutorials seem to be teaching.

Blaming crowdstikes QA might feel good but the problem is that no company in the history of the world have been good enough at QA for it not to be reckless to allow day one patching of critical systems, or for that matter to allow single vendor, single design, critical systems in the first place. and yet the cyber security guidelines required to allow the pretense that windows can be used securely all but demand that companies take that risk.

It's also fundamentally a problem of Danial, everyone knows there will not be an good solution to any issue around security and stability that does not require that the assets tied up inside fragile monopoly operated ecosystems to be eventually either extracted or written off but nobody want to blaze new trails.

Claiming powerlessness is just lazy yes it might take an decade to get out from under the yokel of an abusive vendor, we saw this with IBM, but as IBM is now an footnote in the history of computing it's pretty clear that it can be done once people start realizing there is an systematic problem and not just a serious of one-off mistakes.

And we know how to design reliable systems, it's just that doing so is completely incompatible with allowing any of America's Big IT Vendors to remain big and profitable, and thats scary to every institution involved in the current market.

The problem is that without tools and processes to systematically validate those result's people might be perfectly happy about completely inaccurate results.

I know i have had to correct one in three excel sheet i have ever gone over using pen and paper in order to validate the results but i am a paranoid sod who actually do this kind of exercise on a regular basis.

almost all of the disciplines known to rely on excel have a serous issue with repeatability of results either because nobody ever attempts it, or because it's a messy field without a well defined methodology.

If crowdsource QA department is all that stands between you and days of no operations then you chose to live with the near certainty that you will have days rather then hours of unplanned company wide downtime.

And if you cannot actually abandon someone like microsoft that consistantly screws up their QA then it's basically dishonest for you to claim that reliability is even a concern for your desktop platform.

And that's essentially what i say when i accuse the modern enterprise it's client device teams of being stuck in the 90ies as those risk were totally acceptable back when the stakes were low and outages only impacted non time critical back office clerical work. but what we saw today was that those high risk cost optimized systems got deployed into roles where the risk/consequence profile is entirely different.

So what you do is that you keep the low impact data entry clerks and spreadsheet wranglers on the windows platform but threat the customer facing workers dealing with time sensitive task something a bit less risky.

It's might not be as easy as just deploying the same old platform designed back in the 90ies to everyone but once you leave the Microsoft ecosystem dual sourcing based on open standards become totally feasible, at costs that might not be prohibitive as everything in the unix like ecosystem including web browsers have multiple independent implementations so you basically just have to standardize of 2-4 rather then one platform which again isnt unfeasible.

It's telling that an Azure region failed this news cycle without anyone noticing because companies just don't tolerate the kind of risk people takes with their wintel desktop for their backends so most critical services hosted in microsofts Iowa datacenter had and second site on standby.

Things have definitely gotten better.

The problem with the linux desktop was usually that most hardware companies were either not spending any time/effort on non-windows drivers/compatibility or when they did it was a tiny fraction of the effort that went into working around bugs in the windows driver API's.

Today with the failure of windows in both the mobile and industrial control space we now see vendors actually giving a damn about the quality of their Linux drivers.

Today the main factor keeping the enterprise marked locked on windows is the fat clients written around the turn of the millennium, and that's as much a problem for mac adaptation as it is Linux adaptation.

The macs are slick well designed devices that speaks to a huge segment of the consumer market so will eventually find the way into the high cost niches where no specific dependency on legacy software exists but they are too expensive and inflexible to replace all of the wintel system so for Microsoft and it's partners to have their license to screw over the enterprise sector revoked Linux(or FreeBSD) will have to play a role too.

All of those are product that creates huge risks when deployed to mission critical environments and this is exactly the problem.

The entire wintel ecosystem depends on people putting their heads in the sand and repeating "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft/crowdstrike/IBM" and neglecting to run even the most trivial simulation of what happens when the very well understood design flaws of those platforms gets triggered by a QA department you have no control over drops the ball.

The problem is that as long as nobody dares recognizing that the current mono culture around the "market leading providers" this kind of event will remain really likely even if nobody is trying to break it and and extremely likely once you insert well funded malicious actors(ranging from bored teenagers to criminal gangs and geopolitical rivals).

The problem is that adding fair weather product that gives the illusion of control though fancy dashboards on the days they work is not really an substitute for proper reliance testing and security hardening but far less disruptive to companies that don't really want to leave the 90ies PC metaphor behind.

Even Excel is beginning to be regarded as a dangerous piece of software that gives the illusion of power while silently bankrupting departments who depend on the idea that large spreadsheets is an accurate and reliable way to analyze large/complex datasets.

the 90ies are over but for some reason average enterprise department have a problem internalizing the fact that the demands today is different then they were 25 years ago.

The liquidation is the company being stripped of assets, who then gets sold of to highest bidder in order to pay the creditors, some of those assets might very well be fully operational business units that someone else(a competitor or the government) want to buy whole.

I known that the us chapter 11 is kind of a bad way to do bankruptcy as it don't really wipe out the whole but allows the previous executives way to much of a stake in the process where as other countries replaces the leadership with a bunch of court/creditor appointed outsiders on day one.

Going directly after the executives would at the very least be better theater then letting a company pay the government with the governments own money.

It probably wont fix the issue but this kind of non-action is why most people have lost all trust in the American Governments ability to regulate corporations at all.

It's very likely that the current court structure would be extremely reluctant to issue any guilty verdict against a member of the executive class for simply chasing short term profit at the cost of the public good/safety so that this is the best that could be do but if that's true it's basically demonstrating that the technocratic center have lost it's ability to be effective technocrats and that can/will have severe implications for who is considered electable to the point where we might not see another centrist government for a while.

And even if they do fail it's rarely the end as the bankruptcy process do totally allow for the critical/valuable aspects of an company to continue under new ownership, and the state could easily ensure that that process happens by buying up the parts they have an interest in doing the bankruptcy proceedings.

All the current model of Bailouts do is protect the shareholders from having their share value wiped out as a part of the process, and of cause keep up the appearance that the stock market can keep going to the moon(which a lot of retirement funds depend on).

The solution is probably going to involve dropping our dangerous utopian ideals about how complexity and deviation from perfection is problems that must be solved by any means necessary.

The world is a complex place where nearly nothing fit into an simplistic vision of simplicity and virtually no other engineering discipline shy away from gradual improvements and complexity management the way the IT sector does.

There is plenty of examples of real world road, water and sewage infrastructure where the system as a whole have continuity dating back centuries where every problem occurring was fixed in place without anyone ever redesigning the system by wiping and redesigning, and this is a source of pride not shame for the people working with those infrastructures.

The sooner we go away from the idea that just one more redesign using X tools in just the right way width the right team will finally crate an system that don't need constant maintenance and refactoring to keep serve the needs of it's users.

And your property rights come from the contract you have with the state. It's all in the formal and informal contract that govern society, and you can(as most suburbanites have) sign away all of the "control" that you seem to argue property gives you to some collective body.

In the same vain the government(and some wery much do) can set pretty strict rules on what restrictions a private landlord can put in rental agreements and that's before you remember that the government itself have historically been the largest owner of rental properties.

In the old days before the idea that owning a house was a ticket into a higher strata in the class system a lot of the problems now caused by unreasonable housing prices was solved by the government acting as the reasonable landlord, essentially curtailing the amount of shenanigans some wannabe aristocrat could get away with before going bankrupt from people not putting up with the abuse.

In a pure "realty don't matter" libertarian mindset your of cause right that property rights are always supreme but in the real world it's always a balance of power and negotiations especially once we deal with urban communities(which is the only ones where property prices are a problem).

To be honest OP is kind of making the same mistake in assuming that the only real alternatives is "new data science products" and old school scripting exists as valuable tools.

The extend people goes to to not recognize how much the people creating the SQL language and the relational database engines we now take for granted actually knew what they were doing, are a bit of an mystery to me.

The right answer to any query that can be defined in SQL is pretty much always an SQL engine even if it's just sqlite running on an laptop. But somehow people seems to keep comming up with reasons not to use SQL.

That's again a false argument, made a complete lie by the existence of Home Ownership associations and other contract covenants.

Rights come from your contract with whoever hold power not "property ownership"

There is yes some cases where owning is giving you a better deal then leasing in terms of rights and obligations but this is not an universal truth and not the reason house prices consistently rises faster then inflation and average disposable incomes that have nothing to do with the utility value of property as an dwelling.

Ie if we were to go back to an scenario where home properties lost value as the loans were paid off and things got old and worn there would be no crisis, the issue is that the way that currency and banking intersect makes prices keep rising.

In a lot of ways this is a problem creating itself.

The reason Home Ownership is desirable is that the pricing of houses go up faster then both inflation and depreciation caused by wear decreases the utility value of a dwelling, and the reason that houses are expensive is that the state actors are invested enough in this cycle to make sure it never really breaks.

In a real functional market there would be no real benefit to house ownership over long term leases. but were dealing with a market thats been deliberately broken by policies promoting home ownership for reasons that's fundamentally religious/dogmatic in nature.

And here we see this strange thing that data science people does in forgetting that 6TB is small change for any SQL server worth it's salt.

Just dump it into Oracle, postgre, mssql, or mysql and be amazed by the kind of things you can do with 30year old data analysis technology on an modern computer.

It's not not always been the case that the unions were the weaker non-state actor, in fact they used to rival political parties and business cartels in their ablity to lobby/negotiate.

And in some countries that power havent completely faded away.